Read your Bible, Ken


Here’s a beautiful fossil from the Green River beds, a whole school of fish fossilized in formation.

The article mentions that scientists are uncertain how the animals were locked down in sediments quickly enough to preserve their relative position…or even if this is behavior frozen in time, but maybe an alignment generated by whatever process imbedded them in sediments. It’s something scientists do all the time, admitting that they don’t know something.

Ah, but here comes Ken Ham, professional fool with a sense of absolute certainty. He knows the answer!

A recent article reported on the attempt by several experts to discover how this fossil, found in the Green River Formation, was formed (and I encourage you to go to the article and see the photo—it’s a truly incredible fossil!). One expert, who has studied other fossils from the Green River Formation, said that the school of fish probably died together because of a volcanic eruption, a mass of oxygen-poor water, or a temperature shift, and then all the fish fell to the bottom of the lake and were aligned by the current and then fossilized. But mathematical models appear to rule out this explanation. Others have suggested maybe a collapsed sand dune buried them, but they admitted “they don’t have a great explanation.”

But I do! Since I start with the history in God’s Word, I have the proper lens with which to view the world. This school of fish was catastrophically buried by water-borne sediments during the immediate aftermath of the global flood of Noah’s day. It’s no great mystery!

You can almost hear him giggling at the thought that he is so much smarter than those stupid scientists.

Only one problem: this stupid scientist has read his Bible, specifically, Genesis 7:11-12. His answer doesn’t work.

In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.
And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.

“Catastrophic” is a somewhat ambiguous word. To trap a school of fish in situ would require an event that locked them in place in a fraction of a second. The Biblical account of the catastrophe does not propose that everything was killed and flash-frozen in a picosecond, or a millisecond, or a tenth of a second, but an ongoing disaster that dragged on for a global flood taking forty days and forty nights and leaving everything under water for a year. In Answers in Genesis’ own Creation “Museum”, they have a video recreation showing a gigantic wall of water, a tsunami rising up hundreds of feet, sweeping in and destroying a village (and killing all the happy innocent children playing in it, by the way).

A tsunami would not leave a school of fish unjumbled, just as it would not leave the corpse of a child unbattered.

I am sorry, Mr Ham, but your flood, if we postulate that it even happened, was a prolonged, violent event of unimaginable magnitude. Your own site describes it as a year-long global catastrophe that destroyed the pre-Flood world, reshaped the continents, buried billions of creatures, and laid down the rock layers. Yet when it’s convenient, you now claim that it was a delicate, swift event that froze animals in motion. It reshapes continents, but it leaves a few fish unperturbed.

I think you need to go back and read your Bible. The Book of Genesis is short, the flood is described in only a few vague pages, I’m sure that if you concentrate real hard, you can get through it all. There aren’t even any long words!

Comments

  1. johnson catman says

    But . . . but . . . but, goddidit! (oooh, that left a horrible taste in my mouth.)

  2. nomdeplume says

    Whenever I read something by Ham I am convinced he is the stupidest man in the world. Then I read something by Hovind. Or Comfort. Or….

  3. flexilis says

    Ah, the Green River formation. That’s where I live. There is a wonderful illustrated book about the fossils and geology, “The Lost World of Fossil Lake”, by Lance Grande. The area presents another problem for Flood believers. The Eocene lake system left layers of the mineral trona (source for most of the world’s baking soda, among other things). Trona is an evaporite deposit left when the lakes dried up. There are at least 22 layers of trona separated by other sediments. How did one flood leave all the sediments while drying up and refilling so many times?

  4. Fez says

    I am now craving goldfish crackers. And a world free of people like Ham having any influence. Then again I’ve always wanted the latter.

  5. gss9000 says

    Thems not fish. Thems clearly sperms on the way to making a fully formed person with full constitutional rights the moment one of them hits an egg.

    Science!

  6. dontlikeusernames says

    I almost mistook this for a non-literal quote, but

    But I do! Since I start with the history in God’s Word, […]

    It’s amazing and scary that people actually lap this shit up. At least religiosity is on the decline, generally speaking. Winning, I guess…?

  7. dontlikeusernames says

    Gah, missed a sentence, I think. I mean to say:

    Is an actual quote, and it’s […]

    (Apologies.)

  8. dontlikeusernames says

    (Last one, I promise.)

    I think I understood markup. I clearly don’t. Cries in software developer :/

  9. curbyrdogma says

    Given the fact that the central USA is now experiencing record rainfall and flooding, this would give Mr. Scam ample opportunity to see if his hypothesis holds, um, water. …So go don your pith helmet and get out in the field, Kon!

  10. nomdeplume says

    It is an interesting find though. The only explanations for the mass kill of a school I can think of are low oxygen, high temperature, or chemical pollution. But I think clearly they are the way they are because of current flow, not because of some kind of magic stop-motion effect. If you look closely, here and there are fish goingbthe “wrong way”, plus those several outliers along the bottom of the school. Both observations suggest to me that this is a physical effect mimicking schooling behaviour, not a school stopped in mid motion.

  11. curbyrdogma says

    @ #12: https://geology.com/articles/green-river-fossils/ This formation is famous for its well-preserved, finely detailed fossils (including insects). Most likely it involved very fine, silty sediment and/or volcanic dust that would have choked fish and caused insects to stick to the surface. An entire school of fish packed together also suggests they may have been trapped in one small area, such as a puddle drying out.

  12. davidc1 says

    Just had a peek at hammys facebook page again .Always fun to leave comments there ,don’t know if they get deleted .

    @3 Yes ,but well ,er ,maybe .God did done do it .Can i copy and paste your comment on kennys facebook page ?

  13. flexilis says

    @15

    Be my guest. Doubt my blood pressure could stand a visit to that murky swamp. Rosa Rubicondior did a post about the Green River Formation a few years ago, skewering the creationist timeline.

  14. curbyrdogma says

    Update: It appears that the location of the Creation Museum just received around 3 inches of rain since yesterday and are under a flood warning. (schadenfreude) radar.weather.gov/radar.php?rid=ILN&product=NTP&overlay=11101111&loop=yes

    The creation “scientists” proposed a hypothesis… now would be a perfect opportunity for them to conduct some observations!