4f ii. More Interesting Notes on Dating Rocks

There is no way of distinguishing any one “geologic age” from another, except by the implicit assumption of evolution as applied to fossil interpretation.

For all of the physical evidence to the contrary, the entire fossil assemblage could well have belonged to only one age, instead of to a series of ages. Since the organic world of the present includes invertebrates, vertebrates, fishes amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, there is no a priori reason (apart from the hypothesis of evolution), why the world of the past should not also have contained all these types of creatures.

Increased understanding of present processes has made it obvious that present rates are not adequate to account for geological formations. The very existence of fossils is proof of catastrophes at least on a local scale. To become fossilized a plant or animal must have hard parts, such as bone, shell, or wood. It must be buried quickly to prevent decay and undisturbed throughout the long process. The burial is by sedimentary materials that conform to the object and preserve its shape. The fossil is a mold of that object. Conversely, when the sediment infiltrates the object and eventually replaces the organic material with sediments, the 3D shape of that object is preserved and called “petrified”. A petrified bone is not a bone at all, but a sedimentary rock that has replaced all the organic material in a bone rather precisely. In some cases even blood vessels in fingers have been petrified and are distinguishable inside the petrified object when it is sawn in cross-section. Having no organic materials any longer, the C14 dating method is not usable.

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Rapid burial has been accomplished by sedimentary silts from floods, volcanic ashes, and very heavy snow (eg avalanches). The permafrost burials do not replace the organic material as do the sedimentary silts, but this condition stops the organic decay process. Mammoths preserved in the permafrost have been uncovered with grass still in their stomachs. Human bodies (the 500-year old Iceman) have been discovered totally preserved in the permafrost. Conversely, volcanic ash burials incinerate the organic object after burial (a slow bakeout) preserving only the exterior shape in a fossil. Meanwhile the flood scenarios can produce both fossils and petrified objects, depending on the conditions. The infiltration takes a long time, but if the decay process can be thwarted during this time, while preserving the organic object, then a petrified replacement object can eventually be produced. All petrified trees and dinosaur “bones” fit into this category. Some of the dinosaurs we have excavated have fully petrified replacements, but not all of them. We are currently excavating the last pieces of the “world’s largest known Stegosaurus” and many of the remains are still undergoing the petrification process. ADD PHOTOS FROM DINO DIGS The bones are soft and flakey and easily susceptible to destruction once uncovered. The petrification process was certainly not completed at the time we arrived on the scene. Perhaps it was stopped naturally or it was started in the not to distant past.

Historical geologists now commonly think in terms of local catastrophes in an overall context of uniformitarianism. It’s called, “Punctuated Equilibrium”. The geological record is not dominated by slow, gradual change, but rather by infrequent, catastrophic events that cause local disasters. Geological processes are completely at a loss to explain the fossils otherwise. However, these local flood events are creating the fossils that are used to date the rocks.

We have noted that there is no physical or geological criteria for distinguishing one geological age from any other. Previously we examined the radiometric dating schemes and found that they are plagued with a number of uncertainties as to the initial conditions and the time-varying conditions, so that they are certainly not an absolute, stand-alone method for dating rocks (see section d of 4fi). Also, we noted that each significant fossil or petrified deposit had to have been laid down in a rapid burial process in order to have preserved the organic shapes etc. Next we note that there is virtually no evidence of erosion between successive layers in sedimentary deposits. This indicates that one burial followed the other in relatively rapid succession, wherever they are found. It is the simplest logical solution then to surmise that all the thousands of catastrophes resulting in rapid burial records globally are linked together in a single set of events that happened on a global scale. Here is where the Biblical Flood account fits the observable record better than conventional wisdom expected.

If we transform the uniformitarian age classifications into diluvial stages we can provide the following (oversimplified) general outline for categorizing the fossil records.

Age Classification	Diluvial Events Associated with that Stage
Formation of Earth’s Core, Mantle, and the Crystalline Archaeozoic Rocks	Creation Week
Proterozoic and early Paleozoic Rocks	Early Deposits of the Great Flood, mostly submarine
Mesozoic and later Palezoic Rocks	Intermediate Deposits of the Great Flood with intermixing of continental and marine environments
Early Cenozoic and most Tertiary Period Rocks	Final stages of the Great Flood, mostly continental and shelf deposits
Later Tertiary and all Quanternary Periods	Residual castastrophism of the post Flood period, eg creation of canyons from local draining of residual lakes

2 February 2002

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