Impact Craters and Uniformitarianism

One of the underlying assumptions of Darwinism is something called uniformitarianism which says that no process operated in the past that is not going on today. The snappy way of saying it is “the past is the key to understanding the present.” Impact craters disrupt the uniform history of Earth.

Evolution assumes that the conditions on Earth’s surface have been relatively stable as they are today. That doesn’t mean that there haven’t been earthquakes or forest fires or hurricanes or global warming in the past because obviously there have been. What it does mean is that there have not been global events that would affect all living things. Something like a global flood would not be uniformitarian. If water covered all of the land, vast numbers of animals would have drowned causing a profound effect on the history of life.

The December 22, 2018 – January 5, 2019 issue of Science News (page 40) carried a fascinating report on how many impact craters there are in the crust of the Earth. We have taken groups to see the Barringer Crater near Flagstaff, Arizona. It is a relatively small impact crater only 1.2 Km in diameter. The Chicxulub Crater in Mexico was 150 Km in diameter. Scientists believe it had global implications for life. We have reported on this crater before, and we have talked about other craters scientists have discovered. There are now 190 confirmed impact craters in the Earth Impact Database at the University of New Brunswick in Canada. Scientists estimate that there are perhaps 350 impact craters that have yet to be discovered.

Most scientists accept the idea that astronomical catastrophes like Chicxulub caused major die-offs of life. As the planet warms and ice melts exposing more surface rocks, it is becoming more evident that impacts have been major causal agents of punctuations in Earth’s history. One of the differences between the biblical account and the Darwinian theory is the question of whether or not uniformitarianism is true. The Bible teaches us that Earth’s history is mostly uniformitarian, but rare catastrophes like the flood of Noah have punctuated the history of our planet. Once again it appears that the biblical record fits the evidence better than the theories of evolutionary scientists.
–John N. Clayton © 2019