The mythical geologic column

Dr. Neville Thomas Jones, Ph.D.

In Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal, 1999, 13(2), 77-82 (and reproduced in trueorigin.org), John Woodmorappe quotes Morris and Parker, in order to define the 'geologic column', thus: "This standard column is supposed to be at least 100 miles [160 km] thick (some writers say up to 200 [320 km]), representing the total sedimentary activity of all of the geologic ages." At the end of his paper he concludes that, "There is no escaping the fact that the Phanerozoic geologic column remains essentially non-existent. It should be obvious, to all but the most biased observers, that it is the anti-creationists who misrepresent the geologic facts. The geologic column does not exist to any substantive extent, and scientific creationists are correct to point this out." (Emphasis mine.)

Any such 'column' is claimed to consist of strata, so now consider the words of the renowned French sedimentologist, Guy Berthault (after translation from his native French into English):

"As we have shown in the laboratory, layers of incoming sediment have been wrongly identified as being strata. The scale of geological time and the chronological succession of fossils have been calculated on this mistaken belief, that strata are successive layers of sediment.

"A single layer of sediment can sort itself out into parts of many strata. So the position of fossils, rather than showing evolution, merely indicates the distribution of marine species which lived at different depths.

"If the creatures fossilized in the rocks show no evolutionary sequence, could they have all lived together at the same time? Since we now know that rocks don't need time to form, just enough sediment, there appears to be some reason to believe that they could have all been living together.

"The very fact that [the remains of hundreds of millions of fossilized creatures] were buried in vast quantities of sediment, which has since turned into rock, and that this kind of rock is only made by water, strongly indicates that the catastrophe was a cataclysmic flood, which covered the entire Earth."

Summary

There is no 'geologic column', except, of course, in the minds of young schoolchildren who stream out of the natural history museums after being taught that there is.