The Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Creationism (2018)

Precambrian microbialites could be incorporated into the rapidly deposited strata of Snelling (2008). According to Snelling, 150,000 feet worth of strata were supernaturally deposited during creation week (Snelling 2008, p. 29). A very basic sequential interpretation might look something like this: between Days 1 and 3, two major creative acts occurred: 1. The land came into existence and 2. The plant-world was created. Cyanobacteria could well be included within the creative acts of Day 3 and perhaps even Day 2 (Purdom and Snelling 2013). From a purely supernatural perspective then, microbialites were forming before the land received its final scouring by the oceans. After deposition of perhaps km/thick sediment, some of which now contained entombed microbialites, full-scale erosion of the land (the Great Unconformity) was completed just before the land was soiled and vegetated. One apparent problem with this interpretation is evidence of environmental processes. For example, in one Proterozoic sequence of rocks, underwater channels filled with limestone breccia and herringbone, cross-bedded sandstones are found straddled between stromatolitic reefs (Young and Long 1976). These facies are best interpreted in terms of near-shore, tidally-influenced environments. Yet how can this be if they grew and were subsequently buried during creation week? I think it would be a mistake to invoke an artificial, non-process-related explanation. Some might object and put forward the wine that Jesus created. This wine was created without any process at all, right? The answer to that question is not as straight forward as it seems. Are we to assume that nothing was going on in the mind of God during the time that the water became wine? Certainly “something” was going on in God’s mind. We don’t know what that “something” was, but God somehow took numerous non-time-dependent factors like vine and grape type, in conjunction with time-dependent factors such as fermentation and created mature wine. This process is of course entirely different from that which is experienced in the normal world, but it is still process . It would be better to interpret miraculous events, then, as in some sense process-related . In other words, there was a sequential series of events that formed the wine, just as there was a sequential series of events that formed the microbialites, the breccia, and the herringbone cross-beds. These events may have occurred on the earth, in the mind of God, or at the interface between the two, but either way, they are real and not contrived. Not only are they real, they are also representative of time-dependent processes such as those discovered by modern wine-makers and geologists. We must begin to look at these creative processes much like the ones that formed the earth’s core, mantle and crust. The way in which the earth was formed is highly informative for Christians. God created a complex system of parts with post-creative processes built in . It is thus suggested that the supernatural creative acts of God at creation would look exactly the same as if they had occurred in the space/time, historical context of the post-Adamic world. Since process binds all inanimate objects and events in today’s world, God also brought each part of creation into being mirroring the very same processes . 4. Some objections A. Death before the fall One objection to the formation and subsequent burial of biological entities such as microbialites during creation week is that the death of the organism results from its being buried. Yet this objection rests entirely on the interpretive notion of “death.” Many creationists have already argued that some kind of death was at work in God’s good creation, precisely because without it, necessary processes involved in the breakdown of biological wastes, such as fruit skin or fallen leaves, could not occur (Turpin 2013). B. A God of the Gaps Rather than promoting a God of the Gaps argument, these ideas actually alleviate much in terms of them. If God mirrored space/ time processes, then we should treat every inanimate object and every system of inanimate objects in the universe as if they came into existence in the space/time historical context of today, thus using today’s normal laws of physics to solve problems. Of course, from a Christian perspective, there are informed, revelatory limits. For example, if a Christian geochemist is studying the partitioning of isotopes in ancient mantle rocks (assumed to be specially created), he can do science just like any other secular scientist. Remember, he is assuming that God made these rocks, and the relationships that exist between them, in anticipation of real physical processes that would operate in the real world. One of the factors he must check, however, is the time involved. He can do this because God specifically told him how much time at today’s values was involved. These two pieces of data are not at odds. They simply must exist side by side as do many other theological concepts such as the trinity and inspiration. Given these assumptions, the Christian geochemist can put forward legitimate predictions and test scientific hypotheses just as well as the secular geochemist. C. Where to place the pre-Flood/Flood boundary This is an exceptionally difficult consideration and the proposal provided here is merely my conjecture at this moment in time. It may be that much of the pre-Flood world was in fact covered in water. This then is in accord with the secular view of flooded cratons, and may mean that the Flood event was less destructive in deeper subtidal locations. On the other hand, exposed land masses would feel the full brunt of large bodies of water moving across their surfaces. It is proposed, therefore, that creationists should be looking for a divide in the rock record that separates marine deposits, such as limestones, from regional-scale terrigenous sedimentary sandstones and conglomerates. Such a divide seems to occur starting in Carboniferous/Permian rocks and continuing through the Mesozoic, with a depositional hiatus only occurring between the late Triassic and early Jurassic (Peters and Gaines 2012). Cenozoic deposits are also terrigenous, but they are local in scale. This is not a perfect divide, as some Mesozoic rocks contain limestones and some upper Paleozoic rocks contain sandstones, but it is a consistent observation. Terrigenous deposits, therefore, would be more consistent with Flood rocks than marine deposits should this pre-Flood/Flood boundary be adopted. D. Is God lying? If a glass of Jesus’ wine were available for scientific enquiry today, we would find a set of relationships that exist between all the constituents of the wine. These relationships would most likely lead the investigator to conclude that the wine was made using normal time-dependent processes and ingredients. Why? Because as with the creation of the earth, God creates supernaturally Coulson ◀ Stromatolites ▶ 2018 ICC 386