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This article is from
Creation 1(2):5, October 1978

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Quotes to note

Gould, Stephen Jay, Professor of Paleontology and Geology at Harvard, in ‘Natural History’ Feb 1975 p.16.

‘Charles Lyell was a lawyer by profession, and his book is one of the most brilliant briefs published by an advocate. … Lyell relied upon two bits of cunning to establish his uniformitarian views as the only true geology. First, he set up a straw man to demolish. … In fact, the catastrophists were much more empirically minded than Lyell. The geologic record does seem to require catastrophes: rocks are fractured and contorted; whole faunas are wiped out. To circumvent this literal appearance, Lyell imposed his imagination upon the evidence. The geologic record, he argued, is extremely imperfect and we must interpolate into it what we can reasonably infer but cannot see. The catastrophists were the hardnosed empiricists of their day, not the blinded theological apologists.’

Editor’s note: The above quote is extremely important. In an article which is being widely circulated among anticreationist circles, written as a critique of the book ‘Biology: A Search for Order in Complexity’, the author makes no attempt to answer the geologic arguments except to point to the work of Lyell. The above statement by one of the world’s leading geologists shows how absurd that is.


Heribert-Nilsson, Nils (former professor of botany, Lund University, Sweden, and member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences) in the book Synthetische Artbildung p. 1194, describing the famous Baltic amber deposits:

‘The insects are of modern types and their geographical distribution can be ascertained. It is then quite astounding to find that they belong to all regions of the earth, not only the paleoarctic region as was to be expected. … The geological and paleobiological facts concerning the layers of amber are impossible to understand unless—the explanation is accepted that they are the result of an allochthonous process, including the whole earth.’

Editor’s note: ‘allochthonous process’ = flood


Slusher, Harold S. (Professor of Physics, University of Texas, El Paso, speaking in Adelaide at the invitation of the Creation Science Association):

‘In this real world in which we live, things go from order to disorder, from chaos to cosmos. I maintain that the evolutionist talks about a topsy-turvy, Alice-in-Wonderland sort of world in which things are gradually becoming more complex.’