Posted on 06/23/2009 5:28:07 AM PDT by decimon
Finding a fossil in a coal mine is no big deal. Coal deposits, after all, are petrified peat swamps, and peat is made from decaying plants, which leave their imprints in mud and clay as it hardens into shale stone.
But it was a different thing entirely when John Nelson and Scott Elrick, geologists with the Illinois State Geological Survey, examined the Riola and Vermilion Grove coal mines in eastern Illinois. Etched into ceilings of the mine shafts is the largest intact fossil forest ever seen—at least four square miles of tropical wilderness preserved 307 million years ago. That's when an earthquake suddenly lowered the swamp 15 to 30 feet and mud and sand rushed in, covering everything with sediment and killing trees and other plants. "It must have happened in a matter of weeks," says Elrick. "What we see here is the death of a peat swamp, a moment in geologic time frozen by an accident of nature."
(Excerpt) Read more at smithsonianmag.com ...
For a reason.
Post 35 “There are no ‘accidents’ in nature.”
Post 38 “Mutation happens”
Post 41 “For a reason.”
I realize that creationist religions hold that “accidents” don’t happen in nature.
Nonetheless, the book “Darwin’s Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated” by Steve Jones, has this to say about evolutionary “accidents.” (pages 170-171)
“DNA’s inability to copy itself without mistakes - mutation - means that evolution is inevitable. Natural selection does no more than capialize on that fact. Species, too, are by products of the Mendelian machine. They emerge from the apparatus of inheritance, from the ways that genes join forces to do their job. If genes for size, shape or behavior work together only in the right combinations, then, as different mixtures build up in different places, the origin of species becomes inevitable. Once established they may evolve further, but, of their nature, species happen by accident.”
I see the universe as a creation of God that has a mind/will of it's own.
Maybe accident/mutation are too strong a word(s). To adjust or adapt seems more accurate.
Describing God using the terms “mind,” “will” and “reason” takes me back to the catechism class where I was taught that God created man in His image.
I now prefer to think that God, if there is a God, is beyond our knowledge - transcendent.
The closing words in Jones’ book are ...
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breather into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
Guess I’m a *’tweener* (neither a creationist or Darwinist). As the American Indians say, Great Spirit has power over all things and Mother Earth has power over all spirits.
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