Humans can be incredibly dense. We have proof of a horrible crime at the prosecution table. The defense has failed to explain this evidence. The defense has not even established an alibi. Everyone knows that the offer of one became a joke. It accounted for nothing but an inexperienced counselor for the defense who didn’t know how silly it would really sound.

And yet…

There is an acquittal. The jury did not believe the evidence and went with the likable demeanor of the defendant. Amazing.

If you say a train just went by and I neither saw nor heard it so I ask how you know, and you say, “Don’t you see its tracks?” I’m gonna do a 180 and get as far away from you as I can.

Evidence is not a joke. It’s the truth. An established real event backed up by truth.

My middle name in several languages means variably, “lion” or “son of the lion”

I’m so happy that I don’t do WordPress prompts anymore.

Now that I’ve half-answered today’s prompt, where was I? Oh, yeah. The truth.

Later, the attorney for the defense will be celebrating at the watering hole with a Johnnie Walker red served neat, thinking that he’s better than Perry Mason, but that’s not the truth. People can believe anything.

Are “magical creatures” real? You know, faeries, leprechauns, like those?

I say the evidence for them is poor, easily debunked. Yet I’ve seen things I simply can’t explain. In fact, I still tell myself that I couldn’t have seen them despite knowing better. But if you went to Ireland, you’d get along better if you at least humored the beliefs of others. And, no. I don’t want leprechauns or faeries to be real. I really, really don’t.

Let’s cover something easier to prove. A guy has a piece of rock. Or coal, but I’m sure it was rock. How he found this, I don’t remember, but it was of a sizeable specimen. He dropped it, and it cracked open, revealing a hammer inside. He sent the whole thing (it was visible but still in the rock) to the same lab that analysts examined moon rocks. The metal of the hammer was forged with two metals but had chlorine in it. And that’s a problem because nothing today can be forged with chlorine in it.

This begs two questions. The first is, obviously, how old is this thing, and the second is, how did it get entombed in solid rock?

And that’s only one of a whole lot of examples that I once thought were rare. Stories of frogs found inside coal have largely been debunked. But not all of them.

Coal began to form in the carboniferous period and continued in the early Permian and Mesozoic Eras. That’s a long time. Homes heated by coal should only be using anthracite coal. But in the slow process of coal formation and maturation, how do live animals get trapped, only to die as soon as they are freed during mining?

I could not guess. And yet I would have thought that the rock artifacts would be the hardest to form, taking far longer. Except it’s not. If coal started forming 300 million years ago (mya) then how did all kinds of artifacts get caught in rocks forming?

The answer has an easy version and a complex one.

I don’t know how to do either one with the limited skills I have. Let’s say that a decade ago, a team investigating a crater beneath Cape Charles accidentally found remnants of an ancient ocean beneath the Chesapeake Bay. Its salinity is twice that of today’s oceans. Now, that could be exactly how Cretaceous Period seawater was. It could also be so high in salinity because it is not a large body of water anymore, but is in small pools or likely separated ponds of water, and most of the original seawater has been filtered down into the porous rocks- distilling what sank, leaving much of the salt behind with far less water.

How low does the water get, then? It goes really deep, perhaps as much as ten miles. This has little to do with aquifers; it’s where both saltwater and freshwater had large reservoirs in the ancient world. And if you don’t see where this is getting to, don’t feel badly. I told you my skill set for this is pretty crude. Now, let’s move on from weird, out-of-place objects to something I know even less about: out-of-place fossils.

Because I’ll bet that you thought fossils lay in neat layers according to the time they’re from, oldest to youngest, with the youngest or more recent above, and the oldest below. Except, we’d be wrong. All over the world, there are strange formations where deep sea and general marine life died alongside land animals. Not only are they mixed in location, but also by wide ranges of time. In other words, a calamity on a global scale killed and fossilized every type of creature there was, together. There’s examples in sandstone of spiders, mollusks, reptiles, jellyfish, and trilobites killed and instantly fossilized. That’s incredible. What could do that?

Cut through limestone in the Grand Canyon. Nautilus-like creatures, plants, and more. All killed and preserved during the settling of lime, sand, and other silt quickly entombing the dead animals in a thick lime slurry (think of it as mixed concrete but less dense). Trilobites preserved so perfectly that scientists have examined their eyes.

How did this happen? Why do you see something so bizarre in the red limestone of the Grand Canyon or sandstone and limestone in Europe?

There can be only one answer. That answer also covers the question of why, on the Nepal side of the tallest mountain in the world, the same mix of marine fossils is found close to the summit.

A global flood that built up so rapidly that nothing could survive.

And Everest was not a mountain then; it was on an equal level, if not just a bit higher than ground level.

It had to be something so fast that any humans alive at the time could never have survived, and if sea creatures were killed, then how much more quickly could people have been wiped out?

But since we are here, someone must have survived. Because written accounts across almost all civilizations have a written history of this event. In most, there is a man who built a boat. A big one for the time. A dreadnought-sized monster.

How?

This is the part where I always got hung up. I wavered between suspicious belief and faith. Then disbelief with lots of scorn and sarcasm. It is the same approach most folks have. It’s called the flood myth for a reason. It can’t be true. It isn’t even much of a myth, lacking drama, excitement. Like, what good was it? Was it an ancient boogeyman story: “If you don’t go to sleep, God will send a flood”?

That’s harder to believe than I could bear.

But what I was really doing was ignoring a wealth of research and proof gathered by disciplined scientists and scholars. And, of course, thousands of students who were patient diggers and civilians who found and offered their own proof.

I had forgotten my childlike faith. My simple faith that didn’t need proof.

So much so that it had turned to disbelief and scorn. A grave sin.

God wants that faith. It is his due. Without him, life means nothing but going from one sin to the next, seeking selfish and sensual things that only make us miserable because it all gets so boring and routine. Then we look for new things to fill our emptiness. An affair. Cheating. Thrills from gambling, drugs, drinking, and daredevil behavior. Then, on to the next thing, looking for meaning and feeling even more empty because none of that stuff can fill that hole but faith.

And I got hung up on something else, too. Like, how could a boat even that big hold two of every animal? How could they be kept safely, and how did the ship have enough food to feed them?

God looked and was sorry he had created man because his every thought was of nothing but evil. He knew Noah, though, and found him worthy. He and his family would be spared the fiercest cataclysmic event in world history. So he gave instructions for building an arc. And when it was time, he gathered–

Wait! Two of every animal?

Wrong. He didn’t need two of every animal. Some, like I described above, were also a part of God’s list of what had to die. Two of one family of animals would have been enough to evolve quickly because the animal kingdom is far more efficient than humans in that department.

Now I begin to see how possible it was. Now, needing no more proof, I believe.  There’s just one question left:when did it happen? Because fossils of trilobites aren’t supposed to be younger than 200 mya. It died out in the Permian mass extinction event. No human ever saw one. Not alive.

There’s a problem in the fossil graveyards then. Because I’m not a Creationist who claims that the earth is only 6,000 years old. There’s no evidence of that.

Okay. You know what my faith tells me about the answer to this question? It tells me I’m not meant to know the answer. Facts cannot replace faith. They just help us find our way back when our faith is weak. There’s facts-truth. Then there’s faith. Go on, research this yourself. The Bible tells us that there was plenty of water to flood the earth. Vast stores of underground water sprang forth and gave up their water. Then the heavens opened up. Subsequently, the atmosphere changed. Water pressure bearing down on now empty underground water stores collapsed, creating tectonic activities that formed mountain and oceanic trenches.

Remember one thing while doing your own research: you’re never going to get all of the answers, so guard your faith. That is your most valuable possession. I’m ashamed of needing proof. Jesus said to his Apostles, “Because you have seen, you believe. How much more blessed will be those who have not seen, but yet believe?”

If this has had no effect on you, it’s evidence of no consequence to you. Don’t be on the jury that sees evidence but ignores it. Please think on this.