The Long Coal Train

Everyday, sometimes twice a day, a very long train passes through our town. Each car is heaped with as much coal as it can carry, the top few black feet clearly visible from the lower vantage point of my waiting automobile. This train is heading to a power plant about 12 miles north, and I marvel at the ability of the two or three engines to move so much weight. And some of the times when I am lucky enough to be held up for the ten minutes it takes for the train to rumble by, I think about something related to me by a guy who once worked for the utility, driving a large bulldozer that moved that coal around. He asked his superiors, noting the immense amount of volume consumed each day, if we would soon run out of coal, and was told that our country has enough for hundreds of years more. Sometimes I reflect about where the coal comes from. I'm not talking about whether it is western or Appalachian coal, but rather how all of that coal came to be.

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You would think that is the type of question that any school child, seeing the same train, would ask. And you would think that there would be an answer that seemed logical to anyone really interested in the orgin of coal. The problem is, you can get a text book answer as to how coal is made by natural processes over time, but the answer is only theory because there is not any place on earth today where seams of coal are in the process of being formed. Peat is being produced by natural processes, and the text books tell us that peat turns into coal. Peat has to somehow get buried with enough of the right covering to create the pressure needed to convert it into coal. But that has not been observed by man in the present or in the recorded past.

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Coal comes from vegetable matter such as plants and trees. In growing, these living things convert energy from the sun with molecules from the soil and water, and the structure is made up of carbon atoms drawn from those sources. When a plant dies, oxygen works to break down the atomic structure, and everything gets recycled. Dead plants on the ground eventually disapper. I live in a woods, and each fall I rake the large amount of dead leaves into the wooded areas just past my lawn. The old leaves are several inches thick, but the volume does not increase, because the leaves of two years ago have disappeared. And just like my woods, the ocean floor is not mucky with dead vegetation or dead marine animals (the source material for oil). In our current world, if vegetation dies in a swampy area where the water is oxygen poor, the old matter will grow thicker, and peat may form. But coal requires a large mass of vegetation to be rapidly buried, the burying material shielding it from further contact with oxygen. And the burying material has to be in sufficient volume to create the pressure needed to convert the vegetable material into coal.

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The text books will tell you that it takes thousands of years for the buried peat to turn into coal, although it has been demostrated that coal can be produced by man in a very short time. There are coal seams that span hundreds of square miles. Some seams can be very thick, and some are only a few inches thick. The surrounding material found around ALL coal seams is sedimentary rock (water carried material). And the current scientific explanation for the formation of these hugh expanses of coal requires that in the distant past there were extreamly large swamps, multi-state wide in area, covering the western and eastern parts of our country (and in many other parts of the world as well). The rotting vegetation in those swamps were quickly covered by sediment brought in by sea water (note: the effect of the extra oxygen brought in by the sea water not accounted for). The ground then had to rise (this is called an "uplift"), and then the land eventually had to sink again to create another swamp, and then rise and sink again and again over hundreds of thousands or millions of years because there are multiple layers of coal seams. As unlikely as that scenario sounds to me, science assures us that it must be true, because anything can happen if you allow for millions of years. The presence of rootless trees, some upside down but vertical, that cut through multiple layers of coal seams and sedimentary strata (or millions of years of time) are unexplained, as are the esistence of boulders in the seams (logically transported by being entangled in the roots of trees and transported by a major flood).

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I checked into coal formation on a Google search, and found a site which gives school teachers an experiment to demonstrate how coal comes to be. First you get an empty aquarium tank, place a layer of sand on the bottom, fill it with water, place vegetable matter in the water, wait for the vegetable matter to sink to the bottom, place another layer of sand into the tank to cover the rotting vegetable matter, put the tank in a well ventilated area because it will stink - and if you do this, after several days you will give the students a visible picture as to how coal is formed. The experiment does not actually produce coal, or peat for that matter. All it does is provide a picture, or an icon, of the theory of coal production. And years later the kids will remember this icon, satisified that Mr. Smith could demonstrate the slow formation of coal over endless centuries.

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A while after I became a believer at the age of 22, I had to come to grips with how to understand some scriptures that conflicted with what I had learned in high school and college. I believe that scripture is inspired by the Holy Spirit, and that every part of it has meaning and purpose. That meant that the accounts of creation and the flood were much more than stories related by ancient monotheistic peoples. And I believe that scripture was meant to be taken literally, unless the ovvious rendering shows types and examples. Something like the age of the earth, or the timing of the flood, can be understood literally with different interpertations. But as I see it, there had to be a literal first man and woman, Adam and Eve. And they had to have been created without sin, and then sinned, for it to make any sense for Jesus (the second Adam) to have to come and die on the cross for the sins of man. And for various reasons, one being that Jesus is very specific about it, there had to a a Noah, there had to be a universal flood, just as there will be a universal judgment coming upon the whole earth.

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My convictions came through faith. I jumped into the arms of an invisible God, and when He caught me, He showed Himself to me. And when I began to trust that His word was true, He began to show me how faith does not conflict with science. The physical evidence for all of what scripture says is there, but many cannot interpret it correctly because their lack of faith, or outright antagonism toward faith, has blinded them from considering their Creator. Scientists tell us, our kids are taught in school, and the secular press eagerly confirms, that scientists and the scientific method have no bias. But in truth most scientists start with an atheistic assumption that everything in the universe has a purely mechanical origin, it is running a mechanical path, at a fixed pace, and will end with a mechanical implosion. They have to believe in an evolutionary process, and long time frames (see the anything is possible comment) to make it work. And that skews what they are looking for, and the way then interpret all data. We must remember, even the greatest scientists are still people, with an immortal soul, struggling against a powerful enemy they cannot see and do not believe in.

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My faith freed me to look at evidence, and to approach firmly held beliefs, from a different perspective. One of the first books that provided me with another viewpoint toward a universal flood was - Earth's Most Challenging Mysteries (1972), by Reginald Daly, a Ph.D. in goelogy who had taught at Harvard. He made me aware how many of the features of the earth, from the ice caps to the Grand Canyon, can be best understood in the context of an earth wide catastrophic flood. In the book he talks about coal and oil formation, and how the geology of the earth in relation to the settling of the flood waters can even point to the location of coal seams and oil and gas deposits. Sadly, 35 years later, there is not any serious debate in the scientific community concerning even the possibility of a universal flood. It is not because they have solid counter arguments concerning the evidence. Their atheistic viewpoint does not even allow them to consider a "Noah's Flood", and their response to any theories suggesting such is always met with ridicule, scorn, dismissal, and misrepresentation of the viewpoint. And yet, day after day, the long coal train makes it's way through our town. And it reminds me that even in judgment, God was designing and creating something benefical for man, and that He is awesome beyond my imagination.

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"Know this first of all, that in the last days mockers will come with their mocking, following after their own lusts, and saying, 'Where is the promise of His coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation'. For when they maintain this it escapes their notice that by the word of God the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water, through which the world at that time was destroyed, being flooded with water. But the present heavens and earth by His word are being reserved for fire, kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men." (2 Peter 3: 3-6)