Chile is No Stranger to Earthquakes

In an article published on CNN.com (March 1), John van Wyhe – founder and director of Darwin Online – commented on the recent magnitude 8.8 earthquake that devastated Chile on February 27.

...A quake similar to Saturday's struck almost exactly the same part of Chile on February 20, 1835 – almost exactly 175 years ago.

On that occasion, the young English naturalist and geologist Charles Darwin was in Chile as part of his voyage on HMS Beagle....

Darwin spent the next weeks investigating the effects of the earthquake. He found that rocks lined with recent marine shells were now elevated above the tide. The island of Santa Maria was raised an average of about 3 meters (9 feet).

Combining his own observations with those of many local people, Darwin attempted to reconstruct the event and to understand why it had occurred. He found that three volcanoes had erupted along the Chilean coast at about the same time as the earthquake.

Not only did he collect widespread evidence of the uplift of the coast during the earthquake, but traveling inland and into the mountains, he discovered a series of remains of marine shells – proof that the shifting that had recently uplifted the coast by a small amount had occurred over and over in the recent geological past.

The experience convinced him that the great geologist Charles Lyell was right – mountain chains were not created by sudden immense catastrophes, but grew almost imperceptibly, the product of thousands of successive uplifts over almost endless geological time...

Read the rest of the article here –>

As Creationists we need to continually return to the subject of assumptions and worldview.

Notice how van Wyhe describes Darwin's progression of thought:

1. "He found that rocks lined with recent marine shells were now elevated above the tide."
2. "...traveling inland and into the mountains, he discovered a series of remains of marine shells..."
3. This provided "proof that the shifting that had recently uplifted the coast by a small amount had occurred over and over in the recent geological past."
4. Therefore, "Charles Lyell was right – mountain chains were not created by sudden immense catastrophes, but grew almost imperceptibly, the product of thousands of successive uplifts over almost endless geological time..."

Hopefully you can detect some of Darwin's underlying assumptions here. His observations were probably perfectly accurate, but his understanding of those observations was skewed by his precommitment to Lyell's "old earth" ideas.

You may be asking, "Couldn't gradual geological uplift actually do that? What could be wrong with Darwin's interpretation?"

My beef with Darwin's explanation is very simple. A relatively recent, worldwide flood catastrophe is just as viable an explanation (in my opinion, much more viable) for marine fossils coming to rest in high-elevation mountainous areas. Claiming that long periods of time and slow gradual change must have been responsible for this phenomena, clearly demonstrates Darwin's prejudice against the Biblical account of the Flood.

You may agree or disagree with me on this. All I ask is that you simply acknowledge the fact that we all have assumptions, and those assumptions invariably affect the way we view the world – for better or for worse.