My friend Monte Fleming has just published a great book on the age of the earth, “Stories About Earth’s History: A Geologist’s Dissent from Deep Time.”
I met Monte Fleming at the 2015 San Antonio General Conference Session, when we were both manning the ADvindicate booth (this was a few months before Gerry and I started Fulcrum7). Monte was a musician, but he was planning on getting a Ph.D. in geology. Well, he’s earned his Ph.D. and, better yet, his conviction regarding the truth of the Scriptures survived his professional training.
Monte has written a wonderful book that upholds what Scripture teaches about our origins and early history. In this little volume, he keeps it clear and simple, and avoids scientific jargon. Having written a book in this area, I can tell you that this is not as easy as Monte has made it look.
The conceit of modern geology is that the “present is the key to the past,” meaning that the currently observed rate of processes like erosion and deposition should inform our interpretation of what we see in the earth. But do geologists really live by that maxim?
It turns out they don’t.
The rates of coastal erosion of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of North America have been well studied. The Atlantic coast is eroding away at the rate of over two feet per year, whereas the Pacific coast is wearing down at a much slower 8 inches per year. Monte points out that at these rates of erosion, the Atlantic and Pacific will meet somewhere near Salt Lake City, Utah, in about 4.2 million years.
But mainstream geology tells us that the North American plate was formed 3 billion years ago, and that the supercontinent “Pangea” separated into the continents we have today about 200 million years ago. But given current rates of erosion, if the continents had really separated that long ago, North America would have completely eroded away about 40 times over. If the present is really the key to the past, the North American continent is vastly younger than what mainstream geology posits. Those 200 million years didn’t really happen.
But coastal erosion is not the only way land masses are eroded away. Rivers are constantly carrying sediment to the sea. The Amazon River by itself deposits about 900 million tons of the earth’s crust into the Atlantic Ocean as sediment and dissolved minerals every year. “According to one prominent study, all the world’s rivers together deposit about 15 billion tons, or 5.6 cubic kilometers, of the earth’s crust into the oceans annually,” writes Fleming. “At this rate, all of earth’s land would erode down to sea level in just 22 million years.”
And that is a conservative estimate. Reservoirs lose about 1% of their capacity per year due to sediment piling up behind the dam, filling the reservoir with dirt. They must be dredged regularly at considerable expense in order to maintain their function of storing water. Scientists have calculated the quantity of sediment trapped behind dams at about 50 cubic kilometers per year worldwide, meaning that all the land on earth could be trapped behind the world’s existing dams in just 2.5 million years.
Combine river erosion with coastal erosion and it is very clear that all the continents would have eroded away in just a few million years. If the earth were as old as geologists maintain, none of us would be standing on dry ground. As Monte writes,
“The present is supposed to be the key to the past at least in some respects, but when we can’t extrapolate current conditions back more than a few million years without destroying all the continents, the idea that the present is the key to the past undermines the deep time it was intended to support.”
Another interesting point Fleming makes is that the mountains are still rising. The forces of orogeny (mountain building) exceed the forces or erosion, so that, for example, Everest is rising at 50 to 62 millimeters per year, while being eroded down at only about 2 millimeters per year. Everest’s peak is 5.5 miles above sea level, and mainstream geology asserts that the mountain is 40 million years old. But if it were really 40 million years old and had been growing at a net rate 48 millimeters per year (50 less two for erosion), the peak would now be 1,920 kilometers, or 1,193 miles, above sea level. (By comparison, the space station orbits the earth at 254 miles.) Climbers would need to carry a lot more oxygen than they do now.
There is much more in the book than just this type of simple calculation. In the later chapters, Fleming describes how vast continental deposits, laid down over hundreds of thousands of square miles, do not have an analog in any modern depositional environment. Multiple lines of evidence indicate that they were deposited rapidly, one after the other, with no long eras intervening between them.
In short, mainstream geology’s millions of years do not exist. They never did. What we see in the earth’s crust is perfectly consistent with the Genesis narrative. Rightly interpreted, the earth testifies to the truth of God’s revelation to his human family.
Fleming ends by noting that wrong interpretations of Scripture widely held within Christianity, such as the idea of eternal conscious torment in hell, form the real reasons why scientists rebel against, and want out from under, the Bible’s history of our planet. Fortunately, Adventists have the answer to those misinterpretations. No, Jesus does not torment the lost throughout the ceaseless ages of eternity; they are reduced to ashes, and it is as if they never were.
Everyone should read this book. It is only 109 pages and can be read in about two hours. It is available as an e-book for only $4.99; free if you are on Amazon’s “Kindle Unlimited” plan. Monte has certainly done everything possible to see that this book enjoys wide circulation, and it should!