South Dakota Badlands Good for Creation Science

The word badlands is often used to mean that an area is not good for living in, growing crops, and so forth. South Dakota has badlands. The Badlands National Park takes up the area of three counties. Also in the badlands area is a National Historic Site involving deactivated nuclear missile silos. Nuclear missiles make good days go bad. 

So why make a national park? A passel of wildlife call the area home. It also has geologic formations, and the study and removal of fossils needed to be regulated.

Badlands National Park, Unsplash / Wesley Sharp

Geologists and paleontologists who presuppose millions of years interpret what they observe into an interesting story. It does not hold up. Biblical creationists also has presuppositions, the main ones being that the Bible is true about recent creation and the devastating global Flood. Using Flood geology and models, the formations are explained in a way that makes sense.

The eroded cliffs of the Badlands terrain of west central South Dakota with their variously colored layers are beautiful and desolate, fascinating yet formidable (Fig. 1). Early settlers avoided this land because it was poor for farming and was a barrier to travel.

Yet from the walls of the canyons and cliffs of this hostile terrain and from along stream banks have come the strange bones of probably the richest storehouse of vertebrate fossils in all of North America. It provides much of what we know about North America’s “Golden Age of Mammals” in the so-called Oligocene Epoch, supposedly 23–34 million years ago.

To read the rest, rock on over to "The Origin of the Badlands, South Dakota."