Sedimentation, Fossils, and a Lens

I served in the United States Navy in the 1960s during the time of the draft; many in the military couldn’t wait until their enlistment ended.  When they got close to the end, they were dubbed “short timers” and typically began to count the days.  

Psalm 90:9-12:

9 For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told.

10 The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

11 Who knoweth the power of thine anger? even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath.

12 So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

Our lives are “as a tale that is told.”  Once upon a time lived you.  Years have been assigned to each of us, and the earthly story then ends.  Psalms proclaims an average age of 70 years and also says “so teach us to number our days.” 

At the time of this printing, I am 69 years of age and if I die at the average of 70 years, I have 180 days of this tale to live.  One hundred eighty is the number of seconds in three minutes.  If you are 35, you have 12,775 days of story left.  Twelve thousand, seven hundred seventy-five is the number of seconds in 213 minutes, or the number of minutes in 3.55 hours.  James 4:14 compares our lives to a vapour—like steam rising from a pot of boiling water and disappearing.  Many are disappointed—even terrified—regarding this life’s stark brevity, but what if you could live forever where there is no death nor sorrow, no crying nor pain—would you be interested?  God advertises such a place in Revelation 21:1-5:

1 And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.

2 And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

3 And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.

4 And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

5 And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.

Access to this magnificent promise of the Kingdom of God requires one to be “born again.”  John 3:3:

Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

“Born again” is a very literal place where the believer is born again—literally born a second time, this time of the Spirit of God.  Everything changes here. 

Have you been born again?  Will today be the day all your sin and shame is washed away and all your bondages broken?  Today, the door is open wide, but be advised: This is a limited-time offer to one who exists in a limited-time story.  Do it right now!  Click onto “Further With Jesus” for childlike instructions and immediate entry into the Kingdom of God.  NOW FOR TODAY’S SUBJECT.

GOD SAID, Genesis 1:1:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

GOD SAID, Genesis 6:5-8:

5 And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

6 And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.

7 And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.

8 But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD.

GOD SAID, Genesis 7:1-4:

1 And the LORD said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation.

2 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.

3 Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.

4 For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.

MAN SAID: Get this antiquated God out of my face! 

Now THE RECORD: All of life is viewed through a particular lens; the lens one uses dictates the interpretation of the information reviewed.  There are only two lenses to choose from: One is faith in the inerrancy of God and His Word.  The second lens is unbelief—the opposite.  This ruling principle is established in Genesis Chapter 3. Grandmother Eve’s faith in God—which is all she knows—is challenged by a new carnal knowledge promoted by Satan at the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Eve, in an act of unbelief and disobedience, followed Satan and then Adam followed his wife Eve.  At this point of unbelief and disobedience, the law of sin and death began to reign upon this earth. 

Speaking of the Antichrist and the soon-coming end of days, II Thessalonians 2:8-10 reads:

8 And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming:

9 Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders,

10 And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.

These are the last days and the deceivableness of unrighteousness—the wicked deeds of unbelief—shall dominate and deceive the sons of Adam. 

The lens from which you personally view life’s information dictates very real, measurable outcomes.  A scientific, global field study with a sample size of billions is in, and Galatians 6:7 is flashing red:

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

Job 4:8 records:

Even as I have seen, they that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same.

When the inerrant truth of God’s Word is rejected, the deadly results of doing the wrong thing emerge.  GodSaidManSaid has supplied a plethora of examples in previous articles, but here is one that has affected—and is affecting—everyone you know.  God commands against all sexual activity outside the marriage bed, but this direct commandment has been fully rejected by the masses. 

The headline in the October 6, 2014 CBS Atlanta news release reads, “CDC: 110 Million Americans Have STDs at Any Given Time.”  A few paragraphs follow:

While the national media focus is on the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and the patient in Dallas, the CDC is reminding Americans that sexually transmitted diseases are an ongoing but hidden epidemic. 

In the United States, nearly 20 million cases of new STD infections are reported each year, reports Live Science.  Since infections can persist for a long time, and because some victims are not even aware they have a disease, it can easily be spread to others. 

Based on data from 2008, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the eight most common sexually transmitted diseases are: Chlamydia, gonorrhea, hepatitis B (HBV), genital herpes, HIV, human papillomavirus (HPV), syphilis, and trichomoniasis. 

About 50.5 million current infections are in men while 59.5 million are in women, for a total of 110 million Americans with STDs at any given time. 

Fifty percent of new infections occur in young people from ages 15-24 and gonorrhea is the most commonly reported STD in that age group.

New cases of STDs cost nearly $16 billion a year in direct medical costs, according to the CDC. [End of quote]

Sexually transmitted diseases are a pandemic.  Looking for proof that the God of the Bible exists?  Simply look at the results of disobeying His commandments. [End of quotes]

If you look at life and pursue it while looking through the lens of unbelief, you will surely be a statistic in this global field study. 

The following email is from K.G.:

I am a Christian and a believer of God’s Holy Word; however, I have a question that puzzles me.  If the fossils [found on mountaintops] of crinoids and shellfish in general are from the Great Flood—and are not millions of years old as science would have us believe—then where are the fossilized remains (i.e. large bones, skulls, etc.) of all the evil people of the earth destroyed in the Flood?  Surely there would be some evidence in the fossil record, right? 

Thank you,
K.G.

The camp of the faithful and the camp of the unfaithful look at the same geological and paleontological information and, due to the lens used, come to very opposite conclusions.  Keep in mind while visiting this feature that every mountain peak is festooned with marine fossils and that historians have uncovered hundreds of societal records from all over the earth that make some reference to the Noahitic flood. 

In the 50^th Anniversary edition of The Genesis Flood, written by Whitcomb and Morris, you’ll find the following concerning sedimentation and fossilization during the global Flood:

And yet, despite the complexity of physical agencies involved and the resulting variety of formations and sediments, certain general semblances of order might be anticipated in the deposits when the waters abated.  The creatures of the deep-sea bottoms would universally be overwhelmed by the toxicity and violence of the volcanic emanations and the bottom currents generated thereby and would in general be mixed with the inorganic materials simultaneously dislodged from the bed, transported and eventually redeposited on the bed. 

In similar fashion, the fish and other organisms living nearer the surface would subsequently be entrapped by either materials washing down from the land surface or the shallow coastal sea bottoms or by materials upwelling from the depths.  Again, these sediments would be transported and redeposited either on the sea bottom or occasionally on top of other sediments already laid down. 

On the land, the raging rivers would carry great quantities of detritus seaward, occasionally entombing animals or reptiles, together with great rafts of vegetation.  These would normally be deposited finally in some more or less quiescent reach of stream or finally in the sea on top of other deposits or perhaps on the exposed bottom itself. 

As far as land animals and man were concerned, their greater mobility would have enabled most of them to escape temporarily to higher ground as the waters rose, only occasional individuals being swept away and entombed in the sediments.  Eventually, of course, the floodwaters overtook even those who had fled to the highest elevations, but in most cases, these men and animals would not be buried but simply drowned and then carried about by the waters on or near the surface until finally decomposed by the elements.  Certain spectacular exceptions to this rule might occur when groups of animals, huddled together in a cave on some hillside or on a summit, were swept away by a sudden, sediment-laden wave of water to be buried en masse at another place. 

Of course, in localities where more than one system is found exposed or revealed by well-logging or other means, it is frequently found that the lowermost strata are those containing the simpler (and therefore supposedly more ancient) organisms, usually marine organisms.  This, however, does not at all evidence evolution, as commonly claimed, but rather testifies quite plainly that these marine creatures were, as would be expected, deposited first and deepest in the Deluge sediments.  Two factors combine to make this a general, though by no means inviolable, rule.  The sea-bottoms, both deep and shallow seas, would have been first affected by the breaking-up of the fountains of the great deep.  This inference is corroborated by the fact that those strata found usually lowest in the column are marine strata, containing marine organisms.  With reference to the Cambrian strata, supposedly the oldest fossiliferous strata:

At least 1500 species of invertebrates are known in the Cambrian, all marine, of which 60% are trilobites and 30% brachiopods. 

The same could largely be said of the Ordovician, Silurian, and Devonian periods, as far as their fauna are concerned, although there are evidences of continental-type flora in the latter.  It is not until the Permo-Carboniferous is reached, well up in the geologic column, that the first land animals are encountered.

The other factor tending to insure the deposition of the simple marine organisms in the deepest strata is the hydrodynamic selectivity of moving water for particles of similar sizes and shapes, together with the effect of the specific gravity of the respective organisms.  [End of quotes]

The following excerpts are from Andrew A. Snelling’s book Earth’s Catastrophic Past (Vol. 2):

Another factor tending to ensure the deposition of the supposedly simple marine organisms in the first-deposited strata, now deep in the geologic record, is the hydrodynamic selectivity of moving water for particles of similar sizes and shapes, together with the effects of specific gravity of the respective organisms.  The so-called “Impact Law” states:

The settling velocity of large particles is independent of fluid viscosity; it is directly proportional to the square root of particle diameter, directly proportional to particle sphericity, and directly proportional to the difference between particle and fluid density divided by fluid density. 

These criteria are derived from consideration of hydrodynamic forces acting on immersed bodies and are well established.  Moving water, or moving particles in still water, exerts “drag” forces on those bodies, which depend on the above-quoted factors.  Particles in motion will tend to settle out in proportion mainly to their specific gravity (or density) and sphericity.  It is significant that the marine organisms fossilized in the earliest Flood strata, such as the trilobites, brachiopods, etc., are very “streamlined” and quite dense.  The shells of these and most other marine invertebrates are largely composed of calcium carbonate, calcium phosphate, and similar minerals, which are quite heavy—heavier than quartz, for example, the most common constituent of many sands and gravels.  This factor alone would have exerted a highly-selective sorting action, not only tending to deposit the simpler (that is, the more spherical and undifferentiated) organisms first in the sediments as they were being deposited, but also tending to segregate particles of similar sizes and shapes, which could have thus formed distinct faunal stratigraphic “horizons,” with the complexity of structure of deposited organisms, even of similar kinds, increasing progressively upwards in the accumulating sediments.

The third factor to be considered is the mobility of land vertebrates.  Once they became aware of the need to escape, how capable would they then have been of running, swimming, flying, or even riding on floating debris?  Amphibians would have been the least mobile, with reptiles performing somewhat better, but not being equal to the mammals’ mobility, due largely to their low metabolic rates.  However, birds, with their wings, would have had the best-expected mobility, even being able to find temporary refuge on floating debris. 

[During the Stone Age, the world population of humans was said to have been roughly constant, between 1 and 10 million people.  People buried their dead, often with artifacts.]  Of course, according to that scenario, it is easily calculated that these Stone Age people would have buried at least 8 billion bodies.  If the evolutionary timescale is correct, then buried human bones should be able to survive intact for much longer than 200,000 years.  Thus, many of the supposed 8 billion buried Stone Age skeletons should have survived to still be easily found near the present land surface, along with all their buried artifacts.  However, only a few thousand have been found.  This must imply that the Stone Age was much shorter than evolutionists believe, perhaps only a few hundred years in many areas. 

On the other hand, the Bible depicts pre-Flood man as having been destroyed by the Flood cataclysm, so that all traces of human remains, whether bones, artifacts, or cultural remnants, must date from after the Flood, only about 4,500 years ago. [End of quotes]

All of life is viewed through a particular lens and the lens one chooses dictates the interpretation of the information reviewed.  There are only two lenses to choose from.  Choose faith and live. 

GOD SAID, Genesis 1:1:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

GOD SAID, Genesis 6:5-8:

5 And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

6 And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.

7 And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.

8 But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD.

GOD SAID, Genesis 7:1-4:

1 And the LORD said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation.

2 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.

3 Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.

4 For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.

MAN SAID: Get this antiquated God out of my face! 

Now you have THE RECORD.

 

 

References:

Authorized King James Version

GodSaidManSaid, “110,000,000 Americans with STDs—But It Didn’t Have to be That Way!”

Snelling, A., Earth’s Catastrophic Past (Vol. 2), Institute for Creation Research, 2009

Whitcomb, J., and Morris, H., The Genesis Flood, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1961

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