Flood, Fossils, and the Layers Beneath our Feet.

What if the fossil record isn’t the result of slow processes over millions of years—but instead a snapshot of rapid, catastrophic burial? This episode examines how fossil formation, sedimentation, and rock layers could align with the biblical account of Noah’s Flood.

1. What Fossils Require

•  Fossilization depends on rapid burial, low oxygen, and mineral-rich water. 
•  Lab experiments show fossil-like preservation can occur quickly under the right conditions. 
•  Soft tissue fossils (like jellyfish) suggest burial within hours—not ages. 
• How Do Fossils Form? Australian Museum
• Scientists Baked a Fossil in 24 Hours Smithsonian Article

2. A World Primed for Fossilization

•  A global flood would create: 
  •  Massive sediment flows 
  •  Volcanic ash coverage 
  •  Mineral-saturated water
•  About 95% of fossils are marine, consistent with ocean-based catastrophe. 

3. Fossil Order Reconsidered

•  Traditional view: evolutionary progression. 
•  Alternative: burial order during a flood: 
  •  Marine life buried first 
  •  Then fish, amphibians, reptiles 
  •  Birds and mammals last due to mobility 
•  Marine mammals in upper layers may reflect survival ability—not evolution. 

4. Sedimentary Layers & Rock Formation

•  Fossils form in sedimentary rock, typically deposited by water. 
•  Observations include: 
  •  Flat, continuous layers across vast regions 
  •  Minimal erosion between layers 
  •  Ripple marks indicating water currents 
•  Examples like widespread sandstone formations suggest large-scale, rapid deposition. 
• Startling Evidence for Noah's Flood Answers in Genesis
• Wading Newts May Explain Enigmatic Tracks Science Today

5. Evidence for Rapid Formation

• Folded rock layers indicate soft sediment bent before hardening. 
• Polystrate fossils (trees spanning multiple layers) suggest quick burial. 
•  Fossils captured mid-action point to sudden burial, not gradual processes. 
• Polystrate Trees and Fossil Fields Explained Creation.com
• Bent Rock Layers Answers in Genesis

6. Coal, Oil, and Mass Burial

•  Massive deposits of coal and oil require large-scale burial of organic material. 

7. Rethinking the Geologic Time Scale

• Relative dating relies on circular reasoning (rocks date fossils, fossils date rocks). 
•  Radiometric dating can produce inconsistent results, especially in sedimentary layers. 
•  Raises the question: Are interpretations shaped by assumptions? 
• Unlocking the Geologic Reco

If this episode encouraged you or sparked your curiosity, be sure to subscribe so you don't miss upcoming deep dives into Genesis, the Flood, the Exodus, and more - with scientific and archaeological insight every step of the way.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:51

Welcome to Understanding the Light.

SPEAKER_00 0:56

Welcome back to Understanding the Light. I'm Jess Cho, and today's episode is one that challenges how we've been taught to see the earth beneath our feet. We're diving into fossils today, sedimentary layers, and the geologic timescale. But we're going to look at it through a very different lens. Though there the show notes are going to include a lot of information and references. There's actually a lot of information in this episode. I couldn't figure out how to split it up into two parts, so it may be kind of a longer episode if you want to like split it up into a couple of parts to listen to. But there's a lot of research that went into this. There's a lot of ongoing research that a lot, many folks are doing. And it's extremely powerful what we're going to look at today. So the fossil record, right? This is this is um a very interesting part of science. Uh children love fossils, adults love fossils, like they're just interesting, and they show us that they're the earth has a past, the earth has a history. And but what is that history and what can we learn from fossils about the past? So, you know, traditionally we're taught that um fossils take many times millions of years to form. But what if the fossil record isn't a slow story written over millions of years, but instead a snapshot of one single catastrophic event? So, what I'm talking about is Noah's flood uh and how it may explain fossil formation, sedimentation of rock, and the layering that we see across the globe. Uh, specifically, um, a great place to snapshot this is the Grand Canyon, but we actually see rock layers all over the earth. So let's start with something simple but very important. So, fossils, for years, many of us have been taught through textbooks, uh, museums, websites, all of this stuff, videos that fossils take vast amounts of time to form. Um, but when you actually look at how fossils are described in these places, these resources, something interesting stands out. Uh, for every single explanation, there is one key requirement, and that's rapid burial. So I'm gonna link um uh it's it's kind of a generic fossil formation, but it's a really good picture and explanation, and it's through the Australian Museum. And through all of it, you know, it it even takes place underwater. This dinosaur is kind of like swimming around, and then something kills it or it dies, and it sinks down to the bottom, but then it gets buried quickly, right? Um, and and actually, nowhere in the description does it talk about the millions of years required to form this fossil, except at the very end. Uh, the actual process and formation is all very quickly, and then it says over millions of years this fossil formed, uh, which is kind of how this story goes. Fossils actually don't form when an organism sits on the ground. Uh, bones that are exposed to sunlight, water, oxygen, or scavengers actually decay very quickly. We that's why we don't see fields full of ancient bones lying around today. Um, for example, when you see a deer or something on the side of a road, I had a deer uh die on the side of the road at my house, a little bit down from my house a few years ago, and it just sat there. Nobody came and took it away or anything like that. But guess what? That deer is now gone, and it's because you know, either animals came and ate at the carcass or the sun exposed the bones and they kind of got brittle and they dried up, uh, and then they just became dust. Uh, the only thing really that hung around for the longest time was the skin, the um the hide of the animal, but even that is gone now as well. And none nobody took care of that. It just it just decayed. I had to keep my dog away from it, but other than that, it was it was gone within a matter of oh, probably eight to ten months, it was gone. So, this is why we don't see a bunch of bones and fossils lying around, is because if they're at the surface, they get to they get decomposed. That's what they're made to do. Um, so instead, fossilization occurs through a quick burial. You have to be protected from um elements, you have to be protected from scavengers, you have to be protected from uh sun, and to a certain extent, water, although water does play a part in forming fossils as well. Um, especially especially oxygen. We've talked about oxygen in um when we talked about the Miller-Urey experiment in previous episodes, and how oxygen is devastating to organic materials. So, oxygen is a destroyer, it's a it's an oxidizer, it actually takes um things and breaks it down, specifically organic materials. So, whenever um, you know, we're alive and we're walking around, but we have these like huge um sacks of skin that we walk around, and the skin is actually specifically designed to protect us from the oxygen that's around us. Um, our lungs, where we take oxygen into our bodies, is protected by a mucus layer. Um, and if we don't have that mucus layer, you um actually can start to experience like you think about a sore throat. Like if you've been at a concert or a game and you've been yelling a lot and you've been kind of like disrupting that mucus layer, your throat will get sore, and that's because you are breathing in oxygen, and the oxygen is literally trying to decompose you. Um, so we our bodies produce this layer of protection that's around us, and it's done it's designed to protect us from oxygen. Um so when you stop living, or a dinosaur stops living, or a bird, or whatever, uh, and they die, the oxygen can kind of take over, and it can start to destroy that organic material that isn't protected by that mucus layer anymore, or those whatever protection there is. Um, also, fossils require mineral-rich water to infiltrate and preserve the structure of the fossil. So, mineral-rich water, this is water that's running through rocks, picking up minerals as it goes, and then washing through the fossil or sitting in the fossil and all the little particles. It's probably not a very fast pro like fast-moving water. Um, it's probably just sitting in water, and and the minerals that are in the water are actually trading out with all the organic material that's in the fossil. So, fossils, it's called permineralization. Um, they are not actually organic material anymore, they are actually rock. And this happens when those minerals are replacing the organic material that's inside the buried remains. Um, these are like the bone fossils that we find, uh, or tree fossils. You think of petrified wood, they're actually rock layer, rock, but um, that's replaced the organics in the shape of the fossil that was left. We also find print fossils and mold fossils. These are fossils that um like soft animals like jellyfish or fern trees or feathers, things like that, that um the fossil was there, and then the rock layer kind of hardened around the fossil uh the material, and then the um water kind of brushed away the the actual soft organism and left an imprint. So those are two types of fossils we find. We find actual stone fossils um through this permineralization process, or we find imprint fossils uh like footprints, um, you know, bone uh not bone, um feather prints, jellyfish prints, things like that. Um, so none none of the fossils are actually organic material anymore. Um all of the atoms of a once living thing are replaced by the rock minerals, and the only way for these minerals to infiltrate and replace the organic materials is by saturation. Uh so there has to be water present in order for this transfer to happen. It doesn't happen in air. So the key point is that burial must happen quickly. These things have to be covered up. In fact, scientists have actually been able to produce fossilization in laboratory settings, and it takes a matter of days. This is crazy because, you know, in every resource out in the secular world, we're taught that it takes millions of years for fossils to form, and yet they actually have formed fossils. And this is not creation research, this is like um the Smithsonian was uh published an article about this on um some paleontologists that produced fossils in a matter of days. And the reason why they are trying to do that is because they want to be able to research fossils more, and so they came up with a way to produce more. They tried many other different ways before, um, most of them through heat and pressure. But this one group of paleontologists, and I linked the Smithsonian article about this, um, they prepared fossils by layering organic items in layers of clay and then subjecting them to pressure and heat through a hydraulic press. Every other attempt at making fossils just used the heat and pressure, but the clay was the key to the fossilization process. Clay is dirt or sand, but it's actually very, very fine sand that's full of water, just as the layers would have been during the flood, the sedimentary layers that formed the fossils. So it's very interesting that um they used water full uh silt and and clay. Clay is actually a particle size in the rock um, like when you're classifying rock materials, clay is a particle size, but clay layers, in order for it to be layers of clay, there have to has to be water present. And if you squeeze uh clay, the water does come out and it forms these rock layers, and then the fossils formed. Um so even more striking are these soft tissue fossils like jellyfish. Remember, I talked about the the cast and molds, the imprint fossils that had to form. The only way these fossils would have formed um be is for them to be buried rapidly, and then the rock formed rapidly. They would have to have been fossilized in less than 24 hours. Why? Because soft tissue things are going to decay very quickly. These guys don't have bones. Think like a jellyfish. Um, they don't have any bones, and so very easily they're going to get decomposed. Uh, and so it would require less than 24 hours for the rock to be formed in low oxygen conditions and rapid burial in order for these, and we have lots of these types of fossils. So, right away, we are not looking at slow, gradual processes, we're looking at a sudden catastrophic condition. So, now let's think about a global flood. So, according to the biblical account, the flood didn't just involve rain, it involved the breaking up of the fountains of the deep. This is massive tectonic activity. So, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, all of this would have reshaped the earth rapidly, and all of the water that came spewing out of um the bottom, specifically like under thermal seafloor vents, underwater vents, um, or but also in the middle of continents, you know, we talked about in a previous episode about how Rhodinia was literally just split up into these faults. Um, and it would have been um, you know, cause all these tectonic plates to shape and develop and then start to slam around into each other. So essentially, um, imagine putting like a bunch of um like flat, you know, boards or something in a bathtub and then just moving that water around, how all of it eventually would have gotten covered and crashed into each other, and that's essentially what is taking place during the flood. Uh, we would see massive movements of sediments. So, sediments are particles of rocks that have broken off of other rock. Uh, so you know, sand is a mixture of all these different types of rocks, and that would be a sediment. Uh, think about if you've ever walked through a muddy pond or a lake, it is full of sediment, and that's all that goop and layering that's down at the bottom that you're having to like walk through when you sink up to your knees. It's a lot of fun if you ever get to go do it. Um, just kind of be wary, there could be stuff living down there in the mud. Some stuff really likes the mud. So um, but anyway, sediments. These are these are particles of previous rocks that have been broken off and and kind of fall away. Uh, so the beach is a full full of sediments because of the riverbeds and the ocean and everything. Um, this also would have caused huge mud flows and underwater landslides, so lots of like just huge areas of of sand and dirt and mud just moving around and sloshing around. Volcanic ash would have covered vast regions, and a lot of the fossilization we see has ash layers around it that's cutting off that oxygen because ash is really good at layering in a in an impermeable way so that oxygen cannot permeate it. Um, and then mineral rich rich waters. So the all this these waters would have come up from the ground and they would be full of minerals, right? Kind of like ocean water is full of minerals, um, and they would saturate these very quickly buried organisms. So, this is what's taking place during the flood uh when the fountains of the deep break open. Um, these are exactly the conditions needed for huge amounts of sedimentation but also fossil formation, which is what we see. Now, I want to tell you something that is really crazy. We actually don't have a ton of fossils. Um, it sounds like we have fossils everywhere. We we really don't, but of all the fossils that we have, 95% of the fossils that we have are small marine organisms. These are organisms that live in the ocean. They do not swim. So we're talking like clams, trilobites, um, single-celled organisms that live in the ocean. And 95% of our fossil record are actually marine organisms, small single-celled or um like small marine organisms that don't swim around. So think shellfish, you know, jellyfish, things like that. This actually makes sense at if the oceans were the starting point of this catastrophe. You might be thinking to yourself, well, just um, if it was the flood, then wouldn't all these things have survived? Not necessarily. Um, so if you think about, if you know anything about ocean animals, marine animals. So so ocean animals, they live in a salty area. Um, they are extremely sensitive to changes in their environment. So if the saltiness changes, which this this would be the mineral content, they can die. If the temperature changes, even a few degrees, they can die. If the pressure changes, they can be affected by that as well. Um, and so this water that just kind of spewed forth from under the seafloor would have been super heated, right? And so this would have changed the temperature drastically. And it would have mixed with that ocean water, marine ecosystems would have been devastated by this. Uh, changes in salinity from all that rainfall and the underground water would have also put stress on marine life. Plus, if these things just, I mean, these things are meant to swim freely in the ocean water, and so if they get buried by all this mudslides and landslides and everything moving around and the sedimentation, they also would get cut off from their source of oxygen and they would die. So it makes sense that the massive amounts of fossils that we have are actually these small, not able to swim away from their problems, marine life forms that we have. We have um they would have been buried first. The small bottom-dwelling organisms would have been the ones that would have just been caught up in everything and not able to get away and buried first. So I want to talk about something that is really cool when you think about it in this perspective. Uh, the order in which fossils appear in rock layers. So, you know, in biology, we're taught that, you know, the single-celled organisms, the marine organisms were the first life forms to appear on earth. Um, and then slowly we started to like swim a little bit, you know, um, and became fish, some kind of like fish, and then these like low-lying, crawling animals that crawled their way out of the water and started to live on land. So, this like amphibial, reptile type of being, you know, I'm talking about the evolutionary process right now. And then eventually, as we developed, um, as as animals on earth developed, they developed out of this reptilian form into um oxygen breathing and um you know walking around on two feet type of forms. Um, these the mammals, right? So we've got the mammals now, and the birds were the last that developed, and you know, you've probably heard before that birds came from dinosaurs because dinosaurs were here on the bottom layers and birds are on the top layers. Well, actually, we find plenty of birds on the bottom layers too. But um, but the the the you know, the majority of the fossil record the way it is is um you see these small marine single-celled organisms on the very bottom layers. Then you see the amphibians and reptiles, or like the fish, you'll see fish, and then on the next layers you'll see reptiles, amphibians, and this is where the land dwelling creatures came from. And then um above that you start to see the mammals and and uh the larger reptiles and things like that, and then finally you get birds, and they're they're in there as well. And they call this the evolutionary timeline. This is how life developed on Earth over millions of years, according to these rock layers. However, as we've already covered, fossils don't um they don't develop uh slowly, they have to be buried quickly. And so let's think about this in terms of animals trying to get away from a flood. Well, first we would see the marine uh invertebrates that the things that cannot swim living at the bottom of the ocean getting buried first. So your shellfish, your jellyfish, your um your single-celled organisms, those all would be at the bottom, the bottom layer, and that's pretty much what we see. Then you would see fish and the swimming creatures. These are the things that can get away because they cannot jump out of the water. Um, and so fish are buried, or you know, other jellyfish are buried. Um just yeah, like huge, huge amounts of fish are buried by the the sediments that are swirling around in the flood waters, but they can't get out of the water. Uh, then what's next? Well, we've got our amphibians and reptiles. These things are very low to the ground, they can only crawl, they cannot run very fast for very long distances, so they're not going to be able to climb up mountaintops to get away from the rushing water of the flood, so they're going to be buried next. And then finally, the mammals, the birds, the larger reptiles, these are the things that can get up to the top of mountains. They can get out of the way of the flood waters faster and kind of protect themselves a little bit longer, but ultimately they do get buried as well through the swirling waters that are carrying all the sedimentations around the globe. And this is exactly what we see. It has everything to do with the mobility of these creatures and where they live, uh, how the floodwaters and the sedimentation and mudslides would affect them differently. Um, perfectly explained in one catastrophic event. One interesting thing that has been um kind of a question mark for evolutionists is whales. Whales are marine mammals, right? So these come, these these animals live in the ocean. And but yeah, they're a mammal, so they're very light. So evolution teaches that because we find marine um mammal fossils, whale fossils in the upper layers, therefore they had to have developed from land dwelling organisms that developed from previous sea creatures. So whales not only developed from From a land version of themselves, such as humans and dinosaurs and gorillas and all this and elephants came from some kind of a marine organism. But not only did whales develop from these marine organisms and live on land for a while, but then eventually they redeveloped and evolutionized themselves back into the water. So there's kind of like a double pathway for whales according to evolution, that they once came from land mammals that also came from sea creatures. And this is because we find whale fossils in the upper layers after the land mammals are there. But let's think about whales and how they would be able to survive a flood. They would naturally be found in the uppermost layers of fossils because they would have been the most able to withstand the devastation of the flood. They would have been able to, they're built for living in water. So they can travel around quickly. They migrate huge amounts of areas today, you know, as we see. They go all over oceans. So they would be able to swim pretty well. Whereas land animals are going to have to find dry land. They can't swim forever. They're also very much lighter than the other non-marine animals that are found in the ocean. So they float, and whales tend to float. They need the oxygen from the above. And so their carcasses are going to float rather than sink when they die. Amphibians and reptiles, they actually tend to sink because they're very dense animals. And that's why we see them closer to the bottom. And so the flood pattern aligns remarkably well with what we see in the fossil record based on one event. And it explains all of that away. So you might be asking, well, what about the rock layers and radiometric dating and all this stuff? You might be thinking, well, all this stuff has been dated. Well, we'll get to that in a minute because it's interesting what happens when you actually get into the nitty-gritty of it. A lot of the stuff has not been dated, or it's not been dated well. So let's talk about the rocks themselves. There are three main types of rock on Earth. There's what's called the igneous rock. These are the ones that are formed from volcanic activity, so like lava, magma. They're the ones that are formed when these volcanoes cool. And so this is this is rock that has been liquefied and then cooled. And is where we get all of our crystals from, you know, our diamonds, things like that are from igneous rock. Lots of lots of crystallization. We get some crystals from metamorphic rock, but mostly from the cooling of igneous rock. So it's very we can we can all igneous rock, we can find, you know, we can say a distinct all the igneous rock is formed from this one event, right? Not saying the flood event, it's just whenever it formed. That's when the the event was that that rock formed. We can we can actually put that in time. Metamorphic rock. This is rock that is on fault lines and next to some volcanoes, but like it's the rock that doesn't get molten, it doesn't get liquefied. And so this is rock that's formed through heat and or pressure, not always the same. Um, and and it's it's just rock that's changed as a result of that heat or that pressure. So the rock that we find along the fault lines, this is squeezed rock, and it changes it through that pressure. The the rock that we find kind of next to volcanoes, so not the lava rock, not the igneous rock, but the rock that's like next to it, that that's you know, because obviously it doesn't go from immediately hot to immediately cold. There's an in-between area where the rock cools down, but it's not quite hot enough to liquefy. This is the metamorphic rock, and so that also has a distinct time of formation, and then we have the sedimentary rock. These rocks are not formed through a lot of heat, they are formed through pressure, um, some heat, but not a ton of heat, but through pressure. And um, these rocks are made up of all of the sediments, so these are all the little rock particles, so they can have metamorphic rock, they can have igneous rock, um, they can well pretty much yeah, metamorphic and igneous rock all kind of put together and then they get compacted in layers, and that's when the sedimentary rock forms. So they start out as kind of like the soft mushy rock or groups of rocks together, and then once they get start to form layers and the weight of the layers above them push down, that causes them to form rock. Well, guess what? The igneous and the metamorphic rock is too um devastating to fossils for there to be any fossils found in them. We never find fossils in metamorphic or igneous rock because it's too hot and they get pulverized. We only find fossils in sedimentary rock. And this makes sense because the process of the layering sediment is what buries these organisms and it doesn't destroy them. Um so wind, we how do that how does sedimentary rock form? Well, there's a couple of thought processes. There's really two ways that it can form, it can form through what's called um wind. So think of like sand blowing across deserts and moving dirt around that way, right? Um, and water. Water moves a lot of of sand and sedimentary rock. So, like we have problems with this in rivers. At the ends of rivers, there's the delta. Um, this is the area that all the what the rushing water kind of like goes from the river into the ocean and it deposits all of the swirling dirt and sediment that it's brought with it and lays it down there. And so these these deltas actually fill up and they actually close the river off. Uh, so this has to kind of be dug out sometimes because of all the sedimentation that moves through there. This also happens in other places, um, up further in a river, uh, things cut like where um, you know, when the water slows down, the sediment starts to lay down because it the velocity of the water isn't strong enough to push the sediment, and so we get this kind of like filling in effect that happens, and uh rivers can actually change their course based on the amount of sedimentation. So lots of sediments are moved from water. Okay, so um we find fossils in sedimentary rock, but remember we talked about fossils not being able to withstand, um, they have to be buried first quickly. They can't be exposed to too much. And one of those things is wind. Wind is very abrasive, uh, it's like a sandpaper. Um, and actually, the rocks that we see in deserts are frosted kind of from that beating, that constant beating of the wind, but also beating against other rock. And it's the same idea for fossils, it's not ideal for preserving delicate structures. So, water though, when water transports sediments and covers organisms, it allows for the layering of these rocks without massive destruction to the rocks or to the fossils that are underneath it or the bones that are underneath it. So if rock layers form slowly over millions of years, so now we're talking about the rock layers, not the sediments themselves, uh the fossils themselves, but the actual sedimentary rock layers. If they were to have formed over millions of years, which is what we're told, they would we would see a lot of erosion between the layers of the rocks. We would see a lot of pitting and grooving and like uneven regularities. Um, this would be due to animals or people walking around scuffing things up, uh, air movement from wind causing shifts, or even plant activity moving this dirt. We would see a ton of irregularities, especially if it took place over millions of years of it being exposed. But instead, if you go to the Grand Canyon or some of these places that have these rock layers, what we see instead are these smooth, flat boundaries between layers. There's very little evidence of erosion between layers. We also see huge rock formations that span whole continents or even multiple continents. Um, and then we see ripple marks preserved between layers. This is evidence of like moving water. So think about if you've ever like been at the beach and you know, uh look down in the water, the the sand isn't completely flat. It has this like kind of like lit rippling look to it, like a slow wave. Um, and that is what we see between the layers of rocks in in these, you know, Grand Canyon or uh other places that you can see multiple layers of rock at the same time. So, for example, the Tapiot sandstone, um, this sandstone actually stretches across whole continents of the world. We find Tapiat sandstone, um, you know, it's named in the Grand Canyon. It's actually called something else in the Africa and Middle East, but it's the same composition of materials and it's found in the same span, time span of layers. So it's in the same placement. So this is going to be from the same rock layer. Um, this is, and we find it in the Grand Canyon, but it also stretches all the way across the continent to upper Africa and in the Middle East, and it's such a large, extensive layer that it suggests that it was laid down all at the same time, has to have been laid down underwater. The only way that that could have happened was if it was underwater for it to be there. It's Tapia sandstone is actually very low on the um geologic timescale, it's it's towards the bottom, and this is a huge, um, huge area of sandstone that's covered, and it's made of the same stuff. We find the same fossils in it um across the world, and so we know it's from the same time frame. Another example is uh a layer from the upper um surface, and this is the Coconino sandstone. This one is not as large, but it does encompass an area twice the size of Colorado, which this also kind of makes sense. It wouldn't be as large as the Tapiots, um, because this is a more of an upper layer. Uh, and so as you know, the floodwaters were swirling, the higher layers are going to not travel as far as, you know, the lower layers are going to spread out when there's a lot more devastation. And then as the floodwaters kind of settle, um, less movement's going to happen. Uh, what's notable about the cocoonino is that the there are animal tracks that are found in them. Um, it's long been believed that this layer was formed by wind and that the animal tracks were covered by wind sediments, which I don't know how I feel about that, but uh, because wouldn't wind just blow it away too? But however, some Starling tests have been carried out that demonstrate that these tracks were more likely carried out underwater and water sediment then covered them. This the uh some some researchers actually tested a bunch of like newts walking across uh different surfaces and different substrates, and then um you know uh fossilized them to see which one matched what we find in the Coconino, and they actually found that these amphibians walking through water created the most similar match to the what we the fossils that we have from the Coconino. Um this research was so incredible that it received acknowledgments in Science News and Geology Today. So I've linked the Science News article, I've also linked the full research article, which is from Answers in Genesis, um, in the show notes, but um you know it it made a it made an impact on the at-large scientific community and was acknowledged. Uh, because at the end of the day, science is about discovering and making new discoveries. And so um it's good to see that the scientific community is willing to uh hear and listen and acknowledge when good science is done on any side of this coin. So many geologists will actually now claim that there must have been large regional floods to cause the sediments to have formed. But looking at the big global picture, there must have been a worldwide flood. Not only to have laid down these continental size rock layers, but we also remember those 95% of marine fossils we find, we actually find marine fossils on the tops of mountains. So just sit with that for a second. Marine fossils, these things cannot swim, and we find them on the tops of mountains. How could fossils that belong in the in the bottom of the ocean have arrived at the tops of mountains, except that they were once underwater? Like just how evolution would say that millions of years provide the time necessary for these geologic patterns to occur. However, a global flood also answers this question and accounts for the large areas of sedimentation as well. So the flood just kind of like is a nice neat little bow on everything that we see in the geologic time scale and the fossil record. Uh, there's some other evidences of rapid formation. These are all really cool when you hear about them. So folded rock layers. We see um in the Grand Canyon, this is very obvious. It's also obvious, you know, if you're driving down uh any highway that they've had to cut into the highway, the mountainside to build the road, you can see rock layers as you drive along the side of the highway. And what's specific to mountains is that the there has to be pressure on both sides in order for these mountains to have formed. And so what you see is actually rippling taking place in the rock layers. So when rock layers um are formed and folded over on each other, it when rock layers are formed, they're folded, they're formed in a flat, like kind of like a layer of um imagine you folded up some towels, right? Um, and you laid them in and then you put them in your linen closet. Well, what do you have? You have flat layers of towels in your linen closet. You don't have a bunch of like gnarly looking towels, they they form in a nice flat way. And the same thing with sediments in the river or rock layers. We see, you know, these these neat flat uniform uh layering that takes place, except when we get to where mountains form. And where mountains are formed, what we see is um imagine you take your your basket of towels or your linen closet of towels and you push in on it from both sides. What's gonna happen to those towels? They're going to fold up on each other, they're gonna ripple, they're going to maybe fold even over each other. What they're not gonna do is they're not gonna break. You're not going to break your towels by pushing them together, right? Um, so when we see rock layers that are folded up like a layer of towels, they only could have formed from being soft before they were uh completely hardened into rock. So they were for they were folded when they were full um soft and then they hardened that way quickly. Um and because imagine if you instead you instead of taking a layer of a whole group of towels and pushing inwards on it, take like a whole group of like um like building blocks or uh books, you know, like layers of things, layer them all up on each other and then push in on them. Well, what you're not gonna be able to do is push in on them and you're not gonna be able to make them fold. If anything, let's say you use like something stronger than your arms, like a like a press or a vise or something. Well, eventually what you're gonna do is you're going to break those books or those blocks. They're going to like pop up all over each other, they're going to break in half or they're going to flip around. And you're not going to fold them. Because these are hardened objects. And the same same things happen with rock. When rock is hardened and we push on it, it cracks and it breaks. And so the only way that we could have folded rock layers, many, many, many like stacks of these rock layers, is if they were all folded as soft layers and then quickly hardened. And then we find we do find fossils in these layers as well. Um, and that's the only way that these rock layers could have happened. Instead of over the course of millions of years, it all they all had to lay layer themselves up at the same time, and then over over a short time and stay soft, and then they were folded and then they hardened in that position. That's the only way that we can get folded rock layers. And we see folded rock rock layers wherever there's mountain building processes going on. Um it it's it's pretty crazy. Um, I'll also link some examples of that in the show notes. Another example of of how these rock layers could not have formed over millions of years but had to have formed quickly is these things called polystraight fossils. These are trees, fossilized trees that um actually span multiple rock layers, like we're talking like 10, 15 rock layers, and they they they're standing upright through the rock layers. Um, so for years, this has kind of been a puzzle to evolutionists and geologists because how could these trees be there? Uh, and so what they say is that these trees grew from the they they the seed was planted in the bottom of the rock layers that they are found in, and then the tree just grew up through the rock layers, and then that's how they were there. So I don't know about you, but I don't think there's any trees that last millions of years, right? Um, and so if the trees grew through the rock layers to the size that they are in the because these are full-form trees, these aren't like saplings, right? Um, it would have taken it wouldn't have taken millions of years for the layers to form around these trees. So, okay, so well let's let's say the tree died then. So the the tree grew up through these rock layers, uh, but then it died. Um, even if the tree had died and remained in place, evidence of decomposition of the trees would be found in the parts that are exposed to the rain, wind, sun, and oxygen. So what we what we would see is that the top parts of the trees would be kind of like obviously dead and broken off and decomposed, and then the bottom parts would be very well preserved. We actually don't see that either. What we see is that the trees demonstrate the same amount of decay throughout all of the layers and the length of the tree. We also don't find any root systems, and that would be the one thing that would be preserved more than anything else is the root systems of these trees because they would be the most covered and protected. Yet none of the polystraight trees have a root system. So the only explanation for these trees is that some crazy event caused them all to break off from their roots, like think a landslide, right? And then they found they they as they started to settle down in the mud, the denser part of the tree went towards the bottom, which is the bottom of the tree. Um trees are uh susceptible to gravity just like we are, and so they actually have a thicker, denser bottom than they do atop. And so as the waters kind of settled down, they would have placed themselves um bottom down in the in the layers, and eventually, like kind of like a like a heavy boot or something, they would have pushed all the way down to where they met rock in the rock layers, in the the mud layers at this point, the sedimentary layers, and then they would have been fossilized there quickly, and and that's what we see. We actually see an example of this in the aftermath of Mount St. Helens. I think I'm gonna do an episode on Mount St. Helens because it is so indicative of what happened during the flood, it flies in the face of everything uh that that geologic timescale wants to give us. Um but whole whole like yards of trees are found in these rock layers because you know the the the planet was covered in trees, and when the flood happened, all these trees would have been swept away and they would have had to deposit somewhere, and they all deposited kind of in the same place because they all came from the same places, and so we see actually large tree beds for these polystrate trees. There's not just like one or two, it's like gazillions, right? Um so the simple ex simplest explanation for these trees is that they were buried in place with no root system, and the layers were deposited around them of sediment rapidly, and then they were all compacted and made rock at once. Um we also see a lot of our fossils are in the middle of an activity. Uh, we see fish eating another fish, and so um, if this was going to be something that happened uh, you know, slowly. Over time, these fish would have decomposed. But obviously they were in the middle of a meal. They weren't trying to, these particular fish weren't swimming away from anything. It just kind of happened rapidly. We see an Ichthyosaur uh giving birth in the process of labor. If that had happened, then the it's a chance that the baby would have been able to swim away. If that had happened slowly, it's it's weird that both of them would have died, uh, the mother and the young. And so um, you know, they get buried rapidly in the middle of this birthing process. Uh, animals, lots of our fossils, especially the bird fossils, um, are found, and the reptile fossils are found as if they're running away from something or fleeing something. Um, they're in a position where their heads are thrown back uh as if they're dying a horrific death. So if they had been predated on, like if something was chasing them to eat them, then the fossil wouldn't be there, or it would show evidence of being partially eaten or eaten entirely. So we wouldn't see these fossils. They they got buried quickly, um, and they're also like trying to get away from something. These are all snapshots of sudden, not slow, gradual burial. We also have huge resources of coal and oil. Coal comes from massive accumulations of plant material. Oil reservoirs come from buried organic matter under pressure. Um, these deposits are enormous, like huge amounts of coal and oil that we've had. They're global in scale. What kind of event would bury such vast amounts of living material quickly enough to preserve it before it decays so that it got compacted and preserved in a way that coal and oil is? The slow process actually struggle struggles to explain the scale of the coal and oil reserves that we have. However, a catastrophic event like a global flood provides a compelling alternative. So, and then let's talk about that geologic time scale. So, the geologic time scale is that there's these layers of rock, right? We've kind of talked about both of these aspects already, but there's these layers of rock, the rock that's at the bottom layer is older, the rock that's at the top layer is younger, and then there are fossils that are interspersed throughout the rock layers, and based on what we see in the older layers, those are the older life forms, and the ones at towards the top are the younger, newer life forms, right? So conventional geology uses something called index fossils to date rock layers. These are fossils that are only found in certain layers, um, and so they're believed that they only existed during certain time periods, right? So here's an issue though. So for many years, we didn't, you know, radiometric dating is not as widespread as you would think. Um, and for many years, paleontologists did not have access to radiometric dating, nor did geologists. It wasn't even around until like the 40s, 50s. So they use what's called relative dating for their specimens. So geologists would date their rocks based on the index index fossils that they found that they contained. Paleontologists would date their fossils based on the rock layers that they're found in. Think about that. No one is sending any information away to a lab. What they're doing is using the other to date their fossils. This is circular. This is a circular thing. Well, this f this this fossil is this age because of the rock layer it's found in. And then geologists are on the other side saying, well, this rock layer is this age because of the fossils that are found in it. They're relying on each other to give them the dating. This is called relative dating. It's very common. Um, radiometric dating methods came into the fore um in the 50s or earlier. Um, it was really later, I think. Um, and they're often presented as independent confirmation. Uh, the rock is this age because of the radiometric date of this age. However, a few places have sent rock samples off to different labs and gotten wildly yield different results, conflicting results, using depending on what method is used. So there's multiple methods you can use to date rock, um different radiometric signatures and things like that. Uh, this is actually largely due to the fact that it's really difficult to date sedimentary rocks because they're formed from the particles of older igneous and metamorphic rocks. So it's possible that a sedimentary rock layer can give many different ages through radiometric dating from the same layer. And that's because of the age of the sediments that are in the sedimentary rock. It's very difficult to date sedimentary rock. And we don't date fossils because that destroys them. So the question, and well, actually, we don't date fossils the same way at all. Uh so the question because are we interpreting the evidence or are we fitting it into a pre-existing framework? So are paleontologists or geologists taking their discoveries and fitting it into their preconceived idea that it took millions of years for these things to form? Or are they actually looking at what the data is giving them and interpreting it from a perfectly unbiased place? And that I don't know. Um, so when we step back and we look at the full picture, the rapid burial, the water-based sedimentation, the marine dominance in the fossils, and the massive layered deposits, and then evidence of sudden burial, we actually start to see a pattern. And this pattern is consistent with the global catastrophic flood. This perspective doesn't challenge conventional, it doesn't just challenge conventional timelines. It invites us to reconsider how we interpret all of the physical evidence around us. So we have to look at this a different way. And I will say that when I was um, I had to be shown this by uh some resources that just explained it in a different way. I didn't come up with this on my own. And and based on the persuasiveness of the arguments from geology and and fossil records, it makes it seem like there's only one explanation. But then when someone pointed out, well, what if this is just the layers in which these animals could run away from the flood waters? I my mind was blown because it fits perfectly. And and for years I thought the geologic time scale, we got to deal with that. There's no way that creation can explain that. And then all of a sudden, it just right there explained it. Anyway, I hope that this was helpful to you today. I know we kind of got into some technical stuff, and I know it was very long, and I'm sorry for that. Um, but how hopefully you listen to it in pieces and and you could kind of digest some of it as we got there. And there's also going to be a ton of information in the show notes because um there's just so much research that goes on around this. It's very, it's very fascinating, it's also very interesting to see, and and it gives a future to future uh creationists because there's still more research that can be done. So I hope that not only has it raised some questions for you, but it also deepens your understanding and your faith and that you look closer and think deeper about the truth of scripture. So until next time, keep pursuing the light.

SPEAKER_01 51:36

I hope today's show has enriched your walk with God. I know I'm always amazed at all of the new and interesting things that I find every time I open the Bible. Until next time, grow deep in God's word as you follow the light.