Introduction to Fossils and Paleontology: A Prologue

In this new series of articles on the field of paleontology and the fossil record, my goal is to introduce you to how paleontologists use fossils to tell a story about earth history. I want to give you a whirlwind tour of the world of fossil organisms, both familiar and bizarre. These reveal God’s glory and give us a glimpse into what the original created world might have been like. I want to paint a broad picture about what the fossil record tells us concerning creation, the Flood, the world after the Flood, and our place in it.

The views expressed in this article reflect those of the author mentioned, and not necessarily those of New Creation.

Fossils are at the center of the origins debate for a reason. Fossils are the remains of once-living plants, animals, and microorganisms that we dig up out of the ground. Compared to the artifacts uncovered by archaeologists, who study the remains of past human civilizations, fossils are older—often much older.  We often find the oldest signs of human civilization built on (or, in the case of the Great Pyramid, out of) rocks containing abundant fossils.¹ Thus, fossils are artifacts of sorts—relics of a time before the rise of the great empires we read about in history—“prehistoric,” if you like.² Paleontologists believe that fossils tell us a story. The nature of that story depends very much on what we already believe about the history of the earth. And that is where the controversy over fossils begins.

What Mean These Bones?

Most paleontologists believe that fossils tell a story of successive eras populated by different types of plants and animals. The “age of fishes” was succeeded by the “age of amphibians” which was followed by the “age of reptiles” and then the “age of mammals” in which we are still living. As climates changed, continents collided, and celestial objects cratered the earth, species branched or radiated out from older species. Meanwhile, other species went extinct, leaving behind niches for others to fill. Again, most paleontologists subscribe to this way of interpreting the fossil record. Honestly, they have good reasons for doing so. The old-earth/evolutionary paradigm makes sense of a lot of the data. It has a long history that goes back even before Darwin.

Just because a scientific paradigm explains a lot of data and is part of a long- and strongly-held tradition doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s true, however. As Bible-believing Christians, we need to carefully consider the cost of simply accepting the story told by conventional paleontologists. What happens to our understanding of the original “very good” creation, the fall of man, and Noah’s Flood, if the conventional paradigm is true? It means God created a world filled with death, cancer, parasites, thorns, and apocalyptic mass extinctions and called it “very good” (see Genesis 1:31). Also, it means that the fall of man was not the cosmic catastrophe that the Apostle Paul believed it to have been (see Romans 8:18-25). Noah’s Flood, then, must have been a local event in the Ancient Near East and the author of Genesis used hyperbole to make it sound universal. I can understand why many Christians opt for accepting aspects of the conventional paradigm to try harmonizing it with Scripture, but I just don’t believe we can do that. The stakes are too high, and the solutions proposed just aren’t all that satisfying. 

Young-age Creationist Model Building: A Better Approach

I believe a far better solution for Christians is to ask, “What if we rewound the clock to a time before Darwin and the development of the conventional paradigm and started over?” What if we started our investigation by accepting the long-held view among Christians throughout the centuries that Genesis is literal history, that creation happened in literal days thousands of years ago, that death entered the world through Adam’s sin, and that Noah’s Flood was a global event? Could we build a logically consistent model based on these premises that could explain the fossil record, make testable predictions, and be scientifically rigorous?³ 

This is the quest of the young-age creationist paleontologist and my own personal quest. I am under no illusions that this goal will be achieved in my lifetime. I am in this for the long game, not the short game. I have a lot of personal questions about the fossil record and how it squares with the biblical account. “What parts of the fossil record (if any) came from the period before Noah’s Flood? How much of the fossil record formed during the Flood? How much formed afterwards? How did such an orderly occurrence of plants and animals become deposited in the sedimentary layers formed during the Flood? How should I interpret fossils that appear to be intermediate between two types of organisms that we thought were very distinct (e.g., reptiles and mammals, dinosaurs and birds, fish and amphibians, whales and land animals, etc.)?”

These questions don’t cause me to question my faith in Jesus or His Word. I know from His faithfulness in my life that He is real. By studying apologetics, I have come to see again and again how His Word has been confirmed by science, historical evidence, archaeology, and the testimonies of countless saints over the centuries. It makes me realize just how much work is left to do.

Answers to these questions will not come easily or quickly. And we will need a lot more people to be trained (and funded) to get the job done. My goal in writing this series is to inspire you to think big about what the future might hold for young-age creationist research, and to get involved by praying for and supporting Christian scholars who are working in the scientific disciplines and even by joining in the quest yourself! I will talk more about that at the end of the series, but for now, let me conclude this introduction by showing you where I am going in this article series.

Starting with the Basics

In the first five articles of this series, I will cover the basics of fossil interpretation. How do we go from collecting fossils in the field and studying them in museum collections to developing a model of earth history? We will talk about what creationists and evolutionists agree on (which is quite a lot, actually!), and where our views diverge radically. These articles will cover:

• How fossils form and what it tells us about conditions in the past
• How we use geology to “read the rocks” to give us a sequence of events
• Why fossil plants and animals appear in a definite order in the rocks
• What similarities between organisms mean for life’s overarching pattern
• How we classify fossil organisms and connect the dots between them 

A “Cook’s Tour” of the Museum Collection

In the second set of articles, I will provide you with snapshots of the common types of organisms that paleontologists collect. We will begin with invertebrates (animals without a backbone), then vertebrates (animals with a backbone), and then plants. It may also surprise you that there are abundant fossils of microorganisms called microfossils! These are actually very important for reconstructing earth history, so we’ll cover them too.

Putting it All Together

In the final set of articles, we will cover the broadscale patterns we see in the fossil record, focusing on sudden appearances and disappearances of groups of organisms. We will examine the ways young-age creationist models account for the order of appearance in the fossil record. We will also talk about some special cases like original biomaterials in fossils and particular fossil localities.

Conclusion

With this article series, I hope to encourage you that we as Christians can make sense of the fossil record within a young-age creationist paradigm. We can take Genesis as literal history and be good paleontologists at the same time! 

Footnotes

1. [1] Klemm, D., & Klemm, R. (2010). The Stones of the Pyramids: Provenance of the Building Stones of the Old Kingdom Pyramids. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG. ↩︎
2. By using this term, I mean that fossils predate the recorded history of the areas in which they are found. We have no direct written records of the formation of specific fossils—thus, all fossils are “prehistoric” relative to the human cultures that inhabited that region. By this, I do not mean to imply that the Bible does not give us a true history of all time. I believe the Bible tells us about the time before fossils formed—the pre-Flood or Antediluvian Epoch. Therefore, there really isn’t anything in the world that is truly “prehistoric.” ↩︎
3. It is often claimed in introductory textbooks that the development of these fields began with the acceptance of creationism, but through rigorous investigation came to realize that it doesn’t work. While it is true that certain disproved notions, like the fixity of species (i.e., species were created as they currently appear and do not change), were often considered part of creationism in the past, it is also true that the kind of rigorous scientific framework I am talking about was never actually attempted until the latter half of the 20th century. Very early on, workers in geology and paleontology came to believe that the fossils they were studying came from a pre-Adamic (i.e., before humanity) period—an essential component of the conventional paradigm. Only a few workers in the 18th and 19th centuries, often called “scriptural geologists” today, attempted to harmonize the biblical record with the findings of geology and paleontology. A revival of young-age creationism in the twentieth century led to the rapid development of young-age creationist model-building, which has especially taken off within the last several decades. ↩︎