WHAT ARE FOSSILS?

Confused? So are we.

Gish, 1995, p. 203

Is this quote taken out of context? Yes. I’ve included it here simply because Duane Gish, who claims that the fossil record supports the creationist account of life’s diversity, and creationists of the past have been puzzled by fossils and have varied greatly in their desperate attempts to harmonize their views of the world with the fossil evidence.

Some creationists consider the study of the fossil record a useless endeavour.

The tedium, the irrelevance, the archaism of investigations of human origins. Palaeontology is self-evidently a dry-as-dust pursuit. Let the fossilized dig for the dead. The thought of those pre-human Ages, vast, silent, and seemingly purposeless, is more likely to bore than to over-awe one. One may shrug them off with indifference, with the cosmic impiety of yawn…Why should we pretend to be excited or awed by the messages from a remote earthly past that we prize from rocks, any more than by the signals from the deep cosmic past that we can effortlessly pick up by looking at the fossilized night sky, any of whose luminaries might be long extinct before its light reaches our eyes….It is no good looking to this value-barren past for inspiration or guidance. Men can have nothing to learn from a process that is essentially sub-human, undirected, and unmotivated.

Spilsbury, p. 1

Fossils, however, do require an explanation. The Bible does not include any clear reference to fossils or to the possibility of extinction. Many ancient writers, such as Tertullian, concluded that fossils were remains from the Flood. In the following passage, it seems obvious that St. Augustine had found fossils of a large animal. He, however, interpreted them as the remains of antediluvian humans.

Wherefore no one who considerately weighs facts will doubt that Cain might have built a city, and that a large one, when it is observed how prolonged were the lives of men, unless perhaps some skeptic take exception to this very length of years which our authors ascribe to the antediluvians and deny that this is credible. And so, too, they do not believe that the size of men’s bodies was larger then than now, though the most esteemed of their poets, Virgil, asserts the same…But the large size of the primitive human is often proved to the incredulous by the exposure of sepulchers, either through the wear of time or the violence of torrents or some accident, and in which bones of incredible size have been found or have rolled out. I myself, along with some others, saw on the shore of Utica a man’s molar tooth of such size, that if it were cut down into teeth such as we have, a hundred, I fancy, could have been made out of it. But that, I believe, belonged to some giant. For though the bodies of ordinary men were larger then than ours, the giants surpassed all in stature…. But, as I said, the bones which are from time to time discovered prove the size of the bodies of the ancients, and will do so to future ages, for they are slow to decay. But the length of an antediluvian’s life cannot now be proved by such monumental evidence. But we are not on this account to withhold our faith from the sacred history, whose statements of past fact we are the more inexcusable in discrediting, as we see the accuracy of its prediction of what was future. And even that same Pliny tells us that there is still a nation in which men live 200 years.

--St. Augustine, City of God, Book XV. 9

St. Augustine was not alone in relating fossils to the Noachian Flood. In the past, some felt that large fossils were the giants from Genesis (the children of angels who had sex with women) and that smaller fossils were the remains sinful humans.

The more pious among the advocates of the giant theory believed that all large bones belonged to the patriarchs of the Old Testament. These were regarded as having been exceptionally tall men because they were known to have lived to a great age. One early eighteenth century writer actually worked out the height of patriarchs on this assumption. Thus Adam was asserted to have been 123 feet 9 inches tall, Noah just over 100 feet, and so on, the height decreasing proportionately as more modern times were approached.

Carrington, p. 102

… the tracks of tortoises in Chesire have at different times been interpreted as the marks made by members of Noah’s family or as footprints left behind by the devil.

Carrington, p. 147

In the days of Noah, men, animals and trees, many times larger than now exist, were buried, and thus preserved, as evidence to later generations that the Antediluvians perished by a flood. God designed that the discovery of these things should establish faith in Inspired history; but men with their vain reasoning, fall into the same error as the people before the Flood; the things which God gave them as a benefit they turn into a curse by making a wrong use of them.

There is a constant effort made [by the adversary of the all truth] to explain the work of Creation as the result of natural causes; and human reasoning is accepted even by professed Christians, in opposition to plain Scripture facts.

Gleason, p. 160

In 1443, when foundations were being dug for St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, the thighbone of a mammoth turned up. It was hung on the gates of the city, which henceforth bore the name “Giant’s Gate.”..In 1335, in a quarry near Klagenfurt, Austira, the fossil skull of an Ice Age woolly rhinoceros was found. It was consideed a dragon’s skull…

Wendt, p. 20

During the Dark Ages the established Church fostered the notion that fossils were the result of any or several of the following causes: (1) creations by the devil to fool mankind; (2) creations by God to test true believers; (3) creations by God to confirm unbelievers in their unbelief; (4) mineral deposits whose resemblances to living organisms were coincidental; and (5) results of spontaneous generation.

--Key, Thomas from Mixter, p.16

After the long night of the Dark Ages the fossil question once more became a subject of learned argument. The scholars of that time were mainly clerics and it was therefore not surprising that someone hit on the brilliant idea that fossils must be the remains of animals that had been drowned in the Biblical Flood….Johann Scheuchzer who in 1726 triumphantly produced the supposed fossil of a drowned human being. This he identified as ‘one of those infamous men whose sins brought upon the world the dire misfortune of the deluge.’ It was perhaps fortunate that Scheuchzer was already dead when a few years later the skeleton was found to belong to an extinct species of giant salamander.

Carrington, p. 100

…some relics of the race of man who were drowned by the Flood have come down to us.

Scheuchzer on Homo diluvii testis 1728

Wendt, p. 38

A giant fossil salamander which occurs abundantly in the Upper Miocine of Switzerland…named Homo diluvii testis [1726]. The motto attached to the figure reads:
Oh sad remains of bone, frame of poor Man of Sin

Soften the heart and mind of recent sinful kin.

Hogben, 1930, p. 141

The last paragraph of the following passage suggests that some fossils resulted from angels were similarly involved with animals.

"There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them" (Genesis 6:4).

…

Others have rightly noted that the term "sons of God" in the Old Testament refers only to angels, thus these must be the fallen angels. Satan had launched an aggressive campaign against Adam and his descendents in an attempt to so pollute mankind that the promised Redeemer, the "seed of the woman" (Genesis 3:15) could not come. But angels in Scripture are spiritual beings having no permanent body, and in heaven, at least, they do not "marry" (Matthew 22:30). And just what would this half angel/half man be? Would it be a giant, and more importantly, would it have an eternal spirit?

Let me suggest another alternative from our modern-day understanding of genomics, one which Bible scholars of yesteryear could not have suggested. I suspect that if today's geneticists and molecular biologists can accomplish such technical wonders as gene splicing and cloning, that the much greater intelligence of Satan could potentially have done it too. The inner workings of the DNA molecule would not have been hidden from the prying eyes of Satan and his henchmen. If today animal genes can be inserted into human DNA, could not it have been accomplished by malevolent spiritual beings bent on destruction of the "image of God"?

Obviously we cannot speak with certainty, for the Bible gives little detail. At the very least, Satan's demons could have selected and indwelt certain men and women, and performed selective breeding experiments to produce over the generations a race of giants. (He could have done the same with animals too, and maybe that's where some of the unthinkable features we see in the fossil record come from. This could represent Satan's rage in trying to fully destroy any vestige of God's once "very good" creation.) Could he not have inserted genes and fabricated clones, mocking and ruining God's majestic handiwork? Perhaps this is why God had to send the Flood, eradicating a civilization beyond repair and starting anew with Noah, preserving the true seed of Adam.

(John Morris, 2002a)

Lucifer, the highest in God's angelic hierarchy, had been defeated and cast out of heaven. His arrogant pride had been wounded. In his rage he may have set out to ruin God's beautiful creation, first recruiting Adam and Eve to follow him, and then after the curse proceeded to so distort "the image of God" in man that the perfect "seed of the woman" could not follow. Is it possible that this highly intelligent being performed breeding experiments, or genetic engineering on both mankind (Genesis 6:2-4 perhaps) and the animals, in his attempt to mock the true Creator/God and usurp His authority? Perhaps even the ancient legends of composite mixtures of beasts and half men/half beast have some basis in fact (John Morris, 1997).

The following account seems to conclude that unusual animals of the past were hybrids resulting from improper matings.

If there was one sin above another which called for the destruction of the race by the flood, it was the base crime of amalgamation of man and beast, which defaced the image of God and caused confusion everywhere…

Every species of animals which God had created was preserved in the ark. The confused species which God did not create, which were the result of amalgamation, were destroyed by the flood, Since the flood, there has been amalgamation of man and beast, as may be seen in the almost endless varieties of species of animals and in certain races of men.

Mrs. E.G. White, prophetess of the Seventh Day Adventists, 1865, from Gardner, p. 130

The Bible mentions dragons in a number of passages. Many felt that fossils were the remains of dragons. Many “dragon” bones were later correctly identified, such as a “dragon skull” from the 16th century which was later shown to be that of a rhinoceros (Carrington).

…there grew the idea of a race of gigantic creatures living beneath the surface of the earth. These were the very type of western dragon of later mythology, who was almost always hostile to man and was the villain of a whole series of legendary battles with the forces of light and life, represented in early times by the sun god and later by the heroes of mythology and the militant saints of the Christian church.

Carrington, p. 66

At the time when the dragon legend flourished in western Europe the true nature of fossils was generally unknown….Previously [fossils] had been regarded as the remains of individuals who were only recently dead and the great size of some of them was taken as conclusive evidence of the existence of dragons and giants.

Carrington, p. 71

Some felt that fossils represented the remains of the “behemoth” mentioned in the book of Job. In fact, the word “mammoth” is probably derived from “behemoth”.

…in 1724 a Russian soldier had found the head of a mammoth…an eyewitness, a certain Michael Wolochowitz, had found at the same time a piece of skin which was apparently covered with hair. He writes, ‘I saw a piece of skin putrefied, appearing out of the side of a sandhill, which was pretty large, thick-set, and brown, somewhat resembling a goat’s hair; which skin I could not take for that of a goat, but of a Behemoth, inasmuch as I could not appropriate it to any animal I knew.”…the mammoth and the Biblical behemoth were often identified, and ‘behemoth’, which is pronounced ‘mehemot’ by the Arabs, has been regarded by some as the true original of the mammoth’s name.

Carrington, p. 110

But although countless ivory carvings were made of [the mammoth’s tusks] , and although their resemblance to elephant tusks should have been immediately obvious to any scientifically trained person, European explorers continued until late into the eighteenth century to refer to them as “horns of the Biblical unicorn,” and drew pictures of them according to this preconception. Those who did not regard the Siberian mammoth as a unicorn equated it with the behemoth mentioned in the fortieth chalpter of the Book of Job…In 1692, when Witzen was mayor of Amsterdam, he wrote… “The tale is told that these teeth are the horns of the beast behemoth, which the Russians call mammut or mammoth. Of which mention is made in the Book of Job.”

Wendt, p. 24

Some people interpreted the Bible literally to mean that unicorns actually existed and then used to existence of the unicorn to interpret the fossil record.

What are your thoughts, Noah, when you acted as host to the crowds of the whole animal creation?...Tell us, is it not wrong to think that a single species perished and became extinct then, when such a great God took in hand the charge of all…Over the whole world it is a common saying that the unicorn perished and became extinct in the flood…