> My other favorite is to have to sit in a geology
>lecture and be told by my college professor what
>an idiot I am for believing in Creation. This is
>while being taught that geologists date rock
>layers by the fossils in them and, in another
>part of the semester, being taught that fossils
>are dated (partially) by which rock layer they
>are found in. And then learning that there is no
>place on earth where these rock layers are in
>their "correct" age order but are, in fact, often
>inverted in *exactly* the opposite order. Or
>found containing fossils "several million years
>younger" than the layers themselves are thought
>to be. And being told that there's ample
>scientific proof for why all these things
>occurred, but not being given the slightest
>explanation. But creationism is so ludicrous
>it's only believed by those with no brains. (Not
>that you guys would say that. That was the
>general idea of the teacher in the above class.)

Professors can be jerks. This is no secret. I've always maintained that people who spend too much time in academia end up going nuts (or were a little nuts to begin with). There's also a pretty heavy liberal bias in American colleges and universities. People complain about the "liberal media" or alternatively the "conservative media" all the time, but I've never ever heard anybody complain about the "conservative bias in colleges" . There's a good reason for that. While the media bias is largly one of perception, the college bias sure seems to be absolutely real ("seems" is my personal favorite weasel word!) So it does not surprise me that you got laughed at for expressing creationist sentiment in a geology class. Whether you "deserved" it or not depends on which flavor of creationism you believe in, however. There's two general camps--Old Earth creationists, who believe that the Earth and the universe are about the age that science tells us it is, but who believe God was the one doing the creating and the guiding and the shaping. Then there are the Young Earth creationists, who hold that the Earth is only 6,000 to 10,000 years old.

Old Earth creationism can be completely compatible with the science of geology. Young Earth creationism, however, cannot be. The exact age of the Earth and the universe are in doubt, but what is not in doubt is that both are several orders of magnitude older than 10,000 years old. Not just geology, but astronomy, cosmology, archeology, biology, physics, and chemistry contribute the the body of evidence that pinpoints the age of the Earth to be much, much, much greater than 10,000 years.

The only way the Earth and the universe can be no more than 10,000 years old is if it was deliberately created to appear to be much, much older. If *that* is what you believe, then fine. If you're an Old Earth creationist, fine. But I submit that if you went into a college geology class and made any sort of claim that the Earth is no more than 10,000 years old, and it can be shown by science that this is true, then you invited the ridicule you received. You might as well have gone into a chemistry class and said you didn't believe water was composed of hydrogen and oxygen.

Looks like my wife already took care of finding explanations for your specific issues. I just looked over that page and it's just chock full of great information. However, I've never taken a geology class in my life, and before reading that page I'd already thought of several ways that the strata could be inverted, misaligned, and shifted. Earthquakes, fault lines moving over/under each other, and plain old human tampering (in the sense of people digging or churing up layers of soil or rock for whatever reason--farming, clearing land to build on, quarrying rock, what have you) are all easy to come up with explanations for this. I find it hard to believe you could sit through college level geology classes and not be able to come up with these too.

Finally, I figured I'd link to a specific page on that site Carrie linked to. It deals specifically with the supposed circular dating of stata and fossils.

-- Dave