I recently watched a very good video called “Behemoths Buried Alive.”  The video is a lecture by creationist Michael Oard and it is produced by Creation Ministries International (CMI)  I would like to summarize some of the main points of the presentation and comment. It has to do with what happened to dinosaurs in Noah’s Flood.  I would recommend the video.

Evolutionists have challenged creationists by bringing up evidence regarding dinosaurs that they see as incompatible with the idea of a global Flood, like the Noahic Flood described in Genesis.  One problem with evolutionist’s attempting to challenge creationists on the Flood is that they seldom look at all the relevant current research from creationists.  They tend to attack ideas that are not necessarily believed by creationists anyway, or which are simply out of date.  Another problem with evolutionists challenges to creationists on the Flood is that Noah’s Flood was a much more complex event than they envision.  It is true that creationist scientists do not all agree on every detail about how the Flood took place.  Neither do evolutionists agree on every detail about how evolution took place or how Earth’s surface features came about.  The facts are often challenging to explain from either point of view.  But creationists have made more progress in geology than they are given credit for.

Evolutionists have brought up various facts that give evidence of dinosaurs that were alive in some setting prior to fossils or fossil footprints forming.  So the argument is that since the evidence has dinosaurs making footprints it could not have been during a Flood.  Evolutionary thinking often views fossils in terms of how dinosaurs normally lived.  So though it would have been some local catastrophe that caused the fossils to form, it would not point to a global Flood.  Also, since according to evolutionists, the evidence suggests normal circumstances such as dinosaurs laying nests of eggs, it does not suggest a global Flood but just points to occasional events that happened in Earth history, such as volcanic eruptions or impacts for instance.

As an example consider the dinosaur footprints in the Paluxy river, in Texas.  There is a long dinosaur trackway of fossil footprints in cretaceous rock South of Fort Worth.  There are many other examples of fossil footprint trackways around the world also.  The fossil footprints at the Paluxy river are found in sedimentary rock, most of them are large three-toed footprints of Acrocanthasaurus.  These footprints are on top of many layers of sedimentary rock that creationists would say formed in Noah’s Flood.  So how is it that there were live dinosaurs making tracks in the mud that became these rocks?  There are different views on this from creationists.  But I suspect many creationists with a geology background would say these footprints were made early in the Flood.  Mike Oard argues for this very well I think.

The Genesis account describes 40 days and nights of rain, but that does not mean the Earth was covered in merely 40 days.  The entire Flood event, as measured by the time Noah and family were in the Ark, was a bit over a year.  Mike Oard takes the view that the peak water depth of the Flood was around the 150 day mark.  I think this is possible but I would prefer to put that somewhat earlier in the Flood year.  At any rate, this means that it may have taken somewhere between 2 and 5 months for the Earth to be totally covered with water.  It has been argued both from geological considerations and even from Biblical details that the water rose in an unsteady, possibly oscillatory manner.  There are a number of possible physical causes of this, such as tectonic uplift and subsidence of the continents, lunar tides (which may be more pronounced in a global ocean), tsunamis, and Flood ocean currents.  These effects could make waters deposit sediment (mud) on the continent, then the water could retreat, allowing animals not yet dead to temporarily escape the waters, only to be buried later when the water rises again.  So before the Earth was totally covered many things could have happened as animals, including dinosaurs, were trying to get away from the rising waters.  Dinosaurs and other animals could have survived in areas for some weeks possibly before being finally killed and buried.  Oard also says that dinosaurs that left fossil footprints are more likely to be better swimmers.  Waters “coming and going” rising in an oscillating manner could also explain the repeating sedimentary rock layers that are common.  For example, there may be hundreds or thousands of feet of sedimentary rocks that oscillate between sandstone and clay for instance.

There is also evidence of dinosaur eggs on many places around the world.  These eggs and nests are on top of sedimentary rocks that had to have formed in the Flood, yet they are evidence that dinosaurs were alive at least long enough to lay the eggs.  Oard makes some good points on the dinosaur eggs.  Actual dinosaur nests are relatively rare, compared to the eggs.  The eggs are often laid on flat plains where there is no evidence of vegetation around them.  In other words the eggs are often found in locations that would not be a good location for a dinosaur to lay it’s eggs.  A nest for dinosaur would be a shallow depression so that it would hold moisture to keep the eggs from drying out.  Vegetation would also be packed around it.  Yet the fossil eggs often do not have intact nests, though there are some nests.  Dinosaur eggs are very porous and so if they are not kept moist the embryo will die.  Yet the eggs are often found in a circle or half-circle on what was flat ground.  This suggests the dinosaurs sometimes were laying their eggs under stress, not in normal conditions.

Then there are a number of examples of bone beds, also called fossil graveyards, where thousands of animals and/or dinosaurs were buried together.  What would cause there to be as many as 10,000 dinosaurs to congregate in one area and then be buried together, if not a massive catastrophe?  In these bone beds, there are few baby or juvenile dinosaurs.  (Juveniles would likely be killed easier and possibly be scavenged more.)  The bones do not have evidence that they were exposed to the air or to normal decay for a long time before they were buried.  Yet, in some cases, the bones have been broken into many fragments by violent water action and are mixed in mud with other bones and rock.  These bone beds sometimes cover a wide area.  Well known sites include areas in Montana and Colorado, for instance.

Oard makes a number of other good points.  The part on polar dinosaurs is quite good I think.  Evolutionists don’t have a good explanation for polar dinosaur fossils because they use the present to try and understand the past.  But what if the Earth and the life on it were once very different and it was changed by God’s judgement?  Believing that there was once a global Flood makes a lot more sense than most people in the sciences think.

Recently on August 23rd 2012 Bill Nye, known for his PBS TV program “The Science Guy” posted a video on YouTube called “Creationism is Not Appropriate for Children.”  I would much commend Nye’s efforts to get kids interested in science.  His TV program was meant to get kids interested in science and present it a way that made it fun.  Bill Nye has spoken about evolution before.  However, he made some statements against creationism that I would say are unrealistic.  He has also told parents not to teach their kids creationism.  I would say Nye’s comments are unfortunate and they reflect several common miconceptions about creationism.

One major misconception from Nye is that evolution is only questioned in the United States.  Boy, is this wrong!  Several nations, other than the U.S. have sizable creation ministries, including Russia, Britian, Australia, and South Korea.  These are just the larger ones.  These organizations would all be likely to have some full time staff, including well qualified scientists.  Some of them may have hundreds of people involved, including people with science degrees.  The Creation Research Society based in the United States has over 600 voting members.  A voting member must have a graduate degree in a field of science.  I’ve heard the organizations in Moscow and in South Korea are also large but I don’t have numbers.  Creation Ministries International (CMI) is out of Australia and they have a large readership in their technical peer-reviewed journal and their nontechnical magazine.  CMI has offices in Canada, Britian, and United States.  Then there are probably hundreds of smaller creation groups, some of college students, some not.  These are not just in the United States, though it’s true the U.S. probably has more of them.  There has even been several European conferences on creationism where people come together from all over Europe.

The home school movement has also had a big part in “spreading” the creation message, for parents who do not agree with Bill Nye and actually want their kids to be exposed to creationism and intelligent design.  Home Schooling is not done only in the United States either.  Home schooled kids often are a bit better at critical thinking, I think partly because of the different points of view they are exposed to in their home education.

I could tell stories that suggest that in some places in Eastern Europe and Russia, there may actually be more openness to creationism than in the United States.  So I would say there is great promise of creationism growing in acceptance around the world.  This is not just true among scientific lay people, but also among people trained in science.  Knowing more science does not necessarily make someone more likely to believe evolution.

Nye also makes a statement to the effect that to reject evolution makes things complicated for you because there is so much science understood to support evolution.  Well, there are indeed implications that if creationism is true, there is much about origins science that needs to be completely rethought!  But creationists have answers to the questions that come up, depending on the research they have done.  Some questions still need more research and there are things we may not have enough evidence to be sure about.  But the answers from creationism are better than the answers from evolution.  Nye mentions fossils, radioactivity, and starlight as evidence for “deep time” (billions of years of time).  I’ve been studying these questions for a long time and evolution does not deal with the evidence nearly as well as scientists generally think.  Creationists do not have definitive answers to everything, but creationism can handle the questions at least as well and often better than evolutionary science.  In the articles on my website (creationanswers.net) I try to glean from the best work from creationists and make it understandable for readers.  If Bill Nye wants to find out about the creationist view on these questions, he would have a lot of study to do.  While scientists have been saying for years that creationists don’t do research and don’t publish in peer-reviewed journals, creationists with a science background have been doing a lot of research.  There is a lot of published peer-reviewed technical material from creationists that goes back to the 1960’s.  If anyone wants to know how to get this information they can ask me I’ll tell them.

In the video, Bill Nye says parents should not teach their kids creationism because that would make their kids illiterate.  This is completely wrong and parents know better than this.  It is not illiterate or ignorant to reject evolution.  Some believe evolution and some don’t but you cannot infer that those who reject it do not understand it, or that they do not know enough science.  What Nye apparently cannot fathom is that many people reject evolution with full accurate knowledge of it.  There are thousands of people around the world who at one time were people who taught evolution, were well informed about evolution, and promoted evolution but who changed to a creation viewpoint because of the scientific evidence.  I’m not just guessing when I say thousands because of what I know about creation organizations; but I wouldn’t have exact numbers.  But there are very few, in comparison, who were well-informed creationists (of the young age literal Genesis perspective) who promoted creationism but then rejected it and started promoting evolution because of the scientific evidence. Note that I do not consider college students starting college believing Biblical creation to be “well-informed.”  So I would not include them in this. Why would this be so, about the lopsidedness of well-informed people changing views?

Bill Nye says that creationism, which he refers to as a world view, in a couple of centuries will no longer exist.  I hope Nye isn’t holding his breath for this to happen.  Creationism has grown in its acceptance by more and more people over the last 30 years, in spite of being shut out of public schools and universities.  I think the unfair discriminatory treatment of people questioning evolution tends to make more of the general public reject evolution and move to a creation perspective.  The dogmatic way evolution is often taught in public schools is also a factor in people accepting creationism. There are various views on creation from Christians, Jews, and Muslims.  (There is also a Muslim creationist organization by the way in Turkey.)  I wish Nye would take the time to seriously investigate creationism, but from the best sources.