Genesis records that on the fifth creative day, the waters of the earth would teem with living creatures, and every winged bird would fill the sky. At the beginning of the sixth creataive day, all the creatures that move along the ground were created. Keeping these texts in mind, I'd like to share with you some of my observations about this wonderful earth that have convinced me that the creative days of Genesis were far longer than the 7,000 year long periods we were taught as Jehovah's Witnesses.
Peter Firstbrook, in "The Geology of Everest" wrote, "When mountaineers stand on the summit of Everest and pose for the photograph of their lifetime, they are standing on the remains of marine fossil over 50 million years old...within a few hundred meters of the summit are sedimentary rocks (clay, silt, and the carbonate (chalky) remains of marine animals). This layer is affectionately known as the 'Yellow Band' by Everest climbers. The very top of the mountain is made from much purer limestone, mixed within sandy layers."
Fossils of ammonites have been found encased inside the solid rock of the Himalayan mountain range. These fossils are not deposited on the mountain sides as debris from a global flood, but are actually embeded deep with the mountain rock mass. The story reads much the same throughout the American and Canadian Rockies. "Canadian Rockhound", a geological magazine reports that, "The town of Field lies in the shadow of Mount Stephen in British Columbia. Around 1886, a geologist working for the Geological Survey of Canada climbed Mount Stephen and high above the town of Field, he discovered a vast storehouse of fossils. Scattered above the tree line were millions of yellowish-coloured slabs of trilobites...There are about 170 species of fossils now
recognized from this site. Similar sites have been found in other parts of the world such as China, but not nearly as abundant, although always near a mountain top. In the January 1999 issue of National Geographic magazine, contributing writer, Douglas Chadwick, described that while in the Bighorn Mountains near the Wyoming-Montana line, he and Don Minchow, a local spelunker (cave explorer), were deep within Bighown Cave, and found clams. Then they began noticing sections of coral. Though close to a thousand miles from the nearest ocean, and 5,000 feet higher, they had made their way to a warm water reef. Thrust upward from seas that covered North America's interior during the Mississippian epoch, this thick limestone layer, the Madison Formation, is a part of a geologic landscape that reaches from Idaho to the Dakotas and north into Canada."
Was this coral reef part of the debris of a global flood? I think not! When my wife and I visited the Lewis and Clark Caverns in the Rocky Mountains of Montana this summer, we found, encased in the boulders along the foot path to the cave, fossils of Horn Coral, Crinoids, Brachiopods and Castropods. These are all marine creatures that once lived in a ancient inland sea, and are now part of solid rock, on a mountain top in Montana. Some would say that all these fossils are thr result of the flood of Noah's day, but how could this be? There weren't any trilobites or ammonites in Noah's day. Rock strata earthwide shows that the trilobites were long extinct before the ammonites showed up, and the ammonites finally disappeared with the dinosaurs. How could these marine creatures be part of the debris of a global flood?
The January 1993 issue of National Geographic magazine, on page 16 and 17, shows spread-eagled against an almost vertical rock face, Argentine geologist, Ricardo Alonso. In this two page photograph, he is pointing at three sets of ancient footprints. The text reads, "About 65 million years ago, long before tectonic forces tilted the landscape of the Andes, dinosaurs walked here along the wave-rippled shore of an inland sea." The rock face all around these footprints is fine ripple mudstone. Fine ripple mudstone looks like the ripples on a sandy beach, and forms as a result of running water over horizontal surfaces, not on vertical cliff faces.
My point is this, long before the Himalaya Mountains, Rockies or Andes were forced into their current positions by forces deep within the earth, the ammonites and trilobites were already created in the fifth creative day, and they died, were fossilized in the sea beds, and were slowly but surely lifted to their present great height by tectonic plate movements.
The dinosaurs that roamed all over the earth were very much a part of the "creatures that move along the ground" tha were created at the beginning of the sixth creative day. The dinosaurs that made footprints in the mud that became solid rock high up in the Andes Mountains were very much alive before the Andes Mountains formed. Were these dinosaur footprints the result of global flood waters? Reason says, "No!" The hard evidence is there for all of us to examine. From all corners of the earth, the story is the same. These land and sea creatures dominated our planet for far longer than just a few thousand years.
In the past, my wife and I have never had a realistic view about the fossils, and the wonderful earth we live upon. We would always mentally block out the comments of scientists that speak that the dinosaurs dominated this earth for millions of years, and that they disappeared 65 million years ago. Who can speak with certainty about such large numbers? What I am now sure of is that the distant past is a lot closer to what scientists have been telling us than what I have always thought.
We had always believed that the earth building processes were long over, and things are what they are. To our surprise, we have found that everything on this planet is still in a process of change. Think about it! When the earth shakes, when volcanos erupt, when one huge tectonic plate dives beneath another, to in time melt back into lava deep within the earth, the evidence is that these processes have never stopped and probably never will.
Scientists are now using global positioning devices to monitor the Himalaya Mountains, the Rockies and Andes. These instruments can tell within one quarter of an inch the movement of these mountain ranges. These mountain ranges are still moving upward, and the whole Himalyan mountain rance is still being pushed northward.
Our lifetimes are so short that we fail to take note of this very slow movement. After examining the evidence so far, I now feel it has taken millions of years for these great mountain ranges to be pushed up to their present great heights from the seabeds that they once were, and in the process they carried within them the remains of the creatures of the past, great and small with them.
Thanks for listening...Rockhound.