"It's a big problem. Think about this--in 1995 there was a murder trial involving a famous athlete that went on for many months. If lawyers and the forensic scientists had such a hard time trying to reconstruct an event that occurred just months earlier, how can scientists ever reconstruct what happened supposedly millions or billions of years ago? Do creationists and evolutionists argue about photosynthesis, how a computer works, or how to put up a space shuttle? No, they don't disagree about those things. But do they argue about origins? Most definitely! So what's the difference? Current technology deals with what we can observe in the present. But, when it comes to origins and the past, this is outside real science because we don't have the past with us! In Genesis, though, we have a record of a witness Who has been there in the past. This is the basis for TRUE science."
The AIG contends that without a witness science is stuck "because we don't have the past with us." The work of lawyers and forensic scientists is admittedly hard. Because that work is hard, it doesn't mean that crimes are not worth investigating or will necessarily remain unsolved, however. A knowledgeable and persistent detective can often find just the clues they need for a solution and conviction. Sometimes, all it takes is a showman lawyer whose rhyme and charges of racial bias causes the jury to disregard all of the (admittedly complicated) DNA evidence.
The AIG question is actually two questions: What is the origin of life? And, how do scientists investigate the past? The origin of life question remains unanswered. In fact, evolution, including Darwin's work, is concerned with the origin of the observed diversity of life (the origin of species) and not the origin of life. Experiments have shown how chemicals characteristic of living things could have been made from components of Earth's early atmosphere. Or, life may have begun as complex chemical interactions in the vicinity of hot, metallic, sulfur-rich springs at the bottom of dark oceans. There is also evidence that clay may have acted as a catalyst that hosted self-reproducing chemicals. It may be that life originated somewhere else in the universe and made its way to Earth on comets or meteorites. As yet, there is no clear winner in this debate. Until we reach other planets and star systems and have other examples of life, this question will likely remain unanswered, but that doesn't mean the question is unanswerable. It simply means that for now, the only way we have available to directly investigate origins relies on fossils and the chemical reactions that were the precursors to life didn't leave traces ("fossils") that we know how to detect. It is sufficient (but not scientifically satisfying) that sequences of chemical reactions that produce those precursor chemicals of life can be demonstrated.
We do have the past with us; the rock record is around and underneath us. Using the basic principles of geology, the rocks around us can be ordered, oldest to youngest. Once placed in that context, methods for studying the past go far beyond just identifying fossils. To list a few techniques, rocks are photographed, classified, tasted, hammered, blasted, cut and polished into micro-thin wafers, examined with microscopes, dyed, crushed, sieved, dissolved in acid, x-rayed, CT-scanned, and tested with Geiger counters. Structures in the rocks (mud cracks, worm burrows, roots, soils, crossbedding, and others) are described, counted, and measured. The relationships of a rock unit to those above it, below it, and laterally equivalent are studied.
All of this information is compared to processes and rocks we can see forming today. Was rock formed by the action of a volcano, water, wind, ice, earthquake, storm, or landslide? Was it formed in a lake, beach, river, swamp, forest, flood, or desert? Did water flow back and forth, like tides, or in just one direction, like rivers? Was water deep or shallow, fast, slow, or still, or fresh or salty? Current technology allows geologists to make observations and conduct experiments that lead to answers to all these questions. This detective work combined with the relative geologic time scale and radiometric age dating enables us to answer more questions. When was this area a lake? Where were the rivers and mountains when that soil formed? How old is the Atlantic Ocean?
Some of the investigations are as detailed and painstaking as any murder investigation. In Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution, Richard Fortey describes one researcher who spent a lifetime examining the trilobite fossils in a single rock unit. After examining thousands of specimens, the paleontologist showed that rather than many species of distinctly differing sizes and number of body segments his trilobite fossils represented different life stages of the same species from larva to adult.
Geologists and paleontologists are the detectives of the Earth's past. Wherever there are rocks on the surface or deep within the Earth, scientists are looking at them. Understanding this past is essential to our future. For example, to better know the effect of greenhouse gases on Earth's climate, we need to know how Earth's climate has changed in the past, what caused those changes, and how those changes affected living organisms. These are the types of problems "real" and "true" scientists can investigate by interrogating our witnesses, the rocks.
