Of fossil spiders and Darwin

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Yahoo! News have reported that a large fossil spider has been found in China.  It is the largest fossil spider ever found.  How large is ‘large’?  These spiders, named Nephila jurassica, can have bodies one inch wide and legs of legs 2.5 inches long.  This wonderful find is a great opportunity to think about how fossils are formed.

This fossil spider was discovered in volcanic ash in Inner Mongolia.  Jonathan Sarfati writes that, “fossilization requires specific conditions.  Normally, when a fish dies, it floats to the top and rots and is eaten by scavengers.  Even if some parts reach the bottom, the scavengers take care of them.  Scuba divers don’t find the sea floor covered with dead animals being slowly fossilized.”  In nature well-preserved fossils nearly always require rapid burial, with some form of cementing agent present.  Fossils like this spider are usually fossilized during catastrophic events, such as a flood or volcanic event.   

Uniformitarianism (the theory that what we see in the natural realm has developed slowly over a long period of time, i.e. gradually and largely uniformly) struggles to explain the origin of fossils.  The presence of fossils at relatively high altitudes is especially puzzling for this worldview to explain.  The formation of fossils is not the only challenge to the theory of uniformitarianism (and its associated unsubstantiated hypothesis, particle-to-people evolution).  The absence of fossil evidence for intermediate or transitional forms is a great problem for those who hold to Darwinian theory.  Charles Darwin himself wrote in The Origin of Species by Natural Selection, “Why is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links?  Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory.”  Even Stephen Jay Gould, an ardent atheist, has been quoted as saying that, “The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for accounts of evolution.”

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What is the alternative to the theory of uniformitarianism?  One alternative is the theory that what we see in the natural realm did not come about gradually and largely uniformly, but that the world has been subject to a global flood and its aftermath of regional catastrophes.  This Biblical worldview is ridiculed by those who hold to philosophical naturalism (commonly called atheism).  What is interesting about the condescention that the Biblical teaching of a global flood receives is that many secular geologists agree that there were huge floods on Mars.  Not one drop of liquid water has been discovered on the red planet.  Yet these secular geologists deny a global flood on planet earth, which is seventy percent covered by water.  In fact, it has been written that if “the entire Earth’s surface were levelled by smoothing out the topography of not only the land surface but also the rock surface on the ocean floor, the waters of the ocean would cover the Earth’s surface to a depth of 3 kilometres (1.8 miles).”  Perhaps the reason why many people don’t want to believe in a global flood on earth is that they would then have to consider the posibility that it was Noah’s flood.  If they believe in Noah’s flood, then they would have to believe in Noah’s God.  That is not an exciting prospect for those those who don’t want to be accountable to anyone, least of all God!