And Moses stretched forth his rod toward heaven: and the LORD sent thunder and hail, and the fire ran along upon the ground; and the LORD rained hail upon the land of Egypt. So there was hail, and fire mingled with the hail, very grievous, such as there was none like it in all the land of Egypt since it became a nation. And the hail smote throughout all the land of Egypt all that was in the field, both man and beast; and the hail smote every herb of the field, and brake every tree of the field.
(Exodus 9:23-25) KJV
Is there any Biblical basis to support the possibility that billions of tons of sediment could fall out of the sky? Why yes, there is. There are several passages which describe rocks falling from the skies.
Entire schools of fish were buried in an event so violent that the hardest rocks were smashed and ground down to smooth pebbles. That doesn’t sound like the popular science (SciPop) narrative of fossilization, of poor sick lone creatures being trapped in the soft mud of shallow pools. Fossilization of healthy fit animals and plants happened en mass.
An outstanding example is the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland. It’s assigned to the Devonian period because of the wide variety of extinct fish species in it. The SciPop narrative is that this was a period of time when there was a big increase in the diversity of fishes. It’s a good illustration of the blind idiocy of SciPop. The evidence isn’t an increase in diversity. The evidence is the violent destruction of diversity. It was a mass extinction event that nothing survived.
The old red sandstone was described by William Buckland, in his book Reliquae diluvianae, (relics of the flood) (1823). It’s not easy to find a copy (or .pdf) of Reliquae diluvianae, but the work is reviewed by Hugh Miller, The Old Red Sandstone (Boston, 1865; first published in England in 1841), p.48. There we find some descriptions of the Old Red Sandstone sedimentary deposits.
“The earth had already become a vast sepulchre, to a depth beneath the bed of the sea equal to at least twice the height of Ben Nevis over its surface.
“The history of the period represented by the Old Red Sandstone.. in what now forms the northern half of Scotland,
“The vast space which now includes Orkney and Loch Ness, Dingwall and Gamrie, and many a thousand square miles besides, was a scene of shallow ocean, perplexed by powerful currents and agitated by waves. A vast stratum of water rolled pebbles, varying in depth from a hundred feet to a hundred miles, remains in a thousand different localities, to testify of the disturbing agencies of this time of commotion.
“porphyrines of vitreous fracture that cut glass as readily as flint, and masses of quartz that strike fire quite as profusely from steel, -are yet polished and ground down to bullet-like forms.
“…and yet it is difficult to conceive how the bottom of any sea should have been so violently and so equally agitated for so greatly extended a space…and for a period so prolonged, that the entire area should have come to be covered with a stratum of rolled pebbles of almost every variety of ancient rock, fifteen stories height in thickness.
“some terrible catastrophe involved in sudden destruction the fish in an area at least a hundred miles from boundary to boundary, perhaps much more. The same platform in Orkney as at Cromarty is strewed thick with remains, which exhibit unequivocally the marks of violent death. The figures are contorted, contracted, curved; the tail in many instances is bent around the head; the spines stick out; the fins are spread to the full, as the fish that die in convulsions. The Pterichthys shows its arms extended at their stiffest angle, as if prepared for an enemy. The attitudes of the ichtyolites [any fossil fish] on this platform are attitudes of fear, anger and pain.”
“The remains, too, appear to have suffered nothing from the after-attacks of predaceous fishes; none such seem to have survived. The record is one of destruction at once widely spread and total…
“innumerable existences of an area perhaps ten thousand square miles in extent [being] annihilated at once?
“Conjecture lacks footing in grappling with the enigma, and expatriates in uncertainty over all the known phenomena of death.”
Hugh Miller, The Old Red Sandstone (Boston, 1865; first published in England in 1841), p.48
So the question which comes to mind is: Violent death fell from where, exactly?