Dr. Charles Ruark
As I mentioned, Jay Gould’s book Wonderful Life: the Burgess Shale and the Nature of History ranks (for me) among the more important books ever written when understood from a Christian viewpoint. Remember, I have told you that evolution is impossible because all life depends on an elegant code: the DNA code. No exceptions. Random chance cannot create a code. Not even a stop light code can exist by chance. No DNA code, no Life. It’s that simple. Yet this fact is ignored by modern science.
Let’s consider the information on page 55 of Gould’s book. You don’t necessarily need his book for the below discussion, but it would be helpful. You have been taught for almost 100 years that evolution proceeded in an orderly manner progressing from simple to complex animals. You were taught that evolution begins with the fossil record recording a few simple multicellular animals. Next you were taught that life proceeds to evolve in an orderly majestic progression as documented by the fossil record to the multitude of complex disparate and diverse animals seen on the land and in the seas of today.
When in fact it is the opposite.
This is the message of the fossils of the Burgess Shale. Therefore, knowledge of Gould’s book is extremely important from a Christian standpoint. His book contradicts everything we were taught about evolution and the fossil record. It shows a fossil record replete with mass extinctions. No orderly progressions from simplicity to complexity exist. It shows a fossil record of at first, maximum disparity and complexity followed by simplicity and diversity of organisms occurring within that simplicity.
I do not believe that these time periods listed below ever existed. However, they are the inevitable conclusion of a humanity that is drunk on “science” that has become its religion. Going back to the formation of our solar system and our eight planets, you encounter the Grand Tack Theory, which is one of the most implausible theories I have ever heard of. Finally, 13.7 billion years ago there is the Big Bang where we encounter Eternal Inflation which states that for our universe to exist, with its 23 constants necessary for life, we need the spawning of 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 34 universes per second forever! Hence, for our universe to exist, there must be a multiverse of universes that is forever creating this number of universes every second!
According to modern evolutionary theory, below is earth’s geologic history including its formation.
(Eras > Periods > Epochs representing a few billion to a few million years of geologic time)
Precambrian Era: it includes the earth’s history before 530 million years ago and lasting about 4 billion years. The latest and largest microfossil is Grypania spiralis thought to be about 2 billion years old. It is thought to be an algae or extremely large bacteria or a colony of bacteria. Supposedly during this era, nothing but single celled organisms existed for about 3.5 billion years. I doubt microfossils even exist.
Periods (of geologic time):
Cambrian: about 530 million years ago sudden appearance of every single animal phylum over course of 100 million years as documented by fossils of Burgess Shale. Think about that.
End of Cambrian: multiple mass extinctions caused by falling oxygen levels in the oceans.
Ordovician/Silurian: huge mass extinction 45-60% of all marine genera and 85% of all marine species caused by cooling then warming of earth.
Devonian: Ended when 19% of all marine species and 50% of all genera became extinct. “Extinct” is just another word for “vanished”. Some sources state that 70-80% of all species were extinguished. Party line: oceanic anoxia (lack of oxygen in the oceans).
Carboniferous: ended with a mass extinction of global rainforests because of climate change: cooler drier climates, i.e., a mass extinction of plants. Think about the number of species of plants that allegedly must have vanished.
Permian: greatest of all mass extinctions: 95% of all marine species and 70% of all land species instantaneously vanished 225 million years ago due to multiple not well understood hypothetical causes.
Triassic: began 255 million years ago with the supposed evolution of the dinosaurs after the worst of all the mass extinctions, i.e. the Permian. Ended with another mass extinction of 80% of all animals. Small mammals first appeared at its end. Cause for this extinction remains unclear, possibly astronomical.
Jurassic: age of the dinosaurs begins. At its end there was a minor mass extinction. During this extinction, most of the stegosaurid and enormous sauropod dinosaurs died out, as did many genera of ammonoids, marine reptiles, and bivalves. No one knows what caused this extinction.
Cretaceous: age of the dinosaur. At its end 65 million years ago a large meteor impact conveniently wiped them out but strangely, the delicate amphibians (frogs and salamanders) survived along with lizards. How do you think early humanity would have fared pitted against T-Rex and his like?
Epochs (of geologic time) to the present:
Paleocene: rise of the mammals. An event known as the PETM (Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum) supposedly ended it with the largest deep sea extinction event in the last 93 million years. The oceans rapidly acidified and rose in temperature by 5-8 degrees Centigrade or 9-14.4 degrees Fahrenheit. This supposedly caused a diversification of life in the surface ocean and on land. Best analogy for today’s climate change. Caused by a massive methane release from marine gas hydrate reservoirs. Methane is the worst of the greenhouse gasses. Note how there must be a postulated cause for all these mass extinctions.
Eocene: replacement of the older mammals with modern ones. Ended about 33-30 million years ago with the mass extinction of 63% of all mammals and large-scale extinction of flora and fauna because of climate change.
Oligocene: primitive three-toed horses, rhinoceroses, camels, deer, and peccaries lived during this epoch. Extinction of about 50% of coral species occurred.
Miocene: (23 million to 5.3 million years ago) during the Miocene, land-dwelling mammals were essentially modern; many archaic groups were extinct by the end of the preceding Oligocene, and fully half of the mammalian families known today are present in the Miocene record. This epoch saw the extinction of some ape species and fauna.
Pliocene: continued diversification of mammals. Mastodons lived then. By the end of the Pliocene epoch almost all the modern groups of whales had appeared, as had the early seals and walruses. Birds such as herons, rails, ducks, eagles, hawks, crows, sparrows, pheasants, owls, and partridges were present in Europe. Supposedly ended by supernova explosion 2.6 million years ago. The end-Pliocene extinction was concentrated in coastal waters, where larger organisms would catch a greater radiation dose from the muons. One of the extinctions that happened 2.6 million years ago was Carcharocles megalodon, the largest shark that ever lived on Earth.
Pleistocene: the famous Ice Age: began 2.58 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago. It ended with the extinction of 38 genera of large mammals. Most likely cause was climate change. No evidence for human over predation.
Holocene: Recent 4004 B.C. according to Ussher’s The Annals of the World.
The above is concisely Professor Gould’s nature of history that he describes in his book Wonderful Life as chronicled by the above evolutionary description of Life.
Notice that with all supposed extinctions, important choices are continually occurring within the fossil record. Disparity is ever decreasing. Complexity is ever decreasing. Diversity of fewer and fewer complex and disparate animals and plants is ever increasing until we reach the Holocene, i.e., todays biosphere.
The question then becomes: who’s making these choices? Is it the engine of Darwin which is random chance and natural selection, i.e., evolution or the Mind of the Deity making His choices and leaving a record of them during the 6 days of creation, i.e., the fossil record?
If I had to contrast Gen 1-3 with evolution it would be: supernatural memories (the outputs of Gen 1-3) with no preceding natural events vs natural events preceding natural memories (evolution based on the laws of physics starting with the Big Bang and ending with our current universe, which is the memory of the Big Bang).
The fossil record is a memory. Evolutionists like Gould have constructed the above Eras, Periods, and Epochs from this memory. However, Jesus created this memory on Day 3 when He created the earth’s core, its layers, surface topography, and oceans. He also created the Plant Kingdom and Standard DNA Code on Day 3.
Thus, I argue that the fossil record is quite consistent with the Gen 1-3 account of creation. The plants and animals of today are less complex and disparate than the animals found in the fossils of the Burgess Shale. As one examines the fossil record from the standpoint of Gen 1-3, one can see the final choices Jesus made to create the amazing speciation found within today’s biosphere. This huge number of species exists within a much fewer number of unique anatomical designs than are found within the fossils of the Burgess Shale.
“The Burgess Shale includes a range of disparity in anatomical design never again equaled, and not matched today by all the creatures in all the world’s oceans. The history of multicellular life has been dominated by decimation of a large initial stock, quickly generated by the Cambrian explosion. The story of the last 500 million years has featured restriction (decreased disparity—auth. note) followed by proliferation (increased speciation—auth. note) within a few stereotyped designs, not general expansion of range and increase in complexity as our favored iconography, the cone of increasing diversity, implies. Moreover, the new iconography of rapid establishment and later decimation dominates all scales (eras, periods, and epochs—auth. note), and seems to have the generality of a fractal pattern-” (Quote taken from Wonderful Life p. 208, first paragraph).
Everything Jesus does is supernatural. Jesus doesn’t build something (the output or memory) through a series of preceding events. When He created all those fish and bread during the feeding of the five thousand, He did it instantaneously. No machine or instrument of science could measure, detect, or comprehend a power like His.
The power of Jesus is the power to create anything He wants as a completed output, i.e., memory. He created the universe and everything in it as a perfect memory over a six-day time period and rested on the seventh day, in order to provide us a unit of time known as a week. There is no scientific explanation for our 7-day week. He could have created the universe instantaneously had He so desired.
Jesus is the eternal output (John 1:1). No event caused Him. It is beyond us to have any comprehension of this kind of existence. However, it is entirely logical that when He creates, He creates in the way He exists: He creates outputs (memories) using no inputs (events) whatsoever. Adam and Eve were created complete perfect beings. They did not begin as infants.