Fossils

Why would a Christian college have a large collection of fossils?

We have a large collection of fossils because we are an institution that promotes thinking and learning.  Just as we have a large library of books, we also have a large library of fossils.  They have been found in diverse places all over the world.  Many of them are beautiful as well as interesting.

After many years of study and observation, several conclusions have leapt out at us.  They are, for the most part, quite obvious:

Fossilization doesn’t just happen all the time.  When an animal or plant dies and is buried, it doesn’t just lie there and turn into a fossil over the course of the next million or so years.  Even though fossils are relatively common, the process required for fossilization is a somewhat unusual process.  In order for a plant or animal to become fossilized, it had to be buried in mud and water.  It also has to become fossilized relatively fast.  Think about this: when a tree falls over in your back yard, if it lies there long enough, it will rot away.  If you bury it, it will still rot, perhaps even faster.  Only when buried in mud and water can the minerals seep ion the wood and petrify it.  Many large petrified logs are found all over the worlds.  Some show signs of decay, others show none.  We can learn from this that they were fossilized quickly, before they had time to break down.

Fossils display little or no signs of true evolutionary change.  Any kind of animal that is alive today can be found in the fossil record.  From dragonflies to frogs to cats to kangaroos, they are all there.  And the amazing thing is that the fossils really show no signs of evolutionary change.  The animals may be slightly different in size or shape, but in the fossils that are supposedly a hundred million years old, a fish is still obviously a fish.  Charles Darwin said, “Why then us not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links.  Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely-graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory.”  (The Origin of Species, 1859) In other words, Darwin felt that perhaps the strongest argument against his theories of evolution were what was found (and what was not found) in the fossil record.  Now, we acknowledge that several so called intermediate fossils have been found since the time of Darwin.  The problem that we see with so many of these “missing links” is that often they are found in rock strata that strongly indicates that they were in no way a bridge fossil, because their supposed descendants were already found fossilized in earlier fossil layers.

Past extinction events happened on a truly massive scale.  Two small animals that you may have never heard of before once ruled the seas.  They were the ammonites and trilobites.  We have many of these in our collection.  Ammonites and trilobites are truly some of the most common fossils to be found.  At one point, the waters must have teemed with them.  In our view, as prevalent and successful as ammonites and trilobites were, it is almost unthinkable that they would become extinct.  And yet, they are.  Extinction events that have occurred on our planet must have happened on a scale that is almost unimaginable in size and scope.  If trilobites and ammonites could be wiped out like this (not to mention dinosaurs and many other creatures that have been lost), is it any wonder that any life survived on this planet.

This planet once enjoyed a much greater diversity of life.  We all have seen the evolutionary tree in textbooks that starts out with a single celled organism at the bottom, branches into fish, reptiles, mammals, primates and eventually humans.  We understand that most biologists would say that this chart is over simplified, but one of the central tenets of evolutionary though is that life continues to diversify through great lengths of time.  The fossil record seems to indicate the opposite has happened on this planet–with almost every kind of life.  We find many, many different kinds of animals that once lived in diverse groups, but now they are extinct.  It has been correctly noted that by drawing the tree of life using the fossil record only, one would have to begin with a large group of animals at the bottom and then move upward through time eliminating one species after another, until we arrived at today, with only a fraction of our animal diversity left.  The fossil record shows exactly the opposite of what one would expect when trying to prove the theory of evolution.

So what conclusions do we draw from all of this?  To be very honest, we’re still working on it.  We hope that with a very open mind, you will continue to work on yours.  We are not trying to say that a person cannot be a Christian and also believe in evolution.  What we do continue to see is that the fossil record seems to be very much opposed to the theory of evolution.  The two can be forced together, but it seems like trying to smash a square peg into a round hole.  Send us an email and let us know what you think.  If you are in the area, we would love to show you our collection (whether you agree with our thoughts or not).