by Aaron Murray
One of the most common (and one of the worst) arguments made by creationists -when it comes to Geology- is:
The geologic column doesn’t exist anywhere in the world!!
I run into this statement ad nauseam in their “educational” videos and literature. They state that the text books are lying to us and that it is a another fabrication made up by scientists to mislead and indoctrinate or children to convince us of the lie of evolution. But what argument are they actually making when they say this? Are they implying that the earth doesn’t not contain multiple stratigraphical layers? Of course not. This awful argument is formed on the foundation that most creationist arguments are: confusion and a straw man understanding of geology.
The first problem they run into is confusing the geologic time scale with a geologic column,and in some cases doing so on purpose to confuse the issue.
Here is the geologic time scale:
And this is an example of a geologic column of the Grand Canyon:
The geologic time scale is a representation of the entire age of the earth as a whole,while a column is how those times are represented for a specific local or regional area. What the creationists want is a geologic column that contains EVERY SINGLE age of earths history,as represented in the geologic time scale, in ONE location. That’s usually the challenge issued after making that statement: “tell me one place on earth I can see the entire geologic column.You can’t!”. And of course,we can’t. At least not to the extent that they demand to see. It’s been pointed out to them that all the main Era’s are represented in place like the Williston Basin,North Dakota,but their counter to that is that an Era is a large time scale and they want all the Age’s,not all the Era’s. We can’t find all the Age’s in one single place,but we can follow regional formations to complete the picture globally.
The question I have have for them is: Why should we expect to find that? This is where the dishonesty really takes form. You don’t have to travel the globe to see that there is a multitude of different environments globally,so it’s no surprise you don’t find the same thing everywhere at once geologically. New layers are only deposited in conditions that favor the deposition of new sediments and regions fluctuate constantly between erosional and depositional environments. If you’re in a depositional environment then sediments deposit and if you’re not then erosion can do it’s deed. That’s just common sense! You can know nothing at all about geology to understand this concept. So why do they pretend that its some kind of special pleading to point this simple principle out?
I have a simple to understand analogy to demonstrate this principle,as if it really needed to be simplified. Think of how it snows in the winter time,where snowflakes represent sediment. A snow storm represents a time period where conditions favor deposition. It might snow for a few minutes,hours or even days slowing building up the pile of snow on your lawn. But it doesn’t snow every single day of the winter and in between storms the already fallen snow might be blown or melt,which represents non depositional,erosional time periods. You would be considered an idiot if you argued that January wasn’t 31 days long because you can’t show one single place where snow fell every single day,minute and second of the month. Unfortunately for the creationists,this is exactly what they are doing.
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