Christian Answers: Fossils and The Flood

Gee, whiz, folks, it's Saturday, and that means that I get to tear apart an "educational" article from the Kid Explorers section of Christian Answers. Why do I do it? I do it because I have a vested interest in thorough and correct education for children. I do it because I believe lying to children is wrong. I do it because somebody has to. Today's Christian Question, penned by one Paul S. Taylor, is:

Are dinosaur fossils evidence for the great Flood?

At first blush, the phrasing of the question seems itself disingenuous. The question presupposes the truth of the flood and thus is hardly scientific in nature. This is, of course, how YECs, IDers, and "scientist" Christians do "science." First they decide what they want to prove, then they take whatever measures they can to create a "proof" that is convincing to the rhetorically and scientifically lacking. However, this kind of subtle indoctrination of children is infuriating. This question instills in their heads "The flood happened, but do dinosaur fossils work with that?" The answer, unavoidably, is yes. Once you've assumed your truth, your only recourses with contradictory evidence are to ignore it or somehow torture it so it fits your a priori assumptions.

So let's look at the opening paragraph, shall we?

Such a great event as Noah's Flood would surely have left evidence to be found today. For instance, one would expect to find billions of dead creatures buried by water in mud and sand (now hardened to rock). And that is exactly what scientists do find around the world.

Yes, Noah's flood would have left tons of evidence, and we would expect to find billions of creatures. Humans, animals, plants, and...dinosaurs. But is that exactly what we are finding around the world? We'll get there later. For now:

Thousands of dinosaur bones can be found where they were washed together by violent flood waters and buried under mud, sand and rock. Many of the animals were torn apart and their bones broken and jumbled-up. The muds and sands hardened like concrete to form the great layers of fossil rocks we find today.

Thousands of bones hardly adds up to billions of creatures. But not all of them were dinosaurs, I guess, eh, Paul? The real problem with this statement is the claim that muds and sands magically hardened like concrete and somehow (also magically) created the various layers of strata which radiometric dating proves belong to the ages that science expects. How'd that happen, Paul? Got a mechanism other than "That's what happens when god floods the place..."? It also bears repeating that the various strata each contain the fossils that evolution predicts for their perhistorical era, and only those fossils. No horses down with ankylosaurus, no sir. No sauropods next to a possum or a human child. This was a very convenient flood, it would seem, that just happened to lay things out exactly how science would come to predict them centuries later and confirm many hypotheses about the age of the world and the creatures that populated different time periods. Not one single idiot apatasaur wandered over into the "Triassic" group by accident. Hell of a flood, that.

Quick flood burial would be the only way that so many dinosaurs and other things could have become fossilized in the way scientists have found them.

Lie some more, Paul. Go ahead, do it. Don't tell them about tar pits or freezing or volcanic eruptions or drowning in deep but non-flood waters or any anoxic environment whatsoever. It's all flood, children. It was a hell of a flood, see.

Animals and plants will fossilize only if they are buried quickly and deeply - before predators, decay and weather destroy them.

Well, at least he switched to a half truth here. Yes, the lifeforms must avoid scavengers and bacteria and the elements, but there are plenty of ways to do that that don't involve a world-wide flood. See above.

Review: What are the main ingredients for making fossils?

1. Quick burial
2. Water, in the right amounts
3. Suitable mineral

This is the only place in the entire article where he even comes close to talking about the process of fossilization, wherein minerals from the corpse's environment slowly diffuse their way into the tiny spaces within its tissues, eventually coming to replace them entirely. It's also suspect that Taylor never clarifies the definition of "fossil." He makes it sound like all those crazy paleontologists just go around digging up bones and putting them together again and coming to false, non-Biblical conclusions. But as anyone who took middle school science (and any male who remembers his dinosaur obsession phase) knows, fossils are more like mineral imprints of the bone. Fossils of creatures, whether bone, skin, or chitin, are not their actual biological tissue; though traces may remain, fossils are stone, through and through. This leads us to the ingredient that Ken so conveniently left off his list:

4. LOTS OF FUCKING TIME

Monsieur Taylor's dishonest portrayal of the nature of fossilized tissue is obviously tailored to create in children the idea that fossils are merely bones that we just dug up out of the ground. He never comes right out and says it, but the obvious implication here is that fossils are just plain old bones, buried by Dog. Were this true, his half-assed "Them bones just done got buried real quick-like" theory might work. As it is, proper fossils are objects that take eons to form. Bone does not get completely replaced by mineral overnight. He leaves out the actual nature of fossils, and even goes so far as to mostly ignore the fact that bones are not by far the only things that get fossilized. They're very common, but skin has been found, feathers, exoskeletons, microbes...Under the proper conditions, almost anything can fossilize. Unfortunately for Paul S. Taylor, those proper conditions are not "big giant god-flood." So what does Paul conclude?

Conclusion: Conditions during the Flood were ideal for "fossilizing" millions of animals, plants and even dinosaurs.

Here we can see his blatant contempt for real science, as he places "fossilizing" in quotes, as if it were a silly term, and not entirely accurate. After all, "fossilizing" is a very specific natural process in scientific parlance. He wants it to be redefined as "covered in lots of dirt and stuff, but stay all boney" and so he must marginalize the proper definition of the term. Hell, he even implies that dinosaurs aren't animals! His mention of plants is odd, as a plant would require fossilization to still be around, and it's not like scientists have ever dug up Jurassic plant matter. Just fossils. But his theory would logically have to predict that, among those oh-so-real bones we find all the time, there should be some still viable plant material. Sure, he can say it rotted away, as is likely under his scenario, but he recognizes that plant fossils have been found. Which way do you want it, Paul?

I feel obligated to address one more problem with Paul's assessment of fossils and the flood. His "god flushed his toilet on the world 5000 years ago" theory, if true, would predict far more fossils than we actually find. If all that happened was "flood came, things got covered in water and dirt, things became 'fossils,'" then we would expect to find the fossilized remains of probably every single lifeform that was on planet Earth at the time of the flood. The ground under our feet would be teeming with the fossilized remains of every single human, duck, centipede, hippopotamus, brachiasaurus, deinonychous, rhodedendron, Japanese beetle, and kangaroo that was walking, flapping, crawling, stomping, running, buzzing, and hopping across the planet at the time god decided they were all unworthy. Let's look back at Ken's statement:

For instance, one would expect to find billions of dead creatures buried by water in mud and sand (now hardened to rock). And that is exactly what scientists do find around the world.

But is it? Fuck no!

In contrast to Ken's wishful little world where we tread daily upon the bones of the unworthy, we hardly find any fossils at all. Given the populations that would have been necessary to create a sustainable ecosystem, we're only finding the bottom-of-the-barrel scrapings. We're finding the dumbass T-Rex who tripped on a rock and fell off a cliff into the ocean. We're finding the raptor who went just a little too far north in his search for Dr. Alan Grant. A handful of complete skeletons and countless fragments from a couple hundred dinosaur species is not what Ham's little theory predicts. He says it himself, and say it with me in a Carl Sagan voice: "billions." Billions of complete sets of remains from millions of species.

Science predicts that, given the sheer unlikelihood of a creature's remains ending up in a situation where they are fossilizable, we would find just about dick compared to the actual population at the creature's time of death. Though it may seem otherwise to a small child who saw so many dinosaurs at the natural history museum, that's exactly what we find. A few, here and there, all neatly and predictably separated into their proper strata. The dozen T-Rex skeletons on display around the world don't even touch the true numbers of the King of the Terrible Lizards in his Cretacious paradise. And there's the rub. Science makes predictions to be tested, and sometimes those predictions come true. The "floodbones theory" makes no predictions, and the predictions I deduced out of its tortured content are not only contradictory but insofar as they are comprehensible, they are not true on any front. After all, to paraphrase Lewis Black, these people watch the Flintstones as a documentary.

Lying to children is wrong. Manipulating their minds and thoughts at an age where "I saw all these dinosaurs at the museum!" easily leads them, given the right "information" from an authority figure, to the erroneous conclusion that "There's lots of dinosaurs everywhere! We dig them up all the time!" is not only dishonest, it is reprehensible behavior. I have nothing but hatred and rage toward people like Paul S. Taylor and his ilk, who would so readily misinform children to their own ends, creating yet another generation of ignorant, militant religious. But I can do little to stop it.

So I blog. And I do my best. And I hope someone reads.

See you next week for more Christian Answers.