We all remember the theory proposed by some in the not all that distant past of mankind that the earth was flat and that maybe one would sail off the edge. Of course that was wrong thinking, however the science was not there at the time to get it right. But how about more modern times with a major worldwide theory accepted by the entire world scientific community.

Have they ever been wrong?

How did the world's major mountain ranges originate? The geosynclinal theory hypothesized that huge trough-like depressions, known as geosynclines, became filled with sediment and subsided until they gradually became unstable; then, through heat from the interior of the earth, the sediments became crushed, folded and elevated into a mountain chain.

This (theory) was so well established that as late as the 1960 edition of Clark and Stearn's Geological Evolution of North America, the status of the geosynclinal theory was compared favorably with Darwin's theory of natural selection. The book asserted:

"The geosynclinal theory is one of the great unifying principles in geology. In many ways it's roll in geology is similar to that of the theory of evolution, which serves to integrate the many branches of the biological sciences....Just as the doctrine of evolution is universally accepted among biologists, so also the geosynclinal origin of the major mountain systems is an established principle in geology."

Yet, within the short span of only ten years following the publication of that geology book, the geosynclinal theory was replaced by the theory of plate tectonics, which combined the hypotheses of continental drift and sea floor spreading to explain mountain formation. The new theory held that continents, after drifting inexorably toward each other, crashed, resulting in the upraised mountain ranges found on the continents. The Himalayan Mountains, for instance, are rising because the Indian subcontinent is slowly crashing into the Asian continent. (Recently by precise modern measurement capability this was determined to be about 2 inches per year.)

The theory of Darwinian evolution is no more impregnable than the old geosynclinal theory of mountain formation. The theory of intelligent design, with it's new perspective on design in biology, is destined to replace Darwin's mechanism of natural selection.