William Smith produced the first geological map during the first decades of the 19th Century. His map, impressive by any standards, showed the strata of the British Isle organized according to fossil content. This was possible because the crust of the British Isle had been subjected to forces from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean that had tilted the various strata, exposing many of the layers to the surface eye. While the layers had been exposed for all to see, Smith had conceptualized what the different types of ground at different points meant.
Smith was able to do this through an accident of employment along with an almost single-minded obsession with fossils. As a surveyor's assistant, he had shown great talent in plotting out the dimensions of the surface of the land. At the time, in the last decades of the 18th Century, there was much activity dealing with the land, how it was configured and what it contained. The creation of canals not only cut deep swaths through the English countryside, it did so primarily to carry the coal which supported Britain's burgeoning industrial sector, a sector which, as a result of the Kyoto emissions standards, had to be converted from coal to oil, sending the price of oil skyrocketing on the world market.
Britain's coal measures outcrop around Bath near where Smith grew up and started practicing his first profession of surveying, and these coal measures had been folded and layered so that finding the coal became an art in itself, an art that, because he was drawn like a mole to the subsurface of the Earth, William Smith became very adept at.
Because the coal measures were layered in the land, miners dug deep into the earth seeking out seams to mine. Shafts were sunk straight down and anyone traveling down the shafts would be treated to a repetitive view of the strata, the layers repeating themselves over and over, pointing to the existence of coal. While the miners wouldn't have noticed, Smith started to realize that each of the stratum was unique in composition and coloring. Looking closer, he was able to recover fossils from each of the stratum. Although fossils at the time were not well understood, their existence being shrouded in religious dogma dealing with the creation, Smith, unencumbered by dogma, began to see the fossils for what they were, the remains of life that had been embedded in the layers.
Smith, who was acquainted with fossils collected on the surface, began to wonder if fossils could tell him anything about the layers of earth in which the coal was found. He began to play with the idea of predicting where the coal would be by analyzing the fossil content of the various layers that had been exposed. He became very good at this art and his reputation spread among the various landowners who were seeking out mineral riches beneath their land. When talk of building a new canal around Bath surfaced, Smith was in the forefront with both his surveyor skills and his skill at knowing what was beneath the surface of the earth, a skill that allowed him to plot the best coarse for the canal which needed to travel through ground that was not porous to water in order to operate efficiently.
Of course, Smith had one gigantic ulterior motive in securing the job of surveying the course of the canal. He had come to the conclusion that what was true beneath the land was also true of the land, which is to say, if the fossils in the layered coal seams could predict the existence of coal, then the existence of fossils on the surface could predict when that surface was deposited.
And here we have the first assumption of the resulting geology that Smith birthed. As I have noted countless times in other columns and in my books and articles, empirical science is founded on unfounded concepts that, once in place, can never be challenged. It makes no difference what area of reality empirical science deals with, it must start with unproven and unprovable concepts because it is a mathematical structure and mathematics requires that the meaning of terms be quantized so they can be used in formulas.
And note, because meaning can never be quantized, the quantized meanings in empirical science all have to be accepted as givens. Perhaps the most humorous example of this quantized assumption process is found in meteorology where the Coriolis effect, which results from the Earth turning beneath an object such as a rocket shot to the north or south, is conceptualized as an actual force and then is used to explain the winds (see column 16-05). It makes no difference whether its physics, matter is neither created nor destroyed, astronomy, gravity is proportional to and a property of mass, evolution, life evolves over long periods, one species to the next, without purpose or direction, or something like optics, light is ordered the way it emerges from a prism, empirical science can only build on meaningless concepts that are accepted as reality and then used as a basis for quantizing everything related to them. Nothing can oppose those basic assumptions, for to do so would be to question all the quantization empirical science spent its efforts, collected its money and created its reputation doing.
When Smith made the observation that strata were identifiable by the fossils they contained, he was making an observation about reality. However, in the context of empirical science, he started geology sliding down the slippery slope of making up notions, unprovable concepts, accepting those unprovable concepts as reality and then building probably what could be considered the most massive pile of quantified idiocy empirical science has ever constructed on top of the unproven and unprovable assumptions.
To finish Smith's story, however, he was not a wealthy man and, in fact, once he lost permanent employment with the canal company, spent his life taking commissions to find minerals, survey property, and most remunerative of all, drain the vast estates that were coming under Britain's new enclosure laws which led to the rapid improvement of agriculture and its related arts. Fortunately, because there was need for his services throughout Great Britain, he was able to travel the width and breadth of the land, collecting fossils and constructing in his mind how the various strata must travel beneath the surface from where they appeared in relation to one another on the surface. He spent all of his money and all of his energy creating a map which laid out these strata, a map that pretty much stands up today simply because his notion about the fossils being peculiar to each layer is valid.
Once we convince ourselves that fossils can be used to identify strata, we are then constrained to speculate, and I use the word speculate in its commonly accepted usage, not in the usage assigned it by empirical science where its theories are not speculation but something more. From the point that we determine that the strata can be identified by their fossil content, we are in the area of speculation. We are not in the area of fact or in the area of theories considered to be scientific and therefore fact. We are speculating, making stuff up, throwing ideas at the wall to see which one makes the most sense and when we single one out as the one that makes the most sense, we are still dealing with an idea thrown against the wall which can be easily replaced by any other idea thrown against the wall that makes more sense. However, by the time empirical science crusts its speculations over with empirical crap, the speculations are no longer in sight and therefore are no longer ideas thrown against the wall, They are dogma which can never be contradicted on pain of banishment or worse.
The first speculation we have to make is that the fossils are the remains of life that lived when the stratum was formed, died when the stratum was forming and therefore became a part of the stratum. One way sediment accrues is slowly, as a result of silt on a river bottom or delta, as sediment in a lake and even as sediment in an ocean.
Another way it can form is to be located where floodwaters settle.
Of the two in 19th Century England, which would we expect to gain currency? Well, only bible thumpers believed in the great flood and if we open the door to bible thumpers, we'll let in all the life-was-created-in-a-day kooks, so the sediment is not only obviously not the result of settling flood waters and it never could be the result of settling floodwaters. The empirical disdain for anything biblical eliminates the possibility that the fossils were deposited in a particular stratum as a result of settling flood waters and therefore the strata are always, always, always the product of the slow accretion of sediment in rivers, deltas, and the shallow oceans which populated the Earth back in the ages but which are no longer present today. Hey, when you know your speculations are facts, you have to follow the facts and make up shallow oceans. It's the empirical way.
Of course, it helped that the nascent thoughts dealing with evolution, that it was species based, required vast stretches of time to hide itself in the geologic record. Slow sedimentation contradicted the flood story in the bible while species evolution contradicted the creation story and because both appeared in the bible, it was inconceivable that one might be the depiction of a real event while the other, the story of creation, was a story that could never be anything but speculative.
However, once it was determined that the fossils were deposited by slow sedimentation in every case, empirical robots had a little problem. Not only were the coal measures turned on each other so they were piled one atop the other, the very fact that Smith could determine the underground course of the strata from their appearance on the surface meant that the crust on which the British Isles rested had been subject to extreme stress, in fact appeared to have been physically lifted up and tilted so that at one end it folded over onto itself and when it settled, one end remained elevated over the other.
It's almost like, and I interject this as pure speculation, it's just like a vast amount of water had been added to the planet, causing the center of the Atlantic Ocean to collapse, forcing the land at its edges to rise, causing mountains like the Atlas to rise up, and in other places, like the Western coast of Britain, to tilt and fold over. Much the same could be said to have occurred in the Pacific, rendering the remaining land islands with the remnants of the ancient civilization we find scattered about, cracking the crust to create mountain chains like the Rockies and the Andes and cracking the margins, opening up the crust to the fires beneath to create the series of volcanoes known as the ring of fire.
But, alas, these are only speculations. Empirical science came up with the facts. Already used to dealing with the results of force without reference to any force, everything moves in a straight line but for gravity, the planets move with no current force, they rotate as a result of no current force and, in fact, objects drop to the surface of the planet as a result of no force, but rather as a result of a property of the matter to attract, empirical science didn't have to come up with any cause of the force that caused the British Isles to tilt, it just said the continents roam around on the surface causing all sorts of collisions which result in the surface features we see. You see, the early world was a volatile place, always mobile, its crustal blocks caught up in violent swirls of ferocious motion, and that's a fact.
I mean, if it can't be proven, it can at least be made real by consensus agreement.
So, now that empirical science has made up all the facts, all it has to do is fill in the blanks empirically. First there are eons, of which four have been firmly identified. These eons are empirically divided into eras which can then be empirically divided into suberas but which are normally empirically divided into periods which can be empirically subdivided in subperiods but which are normally empirically divided into epochs which are empirically divided into stages, divisions, subzones, why golly gosh, there's enough empirical flimflam here to keep an army of droids employed for at least another eon or two.
And, of course, when we leave the British Isles and find some strata with different fossils and some with the same fossils, which we would expect to find if life was local and slowly sedimented on a local basis, but was peppered with a dash of identical life as a result of a worldwide flood, why we have a whole slew of empirical unconformities, nonconformities and disconformities.
Devilish clever these empirical wags.
I might mention in closing that even Darwin found life to be local when he examined his finches from the Galapagos and found different finches on different islands, conjecturing that the separation caused them to evolve differently. But when it comes to uniformitarianism, the dogma of slow sedimentation, why, it's perfectly reasonable to expect a stratum in China to contain identical fossils to a stratum in Canada and the British Isles.
It's not empirical science, it's delusional science.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com