Actually the problem is too many fossils. Given the depth of some of the marine fossils if they had all been alive at the time of the flood there was not enough space to hold them all. References available upon request.
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Yes. Please send the links.
Thanks
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This got me to thinking about the sandstone formation near here where sixth graders used to go to dig fossils. Figuring a thousand sixth graders per year each digging out two to three fossil bivalves for about forty years, generally destroying three or four other fossils in the process of getting one free, it comes to 350,000 fossils – and this is in a section maybe eight feet thick by thirty feet long, with a loss of maybe three feet of surface material over the years, which comes to roughly 480 fossils per cubic foot or one in every three and a half cubic inches. This sandstone formation runs at least two miles in one direction and the same the other direction, and assuming the density of such fossils continues then there are over a trillion bivalve fossils in this one formation!
(note: this is an odd formation since the bivalves in question didn’t live more than a foot down in estuaries, but it got explained thanks to the work of some grad students I knew in my university days: the sandstone contains reddish mud particles along with occasional bits of plant matter, which means the formation consists of sand mixed with local river mud in a process that mixed in bits of plants from the land; this pegs it as a tsunami deposit from the massive quakes the area gets every five- to eight-hundred years (the last one was in 1700). So the formation constitutes a large part of the bay just to the north churned with river mud and bits of plant matter from the tsunami washing right across the sandspit that forms the bay; it essentially sloshed up against the (mostly) basalt cape and heaped eight feet thick. Once this was figured out, the question changed from “How in the world did this happen?” to “Where is all the rest of the material from the bottom of the bay and estuaries?”)
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Walton tells that in the ancient near east (ANE) understanding, everything in the material reality was understood as parts or acts of gods; earth, objects in the sky, rain, sunshine, etc. The chaotic waters may have been an exception(?). From this viewpoint, the creation of gods in the ANE creation texts is linked to the creation of the material reality. Walton did not consider this viewpoint in his book. I do not think that this omission matters much in the interpretation of Genesis one. The key point in the book was to propose and defend a particular interpretation of the creation text in Genesis one, so it is ‘natural’ that other viewpoints did not get as much attention.
By the way, as part of my studies in theology, I need to write a critical but ‘friendly’ analysis about the interpretation proposed in the book ‘The lost world of Genesis one’, and compare the strengths and weaknesses of this interpretation with other, ‘competing’, alternatives. I would appreciate any hints about other potential omissions or weaknesses in the interpretation proposed by Walton.
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Thanks for Vischer’s succinct video. My boys and I all watched it together and found it helpful to maintain respect for the Bible and science at the same time.
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I read that link and another one speaking to the same topic and location. He has some good points. However, a non-sclentist posted a reply which seemed to have some decent arguments going the other way. I copied his quote below. I also noted this. Market squid live from a depth of 0 to 2,600 feet. I don’t think we know what depth belemnites lived at. So, arguments about the square feet of the surface of water or land has some flaws in it if we don’t know what depths belemnites spent most of their time.
Hi Joel,
I am not a scientist, but nevertheless I have a few issues with what you are saying. Initially I thought you raised some good points in your articles, but I can see a few problems.
Firstly, perhaps a factual error, or a simple missunderstanding. There is nothing in the biblical account that describes a flood that lasted only a few days, or a few weeks. The global flood, from start to finish, was recorded to have lasted for one year and ten days. (My guess is that you were led to believe this due to the fact that in the first stage of the flood it rained for 40 days and nights.)
You don’t say that much that directly indicates what you believe the nature is of the flood that you think creationists believe in, and that you seem to be opposed to, so don’t take this as part of my criticism of what you are saying, but I think it should also be pointed out that there is no claim made in the Bible, or by creationists that the water provided in the flood was comprised of the 40 days of rainwater described in these passages.
But more to the point, and what I consider to be a much greater problem, is the fact that you are making a number of fundamental assumptions and holding them out as if they were univerally agreed-apon facts. Someone doing so cannot possibly claim to “debunk” anyone else’s theory. Especially if the theory you are advocating also has its own set of difficult problems.
I think what is missing in this debate is a little bit of old-fashioned humility, together with the recognition of the fact that we are most likely both wrong on a whole set of levels. After all, neither you nor I nor anyone else was there at the scene of the crime, and we have different forms of evidence that we evaluate differently.
While trying hard not to play the obnoxious card that tries to pit your ability to figure things out against how litterally I interpret the Bible, we need to discuss where along the road each of our ideas are feasible. I of course have to take the unfortunate role of the idiot that interprets what we observe in nature with a Bible in his hand.
But let’s look at what you are saying any why it lacks the explanatory power to convince me that there never was a global flood. To start off, it is interesting to note that you chose diatoms to prove your point about fossil sorting. If you had chosen any other kind of organism to prove your point, including forams, then I would have been totally stumped.
However, rather than turning your readers atention to how low dead diatoms are found in the fossil record, perhaps we should be discussing how living diatoms could possibly be found extremely high up in the atmosphere. You assume that diatoms always existed where they are found today. Why do you assume this? Because of what we can observe today?
Well what we do know today about diatoms, among other things, is that they provide a huge amount of the oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere. That means that if diatoms appeared as late on the scene as you claim, then there would be a much lower content of oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere before their appearance than afterwards. So why do we observe the exact opposite? Perhaps living diatoms that have been found on the walls of a space station can give us a hint.
To much science fiction? Too far fetched? Well why not scurry back to the idea that one-celled organisms somehow became fish, amphibians, land-dwelling animals, and then turned into whales all the while we still have one-celled organisms. Sounds likely?
But let’s move on to the subject of this particular article – the trillions and trillions of belemnites.
Of course, for a human being trillions and trillions is an unfathomable amount. But is it as impossible as you are making it out to be?
You claim that these quadrillions of cephalopods were devoured by predators, but you don’t seem to say that much about the billions and billions of predator fossils that you must have found in out the field. How many have you found?
What if these belemnites were neither killed by being covered by sediments, nor by predators. Where does that leave us?
As far as I can see, in order to produce such a high number of cephalopods all you would need is:
a global catastrophe that disturbs the balance of the ecological system in which they live.
the capability of producing tens of thousands of offspring at a time
a reproduction rate can be increased by climate change.
a creature that grows quickly and has a short life span.
natural enemies, that under normal conditions keep the belemnite population down to a maintainable number, either dying off or evacuating the area
and the sort of creature that turns to canabalism when finding itself in an overcrowded and confined space
With these things in mind, the cephalopods such as these would probably be one of the few creatures of it’s kind capable of such rampant and explosive reproduction. And the fact that the fossils are lacking both above and below this huge number of fossils, actually tells me that it was one single event, as opposed to the same huge area of land being flooded continuously for millions and millions of years.
These creatures were possibly moving to this particular area, trapped between converging flanks of the flood, and then reproducing and dying at the same time … in huge numbers. Because what we have here is a recipe for a population explosion. You have a creature possibly capable of producing up to 70,000 offspring at one single time left in an area that may have been depleted of predators.
Eventually, it would itself die out as a result of the explosion, because with nothing left in the area to feed on but itselves, it implodes and disappears from the fossil record.
Do we see this kind of ecological imbalance occurring today that can effect the size of a population? Actually yes. And what kind of creatures are involved? Cephalopods my friend… cephalopods. The population of which is booming today, possibly due to two things:
Rising sea temeratures, and
The removal of cephalopod predators.
And note carefully what this article says:
“Another strange possibility is that cephalopods will become too weedy and run out of food. If that happens? “They’re highly cannibalistic—they might start eating each other if they overgrow”
And finally, all this leaves me with is the age-old problem.
Where, with all these “trillions and trillions” of fossils available at our disposal… are the intermediates showing gradual changes pointing either downwards under these layers of fossils to a more “primitive” organism, or upwards toward something else? And if we look high enough in the column then what do we get? Diatoms! 
Excuse me Joel, you made some interesting points. But Darwin’s doubt is still alive and kicking to this very day.
Growing up as a young earth creationist, Genesis 1 was interesting to me, but did not appear to have much relevance to my everyday life since it was simply about how the world was made. Coming to understand Genesis 1 as being more about God bringing order to a chaotic world makes Genesis 1 more relevant to everyday life. This could be argued to represent an example of how science can help improve our interpretation of scripture. Many, though not all, early Christians assumed Genesis 1 was about the creation of the material cosmos. At the time, there wasn’t a compelling reason to think otherwise. As we began to discover from geology, paleontology, cosmology, and other fields that the universe is actually much older than a few thousand years, we needed to rethink our interpretation of Genesis 1. Overall, I think this process has led to a better understanding of Genesis 1 that reveals more about God than assuming Genesis 1 is a scientific account of the creation of the universe. Now that we also have better understanding of the “what” and “how” questions thanks to science, we can have a deeper appreciation of the implications of the Biblical answers to the “why” and “who” questions related to creation. The “what” and “how” answers give us the specifics of how to respond to the “who” and the “why” answers.
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True, in the ANE creation views many parts of the world were either themselves gods or were made from parts of gods, sometimes living and sometimes dead. The three most common things considered to have independent existence were waters (“the deep”), light, and earth, though the last might better be called “solid material”.
But those views are directly attacked in the Genesis Creation account: anything the broader ANE regarded as gods, or parts of gods (whether dead or alive), were systematically devoted to merely ‘material’ things that YHWH-Elohim had created for His own purposes. This “merely material” aspect is a critical element in the polemical aspect; it is what makes the assertion that the sky is not in fact Nut, it is just a dome, potent – it takes what the Egyptians said was a god and says no, it’s just a thing.
In all the hours I’ve spent listening to Walton, I don’t recall him ever even mentioning the polemical aspect, which in itself I consider a serious weakness. With the polemical function, material creation is important because it is by insisting that these elements are things that the Egyptian pantheon is declared to be far, far less than YHWH-Elohim.
It occurs to me that in the polemical aspect there’s a sort of divorce happening: the writer doesn’t say the Egyptian gods aren’t gods at all, it just separates them sharply and bluntly from the elements of ordinary existence. The assertion isn’t that Nut, or Aton, or whoever doesn’t exist, it’s that they aren’t the sky or the sun or whatever, because the sky and the sun and all that are just things YHWH-Elohim made for His purposes. From the point of view of an ancient Egyptian, the Genesis writer has booted all the gods out of the world via claiming all that has been made as having been made by Yahweh. From that perspective, the plagues in the Exodus narrative are declarations that the gods had overreached themselves and are being put in their place as nothing but created entities themselves with no special attachments to any parts of Creation. That’s a massive, even monstrous assault of ma’at, the Egyptian concept of order and balance in creation because it declares that the Egyptian gods have nothing to do with ma’at; it is YHWH-Elohim Who manages all of Creation – and that constitutes a serious slap-down to Pharaoh who was supposed to be the link between the gods and material creation, maintaining order and balance.
So yeah, though I haven’t read Walton’s ‘lost world’ book, without the above he’s neglected a huge part of what Genesis 1 is about. TO relate this to Walton’s terms, the first Genesis Creation account isn’t just YHWH establishing His temple, it’s also about booting out all the intruders laying claim to parts of it (much like Jesus booted out money changers and merchants who had appropriated the Court of the Gentiles in the Temple).
For more than that I should probably review what I know of Walton, though I will comment that he seems to have missed the ‘royal chronicle’ aspect of Genesis 1 as well; he seems entirely focused on the temple inauguration aspect.
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Most of the quote you provided is discussing an article which isn’t referenced so I really can say anything about that.
Most marine life lives near the surface, Sunlight produces the energy need to grow the plant life the rest of the oceans food chain depends on. So the population density decreases rapidly with depth. Giant squid may well live at great depth, but there aren’t a whole lot of them down there.
In the natural world predation is the usual cause of death. Very few animals die due to old age.
The size of which is tearing up rock and laying down thousands of feet of sediment. Not very conducive to animal life.
Do you know the reproductive rate of belemnites? Again given the conditions reproduction would be difficult.
How do you know the change wouldn’t decrease reproduction rate?
So the predators are dying off while the belemnites are growing. And how does a creature “evacuate” in the ocean?
Steve this is the usual hand waving YEC argument that might sound good but doesn’t really hold together when you start to pick it apart. Which usually just results in more hand waving trying to answer the problems generated by the hand waving.
They are found world wide.
Not in the context of a global flood that is laying down thousands of feet of sediment.
The age old “where are the intermediates” question, the answer to which is they have been found.
If you would like some bigger problems, there are how do you address the heat problem (no I don’t mean accelerated nuclear decay) and the problem of mudstone?
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I don’t think that the commenter you’ve quoted has properly grasped the numbers of fossils involved.
Joel’s article cites a paper which conservatively estimates that there are more than one quadrillion belemnite fossils in the Bighorn Basin in Wyoming – an area of about ten thousand square miles. That means at least one hundred billion fossils per square mile, or forty thousand per square metre. These were critters each about the size of a domestic cat.
For all of these to have been alive at the same time, you’d have to have four of them per cubic metre down to a depth of ten kilometres—that’s the depth of the Marianas Trench. Not only that but you’d have to have all the food that they had to eat in order to grow to that size – each of them hundreds of times their own body weight. There simply wouldn’t have been enough space.
And bear in mind that you’re not just talking about a couple of counties in the middle of Wyoming. The Bighorn Basin is just one part of what was once the Sundance Sea—a huge inland waterway in the mid to late Jurassic covering vast swathes of the western USA and Canada.
It isn’t even remotely realistic to suggest that all these critters could have been alive within a few years of each other. It doesn’t take a “secular” or a “materialist” worldview to see this either, and you don’t have to make any “assumptions.” You just need to do something that young earth arguments fail spectacularly at time and time again: basic school-level maths.
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That’s about how I felt up until I hit my third year of Hebrew and it clicked in my mind that it shouldn’t be read as though it was modern literature – as I commonly say, it’s not a friend’s great-grandfather’s journal of events he witnessed. How it should be read came later at a seminar where a visiting lecturer was describing a type of ancient near eastern literature he called “royal chronicle” and as he listed the attributes of that literary type I suddenly recognized that those attributes described the opening Creation account in Genesis. The main function of that literary type was to set forth a mighty act of a great king, and an important aspect was that the details were not meant to be taken literally in themselves though they could be in expounding the meaning of the chronicle. In that genre, the first Creation account sets forth “King YHWH-Elohim” conquering chaos and ordering it into His kingsom – a breathtakingly different understanding than “how the world was made”.
Something that has intrigued me is the matter of just when the understanding of the Genesis Creation account changed.
It was brilliantly written as two types of literature at once with three different messages, and the early audiences would have recognized those – and none of the three were written to be taken literally; they were written to (1) portray YHWH-Elohim as the mighty king Who conquered chaos and established order, (2) set forth that YHWH-Elohim built His own temple, then filled it, then took up supervision of it and enjoying that (“rest”) with humans as the image in the temple, and (3) de-throning all the Egyptian gods and declaring that what were supposedly gods were just things that YHWH-Elohim made for His purposes.
At some point these were forgotten, and unfortunately we just don’t have enough archaeological or other evidence to show when that happened; all we know is that by the first century B.C.E. that first Creation account was being read more as history than anything (or allegory sometimes). My suspicion is that the change happened after Alexander of Macedon came marching through what the Romans would later call Palestine on his way to gaining the epithet “the Great” and before those Romans finally annexed the place in 63 B.C.E. after occupying it for over half a century. These events changed the culture in two ways: Greek influence, where mythology/theology was written primarily in poetry, not prose, and Roman influence, where the practical trumped the mystical/mythological – a pair that between them would have regarded the prose, however poetic, of that first Creation account as history and nothing but history.
I land in this period because during the Exile the literary forms used would have continued to be regarded as what they were written to be because those forms were still in use in Babylonia. They were not, however, used by the Greeks or Romans, and those two cultures came to dominate over time.
I am still amazed at how there were Hebrew scholars (who grew up speaking and reading the language) back before any of those sciences you list had even begun concluded from the Hebrew text that the universe started out smaller than a grain of mustard (idiom for the smallest thing possible), expanded incredibly rapidly while the fluid “waters” that filled it thinned until light could shine, at which point God ordered light to come into being, that the universe was old beyond comprehension and the Earth itself old beyond counting.
Yes. I’ve come to think of it as the material items in the Creation account as the “set” on which the drama plays out, with (of course) the caveat that the set is being built while the “play” unfolds. So it isn’t just about “who and why”, it’s also about “what” and “how”.
My favorite juxtaposition between “who and why” and “what and how” is seen in the polemical function where the Egyptian deities are one by one demoted and declared to be mere created things made by YHWH-Elohim for His purposes – in other words, that the things those gods claimed to be were set forth as nothing more than tools fashioned by the God of the Hebrews (I like to sum up this message as "All your gods are belong to Yahweh).
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Wow, did that take me back!
When I was living in Colorado, some “pro-animal” group was trying to persuade the state legislature that special hunting seasons should be eliminated, with the idea being that the deer and elk could “live out their natural lives”. One state senator made the very same point you did, in very close to the same words – though he made it more graphic, asking the spokeswoman whether she would rather die in one or two seconds from a bullet or be brought down by claws shredding an entire side of her body, and a leg broken so she couldn’t get away, then her throat torn out by teeth made for ripping and tearing flesh.
When she insisted that wasn’t how many animals died, he shrugged and asked if she would like to die of disease and starvation.
Not to speak of setting the oceans boiling!
A population explosion of unicellular critters that thrive on suspended sediment, perhaps, but for anything multicelled a heavy sediment bruden is deadly.
Like the mudstone on a cape near here that rests on top of basalt that erupted on land and below basalt that erupted underwater.
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Well, let me ask you a question. Have you seen any living creature that is 25%/50%75% evolved into something else? Not talking change in beak size, or skin color, etc. But something major. Every insect, fish, mammal, bird, etc I have seen don’t show any signs of turning into something else. Many animal species have been around for over 50 million years. Yet, the bee is still a bee, the turtle is still a turtle, the bat is still a bat, etc, even though they have all been around 50 million years or more. Since it supposedly only takes 100 million years for major life forms to evolve (fish to amphibian, amphibian to reptile, etc) we should be seeing all kinds of bees, turtles, bats, whales, etc that are partway evolved into something else by now, since they’ve had 50-100 million years to evolve.
Check back in 50 million years for the answer.
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What topic are you changing to now? It plainly isn’t science.
So? Many are, but you just don’t know how to look.
We do – 20,000+ different species of bees in 7 different families. A hundred million years ago there was one family with maybe a handful of species – in fact they would have been classified as wasps back then.
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I did! I’m living 50 million years after the first bat, 100 million years after the first bee, etc. The answer should be living now. And there should be lots of answers living now.
St. Roymond, it sounds like you are agreeing with me. The bee is still a bee after 100 million years.
If evolution produced all we see around us, and all the extinct animals, then there should be plenty of examples of current living species (that have existed on the earth for 50 million years or more) that are 25%/50%/75% evolved into something else. They’ve had plenty of time from the appearance of their first ancestor. I’m 68 years old. I’ve seen quite a few creatures during that timeframe. But I have yet to see any living creature that appears to be adding wings or gills, or transforming into a new creature. There are changes in beak size, skin color, etc. But nothing significant. Seems there should be lots of examples in our current living species if evolution is true. That’s all I’m saying.
Well, the difference between a wolf and a dachshund is pretty far in just 10,000 or so years. Isolate the dachshunds for a million years and see what happens.
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Nothing was called a bee millions of years ago. That’s a modern label invented by modern humans by looking at modern bees. Of course bees are still bees. Mammals are still mammals too – even human mammals. Using a label for a big group doesn’t rule out diversity within the group.
But even if everyone decided to call a type of bee a Zurg instead, that wouldn’t change reality. Nothing about our solar system changed when the definition of a planet was refined and Pluto no longer made the cut. Arguing from labels doesn’t show anything about reality. You can’t put a dent in evolution based on how scientists label species or how we use common names.
And anyway, Phil Vischer’s video goes out of its way to not get into an evolution debate. There are plenty of other threads here that discuss evolution. But to make any headway in those discussions, you’d have to dig deeper than labels.
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