March 4, 2007
My rejection of YE Creationism owed a lot to weak arguments like this one from the CESM FAQ page: “Animals and plants must be buried quickly to become fossils, further proof of the global deluge. Polystrata fossils traverse multiple strata layers proving their rapid formation.” No geological knowledge is required to see the non sequitur in the first sentence. Since when does it take a global flood to bury an animal or a plant?! A minor local flood like ones we see today will do just as well! My home insurance company apparently agrees, since they will charge me a lot extra or refuse a policy altogether if my house is in a “100 year flood plain,” i.e., a place where a lot of mud may be deposited rapidly once every 100 years or so. Fact is, the existence of fossils poses no problem for even the strictest form of uniformitarianism (i.e., “the present is the key to the past”). As for the second point, the term “Polystrata fossils” (more commonly spelled “polystrate”) is a concoction of YE Creationists and not used by mainstream geologists. It is most often invoked to imply that multiple layers traversed by a “polystrate” fossil had to be deposited in the short period of the Noachian Deluge (less than a year), else the organism would have decayed before fossilization. But geologists believe episodic local floods are quite up to the task of rapid burial, so this argument is a big “straw man.” Unless, perhaps, you could find some humungous organism that traversed layers believed to represent the passing of many thousands of years. Perhaps a whale fossilized in an orientation with its length perpendicular to rock layers? Such an example so enticed young-earthers that they felt obliged to make it up! See A Whale of a Tale for the full story. After finding out that the alleged “vertical whale” was actually buried horizontally in layers that were later tilted by 40 or 50 (but not 90) degrees, Darby South comments: “What was found to be most disturbing was the tendency for creationists to deliberately omit specific locational data and references… It almost seems that the people making the claims about this whale being evidence for a catastrophic or Noachian Flood wanted the reader to take their claims as a matter of faith and wanted to make it impossible for anybody to check the veracity of the story. This is propaganda, not science, in the form of paragraph- to page-size versions of media sound-bites.” Note to self: Don’t take any YE Creationist “facts” at face value without checking them out. So are there any “polystrata” fossils with documentation? What YE creationists are usually referring to is fossilized vertical tree trunks. None of these pose any problem for mainstream geologists who simply call them “in situ trees.” In situ forests have been buried and sub-fossilized in historic times! Trees as tall as 20 feet and tree-ring dated between 1479 and 1857 were buried by lahar flows at Mount St. Helens and exhumed by mudflows in the 1980 eruption. See Don Lindsay on “Polystrate” Fossils, OE creationist Neyman’s rebuttal of John Morris’s Q&A #81, and Andrew MacRae’s “Polystrate” Tree Fossils. Most damning, perhaps, are fossil forests that could not have formed in the time allotted for the global flood, since successive forest horizons appear that would have required time for the growth of several generations of trees! See Fossil Forests and the Flood. The larger botanical fossil record contradicts flood geology over and over. For example, any Colorado Plateau tourist can view a petrified forest of conifers and tree ferns in the Chinle Formation, another within the Morrison Formation, and thousands of feet of rock in between these layers, including the desert Navajo Sandstone. There are no fossils of land plants at all in Cambrian rocks at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, or in Cambrian rocks anywhere on Earth for that matter. Thousands of feet of marine limestones overlie Grand Canyon Cambrian rocks. Above these, fossil fern leaves can be seen along the Kaibab trail in the Permian Hermit Shale . This layer is capped by a desert sandstone, then a limestone reef deposit. These all lie underneath the Chinle to the east, which is full of petrified wood. There are no flowering plant fossils (angiosperms) in any of this. For those you must go near to the top of the Grand Staircase. All this rock is interpreted by YE Creationists (and CESM in particular) as deposited in a single global flood! Why, then, are the major plants on Earth today never found in rocks below those with primitive tree ferns and cycads, for example? YE Creationists nit-pick about upright tree trunks but make no effort to square with the major features of the record. This calls to mind the phrase “strain at a gnat and swallow a camel” by somebody or other. 
So where are we? YE Creationists effectively say that stubby vertical fossil tree trunks prove a single flood was responsible for 2 vertical miles of rock near where I live. Even though these fossil localities are quite limited in extent, they conclude the flood was global. I’m frankly astonished that anyone would think this leap of irrational imagination is persuasive! Nevertheless, I suspect the argument will stay around and provide another iota of false comfort to those who believe YE Creationism for reasons that have nothing to do with empirical evidence and everything to do with wishful thinking.
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