B6-Creationism_Fossil.txt

Graham L. Kendall
Modified  12/2/2002
Email grahamkendall74135@yahoo.com
I am found on IRC Efnet/Undernet as glk
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All are free to use any of this material without limit.
===================
From: "E. Dean Hovey" <edhovey@slc.quik.com

http://nowscape.com/atheism/zindler2.htm also.

CREATIONISM: The FOSSIL RECORD and the FLOOD

"It very often happens there is some question as to the earth or sky, or
other elements of this world...respecting which, one who is not a Christian
has knowledge...and it is very disgraceful and mischievous and of all things
to be carefully avoided, that a Christian speaking of such matters as being
according to the Christian scriptures, should be heard by an unbeliever
talking such nonsense that the unbeliever perceiving him to be as wide of
the mark as east from west, can hardly restrain himself from laughing."
-Augustine, bishop of Hippo-

One hundred years ago, Robert G. Ingersoll wrote Mistakes of Moses, in which
he virtually demolished biblical tales with his incisive logic. It is sad
that he did not have at hand the knowledge of physical science, biology,
paleontology, anthropology, and archaeology that we have today, for it
probably would have embarrassed religious fundamentalists so greatly that a
literal belief in the so-called "Word of God" would not be possible.
Mormons have their Joseph Smith with his tablets and magical spectacles
with which to read them. Jews have Moses and his tablets. Islam has its
Khomeini. Catholicism has its Pope. Religious sects are alike in that
infallibility is expected of such figures. Fundamentalists have elevated
the bible to the position of infallibility. All questions are answered by
an "inerrant" book, rather than a high priest. "The Word" is their pope and
it resides in the bible-literally, explicitly, factually-not merely
symbolically: Creation occurred in seven twenty-four hour days1-not in seven
eons, or other symbolic time periods. Each word means no more, nor any
less, than its dictionary definition. Fundamentalism is concrete,
crystalline, impervious to reason. It is inflexible, rigid and omnipotent,
and therefore unyielding to any logic. Its witnesses need have no other
education, no other philosophy, no wisdom, no humility. They know nothing
of compromises and easily elevate themselves to positions of moralistic
dictators. But those who live by the literal bible will die by the literal
bible. They have left themselves no escape from knowledge that more pliable
and less dogmatic main-line religions easily adapt to without complete loss
of face. The "literal" word of the bible is patently foolish and destroys
itself by its own inconsistencies.
"Scientific creationism," which is nothing more than an attempt to
persuade us that Science and Religion have no basic quarrels, and that, in
fact, science supports the literal biblical word, has come up with all sorts
of distorted and twisted science designed to fit the literal "Word."
It is a blatant attempt to break down our constitutional separation of
church and state which has been the primary reason for religious peace and
tranquillity in the United State for over two centuries. We must not allow
any religion to breach the protective wall that has benefited both church
and state and allowed the plurality of religious sects to live side by side
with a minimum of conflicts such as are found everywhere else where religion
dominates.
This essay addresses itself to the so-called "biblical flood" which
"scientific" creationists depend upon so strongly in their own attempts to
explain the fossil record of evolution. The great oak of a literal bible
will break in the face of simple arithmetic, logic, and scientific
knowledge.

TWO PERCEPTIONS OF THE FOSSIL RECORD

No single, so-called "scientific creationist" hypothesis illustrates so
forcefully the lack of solid scientific application and knowledge than its
use of the biblical flood to author the fossil record.
Using the most unlikely and impossible explanations to attack and try to
refute evolutionist interpretations of that record, they fly in the face of
every scientific discipline-exquisite scientific disciplines which have put
men upon the moon and space probes into meticulous orbits around the planets
of the solar system. Scientists who are apologists for creationist
superstition are never found in the forefront of scientific progress; they
publish no papers in reputable journals; they fight a rear-guard action to
impart divinity to a word-of-mouth ancient history passed down from one
ignorant generation to another. They perpetuate the ignorance. Those who
still believe as the writers of the "Word" believed remain at the same level
as the very authors of Genesis.
The entrance examination into the realm of "scientific creationism"
primarily consists of one question: "Do you believe in the absolutely
inerrant, literal word of God as recorded in the Holy Bible?"  Only if the
answer is in the affirmative will they be accepted, for it is not scientific
proficiency creationists seek; it is the ability to fit, no matter how
poorly, a smattering of science onto the manikin of dogma that they
desire-not a freely inquiring mind which goes where evidence leads.
The creation scientists' problem is that they simply have never carried
their "thinking" down to the nitty-gritty of what Noah's flood would really
have been like. Their glib assertions that the orderly fossil record was
the logical and inevitable outcome of a great flood fools only naive
students in their creationist schools, the scientifically illiterate, the
superstitious, and the gullible.
They have been getting away with this nonsense for some time now,
even to the extent of getting legislation passed to allow them to teach
"creationism" side by side with evolution. The true scientific community
has largely remained within its hallowed halls rather than storming out into
the quadrangle to do battle with what it knows to be pure nonsense.
Scientists, unlike religionists, are political neophytes and generally
remain oblivious to the issue of religion.
Average Americans are not willing, nor intellectually mature enough, to
handle such heady stuff as questioning any religion except upon tweedle-dum
and tweedle-dee issues. Undoubtedly, this results from living under a
Constitution which, in its consummate fairness in not favoring one religion
above another, has made attacks on religion nearly needless and obsolete.
But in the First Amendment's success lies a great danger to our liberties.
If we never question our religions or their motives, they will ultimately
destroy our freedom to do so. The fossil record, according to geologists,
archaeologists, anthropologists and paleontologists, reveals a predominantly
faithful, reproducible pattern and ordering of the fossils within it. Fossil
sequences, wherever found, are immutable.
The only apparent exceptions are provided where plate tectonics-the results
of continental drifts and the resulting overlays of already existing fossil
strata which seems to negate the regularity of the record-have acted
occasionally to "shuffle the deck."  Here and there are found reversals of
the record, as geologic cataclysms turned the record completely upside down.
Yet, even where that has occurred, the same sequences, only vertically
transposed, still confirm the inevitable patterns.
Rather than having conclusions first, and then synthesizing the evidence to
support the conclusions, scientists see that the record is explainable only
as the result of chronological arrivals and departures of species found in
the record over a time span of a billion years. That record always begins
with simple life forms at the base of the geologic column and the most
complex at the top.
It is long past the time to demolish completely the last vestiges of
creationist assertions that, in reality, the orderly fossil record resulted
from a cataclysmic flood and turbulent waters which supposedly laid down the
remains of every species in a serene, logical, unbroken sequence over the
face of the earth. We shall examine this imaginary flood and demonstrate
that the biblical account cannot survive a critical analysis of the physics
which had to be involved to produce such a flood.
Indeed, we shall show that, rather than the creation model of Genesis
predicting an orderly fossil record, the precise opposite-a completely
scrambled mish-mash-would have been the only result of such a catastrophe!
Further, we shall show that such a flood could not even have occurred!

SSQ (SPECIES SURVIVAL QUOTIENTS)

Creationists draw on three explanations for the creation of the fossil
record:-1. "ecological zonation," which simply says that such life as
trilobites and brachiopods appear first at the bottom of the geologic
column, since they normally live at the bottom of the sea.-2. "hydrodynamic
selectivity," which supposedly is the result of the fact that simpler, more
spherical organisms sink to the bottom of the seas faster than more complex
invertebrates with external appendages, and-3. each species had a built-in
"survival quotient" which enabled more clever and advanced animals to avoid
the ultimate calamity of extinction by the encroaching flood-waters for the
longest period of time.
Point 3 above, which is merely an accelerated replay of the "survival of
the fittest" theme, would even have merit under other circumstances. Given
sufficient time to solve the problems posed by a very, very slowly
approaching flood, man would probably have a better chance of surviving it
than lesser beasts for a longer time and hence would appear at the top of
the bone heap in the fossil record-a Pyrrhic victory to say the least. But
this flood was a flash-flood, the likes of which has never been seen in all
of history. The literal account destroys completely the other possibilities
that a more commonplace flood would have permitted.
The simplistic theory of creationists, calling upon differing
"survivability quotients" requires that every living thing on earth had to
succumb to the waters of the flood at precisely the exact sequential moment,
and at precisely the proper topographical spot for its species' location in
the record! If they had not, they would have been found either higher or
lower in the fossil record. Every individual within a species which did not
reach its predestined stratum level to die would have to be found at a
different level-which would have tarnished the fossil record sequence. But
the record has not been tarnished! Not one individual of any species has
ever been out of order!
Does it really seem likely that every individual of every species was so
"fine-tuned" that not one of them failed the survival test to be found out
of sequence? Such a thought is preposterous.

WATER, WATER, EVERYWHERE
Let us examine the flood's water supply. The account reads: "the waters
prevailed exceedingly upon the earth, and all the high hills that were under
the whole heaven were covered. Fifteen cubits (twenty-five feet) upward did
the waters prevail, and the mountains were covered."  The account says the
ark was finally dropped atop Mt. Ararat, which is seventeen thousand feet
high.
This, and the supposed extinction of all life, would lead us to conclude
that all the mountains were covered, and this includes Mt. Everest. Now
Everest happens to be nearly thirty thousand feet above sea level. There
had to be sufficient water available to raise the water level to a height of
nearly six miles to fulfill the word of the bible.2
Simple arithmetic enables anyone to obtain the volume of water required to
supply 30,000 feet of water over the entire face of the earth. To find the
area of the earth's surface, the formula 4 pi r squared applies. 4 times
3.14 times 4000 squared equals 200 million square miles-the area of the
earth. To obtain the number of cubic miles of water it takes to cover Mt.
Everest (and of course, the rest of the earth to that height), simply
multiply the area by the height of Everest in miles-200 million times 5.7
miles, and the produce is 1.14 BILLION CUBIC MILES!
To simplify the arithmetic, we shall use the round figure of one billion
cubic miles of water as that required to accomplish the flood requirements.
On all this earth there is only one-third that amount of water! The
atmosphere, the springs, the oceans, the seas, the rivers, the lakes, the
ice caps-all of them together (see Encyclopedia Britannica) contain only 360
million cubic miles of water! Melt the ice caps and the oceans will rise
only 200 feet. Squeeze every drop of water from the clouds and the air
around us and A MERE ONE INCH OF RAIN WATER WILL COVER THE EARTH! According
to The Air Around Us, By T. J. Chandler, earth's atmosphere holds only 3000
cubic miles of water.
The mythical flood, then, supposedly rose three hundred thirty-three
thousand times higher than all the water in our present earth's atmosphere
could have provided! It is perfectly obvious that our present one could not
have had any more than a figurative drop-in-the-bucket of the required
amount of water called for by the Genesis account.
We have heard that there was some sort of vapor envelope or canopy that may
have been responsible. So far as we know, none of the scientists for
creationism have disclosed any evidence explaining just how such an envelope
operated. But if we assume that earth's atmosphere at the time of the flood
was the source of the rains, let's examine its necessary characteristics.
Our present atmosphere, which holds only three thousand cubic miles of
water, has a barometric pressure of 15 pounds per square inch at sea level.
The atmosphere required to hold one billion cubic miles of water would have
to extend to a height of TWO MILLION MILES, and have a barometric pressure
of five million pounds per square inch at sea level. The mercury barometer
needed to measure atmospheric pressure of that magnitude would have to be
over 900,000 feet high (170 miles).
The greatest natural environmental pressures known today on the earth's
surface are only around 15,000 psi at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in
the Pacific Ocean. Obviously, if an atmosphere 300 time as severe as in the
Mariana Trench prevailed generally in those biblical days, all of life was
subjected to the above pressures. If the pressures were not enough to
destroy life as we know it, it certainly would have been impossible for
sunlight to have penetrated the depths of such an atmosphere to provide
energy capable of sustaining the photosynthesis of plant life. How would
Noah and animal life have been capable of seeing in the pitch blackness that
an atmosphere two million miles thick would have placed upon the earth?
The moon, which is only 250,000 miles from earth, would have had to
maneuver through that high pressure, moisture-laden, atmosphere at speeds of
two thousand miles an hour. Surely, it would have been slowed in its orbit
and crashed to earth before it had circled the earth a dozen times.
But perhaps the "scientists" teaching children in private creationist
schools will publish research showing how this can be explained logically
and scientifically. The obvious corollary question is, "where did all that
surplus water go?"
With the earth completely covered by six miles of water, where was it to
disappear to? We can imagine the simple mind of the originator of this tale
saying that the water would run down the valleys and rivers to the ocean or
a lower level somewhere. But the ocean and the valleys were already filled
to the brim! There was no lower level, so there was no way that gravity
could have "assuaged the waters"!
Genesis 8:1 says, "and God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the
waters were assuaged." (That certainly would have been a lot of hot air.)
Then, in Gen. 8:3, "and the waters returned from off the earth continually .
. . and the waters were abated."
The implication seems to be that the waters were evaporated back into the
atmosphere from whence they came! Those unscientific hunter-gatherers of
four thousand or so years ago had probably noticed that a breeze did tend to
dry up water, so when they wrote their Genesis story it is not surprising
that they said that God made a wind to pass over the earth as the most
logical way of getting rid of all that water. Of course, they had no way to
know the physical parameters which were really involved.
Normal evaporation rates could never account for the recession of the flood
waters in a mere ten months. It would have required an evaporation rate
sufficient to drop the flood level by one hundred feet every day or thirty
thousand cubic miles of water each twenty-four hours!
The amount of energy required to evaporate such volumes of water simply was
not available. It would have required the sun itself to have dipped to
within twenty or so million miles of earth to provide such energy. Had that
occurred, however, the ark would have been incinerated instantly along with
its entire contents! We think evaporation is a poor vehicle for removing a
billion cubic miles of water in ten months.

HARK! HARK! THE ARK!
Gen. 7:2 is very confusing. It says that God told Noah, " Of every clean
beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of
beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female."  Apart from the
male chauvinism evident in this order, what on earth does it mean? How does
one take seven beasts and have an even number of males and their females?
Perhaps God meant to say something like this: "of every PAIR of clean beast
thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the males and their female. . ."  Perhaps
something was lost in the translation somewhere along the line, although the
fundamentalists claim that every word is the absolute, literal word of God.
Noah had a wife and three sturdy, ambitious boys, Shem, Ham, and Japheth,
and they each had wives. Following God's architectural specifications, they
built an "ark."  Noah was told to stuff into this vessel about one million
species of animal, a male and female of each or more. We have interpreted
Gen. 7:2 as meaning that Noah may have had as many as fourteen of each
species aboard if he considered them to be "clean" beasts. Too many
categories of "clean" beast of any appreciable size would really have
created a problem. Even the QE2 would have sunk if too many fit the
definition of "clean."
These eight individuals began a search for living species which would do
credit to any Academy of Science. With butterfly nets, coon traps and
lassoes, they scampered over hill and dale, mountain peak and desert,
chasing down every representative biological phenomenon that moved-including
those which we in our benighted latter day have not yet discovered.
Beyond the impossible task of getting an unwilling couple of each species
into the ark, Noah must have had the even bigger problem of procuring
nourishment for them. The grain-eating mammals and birds would require
thousands of tons of grain over the year Noah was alleged to have had them
at sea. One elephant eats 1000 pounds of hay in a day. Animals with exotic
appetites would have to be catered to. Flesh-eating animals would need
animals to prey upon-beyond the pairs which Noah provided for on the
passenger list. The lion would require fifteen pounds of fresh meat a day:
such warm-blooded carnivores have enormous prey-to-body weight ratios. Even
if Noah procured and stored the food by miracle (which is no part of
science), the "lions" would devour the "lambs" as soon as they disembarked,
well before the lambs could replenish the lamb population. But that would
be of little consequence. The lambs would perish of starvation, as all
their grass had been destroyed during the flood. Ah, but Noah must have had
even more provisions stored away for several years after disembarkation!
Supposing Noah had traveled to Australia to get specimens of the strange
marsupials which live there, those poor animals could never have gotten back
home by themselves afterwards. The polar and tropical animals would never
have survived in the arid environs of Mount Ararat, even if they were able
to get down from the mountain in one piece. It must have required an act of
God (again not science) to restore each species in the precise ecological
niche from which it had been taken. . .
The story does not explain how trees survived the flood, as a few inches of
water about the base will kill a tree. Noah must have uprooted at least one
giant sequoia during a trip to California, and brought it aboard the ark.
There would have been 250,00 species of plant for Noah to collect.
The situation inside the ark must have been intolerable. The pestilence,
the flies-there would be more than two by the year's end. The carrion-birds
would be too gorged to fly! Imagine the tight, sweaty and pitch-black
quarters, there being only one small window on the top floor. Imagine the
small family, locked in with the bellowing, neighing, snorting, screaming,
howling, banging bedlam, when the box, proportioned 50 x 30 x 300, pitched
over on its side!

*The British Shipbuilding Industry, 1870-1914* (Harvard University press,
1979), Sidney Pollard and Paul Robertson discussed the problems of wooden
ship construction on pages 13-14. They said, "Half the weight
of timber in a wooden ship was wasted, its only use being to hold the other
half in position. Even so, a wooden ship had great stresses as a structure.
The absolute limit of its length was 300 feet, and it was liable to
'hogging' and 'sagging' in addition to being unable to withstand the local
strain of the screw propeller."
The same problems were discussed in *A History of Technology* (Oxford
University Press, 1958) by Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall, and
Trevor I. Williams. They included diagrams to illustrate the forces that
caused sagging, arching, and hogging that quickly made wooden ships
beyond the footage limit unseaworthy (pp. 353-354).

The 300-foot limit on wooden ships is a limit on size of wooden ships.
Shipbuilders were unable even at the height of the
wooden ship industry in the 18th and 19th centuries to build seaworthy
wooden ships beyond this limit. Attempts were made, but these
attempts failed. The ships hogged, sagged, and snaked so badly that
water-tight hulls were impossible. Efforts were made to reinforce the hulls
with iron strips bolted diagonally over the planking in the hulls. Even
this failed to make the hulls water-tight. The wooden ships build beyond
that length had to be used for short coastal hauls.

CREATIONISM AND THE FOSSIL RECORD
Stephen Jay Gould, who is one of the foremost evolutionists and who
contributed largely to the Arkansas creationist decision, has written an
excellent essay in The Atlantic, Sept. '82. It is entitled "Genesis vs.
Geology."  Just beneath the title we find, "The claim that creationism is a
science rests above all on the plausibility of the biblical flood."  He
says, further, "It has also elicited the only specific and testable theory
the creationists have offered; for the rest, they have only railed against
evolutionary claims."
Creationists have hitched their wagon to their four star "explanation" of
the way in which fossils were deposited where they have been found by
archaeologists. The "flood" is in reality their piece de resistance-the
keystone of the "scientific creationist's rickety logic-the finest moment of
his argument against evolution! Were it not for the fossil record,
evolution itself would have nothing to support it. It is the prime
requisite-the indispensable skeleton upon which the entire concept of
evolution hangs, from Darwin to Gould. Hence, creationists are compelled to
try to explain away this thorn in their side because, so long as it is
there, "scientific creationism" could never be taken seriously. If the
"flood" is not a viable alternative it explain the fossil evidence,
creationism is left with absolutely nothing to tie its claim in the bible.
Now we shall completely reaffirm the evolutionist's interpretation of the
fossil record and absolutely destroy the nonsensical "flood hypothesis"
which "creation science" dredged up.
We have seen creationist depiction's of the manner in which the flood was
supposed to have operated to put the fossil record into the order in which
it is found everywhere. Since it is obvious that no one was there with
cameras to record the flood's actions, they necessarily have had to resort
to artists' facile conceptions which, by golly, do seem to support the
claims of creationists. But then, we have also seen Dumbo flying around and
Pinocchio's nose growing longer with each lie. Such lovely fantasies have
undoubtedly tended to soften our brains sufficiently for us to accept
anything we see on screen as being possible, particularly, if one's teacher
offers it seriously to be a religious truth.
Immature, scientifically illiterate minds in the process of learning hardly
have the intellectual wherewithal to offer incisive critiques of such glib
portrayals, nor have they the temerity to question what has been presented
as God's own words. So the children within creationist schools are
spoon-fed with fantastic visuals purporting to be biblical verities, but
there is nothing scientific about them.
Let us see just how well the "flood" fills the bill.
The flood waters fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights.
Remembering that it took over one billion cubic miles of water to cover the
mountains, the magnitude of the catastrophe is easy to extrapolate. Given
forty days and nights, and converting them to 960 hours, we see that the
suppose flood emanating from the "windows of heaven" had to rise at the
phenomenal rate of six inches per minute!-thirty feet per hour and seven
hundred and twenty feet per day! Six inches of water in a mere twenty four
hour period is sufficient to cause considerable loss of life today, so
imagine a flood rising fourteen hundred and forty times faster such as
Noah's flood required! Frequently a human being with his supposed high
"species survival quotient" gets washed down a sewer, which should make one
become just a little suspicious of creationism's assertions that man's
superior intellect is the reason we find his bones on top of the other
species of life in archaeological digs around the world.
The earth's first experience with mass genocide as a result of the Lord's
dissatisfaction with life, which he had previously pronounced as "good,"
must have been an eye-opener. It was all over in forty days. It is even
likely that 99% of it was over in five or six days since, by that time, four
or five thousand feet of water had fallen (seven hundred and twenty feet per
day times the number of days). In fact, since only one percent of the
earth's topography rises above five thousand feet, there could have been no
more than a few beasts left anywhere by then. Distances between elevations
over five thousand feet are so far-flung that fleeing species scrambling for
high ground would have succumbed to the rolling cataracts of flood waters
long before they could have reached it! How far could any living thing have
fled in a mere week? Surely, man could not have reached destinations
exceeding a hundred or a hundred and fifty miles from plains areas in which
he normally resided-particularly with flood waters rising six inches every
minute behind him and before him!
We can throw even more cold water on the creationist arguments. All one
has to do is to take any atlas and find the topographical maps of the earth
to find that 90% of the earth's surface is below one thousand feet above sea
level. It would have taken only a day and a half for this spectacular flood
to have, therefore, covered 90% of all the land that existed. And, to add
insult to injury, 75% of the earth is less than 300 feet above sea level.
It takes no calculus to ascertain that 75% of the earth's land mass would
have been inundated by water within a mere ten hours!
Can you just visualize the "SSQ" effect coming neatly into play here as
creationism tells us it happened? In Africa, for example, a man living on
the Gold Coast would have had to run at speeds of 350 miles per hour through
waters coursing down upon him at the rate of six inches every minute in
order to fulfill the creationist dogma (it isn't even a theory by now) that
he would out-survive all those other animals (who were unable to keep up
with him).
Just how far do we have to pursue this utter reason to completely destroy
the utter nonsense of creationism?
The vain notion of "scientific creationism" that man could have survived
animals several times as fleet-of-foot in the race to high ground is
patently absurd! This flood was not an intellectual challenge. A large
brain would never have been the key to survival, but only raw, brute
strength, agility and tremendous physical endurance would have separated the
animals from men. Man's physical proclivities are actually his least
distinguishing characteristics when he is in competition with
nature-in-the-raw. A ninety pound chimp is twice as strong as a two hundred
pound man. A 100 pound cheetah runs four times as fast as man's finest. A
two ounce bird easily equals that.
This imaginary "race-against-extinction" by earth's fauna, rather than
resulting in a neat "colandering," or sorting, or filtering of all the
species as a result of some notion of a "master species" superiority wherein
man won the day, was a race in which man would have been the most inferior
contestant! The result of such a survival race against the flood waters
would only have ended in his bones' being strewn from here to eternity,
revealing a pattern of pathetic inadequacy. The fish, the fowl, and the
fleet would have inherited the earth's top stratum of the fossil record-not
poor, plodding, two-legged man.
And above all, why would those species whose natural habitat was the very
waters of the seas have departed this mortal coil before the mammal?
Normally intelligent folks would expect sea beasts to have thrived in the
waters of a flood rather than succumbing to them only to be found among the
earliest casualties of the flood! It will take a great deal of sophistry
for their scientist to explain that one away.
Even today, should such a flood be unleashed upon us, who among us imagines
that his own voice would be the last to cry for help? With all of man's
knowledge; with all his encyclopedic precociousness; with all his
magnificent inventions; with all his ability to jog a couple of miles: who
could possibly imagine that all other species of life would die before the
species of man? Who could believe that the eagle, already ensconced in the
security of the heights of its natural habitat, or the mountain lion in his,
would succumb to a flood before the last Johnny-come-lately human being
arrived in his four-wheel-drive Land-Rover?
Dear reader! We have been talking here about the fossil record. We are
talking here about which author is the true one: evolution, writing
life-on-earth's chronology upon millions of pages of geologic strata, or
creationism, tracing a brief account of a magical flood befitting only the
childish imaginations of the first fundamentalists on earth.
Accepting creationism's best aspect, we shall allow the most generous time
period during which time all of life on earth would have had to be wiped
out. That amounts to 960 hours. If three million species were exterminated
in that time, one complete species had to bite the dust (pardon, the mud)
every second! Using the more realistic time frame, where 75% of all life
was exterminated in ten hours at or below 300 feet above sea level, species
were then being exterminated at the rate of one hundred per second! (A
piano string vibrating at a frequency of 100 per second would sound like a G
below middle C. That is how fast species would be eliminated.)
Now which scientist for creationism will stand up and defend the
possibility that such a cacophony of death positioned fossils in the
one-two-three-apple-pie-order in which we find them today so neatly
arranged? Before you do, may we ask further, "How did your precious
sedimentation's-the strata delineating the precise moments of sequential
species' extinction's-manage to secure themselves so meticulously and
permanently at such astounding rates?"

MORE ABOUT FOSSIL RECORDS

Creation "scientists" have been dwelling gleefully for years upon what they
consider to be the damning proof that evolution is wrong-namely, the fossil
"gaps."  They have expected that, in less than a century, our
paleontologists, archaeologists, and geologists should have filled in a
record which sprawls through a billion years of time. They have demanded
that evolutionists assemble the most complex jigsaw puzzle ever attempted,
leaving not one geologic stone unturned nor missing fossil link
undiscovered. It is the frantic refuge of religious zealots who merely call
on miracles to explain away their own intellectual shortcomings.
We now call them to accountability.
There is a fossil record that would, if it were ever to be found, totally
demolish evolution as the means whereby life developed. Scientific
creationist could wipe out completely every vestige of viability of
evolutionary theory if they could only discover just one stratum of fossils
that would automatically reveal the simultaneous creation of all the species
on earth.
If all of life, according to creationism, were created at one time as per
the raconteurs of the Genesis fable, and less than a mere ten thousand years
ago, there must be a fossil record wherein a perfectly homogenized cache of
fossil remains exist! Prior to the imaginary flood, there were no forces
acting to produce geological separations between what were contemporaneous
inhabitation's of all life forms. Where are the sepulchers containing
trilobites side by side with insects? Man with dinosaurs? Apes with
sharks? Creationists do not even have a single piece of evidence that would
fulfill the compelling prediction that such a stratum would have to exist to
uphold the so-called "Word of God."  Talk about gaps!
And at the time of this imaginary flood, how would creation scientists
explain away the fact that there were no remains of the trillions of animals
which had to have been incapacitated, flawed, diseased, aged, and the newly
dead interspersed within the fossil record. These missing carcasses would
have to be there, since they were not even able to join the race for
survival. But they are not there!
Why hasn't the scientific community long since demanded that the
creationists produce the required record from their digs instead of allowing
them to take charge of the entire issue to the point of actually obtaining
legislation to teach their nonsense side by side with evolution as though it
were a respectable theory? Publishers of school books have been diminishing
evolutionary exposure and school boards have supinely folded under the
fundamentalist pressures to confer respectability upon tales by ancient,
ignorant Bedouins.

CONCLUSION

We have belabored this far longer that it normally would take to persuade an
intelligent reader to our arguments. However, we do not expect the
"overkill" to win many converts from among religious zealots who are so deep
into their superstitions that nothing could change their minds. It was
asked of at least one "scientific creationist," "What would it take to
persuade you that you are wrong?"  He answered, "There is nothing that could
make me change my mind."  The very statement itself exposes the fraudulence
of the creationist claim that they are scientists, for true scientists
diligently seek to test their theories against antithetical challenges and
readily give them up in the face of evidence to the contrary. It
demonstrates further that these "creation scientists" are, first of all,
slaves to a prior dogmatic religious indoctrination which makes them unfit
to claim that they are scientists.
However, they have given unwary "evolutionists" quite a scare and at times
waylaid scientific evolutionists by thrusting a fresh, unexpected attack
upon them in debates for which the scientists were totally unprepared.
Science had thought that this low-level foolishness had long since been
disposed of, and it was caught flat-footed by the novelty of finding a
coterie of well-prepared debaters with rather good credential in science now
standing behind the bible itself! Until then, it was easy to dismiss the
superstitions of the bible as superstitions. Suddenly, the new breed of
fundamentalist burst forth from the covert, quiet halls of fundamentalist
colleges where they had been perfecting the attack upon evolution for some
time!
The forces of science found themselves in disarray as creation scientists
fired volley after volley of challenging, scientifically-sounding, and
apparently credible arguments in every direction: at school boards, at
science itself, at political targets, at textbook publishers: at the blindly
faithful-a virtual MIRV barrage designed to bring down the constitutional
barrier between religion and the state.
The prime target was school children, for therein lay the entire future of
religious  fundamentalism! Capture the little children, whose minds are
uncritical, in their classrooms, and the battle is over. Feed them bible
fantasies, wash them down with ostensibly palatable pseudo-science, and they
become fundamentalist zombies-acquiescent or militant witnesses for that
old-time religion which makes so much money for the con-men-par-excellence
who mastermind the movement.
We are hopeful now that this small treatise will help to re-balance
the scales which tilted toward "scientific creationism."  Polls taken prior
to this effort have, indeed, shown the reticence of a majority to stand up
to the creationist attack. Perhaps we shall stiffen the backbones of enough
intelligent people to restore some sanity to those victims of the
fundamentalist dogma which has never befitted intelligent minds.
Further, we believe that the average "creation scientist" who has committed
his probably considerable abilities unwittingly to a cause about which he is
naive may realize that he has been duped by his own inner religiosity inbred
in him by family, friends, and preachers. Given the mental capacity to
exhibit the competence in fields of microbiology, anthropology, zoology,
geology, physics, and chemistry which they have actually demonstrated, it
seems reasonable that they will have to become totally disenchanted with the
notion that Noah's flood supports their explanations for the majestic fossil
record. Then, lacking a counter thesis to evolution, they may lend their
real talents to rational scientific theories, free of religious
compulsion.:)

WILLIAM H. REYNOLDS
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End of B6-Creationism