Anti-scientific “Research Journal” Explains Natural Events with Religious Thinking

“Answers in Genesis” is an website that tries to explain different natural events by using religious thinking. Generally, people in “Answers in Genesis” disagree with evolutionary theory, and believe that god made decisions about which species extinct and which species survive. They see themselves as Christianity defenders and denial scientists for not confessing that god created different organisms and continuously modified the whole world.

One of the “research journal” on this website, Living Evidence of a Global Catastrophe: How Microbial Biogeography Supports Noah’s Flood, indicates that the fossil record is one convincible evidence of the Noah’s Flood. This “research journal” says that the water accumulated from low elevation to high elevation, and eventually cover the whole planet. As the flood progressively increased in depth, animals living in the low elevation were drowned and buried first, and then the animals living in the high elevation were covered. As a result, now people can find fossils of different species under different layers of the stratums. It also states that the distribution of the fossils reflects the distribution of different species in different ecosystems. The reason why we cannot find fossils of human in the site where we can find fossils of dinosaurs is that human and dinosaurs lived in different habitats.

The “research journal” also tries to use Noah’s Flood to explain the distribution of microbes. It says that the Noah’s Flood covered the whole planet, and the microbes that used to live on the surface of the land were carried by the flowing water. Eventually, the water deposited the microbes everywhere on the earth. Fortunately, this article did no go too far. To explain the differences of the distributions of different microbes, the “research journal” uses an explanation that is similar to the natural selection. It states that different environments after the flood would make certain kinds of microbes survive better than other kinds of microbes did. As a result, some microbes may be abundant in certain environment, but never be found in other environment.

The whole article is based on an event that did not happen in the past. And there is no illustration, data or graph that support its ideas. Many of the sources of the article are from non-scientific materials such as Genesis, Scripture and other creationism articles. Moreover, the article attacks the modern biogeography and evolutionary thinking, but does not provide any useful evidence that could support its opinions. For example, it does not explain why we can find fish fossils beneath the soils and rocks on the top of the hills if the fossil distribution reflects the species distribution before the flood. According to their sources, the Flood lasted from “the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month” (Genesis 7:11) until “the six hundredth and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month” (Genesis 8:13), which is very short time for the formation of fossils, or even very short time for the formation of different layers of stratums where fossils were found. People in this website lack basic knowledges about the things and events they are talking about. Even though they try to write a research journal to support their idea, they fail to realize that research is something scientific, something that they do not trust and try to denial.

Posted by Muchen Liu (Group 2, Week 8)

https://assets.answersingenesis.org/doc/articles/pdf-versions/arj/v11/global_catastrophe_biogeography_noah_flood.pdf