What do the Rock Layers Actually Show?
The study of rock layers is called stratigraphy. The strata is supposed to reveal the history of the earth. Secular geologists say that the rock layers and their ancient ages teach the opposite of what the Bible teaches. If they are correct, there is no way we can believe what the Bible says. To understand the secular viewpoint, we need to explore some history.
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In the late 1700s and into the 1800s, scientists decided that the rock layers in the earth were very old. Although many today think that the age of the rocks is decided by radiometric dating, in truth this is not possible, and that idea wasn’t even developed until over a century after scientists decided the age of the rocks. And, of course, rocks and fossils have no dates stamped on them, to tell their age. There is actually no scientific or observable way to tell how old the layers are.
Up until the late 1700s, the study of rock layers was done in light of the Genesis Flood. At that time, the Enlightenment began to shape modern thinking in Europe about God, the church, the Scriptures, and Western civilization. God was no longer seen as the One Who created the earth just a short time ago.
Those who embraced these ideas called themselves Deists. Deism taught that the earth was created by God in the remote past, but that He was no longer involved in nature as recorded by the Bible.
This is more properly when modern geology began.
James Hutton (1726-1797), the Father of Modern Geology, said, “The earth is older than what the Bible says, because it looks older.” He postulated that the rock layers that we see around us were formed over millions of years, by slow, natural processes (called uniformitarianism). God’s intervention had nothing to do with it. And so, modern geology began to develop into a totally naturalistic interpretation of the rock layers.
But do the rocks show that they are old? Not at all. A set of layers can give the appearance of age simply by being subjected to rapid and severe erosion. In the 1830s, William Smith, a geological engineer in England, noticed fossil marine shells in some rock layers, and not in others. His conclusion was that this showed likely successive creations and catastrophes, but that were unrelated to a Biblical Flood. This led to the idea of fossil succession through time, a precursor to evolution. The historical account of the Flood was no longer a viable explanation for the rock layers. Only naturalistic processes over a long period of time could explain it. This idea was fully entrenched in Western society by the end of the 1800s, and was expressed and developed in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859).
In secular geology today, fossils are the key to arranging the rock layers in an order that portrays hundreds of millions of years of slow, developing evolution. To most scientists, the rocks are old because the fossils in them show evolution over hundreds of millions of years. The fossils tell us how old the rocks are, and the rock layers are old because they preserve a record of evolutionary history in the fossils, which must have taken a long period of time. This is classic circular reasoning.
In order to date the rocks, there must be a belief that evolution is a fact, and that fossils represent stages of evolutionary growth. But this has never been observed. So if this did not take place, what do the rock layers actually show?
Rock layers are simply that – rock layers. Some contain fossils, and some don’t. There’s no way to scientifically put an age on the rocks and fossils. But there is an alternative view to dating the rocks that is rooted in history. Uniformitarianism has only about 200 years of observed history to work with, and it denies anything to do with the historical Genesis Flood, which took place over 4000 years before uniformitarianism was invented. Uniformitarianism is not a complete historical viewpoint, and it isn’t science.
The historical framework of the Genesis Flood gives a different picture of the origin of the rock layers and the fossils contained there. The world today is globally damaged and scarred. It is vastly different from the world of that time:
- Climate was much more even, more lush vegetation.
- Man lived longer.
- Disease and sickness did not seem to be present.
- Geologic processes that produced devastating erosion were non-existent.
- The death seen in the rock layers was a result of overwhelming global destruction, not gradual changes over millions of years.
Formation of fossils is sparse today, unlike the record in the rocks. This shows that the fossils in the rock record must have been formed under totally different conditions than today: catastrophic water and mud conditions prevail in the sedimentary fossil-bearing rocks.
We also observe extinction in the rock record. Today, extinction is gradual and isolated. But the rock record shows massive amounts of plants and animals that seem to have suddenly disappeared in mass graveyards, and then were quickly hardened into stone.
The rock layers show:
- Various kinds of rocks mixed together
- Varieties of fossilized plants and animal, many which are extinct
- An abundance of minerals and precious ores that are not being replaced today
- Extreme deformities in landforms worldwide
- Rock layers with flat contacts between layers, indicating very little time for erosion
- Catastrophism on a grand scale, with most of the fossils being disarticulated and scattered
Rock layers are just that, layers of rocks stacked on top of each other. It is the interpretation of these that builds a particular view of their origin. There is no science that could authenticate how they formed or originated.
What about radiometric dating? Radiometric dating involves interpretation and assumption to make it work. Please listen to my podcast, “Has Radiometric Dating Poisoned Your Faith,” for a more thorough treatment of the subject.
To build a solid Scriptural worldview of Earth history, we need to pay more attention to our Scriptural historical presentation. You must know your Scriptures in order to interpret what you see in the rock layers.
Bedrock Geology (kit)
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interesting indeed what you can learn from rocks.