Saturday, September 5, 2009

Of Squids and CAT Planets

In an interview with Astrobiology Magazine, David Grinspoon of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado said this concerning catastrophism (CAT) on Venus:

If you use the word catastrophic it rubs some people the wrong way, but something dramatic happened on Venus which wiped out almost all signs of an older surface. The planet got re-paved, basically, 600 or 700 million years ago. … the planet seems to have been flooded with basaltic lavas in a geologically short period of time, simultaneously around the planet. … If Venus has episodic plate tectonics, where nothing happens for a while, the heat builds up in the interior. Eventually it can't stand it any more, and you have this rapid overturning. …what we're seeing on Venus is the evidence of the last of those great episodes of global resurfacing. …

Venus and Earth both show evidence of rapid geologic activity. Mars has also experienced geological catastrophes. Why not consider Global Catastrophic Plate Tectonics (GCPT) as an explanation the for the Flood of Noah’s day?

Writing in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Victor Baker with the Department of Hydrology and Water Resources at the University of Arizona, Tucson states:

In the 1920s, J Harlen Bretz demonstrated that the Channeled Scabland [of Washington state] formed by cataclysmic erosion and deposition from Pleistocene megaflooding derived from the margins of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, particularly glacial Lake Missoula in western Montana and northern Idaho. Studies of this region and the high-energy flood processes that generated it are stimulating discoveries of similar megaflood-related landscapes around the world and on Mars…

There is a resurgence of catastrophism in the geologic community. Should we not at least explore the option that most of the rock structures were produced by one great cataclysm? Venus, Mars and Earth are all CAT planets!

If the Flood really happened, then traditional geological dating must be in error. Squid ink has been found in a fossil dated at 150 million years in Brittain. Dr. Phil Wilby of the British Geological Survey said:

It is difficult to imagine how you can have something as soft and sloppy as an ink sac fossilised in three dimension, still black, and inside a rock that is 150 million years old.

The illustration above was drawn with the same ink. An independent study has confirmed that protein fragments, including collagen and hemoglobin, have been found in the T. rex made famous in 2007. Surely this protein is not 65 million years old! So dinos and squid show that the rock record is not old and this is consistent with the view that the Flood was the event the produced most of the fossils.

Some argue that since different creatures are found in distinct layers of the rocks, then this supports evolution. This conclusion is unwarranted. Consider the tiny shelled creatures called foraminifera (forams) that live on the ocean bottom (benthic) and also on the surface (pelagic). Evolutionists consider the surface forms to have evolved from the benthic types since the fossils are found in different strata. The discovery of a surface foram that is the same species as a benthic type calls this into question. Just because different forms of life are found in different sections of the geologic record this does not mean that they existed in periods separated by millions of years. This example with forams shows us that some organisms have a wide ecological range and that their fossil remains are consistent with the Global Flood. That is, Noah’s Flood deposited many ecological zones and not ancestor-descendent sequences as Darwin supposed.

And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book: But these are written, that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you might have life through his name. (Jn. 20:30, 31)