Using Spider-Man Action Figures to Demonstrate the Reality of the Geologic Column

An anonymous YouTuber who goes by the name Logicked has a long history or responding to more out there claims when it comes to creation science. A part of that history is an hours-long break down of well known scam artist Kent Hovind's Creation "Seminars". Included in this breakdown is an entire episode dedicated to the geological claims made by Hovind. In all of my years studying creationism, I don't think I've ever found an easier to understand example of what the geologic column is since I saw his video several years back. I wanted to include it on its own as part of this website's resources, as an easy-to-reference piece on a popular talking point. Check out the video below (time 29:54 - 31:58)

TRANSCRIPT

Let's replace the fossils with, let's say...Spiderman action figures to take away the scary evolutionishness of it all. It doesn't matter at all whether the object that functions as an index is a fossil or an action figure anyway, because it will work just the same way! And I'll try to keep it simple and keep out the complicated parts.

So let's say that the whole world is covered in a bunch of layers of rock that were laid down very slowly. Now, let's say you pick any random town off the map. Let's say Union City, South Dakota.

You find that there are three layers of rock, just to keep it nice and simple. In the bottom layer, there are Spiderman action figures. In the middle layer, there are a bunch of Green Goblin action figures, and in the top layer there are Scorpion action figures. And yes, sometimes you'll find a Spiderman in a Green Goblin layer, or maybe even in the Scorpion layer, but you'll never find a Scorpion lower than a Green Goblin, or a Green Goblin lower than a Spiderman.

Now, let's say you head out east to Enning, South Dakota, and you look at the layers again. Here you have three layers again, but instead of having Spiderman then Green Goblin then Scorpion, there's Green Goblin then Scorpion then Vulture.

This doesn't really tell you much but maybe it gets you thinking.

Now let's say you head everywhere else in the world and check the layers, and as you do it you notice that you never find a Green Goblin lower than a Spiderman or a Vulture lower than a Scorpion. Not every place will have all the layers but you have some layers everywhere and they overlap with other layers in other places.

Sometimes you might be missing a Green Goblin layer, but the Scorpion layer will still be above the Spiderman layer.

So you start to draw them one on top of the other, probably in some sort of...I don't know...column? 

Now, what you draw is not going to be reflected directly any place in the world, but if you tell someone else to go across the world a second time and look at which action figures belong to which layers, their drawing is going to end up about the same as yours. The fact that an abstract model of reality doesn't simply reflect the state of Union Center, South Dakota, or any other one location, doesn't mean it doesn't say something true about the world.