GENESIS GEOLOGY

We all have the same geologic evidence. Lava cooled to stone. Sediments were laid down and turned to stone in a process called lithification, including fossils therein. Some parts of the land stretched apart. Some compressed together and rose to mountains. No disagreement with any of that, I think.

But how long does it take to turn sediments to stone?

According to Google and my college-level geology class, millions of years. Here's a video that seems to give a good overview of the process.

Contrarily, it turns out rock can form quickly. I know this firsthand because I once saw a stone someone had installed as a step on a hiking trail. The stone was littered with scattered dead hemlock needles from the tree above. Some of those needles had turned into stone and were now part of the stone step. That's probably only months (elsewise, the dead needles would have been washed away by rain), not millions of years. It turns out lithification requires compaction, cementation, and/or a chemical process, not lots of time. For more information on this, check out this article.

The point is that it doesn't take millions of years. Scientists assumed this because sediments build up slowly today by wind, rain, and rivers. So slowly that at that rate, it would take hundreds of millions of years to lay down the layers and form all the sedimentary rocks we see on the earth. Scientists applied today's rates of sedimentation and applied those rates far into the past, a function known as uniformitarianism.

But God told us that things changed rapidly in the past during the flood. The entire earth was scoured and sediments deposited.

So, which is true?

I'll take faith first for 1000, Alek. I'd rather be a fool for God than look wise in men's eyes.

Fortunately, I'm not limited to faith. There's much more evidence that the layers were placed rapidly and then lithified together. Here's a few.

Curved stone. We have numerous examples of multiple layers of stone bending smoothly as one. If the layers were all soft, then they'd bend together that way, like layered silly putty. If they were hard rock (because a million years went by before the next layer), they'd crack and gaps would form on the outside bends. Rock doesn't stretch well. Below is a pic of me observing uncracked bent stone along the shore of Lake Erie in 2025. There are many other pics by actual geologists available online.

The Grand Canyon. Have you been? It's rather spectacular. Secular geologists say that each layer was laid down and lithified over millions of years. But if so, where's the erosion that happened in between during those millions of years? I mean, did it stop raining between layers? Did the river depositing them stop eroding? There are no erosion cuts in the uniform layers. It seems much more likely that they were all deposited at once and then the canyon formed during a quick rushing event, probably before the sediments could fully lithify.

Polystrate fossils. Geologists have found the fossils of many trees and sea creatures standing upright through many layers of stone. If those layers were deposited and lithified over millions of years, why didn't the top of the tree or creature rot away and disappear before the next layer was deposited?

I'm no scientist, as I've previously said. But scientists, being human beings, can be wrong. Naturalists cling to long time frames because they need them to explain things differently from God. The flood is a far better explanation for the evidence available to all of us. It doesn't take millions of years to form stone.