The Great Blunder by George McCready Price

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Sep 19, 1916

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 43, No. 37.

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The Great Blunder

By George McCready Price

“Doubtless the most peculiar mixture of fact and nonsense to be found in the whole range of the natural sciences.”

The Great Blunder

Mixing Fact and Nonsense — Insulting Our Intelligence

By George McCready Price

GEOLOGY is the only one of the natural sciences that professes to furnish demonstrated facts in plain contradiction to the fundamental doctrines of the Bible. And the alleged facts which are obviously antagonistic to the teachings of the Bible constitute what are regarded as the most basic truths of geology; namely, that the world is old beyond all computation; that life was not created some few thousand years ago, but has existed on the globe in successive ages covering millions and millions of years, and that various distinct types of life have occupied the globe one after another, the present set of plants and animals, including man himself, being but the last of an almost infinite series stretching away in ever narrowing vistas into the “great backward and abysm of time,” until lost in the measureless beyond.

Has Man Existed 500,000 Years?

THESE are the alleged facts of a highly respected modern science, upon which all modern enemies of the older views of the Bible now base their attacks. It is on these alleged facts that, as we have seen in previous articles of this series, Colonel Roosevelt constructs his astonishing pedigree of man, tracing him back through the so-called “ape-man of Java,” who, the colonel assures us, lived about 500,000 years ago.

We have already considered some of the archaeological aspects of this problem of the age of the human race; but it is the geology lying at the basis of this argument of our ex-president which we need to examine with especial care. For in all modern scientific discussions of this problem of how old is man, these successive geological ages are the ever present major premise, expressed or implied; and of course it is very easy for the evolutionist to find a suitable minor to fit it, and to draw from them almost any astonishing conclusion in any direction he may choose.

It is absurd for the friends of the Bible to spend their time bandying arguments with the evolutionist regarding the many minor premises that he may bring forward, when his major premise is itself directly antagonistic to the most fundamental facts regarding the first chapters of the Bible, and above all, when this major premise is really the weakest point in the whole evolution theory, the one tender spot that evolutionists never want to have touched at all.

The Long Series of Differing Types

BUT this is the very point that needs to be well understood. The supreme question of modern science, by all odds the most important problem before the scientific world, is this: “Does geology really prove that there has been a succession of different types of life on the globe in a definite order?”

Not only does the whole theory of organic evolution depend upon an affirmative answer to this question, but all the “advanced” views in theology and criticism, even the present popular methods of interpreting human history and of conducting political campaigns, depend upon the belief that there has actually been a long series of different types of life succeeding one another on the globe in a very definite and well ascertained order, this order being what is termed the fossiliferous series of plants and animals.

It Confounds Evolutionists

IN a former article, I suggested that the reader ask the first evolutionist or professional scientist how to prove, in strictly logical fashion, that when the Carboniferous plants now forming the coal beds of Pennsylvania were living in this locality, the Cretaceous coal plants of British Columbia were not yet in existence, and that only after the latter had been buried for uncounted centuries did the Tertiary coal plants of Germany and Australia come into existence. And I may even say that the reader is perfectly safe in offering a good round sum of money for the required logical proof, or even for any honest attempt at such logical proof, of these alleged facts; for I do not believe that any scientifically educated man in America or Europe would seriously undertake to furnish such proofs. He knows it can’t be done.

I could multiply testimony from such high class scientists as Huxley, Spencer, Nicholson, Suess, etc., candidly acknowledging that the reality of these relative ages has never been proved by geology, but that in all geological writings, these relative ages are merely assumed. There is in reality no way of proving one kind of fossil older than another, or older than the human race. For human remains are found fossil, just the same as the ancient relics of plant and animal life; and it is mere pseudo-science that would seek to say that these plants and animals lived and died ages before the human race appeared on the globe.

Mixing Fact and Nonsense

THE science of geology is in reality in a most astonishing condition, and is doubtless the most peculiar mixture of fact and nonsense to be found in the whole range of the natural sciences. In any minute study of a particular set of rocks in a particular locality, geology always follows facts and common sense; while in every general view of the world as a whole, or in any correlation of the rocks of one region with those of another region, it follows its absurd, unscientific theories. But wherever it agrees with facts and common sense, it contradicts these absurd theories; and where it agrees with these theories, it contradicts facts and common sense.

There is absolutely no scientific reason, not a ghost of a respectable argument, for arranging the fossils in any order whatever of alleged relative age. The current method of arranging the fossils in a definite series representing alleged successive ages is the most elaborate piece of nonsense that I know of in our modern world. That educated people still believe in it, is astonishing.

In the light of modern discoveries in geology — the details of which the reader can see in my “Fundamentals of Geology,” obtainable through the publishers of the SIGNS OF THE TIMES — these distinctions as to age have absolutely no foundation in objective facts, being merely a tradition surviving from the absurd and notorious “onion-coat theory” of a hundred years ago. And the fact that most educated people still implicitly believe in this theory of a definite age for each particular kind of fossil is a sad and instructive example of the effects of mental inertia.

The Trees Obscured the Woods

IT is simply another case of not being able to see the woods for the trees. Even more so than other scientists, each geologist tries to be a specialist. To resume the figure, he is intently occupied with a minute examination of the particular tree in front of his own nose, and very few of them ever rise sufficiently far above the trees to get a general

view of the woods as a whole. Or if any of them does take such a general view, he never dares to vary his description of the landscape very much from the classic descriptions of what the founders of the science a hundred years ago said the landscape ought to be.

But let us see what a broad general view of the whole mass of geological facts will show us.

The Sea Has Covered All

THE broad general fact is that we cannot go to any place of any considerable size without finding plain proofs that at some time the sea must have swept over the place or must have occupied the spot for a considerable time. The Alps, the Rockies, the Himalayas, the Andes—all the mountain ranges on earth, in fact—are largely made up of rocks formed in layers, manifestly laid down by water, in most cases sea water; for practically one and all of these mountains contain the remains of fishes or sea shells or other fossils, that must have been buried by moving waters, though now these localities are high and dry.

But we need not dwell on the remains of sea shells or fishes, as these subjects are not very familiar to most people. Let us deal with the huge animals that walk the earth, which are familiar to every child that ever saw a menagerie or studied geography. And let us begin at home, and here in the state of California. In the southern part of the state, near Los Angeles, are the wonderful La Brea beds, where skeletons of elephants, camels, tigers, huge sloths (megatheriums), and horses, with other huge creatures not now alive anywhere on earth, are found entombed as if piled in on top of one another rods deep, the bones being as closely packed together as sardines in a box, these deposits extending over an unknown number of acres, and extending down to wholly unknown depths. When these deposits were first discovered, the state university leased the ground for two years, and with only two or three workmen, took out some seven carloads of what they called good bones—that is, well preserved whole skeletons—while uncounted tons of other refuse bones are still lying scattered around the pits from which they were dug up. And at this rate, but a mere beginning seems to have been made in these deposits.

How Buried in Such Heaps

Now all these animals must have been buried here in some wholly different condition of climate and of land surface; for when the whites came to this part of California, they found the country merely a wide stretch of rolling desert, with a thin coating of grass, cactus, manzanita, and sagebrush covering the hills, and a few miserable, half starved coyotes roaming around among this stunted vegetation. Of the various animals mentioned above, the horse is the only representative now found living anywhere in America; and even it was introduced by the early settlers, for there was not a single horse to be found from Alaska to Patagonia when the whites first came here.

Why was it that all these animals had so mysteriously died out from all over a continent? The horse, at least, found parts of America very congenial; and when again introduced by the early settlers, it soon ran wild and multiplied exceedingly. That some very extraordinary event must have exterminated all these animals and buried their remains where we now find them, is as plain as any other scientific fact.

But we pass over to the parts of the Western Plains just at the eastern foothills of the Rockies, in Wyoming and Colorado; and again we find immense accumulations of the skeletons of prehistoric monsters that must have been buried by the thousands or millions, and covered by sands and clays spread out by running water. Their huge size is the astonishment of every schoolboy who has visited any of our large museums; while scientists themselves are amazed at the size of the bones, for they seem almost too big for muscles to move.

Yet even more remarkable still is the fact that these are by no means isolated examples, or conditions restricted to a few localities in America. In practically every part of the world, scientists have found very similar deposits of huge beasts in uncounted multitudes, evidently buried by sands and clays that were laid down by moving bodies of water, though in most cases where they are found, the localities are now high and dry, perhaps many hundreds of miles away from the sea, and thousands of feet above the sea level.

In China, India, North Africa, South Africa, and Australia, on the steppes of Russia and the pampas of South America, we find very similar conditions. And who will have the hardihood to offer to explain all these facts without saying that in the long ago, some great catastrophe must have overtaken our world, just as described in the Bible record of the Flood?

Insulting Our Intelligence

IT seems almost like a deliberate insult to our intellectual honesty for the evolutionists to ask us to believe that all these things occurred by now, small, local changes here and there, and that instead of all taking place at once, they took place one after another, by changes as slow as the alleged changes now going on around our seacoasts. Why should we be asked to discontinue the use of our faculties and to forget our common sense, professedly in the interests of science, merely because if we continue to use these faculties and this common sense, we can't help finding all over the globe just such plain evidences of what the Bible calls the Flood, the most stupendous physical event that ever happened to our old world?

But it seems almost a stranger situation when we see many of the professed friends of the Bible among the Protestant churches quibbling with the evolutionists about some minor detail, such as the variation of species or the exact 'age' of some piece of a human skull or of some flint arrowheads, when these large facts of geology, facts which every intelligent high school pupil ought to know, plainly confirm the record of the Bible.

'The book of nature and the written Word shed light upon each other.'

Restoration of the man of Heidelberg, by the Belgian artist Mascre, under the direction of Prof. A. Rutot, of Brussels.