Science may be about to lose a skirmish in the age-old ideological conflict between science and religion.  One of its fundamental tenets is about to be shown totally false.

Christians would do well to take notice of these developments because if science has been so very wrong about this idea, it could well be wrong about many other things.

A number of years ago, a large oil company advertised its gasoline product with an animated television commercial explaining how ancient plants and animals “gave their all” so we could have gasoline for our cars today.  The animators depicted a cartoon dinosaur poking its head out of a car’s gasoline tank, making a somewhat comical growling sound as the car sped off.

This amusing commercial illustrated the modern view, held by geologists and paleontologists, that Earth’s petroleum deposits came from the remains of long dead plants and animals.  It was a cleaver portrayal of orthodox science’s theories—a dinosaur tale, if you will.

Interplanetary space exploration, first begun over 40 years ago, has uncovered an embarrassment of enigmas.  And NASA’s Cassini probe to Saturn is about to unlock more secrets.

We may know more about our solar system than we did before we reached out into space, but we understand it less.  Each new mission brings exclamations of “surprise” from scientists because what they learn differs from their preconceptions.  The Cassini mission is no exception.

Among the most mystifying enigmas is the discovery of hydrocarbons—gas and oil, if you will—on other planets and moons.

But how can that be?  Doesn’t gas and oil come from ancient, entombed biomass?  That’s what we learn from the dinosaur tale told us in school.

Earth’s petroleum deposits and its many byproducts, according to geologists, originated in the distillation of hydrocarbons from the decaying remnants of massive deposits of ancient flora and fauna, accumulations that were then buried by successive depositions in enormous subsidence zones.  Over great expanses of time, opine the experts, these deposits were compressed in geological processes, squeezing out the hydrocarbons, which then collected in great pools beneath impermeable layers of rock, waiting for us to tap them with deep wells.

Hence the term “fossil fuel” is applied to natural gas and oil because they are thought to be the byproducts of life.

But if Earth’s petroleum or hydrocarbons came from dead plants and animals, how did they appear in abundance on lifeless planets and moons elsewhere in our solar system?  Are we to assume that these orbs once supported teeming life, which then vanished, leaving behind their hydrocarbons for us to discover?  Or are geologists wrong about the origin of Earth’s hydrocarbons?

A century ago, the idea of obtaining oil from biomass seemed logical.  Probably since time began, man has mined coal for energy from great seams layered in the earth.  Those same coal beds, and the strata adjoining them, hold the fossils of ancient plants and animals.  Since the only things on this planet seen to contain appreciable amounts of hydrocarbons were the flora and fauna that proliferate on its surface, scientists naturally assumed that this was the source for buried gas and oil deposits.

Deep peat beds found in some locations seemed to support that idea as well.  Those peat beds, which yield burnable fuel when dried, are thought to be simply an early step in a process that eventually creates coal and hydrocarbon deposits.  Thus, it seemed reasonable to assume that coal and oil were the byproducts of accumulated and buried biomass.

This explanation for the existence of crude oil and natural gas—hydrocarbons—beneath Earth’s crust may have been useful up until the mid-twentieth century, but it has no meaning in light of the preponderance of evidence that has accumulated since mankind ventured into the space age.