Recently ADvindicate announced the publication of a new book on the age of the earth by trained geologist Monte Fleming. Fleming holds a Ph.D. in earth science and is currently a researcher at Loma Linda University. Dr. Fleming’s credentials make him well able to speak with authority on his chosen topic—“deep time.” Deep time refers to the idea that the age of the earth must be measured in billions of years.
A Brief Overview
The book is entitled Stories about Earth’s History: A Geologist’s Dissent from Deep Time and is available on Kindle for $4.99 and in paperback for $10.00. The book sounded interesting to me, so I purchased the Kindle version and began reading. What a pleasure! The book is not long and contains a helpful introduction and fifteen fascinating chapters written in an accessible, lively style.
I am not a scientist, but I have a good knowledge of many of the issues in science and faith, and this book greatly impressed me. It was full of careful analysis of physical evidence as well as a love for the Creator God. The last chapter is a special appeal to those who hold the position that the earth is 4.5 billion years old. Fleming offers these readers, who because of “deep time” also accept the evolutionary theory, a spirit of openness to evidence and a picture of God that is distinctly Seventh-day Adventist.
According to Fleming, most Christians who seek to uphold the biblical creation story assert a view of God that is horrifying: a false god who arbitrarily torments the lost in the eternal flames of hellfire. Fleming makes it clear that this god is not the true God. The God of the Bible is open to investigation of Himself and His creation. He is a God who has answers for seekers of truth—answers that are logical, evidence based, and satisfying to the hungry human soul. Fleming’s hope is that the awful god worshiped by many Christians will not stop secular readers from seeing the power of the evidence for a recent literal creation only a few thousand years ago.
Erosion and Deposition
The book begins with the simple problem of erosion. At this moment, the world’s coastlines are eroding at an amazing rate. In the United States, entire lighthouses have been picked up and moved back hundreds of feet to avoid destruction by the power of the sea. Current rates of erosion mean that in 4.2 million years the east and west coasts of the United States will meet somewhere in Utah!
Another example is Mount Everest in the Himalayas. Fleming writes that the “current erosion in the Himalayas advances 50 times too fast to accommodate millions of years of erosion.” According to Fleming, the observable rates of erosion are the fundamental problem with “deep time.” As the book progresses, Fleming demonstrates in great detail how intractable this problem is for currently accepted measures of the age of the earth.
A related problem with deep time is “deposition.” The earth has an obvious record of deposition in the sedimentary layers of rock easily seen in places such as the Grand Canyon. Local floods can move vast quantities of soil and rocks over large areas in a very short amount of time—mere minutes. These local floods can create deposition on a small scale that is dwarfed by the deposition seen over millions of square miles.
My own take on Fleming’s evidence suggests that the lower the layers of deposition are in the geologic column, the wider they are. The higher they are, the smaller the area. A world-wide flood would create a first layer as a foundation, and as later foundations were formed on top of the main foundation, the swirling waters and local volcanic eruptions would create smaller and smaller depositions, sort of the way a pyramid is constructed. (But I’m practicing science without a license!)
Any visitor to the Grand Canyon immediately sees evidence of a worldwide flood. There the layers are for all to see--each one as flat and distinct as the layers of a good vegeburger! But deep time demands that each of these layers was formed and then exposed to erosion for millions of years—with no apparent effect on the individual layers. Most unnatural! As Fleming expresses it, “The world’s rivers and streams could carry much of earth’s land to the ocean in 10 million years.”
The Fossil Record
The fossil record is often seen as the greatest evidence of deep time. Actually, the fossil record is a serious problem for the notion of deep time. Fossils, if anything, argue for a short age for the earth. A key example is the presence not only of DNA in the fossil record, but of living organisms as well. Bio-chemicals have been found in dinosaur bones—biological tissue. In Death Valley, California, small pockets of water have been shown to contain living bacteria trapped in material dated to 34,000 years. Other similar findings have been dated to 250 million years of age. Advocates of deep time are deeply perplexed by this phenomenon, as they should be. Deep time does not allow for the existence of living organisms that long ago.
Fleming discusses a reality of the fossil record that I have never considered. It was quite stunning to hear this information. He writes, “In the modern world, plants and animals that die do not become fossils.” Dead things are recycled through decay. And even if buried, the decay still occurs. Most fossils occur in rock reckoned by modern science to 2.5 million years. And these rocks were formed by rapid deposition in water, the sort of environment that allows for fossilization. (This reality is illustrated by the fossilized fish in the act of eating another fish.) Modern fossils are created by being trapped in tar, ice, or caves. Fleming says, “If modern geology’s claims are true, fossils should be extremely rare.” However, he goes on to note, fossils fill the deeper layers of the geologic column. Fossils are extremely common in ancient rock.
Do the Math
A last and wonderful feature of Fleming’s book is his clever use of mathematics to show what deep time actually means. He provides formulas illustrating that deep time is in fact much, much too deep! For instance, the common worm eats its own weight in soil every single day (.25 grams). How much soil could a worm eat in 4.5 billion years? The answer is 4 billion grams. How much is that? The math shows this much top soil would cover 2,007 city lots. A badger can dig 3 feet a minute. In 4.5 billion years a badger could dig 1.34 trillion miles. By doing relatively simple math calculations such as these for all sorts of natural phenomena, Fleming shows what deep time really looks like. However, deep time is absolutely necessary for the current world to have emerged naturally, without a Creator God.
Recommendation
Fleming’s book is important for showing the logical nature of the biblical account of creation. I highly recommend that readers of ADvindicate take advantage of what this book accomplishes for the non-scientist, which is most of us! In fact, I feel strongly that this book should be turned into a sharing booklet and made available at Adventist Book Centers. Monte Fleming possesses the academic expertise as well as the heart of a soul winner that should be widely used in Adventist evangelism.
Marcus Sheffield is a retired Professor of English from Southern Adventist University. Sheffield grew up in Southern California and later spent three years as a missionary's kid in North and East Africa, Beirut, Lebanon, and Singapore. He was educated at Pacific Union College, Andrews University, and Michigan State University. His main scholarly interest was in the relationship between Puritan theology and American literature. He enjoys mountain biking, golfing, and studying the Bible.