Tape 3 - Evolution vs. Creation Seminar

Fossil Frauds and the Case for Special Creation

Always been just that, man. Of the loss of our ancestors, briefly, is what has happened before. Let me give you the picture quickly. You'd appreciate this fact. There was a famous Nebraska man found in the face of William Jennings Bryant time of the Scripps trial.

Nebraska man was based upon a single tooth that they found out there in western Nebraska. Seemed to have some very important primate-like qualities or man-like qualities. Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborne, one of the greatest experts in that area, and W .K. Gregory and others studied this tooth, were convinced it was either a man-like ape or an ape-like man.

They weren't quite sure. The London Illustrated News, their artists drew a reconstruction of Nebraska man based upon this tooth, and here we see it in the next slide. Next slide, please. Here's the famous Nebraska man, all based upon a single tooth.

Isn't it marvelous what scientists can do? They can get such a wholesale production of conjectures out of such a trifling investment of facts, and this is one case here. Well, there you are. I certainly would call him man, wouldn't you?

Well, after a few more years of study and collection, you know what these gentlemen concluded? That tooth was from a pig. It was a pig's tooth. It was a tooth from an extinct pack of rear pigs. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I'm not just poking fun at evolutionists, but look, that's what, if you were at the University of 23 and 24, this is what you'd seriously be presented as man's evolutionary ancestor, and it turned out to be a pig.

They got that from a pig's tooth. I think that's the case where a pig made a monkey out of an evolution. Next slide, please. And then here's the famous pill-down man. If you were at the university in 1915, 1920, 1930, 1940, 1945, you would have been presented, here is proof of man's evolution, pill-down man.

He found a rather ape-like jaw in a gravel pit near Piltdown, England, but it looked to be very old, and the teeth looked human-like. About a year later, they found the piece of the human skull. They put the skull and the jaw together, the fragments together, and it became pill-down man, E. Anthropus, Don Mann.

Charles Dawson, amateur paleontologist, published a paper along with Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, director of the British Museum on pill-down man. This became the famous pill-down man and accepted by the world's greatest authorities as an evolutionary form of man.

Well, eventually they were able to devise some method of giving a relative age to bones by the amount of fluoride absorbed from the soil. They dated the bones, and alas, the jaw bone was no older than 1910, the year it was found.

The skull was not nearly the 500 ,000 years they had proposed for this creature. A few thousand years old, they examined the bones more critically, found they had been treated chemically to make them look old.

The teeth had been filed with a file to make it look human-like. They could see the scratch marks in the teeth. In other words, pill-down was composed of a modern ape's jaw and a human skull, treated with chemicals to make them look old and fooled the world's greatest experts.

Now, why was this fraud successful? Because of the powerful influence of preconceived ideas. But there you are, ladies and gentlemen, a reconstruction of our ancestor from a modern ape's jaw. Now, this is a case, I believe, when an ape made a monkey out of an evolution.

And finally, we've already reviewed the case of Neanderthal man. We've lost him as one of our subhuman ancestors. So ladies and gentlemen, I believe now, seriously, when all this evidence is completely and carefully and objectively evaluated, it certainly does not indicate a series leading from ape to man, but indicates that we were spatially created, just as we find described in the Bible that God took the bone and flesh of Adam's side and made woman.

And there is no way that we can reconcile that with the theory of evolution. Well, you may ask about races, where'd races come from? How about the cavemen? I've run out of time, so we'll leave that for the question and answer period later.

Thank you very much. Let me remind you, if you'd like to get our newsletter, the Acts and Facts, there's still quite a few sample copies out there. You're welcome to take them. Also, they tell me that some of the books are sold out and others are about to be.

So on this brochure, this not only describes the work of the Institute for Creation Research, but also has a complete list of our books and tapes that we distribute. So you can order from this if you'd like.

If there are any high school students interested in a choice of college, we'd encourage you to look into at least the possibility of coming to Christian Heritage College in San Diego. And so there's a little brochure out there describing that.

We have about 15 different majors, bachelor's degree programs in many different fields, all built around the concept of creation. For the newsletter, if you'd like to receive it regularly, just give us your name and address.

It's free of charge. We now have something like about 45 ,000 or so that go out each month around the country and around the world. Books for different types and so on. So let me just mention a couple of others.

I've already mentioned the Scientific Creationism book, which is our general handbook on all the different aspects of creation. Dr. Gish's book on the fossils is the best thing in that field. He also has a monograph on the origin of life, which we think is the best in that, the biochemical critique of origin of life theories.

Then for someone who wants just a general introduction on a fairly basic level, to both the scientific and biblical aspects of creationism, the little book, Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth, is with that in mind.

It's structured around the biblical teachings on creation, but with the scientific data brought in to show where they fit. And then I might be pardoned for mentioning my own latest book, Many Infallible Proofs.

This is our textbook in general Christian evidences. We use it at our college. All of our students take a year course in practical Christian evidences. And it's also already been adopted by a number of other colleges for similar courses.

So it covers the whole field of the evidences of the truth of the Bible and of Christianity, including the scientific data, but also many other things. Dr. Gish now will be willing to stay here after this session, as long as anyone wants to, to try to answer questions if we can.

I know that in a short time today, we have only given some answers. We've probably raised many questions. We've not been able even to deal with a number of very important topics because of the lack of time.

This is a very broad subject, but we will try if we can to answer such questions as you may have. For this last session, we want to deal with the subject of the history of the earth, particularly as interpreted in the light of geology, because this is quite important.

We don't know how that ties in with the biblical framework of history. Bible, of course, says that all things were made in six days several thousand years ago. At least that's what it seems to say as you read it naturally.

We pointed out earlier today that some suggestions for reinterpreting it to fit in with the geological ages are not really effective in doing that, either theologically or biblically or scientifically.

They don't really satisfy. So we still want to know just what the real impact of the biblical history is and how this does tie in with the geological record of history. Now, the geological ages have been accepted, taught so long, so widely, that everyone just more or less assumes somehow that these really happened.

No one really questions it very much. But we want to show today in a very brief time, again, not really having time enough to deal adequately with all these problems and issues, that there is good evidence for questioning whether the Earth is billions of years old.

May not be. The fossil record we've already pointed out is really the key evidence in deciding the history of life on the Earth, whether life has evolved or was created. Dr. Gish has shown a considerable length and documented it at all different stages of the so-called history of life.

There are no transitional forms from one kind of life to another. There are gaps, systematic and regular gaps in the fossil record. So even if the geological ages did exist, even if we do have these billions of years of Earth history and different forms of life during the ages, there's still no evidence of evolution because each kind appears suddenly in the fossil record without any evolutionary ancestors leading up to it so far as the record goes.

So there's really no evidence of evolution, but we still do have the question of what now do these ages mean? Why is it that say only marine invertebrates are found in the Cambrian? And why do we find the great reptiles in the Mesozoic?

And why do we only find man very recently in the Pleistocene and so on? What's the reason for this? What's the real significance of these geological ages? The importance of the fossil record, I think we at least can reemphasize by quoting from Dr. Dunbar of Yale, Carl Dunbar, in his book, Historical Geology, when he says, although the comparative study of living plants and animals can give convincing circumstantial evidence, fossils provide the only historical documentary evidence that life has evolved.

So you see the importance of the fossil record to the whole system of evolution. We've just seen, however, they really don't support evolution anyway. But they are basic to the concept of evolution, so we wanna know just what the fossils do mean, where they really came from, how they fit in, especially in relation to the biblical interpretation.

Well, of course, the system which has been used in geological interpretation and reconstruction of Earth history for the past 100 years or more is the one known as uniformitarianism. Now, originally, back 200 or 300 years ago, when men first began to study the rocks and the fossils, the first geologists, these men all believed that they were formed at the time of the Great Flood, described in the Bible, also described in many other traditions of nations around the world, and interpreted then these data in the context of catastrophism, but first through a system of multiple catastrophes and recreations.

There was a period when that view was kind of in vogue, but then these became more and more numerous and less and less significant until finally they were all discarded and we had just the system of uniformitarianism.

Let me quote again from Dr. Dunbar. He says, the uprooting of the fantastic beliefs of the catastrophists began with the Scottish geologist, James Hutton, who maintained that the present is the key to the past and that given sufficient time, processes now at work can account for all the geologic features of the globe.

This philosophy, which came to be known as the doctrine of uniformitarianism, demands an immensity of time. It has now gained universal acceptance among intelligent and informed people. Everyone accepts uniformitarianism, he says, at least who's qualified to an opinion.

Demands an immensity of time. If we're going to explain the origin of all the great thicknesses of sedimentary rocks and the great earth structures and features around the earth on the basis of present processes, slow rates of sedimentation and erosion, slow movements of the earth and so on, we're gonna explain them in terms of these present processes by uniformitarianism, obviously it demands an immense amount of time to explain such things as the great thicknesses of sediments in the Grand Canyon or in the Mississippi Delta and other places around the world.

And of course, an immense amount of time is also necessary to make evolution look feasible. We could show it if we had the time and we'll probably do that tomorrow morning at the youth meeting. But no matter how much time we have, it's still not possible for evolution to take place in terms of thermodynamics and probability and so on.

But it does at least look fairly reasonable if we have billions of years. It demands it whereas the creationist concept does not necessarily commit itself to a particular length of time that is the basic creation model.

And so the creationist can open his mind to the evidence that we find in the physical world that the earth might be young. When evidences like that come in, the evolutionist has to reject them out of hand because it cannot possibly fit the evolution model.

But the creationist can look at both and believe it or not, there is a great deal of evidence that the earth is young, physical evidence. You haven't heard much about it because it doesn't fit evolution.

But it does exist and we're gonna discuss some of it. First, let's deal with the question of these geological ages though, just how do we know they existed? Now remember that history only began about four or 5 ,000 years ago.

By that I mean written records. Science is what we can see now and you might say that history is what people have seen and recorded in the past. But beyond the beginning of written recorded history, we really don't know what happened or how long anything may have taken because nobody was there to record it.

So real history, real written records only began a few thousand years ago. And that's not only in the Bible but in Egypt and Babylonia and so on. So the only way we can really know about these great ages which supposedly occupied billions of years is by certain indirect means, certain physical processes which we use.

Well, how do you determine the age of a rock? If you go out in the field somewhere and you find a rock and you wanna know how old it is, how do you decide whether it's a Cambrian rock or a Jurassic rock, whether it's a billion years or a million years, how do you decide that?

How do you know which rock is older than another rock? How do you decide things like that? But most people just kinda have the idea that geologists know how to do that and they just trust them. They feel the geologists know about it.

The old rocks somehow look old and young rocks look young and you can tell. Now I don't mean to be questioning the science of geology, not by any means. I have a high respect for it. That was my graduate minor and I knew many geologists.

I'm a member of the Geological Society and so on. So I don't question this as far as the actual geological processes and the data that are obtained are concerned. But when one tries to interpret where these things came from, when it goes beyond history, obviously necessarily has to make some assumptions.

And these assumptions are gonna be based on his presuppositions. And presuppositions necessarily involve some kind of philosophy or even theology. And this is true because in the rocks, we don't have any calendars.

There's no way of telling how old they were in terms of these physical processes as far as science is concerned. Old rocks don't look old and young rocks don't look young necessarily because you can find say very dense consolidated rocks that look old, which are quite young.

And you can find very loose unconsolidated rocks which look young, which are quite old. And furthermore, there's nothing about the type of rock that tells you. It isn't as though the granite were formed in one age and limestones in another age or anything like that because you can find granites, limestone, sandstone, shales, all kinds of rocks in every age.

Nothing about the type of rock that tells you the age. And furthermore, there's nothing about the minerals in the rock. You can find all kinds of minerals in rocks of all ages and metals and even coal and oil in rocks of just about every age.

And furthermore, you can find all kinds of structural features, that is, falls and folds and movements of all sorts in rocks of all ages. These all seem to be indiscriminate with respect to the age. Now, it seems like at first glance, the evolution model, saying that all things are in this process of development and change, you would think that not only has life changed, but also geology should have changed through the ages.

Because after all, the earth started from just some kind of dust or randomness or something and it had to go through stages to get where it is, if evolution is true. So there should be different types of rocks in different ages.

But they're not, they're all the same. You can't discriminate on the basis of any physical or structural criteria in the rocks as the age of a rock. Let me just quote to document that, just one quotation.

We could document this if we had time and consider a link. Dr. Jeletsky in the Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists says that the physical and stratigraphical criteria alone are devoid of any generally recognizable geological time significance.

It's indeed a well-established fact that the physical stratigraphic rock units and their boundaries often transgress geologic time planes in most irregular fashion, even in the shortest distances. So there's nothing about the physical characteristics of the rock that tell you the age.

Well, what does tell you the age of a rock? Now, you might think that radioactive dating is the way to do it. If you find a uranium mineral and you get the amount of lead in it and make your calculation, that'll tell you the age of a rock.

Well, we'll discuss that briefly in a few minutes, but I think it's obvious right at this point that this isn't the way to tell the age of a rock for the obvious reason that all these ages have been worked out long before anybody may have even heard about radioactive dating.

So this was all done before that. And even now, when you find a radiometric date which disagrees with the previously determined date, the radiometric date will be discarded. And you do often find discrepancies like that, in fact, more often than not.

And it's true that the radiometric dates are subject to all kinds of questions and problems and difficulties. And so it's possible that they could get out of line. And so if you find one that doesn't fit, then you throw it out.

Now, so that isn't the way to tell the age of a rock. Well, how do you tell? Well, without going into great detail, because we only have a short time, let me quote from Dr. Hedberg, H .D. Hedberg, who was president of the Geological Society of America when he wrote this in the GSA Bulletin several years ago.

He says that, our present-day knowledge of the sequence of strata in the Earth's crust is in major part due to the evidence supplied by fossils. There's a truism. It's fossils that tell you the relative sequence of strata, the relative age of rock fossils.

But, of course, not all fossils. Understand, it's only a few fossils that can do this because you find certain fossils that are in rocks of all ages, sponges, starfish, and so on. And even now, some of these so-called living fossils, like the coelacanth and like the neopilenum and various others, as a matter of fact, you can find many types of organisms that seem to have survived all through the so-called geological ages.

So, it's not all the fossils that tell you the age of rock, but only certain ones that supposedly lived in certain ages. Now, if you find rocks that have those index fossils, then they will tell you the age of a rock.

Now, he goes on to say, merely in their role as distinctive rock constituents, fossils have furnished one of the best and most widely used means of tracing beds and correlating them. And, of course, there's nothing wrong with that because if you have a given formation, a given rock formation, all formed essentially at the same time because it's a distinct unit, and it'll have different, it'll have certain fossils.

If you, say, dig a well through the formation over here and one over here, you'd expect to come up with the same sort of microfossils. This is a good way of identifying the formation from one part of the region to another.

That's used quite often in the oil industry and other industries, for example. But now the question is, suppose you have a formation in one region and a completely different formation in another region, how do you know which one of those is older than the other?

Or maybe from one continent to another continent. How do you tell that, then? Well, again, he goes on to say, and I'm gonna quote again from Dr. Hedberg, he says, going far beyond this, fossils have furnished, through their record of the evolution of life on this planet, an amazingly effective key to the relative positioning of strata in widely separated regions and from continent to continent.

So that's how you do it, to tell the relative positioning of strata from even continent to continent. You do that by the fossils. Yeah, but now how do fossils do that? Well, he says, through their record of the evolution of life on this planet, that's how fossils do that.

Of course, that's reasonable. If we knew evolution were true, if evolution has taken place from the one-celled animal on up through these different stages, obviously, if you find a rock in which you find fossils representing a certain stage of evolution, it's gonna, this evolution can take the same route all the way around the world at the same time, so if you find a fossil representing a certain stage of evolution in a rock, that obviously dates that rock.

It's the best way to do it, if you knew evolution were true. But now, how do we know evolution is true? That's the question we're talking about. How do you know evolution is true? Remember what Dunbar said.

He says fossils are the only historical, documentary evidence of evolution. So fossils tell you evolution is true, and how do they do that? Well, you find old rocks that contain simple fossils. You find the rocks back in the Cambrian that have only the simple invertebrates, and you go on.

As you come to more recent rocks, you find more complex fossils, so this shows you that life has evolved. That's assuming we know how to date these rocks so that we know which ones are old and which ones are young.

Yeah, but how do we know that? Well, fossils tell you the age of the rock. So, but how do fossils tell you the age of the rock? Well, through their record of evolution. That's how they tell you the age of the rock.

Yeah, but how do you know evolution is true? Well, because the fossil record tells you evolution is true, and so on, and you keep going around this circle, you see. Now, let me just admit right now that this is oversimplified because of lack of time, but this is really, this is really the key because when you find a contradiction, in other words, when you find, say, fossils from different ages mixed together, which you often find, but when you find rocks representing old ages because of the complex fossils on top of rocks representing young ages because of the, and then you go around, old rocks on top of young ones, by always, you can introduce some secondary explanation against some modifications of basic models to explain how originally they were distinct, following a normal evolutionary sequence, but then they were reworked and got brought together, or they were replaced to get them out of natural water.

You can always make it fit, but often you do have to make it fit. It doesn't fit in the normal way that they're found. Now, there's nothing basically wrong with circular reasoning because all reasoning is circular.

If you press it far enough, you'll find that always you have certain premises. Whether you recognize them or not, they're there subconsciously, if nothing else, and based on those premises, you're gonna come out with certain conclusions, and if the premises are wrong, the conclusions will be that as long as the whole system that you build up on that set of premises, this logistic chain of reasoning is all self-consistent with the data and the facts, then it's probably a pretty good evidence that it's a valid system, but when you begin to find contradictions and questions and difficulties, then it's time to begin to question the premises and see if maybe there isn't another model that will explain the same facts just as well or better.

Now, we believe that as of this time now, after 150 years of uniformitarian geology built up on this system of evolution, which we've already seen the fossils don't really show anyway, that maybe it's time to look at another model.

Maybe it's time to go back to the model of the founders of geology. That is the model of catastrophism to explain these data. Maybe instead of these different fossil ages representing really different ages in the evolution of life, they represent different ecological zones in the existence of life in one age, all buried in catastrophic geologic processes.

Now, this has been almost heretical to suggest such a thing as this in geology for the past 100 years, but if you look in detail at these formations, at the sedimentary rocks, at the igneous rocks, at the fossils and the other structures and so on in these rocks, you begin to be impressed with the fact that everywhere you look, you do find evidence of catastrophism.

Now, the very existence of fossils is evidence of that because after all, how do you get fossils? Fossils are dead things, but they have to not only be dead, but they have to be buried to be fossils. And to be buried, they must be buried suddenly.

If you have just, say, a slow deposition of sediment at the delta of a river, a fraction of an inch per year, you're never gonna get a fossil elephant and something like that, or even a fossil fish. When a fish dies, it doesn't go down to the bottom and wait for sediment to accumulate at the rate of an inch per 100 years or something and make a fossil.

Even when you have great schools of fish die, as you'd sometimes do in the Red Tide, great numbers of fish die. You get lots of dead fish, but you don't get fossil fish because they float around on the surface, they wash up on the shore, scavengers come along, decay takes place, and so on, and they're gone.

How do you get fossil fish? Now, this is a question because, for example, in California, there's a place where there are literally a billion fossil herring in the shales. Now, shales are usually interpreted as being formed very slowly because they represent fine sediment, supposedly falling very slowly through the water.

But here we have great beds of shale with fossil fish, herring, a billion of them. And furthermore, these herring fish are distorted and contorted, they were trying to get away, but they couldn't. The sediment settled on top before they could.

And some of them even have the color still on them, some of them even the soft parts on them. Yet they're supposed to be millions in myocene, 20 million years or so old. But now, how do you get things like that?

You do not get that by uniformitarian processes. And then you think of the great beds of dinosaurs all over the world. All over the world, every continent has great beds of these giant reptiles buried in the sediments.

And you have great beds of elephants in Siberia and Alaska and rhinoceros and horses and camels, great beds of hippopotamus in Sicily and great fish beds in New York and England and great beds of marine invertebrates everywhere.

How do you get beds of fossils like this? Particularly significant sizes and numbers of fossils, they're not buried by uniformitarian processes. Each one speaks of some kind of a catastrophe. And not only the fossils, but the very structure of the rocks, if you look at them closely.

In the first place, there are different kinds of rocks. You have igneous rocks, but igneous rocks representing the flow of a magma, rocks heated to very high temperatures so that they become liquid and flow.

Well, you don't have a liquid rock very long. Formation of igneous rocks doesn't take long. Metamorphic rocks, nobody really understands processes of metamorphism. We don't see them taking place today.

So must have had some non-uniformitarian system to produce them. And great falls, we don't see anything like that taking place today. We have earthquakes, well, but nothing like the great falls that you have at the, say, the Grand Tetons and so on.

You look more in detail, you find that every type of rock and every type of structure in the geological column is not really commensurate with anything that's taking place today. And yet uniformitarianism says the present is the key to the past.

There must have been processes operating at intensities in the past far beyond anything that we see operating today to really explain the rocks of the geologic column. This applies to the sedimentary rocks in particular.

And that's where the fossils are, which identify the geological ages which support evolution. The sedimentary rocks were formed by the transportation of sediments from somewhere. Sediments were eroded, transported, deposited.

But as you look more closely, you'll find evidence that these sediments were not formed slowly, such as sediments on a flood plain or in the river delta today. Well, even today, most of the sediments which are deposited today are formed just occasionally in intense floods.

Normally you have very little, but you have most of it deposited once across a year in floods. The processes of sedimentation are quite complex. They're not simple at all, and it's very much oversimplifying the same thing to say that we can study present processes of sedimentation and on the basis of these, interpret the formation of the sedimentary rocks because we don't even understand the present process of sedimentation.

A lot of experiments have been devoted to it, a lot of study, and the equations, the functions are very complex and they involve many different variables. And that's significant in itself because since we have many different variables that influence the quantity of sediment that will be transported in a water flow, if any of those variables change, then the sediment will change.

That is, the flow will change and the deposition will change. Now that's interesting because these sedimentary rocks are formed of strata. Now you see them, the stratum, the little layers, you've seen them exposed in highway cuts and so on and in sides of canyons.

These little layers represent a sedimentary process. The strata may be a fraction of an inch, sometimes several feet thick. Each one is a distinct unit, therefore represents a distinct set of properties and conditions when it was being formed.

But you don't have a constant set of hydraulic properties very long, only a matter of minutes or hours, so that each unit must have been formed rapidly because soon as the factors change a little bit, the velocity of flow changes or the source of the sediment changes or something else, soon as that happens, then you're gonna get a distinct stratification plane, a new stratum will be formed with a different set of properties.

And you have all these different strata, each one representing a distinct set of hydraulic properties occupying a short period of time, probably a matter of minutes, maybe hours at the most. Now furthermore, at the stratification plane, you find little irregularities usually representing the ripples on the surface of the sediment being transported.

As you know, bottom of a river, sand being transported moves along in a ripple pattern. And these were found often in the fossil record. You find fossil ripple marks and raindrop impacts and worm trails and so on, all of which indicate that these sediments not only were formed rapidly but hardened rapidly or these impressions wouldn't have been preserved.

There were processes of liquefaction taking place, there were cementing materials present which caused them to set up quickly. It didn't take millions of years to produce sedimentary rock from a loose sediment.

And this is obvious from the fact that we have these very ephemeral markings in all of them. But anyway, these little ripple marks at the interface between strata indicates there's not been a significant time lapse from one to the other.

Otherwise, the ripple marks would have been planed off. So therefore, as you go through the whole formation, one stratum by stratum, each one formed rapidly, each succeeding one formed immediately after the preceding one.

You finally say, well, therefore, the whole formation was formed continuously and since each unit was formed rapidly, the whole formation was formed rapidly. And then you go from one formation up to the next formation.

Now at the top of the formation, you may have what they call an unconformity where the strata are not resting conformably on each other but there's been a period of erosion, maybe uplift, erosion. So there's an unconformity and a time gap.

But no unconformity goes all the way around the world. In fact, they only go a short distance and you trace out far enough and you'll find a place sooner or later where the formation does go imperceptibly into the next one above that.

And then that would in turn, you can analyze stratum by stratum and that will go into another one somewhere else above that. Until finally, again, I'm way oversimplifying for the lack of time, but I think you can document this and show it thoroughly if you took all the time you wanted.

Now each unit of the geological column was formed rapidly and each successive unit was formed immediately after the preceding one without any time lapse, at least someplace around the world you find that, from each one to the next one, even at the greatest break, such as the break between the great eras, the Mesozoic and the Paleozoic and so on.

Even there you'll find places around the world where one era grades imperceptibly without a time lapse into the next one. And that means, therefore, that since each unit is formed rapidly and each subsequent unit formed immediately after the preceding one, the whole is the sum of its parts and therefore the whole column was formed rapidly, continuously, without time breaks in between.

And therefore, it does lend itself very easily to interpretation in terms of cataclysmic processes. Now, it's interesting that the concept of catastrophism has been refurbished in recent years. It used to be that catastrophism was kind of an ugly word among geologists.

Uniformitarianism was the watchword, but uniformitarianism has failed and many people recognize that. It doesn't explain things. Let me quote from a recent article in the Journal of Geological Education by Dr. Heilman.

It is hereby submitted, he says, that most scientists are guilty of an overly zealous interpretation of the doctrine of uniformitarianism. Many instructors dismiss the possibilities of global catastrophes altogether, whereas others ridicule and scoff at these early ideas.

And yet, these same instructors will implore their students to think scientifically and to develop the principle of multiple working hypotheses. If we have two hypotheses, why can't we look at both of them and see which one fits the facts?

The fact is, he says, the doctrine of uniformitarianism is no more proved and some of the early ideas of worldwide cataclysms have been disproved. It's still an open question as far as the actual geological evidence is concerned.

And as we look more in detail and we see that each one of these formations does show evidence of rapid formation, well, now it's beginning to be realized that you can really only explain the geological data in terms of catastrophism.

And more and more geologists are coming to that, particularly sedimentologists, who recognize that each sedimentary formation must have been formed at least in a local catastrophe. The question then is whether there are 10 ,000 different local catastrophes over the geological ages all over the world, whether maybe all of these local catastrophes do join together in a great complex of local catastrophes comprising a worldwide cataclysm.

We believe that the evidence supports that. An interesting book that was just published within the past few months, Dr. Derek Ager at the University College of Swansea in England, head of the geology department there, Dr. Ager is at great pains to tell the people who read his book that he is not a fundamentalist, he is not a creationist, he is an evolutionist.

But he does say that the evidence, and he goes formation by formation and structure by structure through the ages and around the world, he shows that every one of them can only really be explained by a catastrophe.

And let me just kind of quote from one section. He says, the hurricane, the flood, the tsunami will be more in an hour or a day than the ordinary processes of nature have achieved in 1 ,000 years. Almost has a biblical ring, doesn't it?