The first major change in scientific thought was in the field of biology. Linnaeus, the Swedish biologist, had…abandoned the theory of the chain of being that claimed that all living creatures formed an unbroken scale of complexity and nobility, terminating with the most complex and noble of all, humanity. Instead, Linnaeus showed that life could be divided into five separate kingdoms, each divergent from the other.
What a gross distortion of the facts.
In fact, Linnaeus was a devout Christian who believed that “The study of nature would reveal the Divine Order of God’s creation, and it was the naturalist’s task to construct a ‘natural classification’ that would reveal this Order in the universe.”
In fact, the separation of mortal living creatures into five categories follows the biblical account of creation which defines 1) water animals, 2) winged animals, 3) beasts of the earth, 4) cattle, 5) creeping things, and finally 6) man as a unique creation representing Spirit God himself in material form.
The second major change in scientific thought was in the field of geology.
Traditional…geologists held that the catastrophes described in the Bible, such as Noah’s flood, had actually taken place and caused many of the signs of geological change that could be seen. This view was known as catastrophism. An alternative to catastrophism was the view called uniformitarianism. Proponents of uniformitarianism argued that the world’s current geological state was the result of uniform forces working slowly over long periods of time. Uniformitarianism was one of the foundations of evolutionary thought, in part because it provided a geological analogy for biological change: both were the result of gradual forces working over extremely long time periods.
In 1830 Lyell published Principles of Geology promoting uniformitarianism over catastrophism. To this day, Lyell’s Principles of Geology is the foundation of modern geology.
That’s simply incredible. Literally unbelievable.
Against all succeeding scientific discoveries and developed scientific methodologies modern geology remains (that’s a pun) based on an amateur examination of a tiny sample of Earth’s terrain excluding all evidence of volcanoes, asteroid impacts, tsunamis, hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones and sudden climate change.
Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology was met with a lot of criticism when it was first published.
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Lyell was pulling from a theoretical idea instead of pulling from empirical evidence to explain what was occurring in the geological world…evidence is all that is needed to support an idea, and that the evidence of geologic events points to a catastrophic event. The criticism of Lyell and his work continued into the 20th century…
The a priori argument is not the only argument that Lyell faced for his work. In 1812, Baron Georges Cuvier…and his colleagues found…intermittent patterns of sudden fossil disappearance in the geologic record for the area, which is now known as mass extinction. Cuvier explained these sudden changes in the geologic record with catastrophic forces. Lyell responded to this argument, stating that the geologic record was “grossly imperfect” and that observations cannot be trusted if they go against “the plan of Nature”.
There is now clear evidence of catastrophic change caused by volcanic eruptions, large earthquakes, and asteroid impacts…
[the roughly 10-mile-wide Chicxulub asteroid…in the Gulf of Mexico] hit with the force of 100 million atomic bombs, quickly opened a massive hole nearly 19 miles deep and 120 miles wide…pushed rock up from 6 miles below the surface…Those rocks travelled approximately 20 miles in a few minutes, first being pushed outward from the impact, then rebounding upward above the Earth’s surface and finally collapsing outward to form a ring of peaks around the center of the impact.
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What has Uniformitarianistic Geology discovered in the past 200 years?
What about Catastrophic Geology?
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In 1883, Krakatau’s explosion caused a century of climate chaos. Krakatau has been extremely active for hundreds of years. In August 1883, it erupted to stupendous effect, obliterating its three islands, and killing tens of thousands of people.
The sound of the eruption alone is said to have been the largest heard in modern history. “The noise was heard as far as 3,000 miles…the equivalent of a blast in Dublin being heard in New York. Half the crew of British ship some 40 miles away reported having their ear drums “shattered”—if they had been closer, they might well have been killed by the force of the sound alone…”the subsequent tsunami…reached over a hundred feet (30 meters) in height, sweeping 165 coastal villages and settlements out to sea. The wave is said to have traveled around the globe three and a half times at astonishing speed, causing tsunamis as far as South Africa and flinging huge chunks of coral reef onto the land as it went. Some of these sections of coral weighed as much as 600 tons…
There was a lasting effect on the world’s climate, too: aerosols emitted into the atmosphere by the blast led global air temperatures to drop by as much as 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.2 degrees Celsius).
According to a 2006 article in the journal Nature, the volcano caused oceans to cool for as much as a century, offsetting the effect of human activity on ocean temperatures. If the volcano had not erupted, the authors argue, our sea levels might be much higher than they are today.
The super-volcano at its heart continues to bubble away… it’s simply a matter of time.
Interesting way to phrase that: “a matter of time.”
Krakatoa became one of the most famous volcanoes ever, not just because of its fearsome power and effects, but because it was the first really gigantic volcano to blow in the era when humans had communications technology — telegraph lines and printed newspapers — to transmit accounts of what was happening, as well as scientific instruments to measure its effects.
Climate change widespread, rapid, and intensifying
Scientists are observing changes in the Earth’s climate in every region and across the whole climate system, according to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report, released today. Many of the changes observed in the climate are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, and some of the changes already set in motion—such as continued sea level rise—are irreversible over hundreds to thousands of years…
The Working Group I contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report addresses the most up-to-date physical understanding of the climate system and climate change, bringing together the latest advances in climate science, and combining multiple lines of evidence from paleoclimate, observations, process understanding, and global and regional climate simulations.
Weird how the same people who recognize the need to combine multiple lines of scientific evidence to assess catastrophic climate change in the present can yet cling to the principles of uniformitarianism in the past. Its as if they believe humans make the only impacts (heads up, that’s another pun) on earth.
A new report claims to offer “the first science-based list of global risks with a potentially infinite impact…”
Major asteroid impacts have caused large-scale extinction on Earth in the past. Most famously, the Chicxulub impact 66 million years ago is widely believed to have caused the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs…
As with asteroids, there’s historical precedent for volcanic eruptions causing mass extinction. The Permian–Triassic extinction event, which rendered something like 90 percent of the Earth’s species extinct, is believed to have been caused by an eruption…
There are almost certainly other dangers out there with grave potential impacts that we can’t predict. It’s hard to even think about how to tackle this problem, but more research into global catastrophic risks could be helpful.
The Tunguska Impact–100 Years Later
[T]he generally agreed upon theory is that on the morning of June 30, 1908, a large space rock, about 120 feet across, entered the atmosphere of Siberia and then detonated in the sky.”
It is estimated the asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere traveling at a speed of about 33,500 miles per hour. During its quick plunge, the 220-million-pound space rock heated the air surrounding it to 44,500 degrees Fahrenheit. At 7:17 a.m. (local Siberia time), at a height of about 28,000 feet, the combination of pressure and heat caused the asteroid to fragment and annihilate itself, producing a fireball and releasing energy equivalent to about 185 Hiroshima bombs…
ATLAS is an asteroid impact early warning system being developed by the University of Hawaii and funded by NASA. It consists of two telescopes, 100 miles apart, which automatically scan the whole sky several times every night looking for moving objects.
ATLAS will provide one day’s warning for a 30-kiloton “town killer,” a week for a 5-megaton “city killer,” and three weeks for a 100-megaton “county killer”…
Watch ATLAS make observations in real time.
Astronomers all across the world check this webpage every night…to calculate the asteroids’ orbits and determine if they could threaten Earth.
Meanwhile, the Scout Hazard Assessment webpage maintained by NASA-JPL’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies interprets the observations using sophisticated computer programs, checking for immediate threats and requesting further measurements of asteroids whose orbits remain uncertain. Both websites are publicly accessible to anyone in the world.
Major asteroid hit on Earth is well overdue
The Earth is long overdue for a visit from space…by great chunks of rock. New research related to what caused the 1.2 km wide [3/4 of a mile] hole in the ground at Meteor Crater in the Arizona desert is a reminder…
The study, published in the journal Science…suggest the impactor was travelling at about 20 kilometres per second (45,000 m.p.h.) when it hit, delivering energy equivalent to a 20 to 40 megaton bomb…
Earth-crossing asteroids of this size are predicted to reach us every 1,600 years or so. Most would strike the oceans, but such a meteor might slam into a land mass every 6,000 years on average.
No mathematician is needed to realise that we seem long overdue for our next visit. The recent disaster movies about cataclysmic impacts with asteroids or comets all assume an object of one to two kilometres across.
The alarm that Harlan Bretz and Joseph Pardee caused in the early 20th century by proposing that 500 cubic miles of water eroded the Grand Coulee and scablands of eastern Washington State illustrates the crisis evolutionists have encountered. This flood from ancient glacial Lake Missoula in Montana emptying in 48 hours would have been half the volume of Lake Michigan!
Secularists readily perceived the implications of accepting this. If a catastrophe explains the geologic formations in Washington, Idaho, and Montana, then will a quick washout be found for the Grand Canyon? And then, what about the 2½ average miles of sedimentary layers around the earth which have evidence of catastrophic burial…
Indeed, evidence of a water source has been found upstream from the Grand Canyon…a computer-generated shoreline reveals that a body of water holding 3,000 cubic miles of water could have been retained…three times the volume of Lake Michigan…
The Grand Canyon is a channel cut through what is called the “Kaibab upwarp.”
If the Grand Canyon were filled [with rock] today, large lakes would form in the Colorado plateau basin to the northeast. Silt and mud layers are evidence of a large lake in eastern Arizona, also called ancient “Hopi Lake…” When Hopi Lake breached its dam through the Kaibab upwarp, this would have destabilized the larger lake…called Canyonlands Lake. When this lake breached its dam and cut out Marble Canyon, it would have been followed by Vernal Lake to the north, cutting a channel through Book cliffs. Or this could have happened in reverse.
All these lakes emptying through the Grand Canyon would have cut it down…as we see it today. The delta deposits are along the Arizona/California border. These sediments create the rise that separates the Salton Sea trough, which is below sea level, from the Gulf of California in Mexico…
Breached dams always fall catastrophically. When water floods over a dam and erodes one foot, that is one-foot-deep water coming from the whole lake! Fast-moving volumes of water have phenomenal erosion power…
A good modern example of hydraulic force was demonstrated in 1983 when heavy snowmelts threatened the Glen Canyon Dam above the Grand Canyon. Engineers were releasing 93,000 cubic feet of water per second to keep the dam from overtopping. When they raised the release rate of one 40-foot spillway tunnel to 32,000 cubic feet per second, suddenly large chunks of concrete and bedrock were thrown from the tube as the water turned red and the ground trembled. Immediately the tube was closed. Engineers found that the 3-foot steel-reinforced concrete wall was pitted and a cavity was cut at a bend 32 feet deep, 40 feet wide, and 150 feet long. It required 63,000 cubic feet of concrete to fill the hole. In the short time the water was running red (like the bedrock), it is estimated erosion was happening at 1,000 cubic feet per minute.
In water flowing over 20 miles per hour strong hydraulic forces are generated. (The Lake Missoula flow was estimated at 200 feet deep and 60 miles per hour over dry falls). Cavitation, plucking, and kolks can pulverize and move rock rapidly.
Hydraulic plucking occurs when high-velocity flows rip loose blocks of bedrock and move it along. Cavitation takes place when fast-moving water, over irregular rock, detaches and generates vacuum bubbles. When they hit the surface and explode, it is like sledgehammer blows that can pulverize rock. Kolks are like underwater tornadoes. The force from the low-pressure vortex exerts extreme suction of bedrock. Sapping structures are also seen along the walls of the upper Grand Canyon when the land rapidly detached from the emptied lakes.
Evidence of these catastrophic forces at the Grand Canyon show that it did not take hundreds of thousands of years for the Colorado River to slowly wear down the Canyon.
It would seem that, in addition to its utter lack of grounds (yes, that’s a pun) for acceptance as a legitimate theory, uniformitarianism has been disproved.
But in order to maintain the fundamental time requirement for Evolution, belief in uniformitarianism must be maintained, with only a grudging concession to the evidence for catastrophism.
[M]odern geologists also realize that not all processes that were at work in the past are happening today…
In this way…uniformitarianism provides us with another explanation that helps create a more complete picture of the processes that shape the Earth and the Universe.
Today, we hold uniformitarianism to be true and know that great disasters such as earthquakes, asteroids, volcanoes, and floods are also part of the regular cycle of the earth.
Is there any evidence for a Deep Time earth?
Radiometric Time Scale
The discovery of the natural radioactive decay of uranium in 1896 by Henry Becquerel, the French physicist, opened new vistas in science. In 1905, the British physicist Lord Rutherford–after defining the structure of the atom– made the first clear suggestion for using radioactivity as a tool for measuring geologic time directly…
The next 40 years was a period of expanding research on the nature and behavior of atoms, leading to the development of nuclear fission and fusion as energy sources. A byproduct of this atomic research has been the development and continuing refinement of the various methods and techniques used to measure the age of Earth materials…
A chemical element consists of atoms with a specific number of protons in their nuclei but [can have] variations in the number of neutrons. Atoms of the same element with differing [number of neutrons] are called isotopes. Radioactive decay is a spontaneous process in which an isotope loses particles from its nucleus [to form a daughter isotope]…Some isotopes…decay slowly, and several of these are used as geologic clocks.
Dating rocks by these radioactive timekeepers is simple in theory, but the laboratory procedures are complex. The numbers of parent and daughter isotopes in each specimen are determined by various kinds of analytical methods. The principal difficulty lies in measuring precisely very small amounts of isotopes…
only certain types of rocks, chiefly the igneous variety, can be dated directly by radiometric methods…Igneous rocks are those…which crystallize from…[volcanic] magma…
sedimentary rocks such as sandstone, limestone, and shale are related to the radiometric time scale by bracketing them within time zones that are determined by dating appropriately selected igneous rocks, as shown by a hypothetical example.
sedimentary rocks such as sandstone, limestone, and shale are related to the radiometric time scale by bracketing them within time zones that are determined by dating appropriately selected igneous rocks, as shown by a hypothetical example.
The age of the volcanic ash bed and the igneous dike are determined directly by radiometric methods. The layers of sedimentary rocks below the ash bed are obviously older than the ash, and all the layers above the ash are younger…
Many points on the time scale are being revised, however, as the behavior of isotopes in the Earth’s crust is more clearly understood.Thus the graphic illustration of the geologic time scale, showing both relative time and radiometric time, represents only the present state of knowledge. Certainly, revisions and modifications will be forthcoming as research continues to improve our knowledge of Earth history.
Doesn’t sound like anything to bank on.
The ancient creatures could reach 80 tons and 65 feet (20 meters) in length, rivaling modern sperm whales.
So how did the remains of massive sea creatures…end up at an altitude of 9,186 feet (2,800 meters)?..
the folding of the Alps…when the African tectonic plate began to push up against the European tectonic plate, created piles of rock layers…pushed them to a rock formation at the top of a mountain.
The fact is that Evolutionists arbitrarily assign long dates to geological layers based on a priori assumption that evolution occurred.
Geologists use fossils to determine the age of the rock layer that it was found in. We know that if a fossil once lived on Earth 260 million years ago, the layer that it was fossilized in must be at least 260 million years old. Geologists can then determine that layers around the world that contain that same fossil must be 260 million years old.
The first life appeared about 3.2 billion years ago in the form of algae, a simple single celled plant. Scientists know that life on Earth has changed over time and that the life has become increasingly more complex. Scientists also know that these changes didn’t occur over night, sometimes it took millions of years for these plants and animals to evolve.
“We know…Scientists know that.. it took millions of years for these plants and animals to evolve.”
How do they know? Just how much do fossils to support evolution’s claims?
Fossils are rare since the conditions have to be right for them to form.
“The fossil record is clearly incomplete, and it is clearly biased by many factors…
So, is the fossil record more like 1 or 50 percent of reality? Benton doesn’t know. And his new paper suggests no else does either.
Evolution’s failure to follow scientific methodology is most cearly shown by the fact that, despite two hundred years discovering billions of fossils the world over, absolutely no fossils of the theorized transitional states between any species have ever been found.
This lack of discovery should have eliminated evolution as a scientific consideration.
Currently, academia and science are clinging to uniformitarianism and biological macroevolution with all the strength they can muster.However…the last 50 years an enormous amount of information has been collected that supports catastrophism and intelligent design.
The Mount St. Helens eruption and subsequent erosion has taught us that rapid deposition and rapid canyon erosion is a fact. It doesn’t take years to form. It doesn’t take rocket science to know that life forms cannot be fossilized unless buried rapidly.
Regarding biological macroevolution:
- No transitional fossils have been found; museums should be full of them.
- Hoaxes, forgeries, and misrepresentations have been rampant.
- Evolutionists can’t explain the origin of life.
- Evolutionists can’t explain complexity or irreducible complexity.
- Evolutionists can’t explain consciousness.
Many in science and academia have a deeply held religious belief in uniformitarianism and evolution in spite of all the evidence pointing in the opposite direction…their original theories were based upon religious political motivations…Julian Huxley, grandson of Thomas Huxley “Darwin’s bulldog,” first director of UNESCO and prominent evolutionist was asked on a public radio station…why evolution was accepted so rapidly. He didn’t say anything relating to scientific evidence. He said the reason it became so popular was because it didn’t interfere with our sexual mores.
Consequently, the evidence definitely leads to the fact that the new paradigm shift from a solid belief in the Bible, the biblical flood and a young earth to skepticism in the Bible, rejection of the biblical flood of Noah and an old earth occurred as a result of using the banner of science to promote a religious belief rather than being based upon scientific evidence.
So what we have is the scientific community doggedly claiming Uniformitarianism as a fact because it is the foundational element of Evolution, while actively pursuing policies, practices and safeguards in acknowledgment of the reality of Catastrophism.
Catastrophism is a reality. Are you prepared to face it? Or will you be among those who will cry out “to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb” when “another explanation that helps create (pun) a more complete picture” of the processes that shape the Earth and the Universe come to pass as warned:
- “there was a great earthquake; [from volcanic, asteroid or megabomb explosions]
- and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair [blocked by atmospheric particles thrown up by the even],
- and the moon became as blood; [particles shifting the light rays to a different range in the spectrum]
- And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, [anything suspended in space and viewed as lights in the sky, including asteroids and modern satellites]
- And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; [closed to view by dense clouds]
- and every mountain and island were moved out of their places [domino effect of underground eruptions and overhead impacts on tectonic plates of the earth’s crust.]” (Revelation 6:12-16)
Belief in the biblical warning of these events at the end of time is based on faith – knowledge that these events occurred in the past as reporting in the Bible and evidenced in nature.
Rejection of the biblical warning of Judgment Day is based on rejection of the biblical account of these events having occurred in the past, despite the evidence in nature.
“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:” (Romans 1:18-20)
Kingdom Come 