Ad Hoc Rock Poppycock
Bodie Hodge gets rock layers wrong. (But he's a creationist, so that's to be expected.) He uses this laughably incorrect understanding to "explain" why there are no transitional fossils. (You can find a list of transitional fossils here. Really, in the age of the Internet, creationists have absolutely no excuse for the level of ignorance required to make claims to scientific legitimacy.)
Hodge tries to make it all scientific-looking by including tables. He takes roughly half a billion years of time(*) and compresses it into one year of global flooding.
Of course, part of the problem is that no modern organism has ever been found in Precambrian rock -- rock that he places between the fall and the flood. All of the strata -- the ones he places before, during, and after the flood -- are extremely well-sorted, with no mixing ever discovered. All Hodge would have to do is show one fossil out of place, and our understanding of the geologic column would have some real problems -- and potentially, evolution with it. But he doesn't, because he can't; and he can't, so he deflects his need to demonstrate any truth in his claims.
Moreover, even the limited rock layers he pretends were laid down in a single, global flood event contain too many fossils for one biosphere. For example, the Karroo Formation in South Africa alone is believed to contain 800 billion fossil land vertebrates with the average size of a fox. There are only 38 billion acres of land on the Earth's surface. This deposit alone represents 21 animals with the average size of a fox per acre. The Karroo deposits account for much less than 1% of the sedimentary column, but even assuming that it represents a full percent, this places 2100 animals per acre; since an acre is 4840 square yards, each animal would have two square yards of territory. The average American house is about a quarter of an acre in footprint; can you imagine every house in your neighborhood surrounded by 525 hungry animals the average size of a fox?
There are an estimated 15x10^18 (15,000,000,000,000,000,000) grams of carbon contained in the world’s coal reserves. An acre of rainforest plant matter contains about 525 kg of plant matter per square meter. Assuming that plants are 18% carbon (they're much less), we have 94.5 kilograms of carbon per square meter. Multiplying this by the number of square meters of land gives us 15x10^18 grams of carbon. We can only get the world's current coal reserves by postulating that the entire planet was once a rain forest -- and ignoring the other things that plants became in the fossil record as well. We also have to ignore the fact that some animals cannot survive in rainforest conditions (e.g., grazing animals).
We are still not through; we have to consider oil and natural gas as well. There are 201x10^18 (201,000,000,000,000,000,000) grams of hydrocarbons in the Earth. In all of the world's living things, there are only 0.3x10^18 (300,000,000,000,000,000) grams of carbon. There is 670 times the amount of carbon in petroleum alone than there is in every living plant and animal on Earth. Surely the world was not 670 times more crowded before the flood than it is now!
There are also too many fossilized plankton (enough to cover the entire Earth to a depth of one meter based on chalk deposits alone), too many diatoms (enough in the opal of the Monterey formation of California alone to bury Earth to a depth of nearly thirty centimeters), and too many crinoids (enough in the Mission Canyon formation in the northwestern United States alone to cover the planet to a depth of 0.6 centimeter -- and crinoidal deposits are among the world's most common fossils, with deposits larger than the Mission Canyon found in Canada, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, Indiana, Mississippi, Australia, Libya, the Ural Mountains, Belgium, Egypt, Central Asia, and China). Where are all the fox-sized vertebrates to live when the planet is covered in plankton, diatoms, and crinoids?
The limestone deposits on Earth alone carry 214,000 times the amount of formerly living matter than there is currently living matter on the Earth.
Not only that, but there are incredibly delicate layers within the layers he mentions as flood deposits. In western Texas and New Mexico, for example, the layers are mere millimeters thick over a range covering tens of thousands of square kilometers. We're supposed to believe, apparently, that the flood credited for moving continents, raising mountain ranges, carving out canyons, and gouging out the ocean beds(**) is also gentle enough to tenderly place layer on top of layer over such a broad area.
And all of the periods that Hodge lists as being laid down by the flood have features like dessication cracks, raindrop impressions, and features like animal trackways and nests that could not possibly have formed during a flood.
All this, as they say, is the tip of the iceberg. Creationism looks like a potentially viable alternative to evolution as an explanation for things at first, but as soon as you start engaging with the world and using some of your God-given curiosity, it has problems that just never stop. Still, Hodge does get one thing right, when he says:
... creationists hardly think twice.
True. More to the point, they hardly think once. That, of course, is the source of this problem(***).
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(*) From the Cambrian, roughly 540 million years ago, to the Pliocene, about five million years ago. All of that, the claim goes, was laid down during Noah's flood.
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(**) Ignore for a moment the amount of heat that would necessarily have been generated to do all this within a year, and how it would have cooked the global sea and the ark's denizens. That's all part of the game of creationism -- ignoring inconvenient, necessary implications of your "explanations", or else generating new miracles that neither science nor Scripture documents in order to attempt to keep your preferred understanding afloat.
---
(***) I like, for example, that Hodge embedded the old "If birds evolved from therapods, why were there still therapods" argument in there. It shows how the refusal to understand sits at the root of so much of the lack of creationist comprehension.
Hodge tries to make it all scientific-looking by including tables. He takes roughly half a billion years of time(*) and compresses it into one year of global flooding.
Of course, part of the problem is that no modern organism has ever been found in Precambrian rock -- rock that he places between the fall and the flood. All of the strata -- the ones he places before, during, and after the flood -- are extremely well-sorted, with no mixing ever discovered. All Hodge would have to do is show one fossil out of place, and our understanding of the geologic column would have some real problems -- and potentially, evolution with it. But he doesn't, because he can't; and he can't, so he deflects his need to demonstrate any truth in his claims.
Moreover, even the limited rock layers he pretends were laid down in a single, global flood event contain too many fossils for one biosphere. For example, the Karroo Formation in South Africa alone is believed to contain 800 billion fossil land vertebrates with the average size of a fox. There are only 38 billion acres of land on the Earth's surface. This deposit alone represents 21 animals with the average size of a fox per acre. The Karroo deposits account for much less than 1% of the sedimentary column, but even assuming that it represents a full percent, this places 2100 animals per acre; since an acre is 4840 square yards, each animal would have two square yards of territory. The average American house is about a quarter of an acre in footprint; can you imagine every house in your neighborhood surrounded by 525 hungry animals the average size of a fox?
There are an estimated 15x10^18 (15,000,000,000,000,000,000) grams of carbon contained in the world’s coal reserves. An acre of rainforest plant matter contains about 525 kg of plant matter per square meter. Assuming that plants are 18% carbon (they're much less), we have 94.5 kilograms of carbon per square meter. Multiplying this by the number of square meters of land gives us 15x10^18 grams of carbon. We can only get the world's current coal reserves by postulating that the entire planet was once a rain forest -- and ignoring the other things that plants became in the fossil record as well. We also have to ignore the fact that some animals cannot survive in rainforest conditions (e.g., grazing animals).
We are still not through; we have to consider oil and natural gas as well. There are 201x10^18 (201,000,000,000,000,000,000) grams of hydrocarbons in the Earth. In all of the world's living things, there are only 0.3x10^18 (300,000,000,000,000,000) grams of carbon. There is 670 times the amount of carbon in petroleum alone than there is in every living plant and animal on Earth. Surely the world was not 670 times more crowded before the flood than it is now!
There are also too many fossilized plankton (enough to cover the entire Earth to a depth of one meter based on chalk deposits alone), too many diatoms (enough in the opal of the Monterey formation of California alone to bury Earth to a depth of nearly thirty centimeters), and too many crinoids (enough in the Mission Canyon formation in the northwestern United States alone to cover the planet to a depth of 0.6 centimeter -- and crinoidal deposits are among the world's most common fossils, with deposits larger than the Mission Canyon found in Canada, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, Indiana, Mississippi, Australia, Libya, the Ural Mountains, Belgium, Egypt, Central Asia, and China). Where are all the fox-sized vertebrates to live when the planet is covered in plankton, diatoms, and crinoids?
The limestone deposits on Earth alone carry 214,000 times the amount of formerly living matter than there is currently living matter on the Earth.
Not only that, but there are incredibly delicate layers within the layers he mentions as flood deposits. In western Texas and New Mexico, for example, the layers are mere millimeters thick over a range covering tens of thousands of square kilometers. We're supposed to believe, apparently, that the flood credited for moving continents, raising mountain ranges, carving out canyons, and gouging out the ocean beds(**) is also gentle enough to tenderly place layer on top of layer over such a broad area.
And all of the periods that Hodge lists as being laid down by the flood have features like dessication cracks, raindrop impressions, and features like animal trackways and nests that could not possibly have formed during a flood.
All this, as they say, is the tip of the iceberg. Creationism looks like a potentially viable alternative to evolution as an explanation for things at first, but as soon as you start engaging with the world and using some of your God-given curiosity, it has problems that just never stop. Still, Hodge does get one thing right, when he says:
... creationists hardly think twice.
True. More to the point, they hardly think once. That, of course, is the source of this problem(***).
---
(*) From the Cambrian, roughly 540 million years ago, to the Pliocene, about five million years ago. All of that, the claim goes, was laid down during Noah's flood.
---
(**) Ignore for a moment the amount of heat that would necessarily have been generated to do all this within a year, and how it would have cooked the global sea and the ark's denizens. That's all part of the game of creationism -- ignoring inconvenient, necessary implications of your "explanations", or else generating new miracles that neither science nor Scripture documents in order to attempt to keep your preferred understanding afloat.
---
(***) I like, for example, that Hodge embedded the old "If birds evolved from therapods, why were there still therapods" argument in there. It shows how the refusal to understand sits at the root of so much of the lack of creationist comprehension.
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