The news is often full of alleged missing links between dinosaurs and
birds, like Archaeopteryx or Sinosauropteryx, or between man and
ape-like creatures, such as Lucy (
Australopithecus afarensis).
Any time I read of a claimed transition between one kind of something to
another kind of something, I love to find out what sedimentary rock
layer it was found in.
Most of the time, secular reports give an “age,” not a rock layer.
This age is an interpretation of a rock layer—keep that in mind. This
age is not a measured quantity but an interpreted one (from chemical
analyses or position in the strata sequence’s uniformitarian timeframe).
And how is it interpreted? It is interpreted in light of millions of
years being an absolute fact that
cannot be questioned. So sometimes you have to do some searching to find out what rock layer the fossil was found in.
Sometimes you can do some “reverse engineering” by taking the age and
back translating it to what rock layer the fossil was found in. For
example, if someone says the fossil is 73 million years old, then this
would be Cretaceous rock. See the chart below so you can reverse
engineer these alleged ages to a rock layer.
Duration of Time for Rock Layers by Secular Dating
These rock layers are real layers; it is the assignment of
time
to them that is rather questionable. The majority of rock layers that
contain fossils are sedimentary rock layers from the Flood of Noah’s day
about 4,350 years ago (By adding up genealogies from the Flood to
Christ, it is about 2,350 years, and Christ lived about 2,000 years
ago.). Of course, there are rock layers that have formed since the
Flood, due to local floods, volcanic eruptions, and so on. But most of
the layers in question formed in the Flood.
Now why is this important? It obviously deals with the
time issue
in regards to the rock layers. But it is more than that. When people
say they have found a missing link in the rock layers, it is typically
sitting in Flood rock or post-Flood rock. See the chart below.
1
Rock Layers in Light of Noah’s Flood
For example, Archaeopteryx and Sinosauropteryx are found in rock
layers associated with the Flood. So how old are they? They are about
4,350 years old. Dinosaurs are also found in rock layers from the Flood,
putting them around 4,350 years old too. Did one turn into the other
during the Flood? Not at all. They were fleeing from and finally buried
and fossilized in the Flood. In other words, they died at the
same time.
Besides, birds (Day Five) were created before dinosaurs (Day Six,
being land animals). So birds were around prior to dinosaurs and did not
need to evolve from dinosaurs. This is like someone arguing
that the laptop computer evolved into the first airplane. This is
clearly fallacious since airplanes were already around prior to laptop
computers!
Furthermore, consider that Lucy and other australopithecines are found in rock layers often associated with
post-Flood
rocks (e.g., volcanic layers erupted on top of Flood layers). How could
such a thing be the ancestor to humans (or a close relation to the
ancestor of humans) when humans, like Adam through Noah, already
existed?
As Christians, we need to start thinking biblically. When you start
with the Bible, sensational finds of missing links are easy to refute.
The transitions don’t exist because the alleged missing link fossils are
found in rock layers that were from the Flood or afterwards, which is
well after people and the animals in question already existed.
Footnotes
- I understand that creationists debate over
the exact placement of the post-Flood boundary, being at or near the K/T
boundary (lower) to the higher end of Tertiary sediments (upper).
However, this graph is for the purpose of relaying the idea of the
fossiliferous rock layers being primarily a result of the Flood and post-Flood events, on which point both sides would agree.
