Coal
By Richard Gunther
As a layperson, I am often amazed at the way those who have had many years of training in some scientific field can completely miss the obvious.
One example is the Grand Canyon, which is a sedimentary landmass of about 100,000 square miles, with many of the layers running horizontally across much of the area, which indicates that they were laid down as a single sheet of sediment. Some ‘experts’ have said that the Colorado River gradually caused these layers to build up over thousands of years, yet common sense totally contradicts this. Rivers never lay down vast areas of horizontal sediment – they cut into their own beds, twist, turn, and leave a chaotic mess. Only a single, massive flood, could cause such wide, flat sediment beds.
Another example is the dating of fossils. Sometimes fossils of very different species are discovered, all in the same sedimentary rock layer. The ‘experts’ deliberately date the fossils in conformity to the theory of evolution. They say one creature came millions of years before the other, yet common sense tells us that because the two creatures were buried together, they must have been alive together before they were buried together.
A letter in a science magazine, from Trevor Fenning, of the Max Planck Institute of Chemical Ecology made the following assertion, “(Old) forests lay down carbon from the atmosphere as ever deeper layers of partially decomposed leaf litter in the soil. This offsets the build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere from volcanic emissions, and it is how oil and coal reserves were formed in the first place.” (New Scientist March 2004)
Anyone who examines coal will notice that, in many cases, it is not composed of compressed leaves. Coal is usually made of wood or bark. It comes in many grades, depending on how well the wood is preserved – anthracite, bituminous and lignite. The encyclopedia says, “blackish mineral substance of fossil origin, the result of the transformation of ancient plant matter under progressive compression.”
Both Mr. Fenning and the encyclopedia make the same assumption that coal comes from “ancient” plant material. The evidence for coal being “ancient” is not exactly overwhelming; in fact, coal could just as easily be quite ‘young’ too, as it depends quite a bit on one’s assumptions rather than hard evidence. It is possible to produce coal in only a few hours, by applying heat and compression to ordinary wood, so there is no need to believe coal is “old” or “ancient”.
Looking at the evidence, coal does not match the descriptions given to it by evolutionists. It is not currently building up on the floor of any forest anywhere in the world today. Leaf litter generally turns into humus and is recycled, rather than forming ever-thickening masses, and even if it did form ever-thickening masses, it would also need to be covered by many layers of sediment to compress it – which implies a massive flood, and that never happens either. Local floods have never produced coal, except in very small quantities – and never on the scale in which coal is found today. Some coal deposits are a mile thick and 100 miles long! Peat bogs never produce coal either. They are the wrong consistency to produce, for example, anthracite, which is a shiny, woody coal of high quality.
Once again common sense has more to say about coal than the grand statements of well-qualified experts. Coal is made from the remains of trees, sometimes millions of them, all piled together and jammed into a heap at every angle, and then covered by enormous amounts of sediment – gravel, mud and silt carried by water. The evidence for coal, and oil, speaks to us of a global-scale flood, not a gradual, painstakingly slow build-up of leaf litter. The idea that coal forms slowly is contradicted by the fact that in many coal seams whole tree trunks are found standing vertically through the layers. If formation of coal was slow, the upper parts of the trees would have decomposed long before they were buried.
From all round the world, in many cultures, there are stories of a worldwide flood. It is not just the Bible that describes this event. A worldwide flood provides the forces and methods of quick burial of wood, and matches with the evidence – coal and oil. Once again, common sense prevails, and the Bible is shown to be accurate and factual in its historical data.
Posted on October 24th, 2008 by Richard
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