The evidence against a young Earth, flood geology, and a global flood is overwhelming, which would make compiling further evidence against it very much a case of flogging a dead horse. However, given the regrettable state of affairs in parts of our community where such nonsense on stilts is promoted, such dead-horse flogging is very much indicated.
In the excellent Age of Rocks website, geologist Jonathan Baker notes how sedimentary rocks composed of weathered rock fragments from lower down in the geological column provided irrefutable evidence against a young Earth. As he points out "Paleozoic (542–251 Ma) rocks had to solidify completely, breakdown into smaller clasts, become rounded and smoothed by abrasion, and then reworked into conglomerates of Mesozoic and Cenozoic age." This rules out the belief that the geological column was laid down within a short space of time by a global flood.
Gastroliths, rocks found inside the stomachs of animals, likewise provide powerful evidence against flood geology for the same reason - the rocks forming the ancient gastroliths had to form and become weathered before being ingested by these animals. When these rocks contain fossils - which according to YECs were all laid down by the flood, the YEC argument simply loses all credibility:
This relationship tells us that the geologic column could not have been deposited collectively within a short period of time, no matter how large the catastrophe.
Gastroliths are no different, in that the rock formations from which they are derived had to solidify completely and weather out before they could be consumed by dinosaurs and other ancient animals. However, this line of reasoning is especially persuasive when gastroliths themselves contain fossils of Paleozoic life forms! As Stokes (1987) observed in Late Cretaceous gastroliths in Utah:An unusual feature of gastroliths is their content of derived or reworked fossils. In specimens collected by the author the rough order of decreasing abundance is brachiopods, sponges, corals, fusulinids, petrified wood, bryozoans, and molluscan fragment.In other words, these dinosaurs were themselves ancient fossil hunters, sampling everything from molluscs that lived in the Ordovician oceans to trees buried in the Upper Triassic Chinle Formation. Added to that list are orange cherts characteristic of the underlying Kaibab Formation. So how did all these fossils end up in the stomachs of dinosaurs, who—according to Ken Ham—were buried in the same catastrophic flood as all Paleozoic life forms?
Perhaps in the beginning stages of the flood, some marine and terrestrial life forms were buried in sediment, which immediately hardened into solid rock. A few days later, the rock was broken up into neat little cobbles, which were consumed by hungry dinosaurs with weak stomachs. Then accelerated digestive decay turned these cobbles into polished, rounded, fossiliferous stones, which are now preserved in the rib cages of well known dinosaurs like the one below…right?
Gastroliths preserved in situ in a specimen of the small theropod Caudipteryx zoui. Image of the display at Carnegie Museum of Natural History reproduced from The Great Cretaceous Walk.
No. Dinosaurian gastroliths don’t simply contradict the Flood geology paradigm. They make it look downright silly.
Creation with appearance of age won't solve this problem if only because a gastrolith with a fossil inside will perform exactly the same function as one without, let alone the different radiometric ages between them. Once again, the creation-with-age excuse is ad-hoc, smacks of desperation, and poses insuperable theological problems as it makes God out to be deceptive.
