APPEARANCE … OF WHAT?

By Tom Couchman

In the world and in the universe around us, we can see many facts and many phenomena which it is easy to interpret as indications that God’s creation is very old. On the other hand, when these objects are examined with the assumption that the creation is relatively young, it’s sometimes hard to make sense of them: the view we get causes us to say to ourselves, “Either this object is not what it seems to be, or my perspective is flawed.”

Consider for example the varves in the Green River shale.

The Green River shale is a well-studied geological formation in the American West, ranging in extent across Colorado, Wyoming and Utah. Shale is a soft sedimentary rock which readily fractures into layers, composed of minute particles of clay which may easily be rubbed from the rock. We don’t have to wonder what makes shale. Formation of this rock can be observed today in places like the bottom of the Black Sea.

Because clay particles are so tiny, they will only precipitate out of very still water. Any significant degree of movement of the water will keep the clay particles in suspension. Again, these statements are not speculative: the behavior of clay particles in suspension may be observed in many places around the earth.

“Varves” are layers of shale. Each layer in the Green River formation is relatively thin—the average thickness of one varve layer is about that of a sheet of standard notebook paper. But the really interesting aspect of the Green River varves is that they occur in alternating layers of light and dark clay. The light clay is fairly pure. But the dark clay is dark because it is contaminated with organic materials, principally fossilized pollen.

How does this alternating of light and dark layers happen? Again, we don’t have to wonder: the formation of varves has been observed for well over 100 years. Each spring and summer pollen from flowering plants falls on the still water and slowly settles toward the bottom, becoming mixed on the way down with particles of clay. The clay-and-pollen mixture reaches the lake bottom in the winter, when a thin layer of clay impregnated with pollen is left. The fall-and-winter clay which settles in summer is (relatively) uncontaminated, and is therefore lighter in color. Each year there are two layers of clay laid on the lake bottom: one layer is contaminated with pollen, and the other is relatively free of such contamination. These two layers are called a “couplet,” and one varve couplet makes an annual deposition of clay. Over time, if they are not disturbed, the clay layers become compacted and lithified into shale.

Another interesting aspect of the Green River shale is that it has a lot of fossils in it. At first hearing this fact might seem contradictory, since most people usually think of fossils as associated with rapid burial. In general, rapid burial is the most common way of producing fossils, because rapid burial prevents the operation of oxygen, which drives bacterial decomposition of the corpus, and burial usually prevents the dead organism from being destroyed or eaten. But very still cold water—such as may be encountered in the middle of inland seas and in glacial lakes—is commonly oxygen-deprived. The bodies of fish which die and sink toward the bottom, when they enter this anoxic water, are protected from decomposition. Similarly, any organisms which venture into this water are deprived of oxygen and die, adding to the morbid mix. These dead beasties can lie on the bottom of the still lake for many years, slowly being covered with thin veneers of clay, forever to be entombed as mute witnesses to the processes of geology.

It would occur to a person that one might be able to determine a minimum age for the rocks at the bottom of a varve formation by counting the number of varve couplets (in practice, the aggregate thickness of several hundred varves is used as a divisor for the total thickness of the formation in order to get an estimate of the total number of layers). We can only know minimum age because it is possible for the deposition of clay to be interrupted, for the lake to be dry for many years during which there is no deposition and some of the layers get eroded, etc. But one thing we do not know is any way to speed up the varve deposition. We observe the deposition of two layers—one couplet—per year, and no more.

Well then, what might we determine about the rocks at the bottom of the Green River shale? What is the minimum age of those rocks?

If we are allowed to conclude that the processes which produce varves today also operated in the same way when the Green River varves were being laid, it took several million years for these varves to form. There were originally laid at least four million of these layers, indicating a deposition time of at least two million years. We can also be fairly sure that the Green River shale is much older than the minimum age. For example, there are a number of layers of wind-deposited volcanic ash among the shale layers, which means that for a time the lake bed was dry and some nearby volcano erupted, leaving the ash layer. But given the measured rate at which varves form, we can conclude that the Green River shale took at least two million years to form.

Or can we?

To many Bible-believers, the Genesis creation story appears to describe in what literal span of time God created the universe and brought it to a state suitable for human habitation. The “six days” to which scripture refers do not in the minds of many Bible-believers allow for billions of years of geological history, or for hundreds of millions of years between the appearance of the first signs of life in the geological record and the point at which humankind arrived upon the scene. When the narrative found in Genesis 1-2 is taken with the genealogies in various places in scripture, the net picture, to these people, seems to indicate that the earth is relatively young—most young-earth believers will say between 6,000 and 10,000 years. Therefore, the Green River varves cannot have taken two-million-plus years to form.

How, then, do we explain these millions of layers of rock? When we look at the Green River varves from a young-earth perspective it is obvious that there is some kind of anomaly at work. Either there is something wrong with the perspective, or the object isn’t what it appears to be. Either the young-earth perspective fails to explain these varves …

… or the varves aren’t annual couplets at all.

How can a phenomenon which looks just like one we see in operation today not be the same process which produced the observed phenomenon? For a Bible-believer who is convinced of the relative youth of the earth and of creation there might be two answers.

Perhaps the flood described in Genesis caused the formation of these varves. After all, everyone seems to be agreed that the varves are the result of sediments precipitating out of water. There was certainly a lot of water about at the time of the flood. So might the flood have produced the varves?

It does not appear very likely. How would the flood have managed to snare pollen in just the right way to interleave layers of pollen-contaminated and pure clay in the manner in which the varves are observed to occur? We might expect such a thing to happen a few times through the nine-or-so months the flood waters covered that part of the earth, but at least four million times? It doesn’t make much sense.

Some young-earth authorities, such as Whitcomb and Morris in The Genesis Flood, have speculated that sheets of flood water must have swept over this vast area many times, leaving a distinct layer of sediment each time. This phenomenon can indeed happen, and it will produce distinctive layers of sediment because the differential speed of the water causes variation in the size of the clasts which are dropped out of the water at various moments. But it doesn’t explain the pollen, does it? And besides, think about how many sheets of water were needed. If we assume, for the sake of easy computation, only 4.5 million original varves laid in nine months, that’s 500,000 sheets of water a month sweeping across an ancient lake bed of millions of square miles—about one sheet of water every five seconds—moving slowly enough to allow clay to precipitate out of the water and not to disturb the still-soft sediments. But water moving that slowly could not possibly cover the entire area over which the Green River varves occur in just nine months.. Again, it doesn’t make much sense. It is very difficult to imagine how the flood that is described in the book of Genesis might have produced the varves found in the Green River formation.

If the flood can’t account for the varves, there might be one other possibility.

Most if not all Bible-believers will agree that God created Adam and Eve as adults, giving them the responsibilities of tending the garden of Eden and reproduction. In order to be able to meet these obligations, the first pair must be physically and sexually mature. In our experience, the attainment of physical and sexual maturity takes something close to two decades to attain. So if we had met Adam and Eve a day or so after their creation, and if we had asked them how old they were, they would have said, “Oh, a little more than a day.” We’d have laughed in disbelief … unless we knew or had reason to suspect that God had wrought a miracle.

In other words, Adam and Eve must have been created with the marks of apparent age. These marks—of the passage of two decades—would of course be false. But the first human pair could not carry out the assignments given them by God unless their bodies bore the appearance of age.

Now, the question which this fact brings to our consideration of the varves, as well as to other natural phenomena which can easily be read as indicators of great age, is this: if Adam and Eve bore the marks of apparent age which they did not in fact possess, why should other objects of nature, all of which is in some sense (miraculous or by natural process set in motion by God) a divine product, not also bear marks of apparent age which are also false? Why should the varves, which appear to have been produced over a span of millions of years, not to the contrary be the direct products of divine creation, given in the act of instantaneous generation the signs of such antiquity? Why should one not conclude that when God created the rocks He gave them an appearance of age just as He gave Adam and Eve an appearance of age. In the case of the varves, that appearance takes the form of layering of thin laminae of shale.

Remember: just about every creationist will acknowledge that creation-artifacts must manifest some appearance of age which they do not possess. Many people therefore apply this principle to every aspect of nature observed today, and to every imagined feature of the newly created earth. If it is supposed that Adam and Eve had navels, that’s “appearance of age.” Might the trees in the garden of Eden have had rings? That’s “appearance of age.” Are there are varves containing fossil-pollen? That’s “appearance of age.” Has starlight reached the earth from more than 10,000 light-years away? That’s “appearance of age.” What was an ineluctable by-product in the case of Adam and Eve—they couldn’t do their jobs without it—has become a primary quality of created objects: every created object must evince “appearance of age,” whether necessary or not.

Therefore, “scientific” examination of the cosmos in an effort to determine its age is vain. Even though we can see varves being formed today, even though the varves we study in the process of formation today look just like the ones we find in the Green River shale, even though one varve couplet forms each year, we cannot conclude this process is what produced the Green River shale. The age found in artifacts of God’s creation is only “apparent age.” How do we know? Because the Bible says the heavens and the earth were created in 144 consecutive hours, and the genealogical records in the Bible say that at most only a couple of thousand years passed between creation and the flood, and at most only a couple more thousand between the flood and the call of Abraham. Whatever science says about the age of the earth, the testimony of scripture trumps science. And the explanation for the discrepancy is … “apparent age,” which makes everything young.

Well, maybe so. But let’s see where this reasoning process will take us, shall we?

Statements about the amount of time it took God to create everything are not the only cosmic matters with which the Bible deals. There are also texts which describe the relationship of the sun and the earth. You remember that debate in the sixteenth century? In an era when most of the people who could read and write were employees of the Catholic church, the Ptolemaic view of the universe—the earth at the center, sun and stars going round it—dominated the thought of the clerics. It did not, however, dominate because one could read it in the Almagest. It dominated because the scripture so clearly supported it.

The classic “proof text,” of course, was the story of Joshua’s long day.

Then Joshua spoke to the Lord in the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel:

“Sun, stand still over Gibeon;

And moon, in the valley of Aijalon.”

So the sun stood still,

And the moon stopped,

Till the people had revenge

Upon their enemies.

Is this not written in the Book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day. (Joshua 10:12-13)

Doesn’t seem to be much room for doubt, does there? In a simple, straightforward way, the narrative tells us that it is the sun and moon which stop in the sky. There is no mention of the cessation of rotation of the earth. Indeed, not only the officials of the Catholic church but essentially all Bible students came to the defense of the traditional view, and it is a historical fact that they gave as their reason for doing so—and I have no cause to doubt that it was their reason for doing so—that the Bible said it. That the sun and moon stopped in the sky appears to be a scientific and historical fact, certainly as reliable as the “fact” that the heavens and earth were created in 144 consecutive hours.

Furthermore, there are other texts which support this “geo-centric” conclusion. For example:

In them He has set a tabernacle for the sun,

Which is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber,

And rejoices like a strong man to run its race.

Its rising is from one end of heaven,

And its circuit to the other end;

And there is nothing hidden from its heat.

(Psalm 19:4b – 6)

What does this statement appear to tell us about the sun and its behavior? The sun moves; there is absolutely no indication that the earth moves. It begins its quotidian movement at “one end of heaven” and travels “to the other end.”

But this text is not the only other one to attest to the movement of the sun. Consider:

The sun rises and the sun sets,

And hurries back to where it rises.

(Ecclesiastes 1:5)

Again, we have a consistent testimony that it is the sun which moves, not the earth. In fact, the Bible tells us that the earth cannot move, for it is set upon foundations which would prevent such motion. For instance:

On what were its footings set,

Or who laid its cornerstone …

(Job 38:5)

In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth

(Psalm 102:5)

… that you forget the Lord your Maker,

who stretched out the heavens

and laid the foundations of the earth …

(Isaiah 51:13)

In fact, there are literally hundreds of texts in scripture which refer to the motion of the sun as it crosses the sky, rises or sets. And there is not a single text which states that the earth moves relative to the sun; not one! This fact is more remarkable when one considers that there are passages which create doubt about the exact sequence of the creation-story: for example, Job 38:5 says that the stars were already in place when the earth was created, and Genesis 2:19 says that Adam was created before “every beast of the field and bird of the air.” But there is absolute consistency to the scriptural testimony about the relative movement of earth and sun.

Why, then, should anyone doubt that the sun goes round the earth? Is it not a historical fact that God set the earth upon a foundation, where it cannot move? If the Holy Spirit had wanted to tell us that the sun moves relative to the earth, how could He have said it any more clearly?

Yet most Bible students today—at least, the ones that I know—have followed the lead of religious authorities since the time of Galileo, “admitting” what the Bible does not teach: that the earth goes round the sun. And does this direction not mean they have caved in to the theories of godless science? Why should Bible students not trust the inspired, infallible word of God? Have they have been seduced by the speculations of fallible men who think they are smarter than the God who set the sun in motion around the earth? How can people who style themselves as Bible-believers, who claim they rely on the scriptures to guide their eternal salvation, so casually discard the testimony of the inspired word in favor of the empty hypotheses of “science falsely so-called”? The word of God says the sun goes round the earth! You want to argue with the word of God?

But, someone may reply, isn’t it an observed fact that the earth orbits the sun, and that the sun travels about the galactic center?

How do they know? How does anyone know? The fact, as any scientist will admit, is that we only have observations of the movement of objects in space from the surface of the earth or very near it. Nobody can actually see the entire galaxy! Nobody can even see the entire “solar system,” if there really is any such thing. It’s all based upon limited observation, just as the suppositions about the age of the earth are based upon limited observation.

If God created objects upon the surface of the earth with apparent age, and we can know the age is only apparent because of what the scripture says about the age of the earth, then who is to say God did not create the earth and planets with “apparent geo-centricity,” leaving us to learn the truth of the sun going round the earth from what scripture says? What’s the difference? Is anyone claiming God does not have the power to create space with the appearance that the earth goes round the sun, when in fact the opposite is true? Is anyone claiming that God does not have the power to create a universe with “apparent galactic-centricity”? If God can do it with regard to the age of the earth and the light from the stars, why can He not do it when it comes to the center of the universe? Evolutionists say the earth is not at the center of the solar system, and not at the center of the universe, but how can they possibly know? The Bible says otherwise. If there are conflicts between science and scripture, those we have an explanation for the conflict ready at hand: appearance.

This principle may be expanded to provide an explanation for all apparent contradictions between a scientific interpretation of scripture and observation. For instance, consider the following instruction:

All flying insects that walk on all fours are to be detestable to you. There are, however, some winged creatures that walk on all fours that you may eat: those that have joined legs for hopping on the ground. Of these you may eat any kind of locust, katydid, cricket or grasshopper. But all other winged creatures that have four legs you are to detest. (Leviticus 11:20-23)

This text says very plainly that insects have four legs. Some “concordists” have taken the position that the “four legs” is just an expression for the fact that these insects walk along the ground. So what? Bipedal creatures, like people, walk along the ground! Centipedes and millipedes walk along the ground! But we observe insects to have six legs. If there is a conflict between what fallible science says and what the word of God says, don’t we know where we should turn for truth? If God can create an earth with appearance of age, and starlight with appearance of having traveled for millions of years, and stars and planets with appearance of geo-centricity, why can He not have created insects with appearance of sexta-pedality? We know from the Bible that insects have four legs. Why should that knowledge not be sufficient for any Bible-believer?

Consider also the following text:

He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches.” (Matthew 13:31-32)

Jesus states that the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds. I have in my pantry a box of mustard-seeds, and when I compare them to another seed which might have grown in a middle-eastern garden—namely, poppy seeds—the mustard seeds are larger. At least, they seem to be larger. But are they really? Jesus said that the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds. If the poppy seed appears to be smaller, is that perhaps because the mustard seed was created by God with the appearance of size, when in fact it is smaller than the poppy seed? If there is a conflict between my fallible powers of observation and the testimony of the infallible word of God, where ought I to place my faith?

Finally, note what the scriptures say about the sky and the stars:

And God said, “Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water.” So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. God called the expanse “sky.” … And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to make seasons and days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. (Genesis 1:6-8; 14-18).

We are told in unmistakable language that the purpose of the sky is to divide the waters “above” from the waters “below.” That there are indeed “waters above” we know additionally from Psalm 148:4. What function do these “waters above” perform? Notice:

He wraps himself in light as with a garment;

He stretches out the heavens like a tent

And lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters.

(Psalm 104:2)

So God’s “upper chambers” are set upon the “waters” of “the heavens.” These “waters” cannot be the “waters below,” for Genesis 1:9 tells us that “the waters under the sky” were divided so that dry land appeared, and that God called “the waters under the sky” “seas.” The only waters to which this text can refer must be “the waters above the sky.” What does God do with these waters?

He waters the mountains from his upper chambers … (Psalm 104:13).

It is those “waters above the sky” which provide rain! But according to Genesis 1 the sun, moon and stars were placed by God in the sky. So the water beyond the sun, moon and stars which are in the sky is the water which falls as rain. We would have a problem with these facts if we did not have our principle of “appearance” to guide us. It only appears to fallible science that the sun is a huge globe of burning hydrogen, and that the stars are similar objects which are many light-years away. Fortunately, we have the Bible’s description to correct what would otherwise be a misapprehension on our part: namely, the appearance of meteorology. From scripture, to the contrary, we know that the sun, moon and all the stars are in the sky, and that God sends rain from the waters which He has placed above the sky.

In conclusion:

By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen what not made out of what was visible. (Hebrews 11:3)

The principle of appearance makes it possible for us to have faith in the scientific soundness of statements which observation seems to contradict. “Appearance of age” gives us faith: that the earth is no more than 10,000 years old. “Appearance of heliocentricity” gives us faith: that the sun goes round the earth. “Appearance of sexta-pedality” gives us faith: that insects have four legs. “Appearance of size” gives us faith: that the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds. “Appearance of meteorology” gives us faith: that rain comes from water beyond the sun and stars.

We Bible-believers need to make up our minds.

If we are not going to be consistent in our approach to harmonizing inspired testimony and fallible observation, then who is going to listen to the message of salvation? We cannot have it both ways. Either the Bible makes scientific statements about nature, or it does not. If we wish to claim a scientific intent for one Bible text, we must defend the scientific intent of every Bible text.

And if we understand the principle of appearance, we can base our faith on such a defense. For:

“Faith comes by appearance, and appearance by the word of God.”

Ó 2000, Thomas D. Couchman