The Ubiquity of Fossils and the Bible

Ubiquity speaks of the commonness of a thing—it’s everywhere. Fossils have that quality, from the peaks of the Himalayas to the valleys of the Appalachians. In fact, fossils are so prevalent in sedimentary rock that the fossils found in it are the metric used to date it.

According to classical, uniformitarian evolutionary scenarios, fossils formed by regular processes of death, deposition, compaction and mineralization. Water, winds, volcanoes, and landslides laid down sediments upon the bodies, tracks, even the excrement of animals, upon plants, and even upon microscopic lifeforms. Those in turn were covered by other sediments, and ultimately, the column of sediments became rock with mineralized fossils embedded.

When things die, especially animal life, there is not much opportunity to preserve it in the fossil record. If a dead thing is not buried completely and relatively quickly, thousands of creatures, microscopic and large, begin a feeding frenzy. What they don’t destroy the elements do. The corpse doesn’t have thousands of days let alone thousands of years to mark its existence for posterity.

It is apparent that fossils only form if the burial process that covered the once living is rapid, as in floods, landslides, volcanism, or sandstorms. Such is demonstrated by those fossils which are like action snapshots-- creatures caught giving birth, eating, even devouring another creature. Suddenly, they were covered by sediment, eventually becoming a freeze frame in the fossil record.

But these rapid mechanisms produce not only fossils, but also sharply delineated, localized fields of sedimentary rock. The fossil bearing sedimentary rocks, however, stretch square mile after square mile in vast fields across the entire planet. About 75% of the land surface of the earth is covered by them to an average depth of over 5400 feet. The scope of these layers is the basis for the geologic column and its ability to be applied to formations across the globe. 

Generally, sediments are laid out flat, kind a like a college student during holiday breaks. If you examine an outcropping in the Appalachians it may not appear that way, but the curvy strata there were caused by folding after sedimentation. In other places where sedimentary rock is present but not horizontal other geotectonic mechanisms can be forwarded to explain its tilt.

The rule is that sediments are laid horizontally: the physics of particles precipitating out of solution or suspension demand it. Even if the floor they are settling on is serpentine, sediments settle in the low spots to a greater degree than the high spots until things are more or less evened out. When sediment fields stretch square mile after square mile in relatively uniform strata, a single body of murky water over the entire sediment field must have been responsible.

How that occurred simultaneously with all manner of flora and fauna being rapidly covered by those precipitates presents some serious problems to the uniformitarian geologist, and most certainly to the evolutionist. It seems to me they don't actually have a plausible mechanism for the ubiquity of fossils.

There is, however, a biblical answer:

For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth. The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water. They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than twenty feet. Every living thing that moved on the earth perished—birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind. Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark. The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.

Genesis 7:17-24 (NIV)

In my mind, it's a better answer.

The Holy Hunch

What does inspiration feel like? How do you know you're receiving it? Jesus described what he experienced as inspiration as seeing the Father act and hearing the Father speak. We may be at a loss to understand exactly what that meant, but we would have to say he was sensing something in real-time. So much for the teaching that experiencing spiritual "feelings" has no place in trying to be like Jesus.

The evangelists occasionally describe Jesus as being moved in the bowels (i.e. with compassion) just before he began miraculous ministrations. I know there is a scholarly assumption that sees that as nothing more than an idiomatic expression basically equated with "he felt their pain." I think there was more to it than that, I think Jesus was "feeling" inspiration. He certainly felt virtue go out from him when the woman with the issue of blood touched him.

Speaking of what would be our experience in the Holy Spirit after the crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus said rivers of living water would flow out from our bellies. A metaphor, or more? How about a physical analog for a spiritual experience: the action of the Spirit causing sensible repercussions in our corporeal beings. I'm not saying every bit of indigestion is God speaking, but I am most certainly saying that God speaks to those that believe and that his voice reverberates in the soul of man.

There are those who would naysay this interpretation of things, but I ask, where are their greater works, their miracles, their anything that Jesus modeled, the Apostles emulated, and that the early church reproduced? Jesus never implied that the church following him, regardless of the passage of time, would do lesser works, see fewer miracles or have a more distant relationship with the Father than he did. In nothing less than unbelief, naysayers say those things passed away, yet charismatic folks daring to believe produce those things even today.

When one has faith and is open to the inspiration of God, the Holy Spirit, even today, flutters within the soul and stirs up a recognition that something supernatural is about to happen. Hardly ever does such an awareness come on the heels of bomb blast or lightning bolt, but somewhere in the consciousness of the willing the dove flutters and the believing experience a "holy hunch." In that moment, the believing and sensitive have the opportunity, if they will grasp it, to step into the supernatural and perform the miraculous. 

Faith or Feeling

It seems to me, if we're not going to trash a decent portion of the New Testament, we have to assume the inspiration of the Holy Spirit which inspired the first church is meant to inspire any church thereafter. The works that Christ did, and the Apostles did, and the church at Corinth did, we can do, and even greater works than they did. That is a promise from Christ, it was the experience of the church in scripture, and nothing but bad exegesis of I Corinthians 13 could make it an unexpected experience for the church today. 

But how does one experience such inspiration? Somehow that inspiration must be discernible to the person inspired or nothing inspired could happen. Since inspiration, generally, is not by fiat, something felt must trigger the action which is being inspired. It has to be felt, perceived in some way, or there would be no way to initiate the supernatural. 

That makes some folks nervous, especially those who have had it rammed into their heads that Christianity is a matter of faith and not feelings. On one level that is most certainly true: becoming a Christian is about buying into an historical record, accepting certain facts by faith. Walking as a Christian thereafter is a matter of trusting God's promises, not depending on feelings. Feelings don't impact facts, and yet, even accepting facts by faith requires the conviction of the Holy Spirit to be present and that is the very definition of inspiration!

Inspiration happens in the present rather than the past. The past can set a pattern to gauge present experience by, but inspiration itself is experienced in the now. One must feel something in the moment in order to move by and with it. Without such an impulse, Spirit-inspired manifestations would not have occurred in the past, and they definitely won't happen now. 

Where manifestations of the Spirit are not happening now, and where they ceased happening in history, they ceased not because God stopped inspiring them but because believers ceased paying attention to the inspiration that produces them. Inspiration is not a matter of will or decision (they operate quite easily enough without inspiration), but Spirit-initiated impulse does have to be acted upon by discerning, willing Christians or nothing happens.

So what kind of feelings are we talking about? Anyone involved with Pentecostalism or the Charismatic Movement for any amount of time can recount stories of folk doing bizarre, even the harmful things, because of a feeling. On the other hand, they would also be able to recount stories of people not doing what is clearly commanded in scripture because folk didn't "feel" led. Either of these extremes CANNOT represent the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

That still leaves plenty of room in between those extremes for the experience of legitimate inspiration from Holy Spirit. Such would have to fall within bounds (at least generally) of what is described in the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and Paul's epistles. The Old Testament isn't germane, because the experience of the Holy Spirit is different in the New Testament than in the old. To dismiss out-of-hand the possibility of biblically described and promised experience is to harden in unbelief and miss out on the legitimate and miraculous.    

The Spirit of God inspires and the willing believer senses an awareness-- perhaps an urge, maybe a sudden certainty, even being provoked in spirit, but something. Something rather than nothing. The feeling should be validated (at least generally) by the scriptural precedent, but it's a false dichotomy to say that our experience as Christians is by faith or it's by feeling. The fact of the matter is: if one wants to live out the biblical promise, it's both.