The Fossil Record: Evolution or "Scientific Creation"

Clifford A. Cuffey

Scientific Creation

There are a variety of different forms of creationism (Scott, 1999b). In this article, I am limiting my discussion to “scientific creation” (= young earth creation; Scott, 1999b) because its proponents were instrumental in the Kansas dec ision. This is clearly indicated by the removal of the earth’s age from the new curriculum (Scott, 1999a, p. 21).

Gish (1985, p. 35) defined the “creation model” as follows: “By creation we mean the bringing into being of the basic kinds of plants and animals by the process of sudden, or fiat, creation described in the first two chapters of Gene sis. Here we find the creation by God of the plants and animals, each commanded to reproduce after its own kind using processes which were essentially instantaneous. We do not know how God created, what processes he used, for God used processes which are not now operating anywhere in the natural universe. This is why we refer to divine creation as special creation. We cannot discover by scientific investigations anything about the creative processes used by God.” “Scientific creationists” consider the earth to be approximately 6,000 to 10,000 years old (Gish, 1995, p. 48), and the creation event to have lasted six 24-hour days (Whitcomb, 1986, p. 28, 32; Gish, 1995, p. 48).

It is important to note that, “Creationists do not deny...the origin of variations within kinds, but they do deny...the evolutionary origin of basically different types of plants and animals from common ancestors” (Gish, 1995, p. 30) . Thus, the “creation model” presents a picture of all of the “kinds” created during the creation week. Since then, no new “kinds” have emerged. However, there has been diversification within each “kind” to produce, for example, the different breeds of do gs. This is the “creationist orchard” (Sarfati, 1999, p. 38, 39). This “variation within kinds” results from each of the “kinds” being created with a range of genetic material.

Because all the major “kinds” of organisms were created during the initial creation event, “...the organisms represented in the fossil record would all have been living contemporaneously, rather than scattered in separate time-frames over hundreds of millions of years...The only reason to think that all should not have been living contemporaneously in the past is the assumption of evolution. Apart from this premise, there is no reason to doubt that man lived at the same time as the d inosaurs and trilobites” (Morris, 1985, p. 112). The “kinds” of organisms presumably lived in different ecologic zones just as they do today (Morris, 1985, p. 118, 119). Consequently, “creation scientists” propose an alternative model to uniformitarian historical geology, in whic h a world-wide “great flood” formed the rock record, especially the fossiliferous Phanerozoic sediments (Whitcomb & Morris, 1961, p. 258, 265, 327; Morris, 1985, p. 117, 118, 123, 129; Gish, 1995, p. 49; Brown, 1996, p. 84-86). During the “great flood,” organisms were hydrodynamically sorted according to size and shape (Morris, 1985, p. 118, 119), and the ecologic zone they lived in.

In synthesis, the “creation model” includes a number of critical tenets that are drastically different from evolution, geology, biology, and paleontology: 1) gaps between created kinds, i.e., no transitional fossils; 2) “great flood;” 3) instantaneous creation and contemporaneity of faunas; and 4) young age of earth. The following sections review these tenets.

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