Without replying to anyone, just a personal experience.
Every year I lecture for a week at the YWAM college in Canberra as part of a course
on science, humanities, and culture. I talk about the history and workings of the
earth, environmental stewardship etc. A key part of the course has been a day in
the field looking at the Devonian sediments to the east of here at Wee Jasper.
After some explanation about the significance of biota, sorting, grainsize, and
sedimentary structures for interpreting sedimentary environments, they see three
localities:
Part of a bioherm where they can see soliatry and colonial rugose corals, tabulate
corals, stromatoporoids, and assorted hash in a mud matrix. I as them to consider
in what sort of environment such an assemblage is likely to form.
A laterally equivalent succesion of bedded wackestones and packstones with a
similar biota. I again ask them consider what sort of environment these might have
formed in and ask them to say why it might be different to the previous outcrop.
A siltstone succession interbedded with the limestones. I ask them to collect the
fossils (brachipods, bivalves, gastropids, and crinoids) and then to suggest why
the environment is different from the two limestone localities.
All very standard stuff, exposing students, almost none of whom have any science,
let alone geology background, to some basic principles of stratigraphy,
palaeontology, sedimentology, getting them to see that rocks are not ink blots into
which we see what we will, but natural documents which can be read. They also
should get a sense of the vastness of geological time and response with awe and
wonder at God the creator.
But not always. Two years ago there was one lady in tears because of the way in
which her world view had been challenged by the discovery of the reality deep. Her
faith survived, whether by denying geology or by changing her world picture, I do
not know.
Jon.
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