Continental Drift And The Fossil Record -- By: Bernard E. Northrup

Journal: Central Bible Quarterly
Volume: CENQ 22:4 (Winter 1979)
Article: Continental Drift And The Fossil Record
Author: Bernard E. Northrup


Continental Drift And The Fossil Record

Bernard E. Northrup

Central Baptist Seminary Minneapolis, Minnesota

A Lecture Given August 13,1979 at the
Annual Creation Convention in Anaheim, California.

I am pleased with the subject which was assigned to me by the committee. I feel very strongly that the separation of the continents is explicitly confirmed by the fossil record. First of all, however, I want to make it clear that I will not be talking about continental drift as such. This is the language of the macrochronologist. The harmonization model of Biblical and geological history which I have developed requires all of historical geology to fit into Biblical time. It does not seek to fit the Bible into geological time and thus rejects the chronology of the historical geologist. Therefore I will be talking about abrupt continental rifting and separation. But some will ask: “Is continental separation a Biblical phenomenon at all?” I firmly believe that it is on the basis of a four-fold “fossil” record.

Now a fossil is something that was once a living creature or a thing which has, by some near miraculous means, been preserved so that its original form can be to some extent visualized by a trained eye. I include “thing” in the definition because it is customary for geologists to talk of fossil raindrop prints and fossil deserts. The word is not merely limited to the remains of once living creatures. In the early part of my discussion I want to use the word “fossil” in this wider than normal sense as I deal with remnant traces of records from the past which support continental division.

The Linguistic Fossil Data

As creationists, we have been neglectful of a sizeable reservoir of information on continental rifting which is contained in the languages of man. Now it should be a basic Biblicist presupposition growing out of revelatory materials that all mankind once had a single tongue before Babel. It was a deliberate act of the Creator,., acting in judgment slightly more than two full generations after the Noahic flood, that produced earth’s babel of tongues. This information is drawn from the two generation list of Japethites in Genesis 10:1–5. The list is climaxed with the-statement, “By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; everyone after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.”

The-second piece of evidence is the two generation list of Harnites. This occupies Genesis 10:6–20. In verses 13 and

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