This Zombie Argument Still Won’t Die

More than a decade ago, I sat down and wrote a four-part series on what has become one of the most durable bad arguments in the young-earth creationist repertoire: the claim that the amount of salt dissolved in the world’s oceans proves the earth cannot be billions of years old. Those posts—published in August and September 2012 here at The Natural Historian—walked through the history of the argument, its dependence on a single 1990 paper by Steven Austin and Russell Humphreys, and the substantial body of scientific evidence that renders the argument meaningless. I thought, perhaps naïvely, that a careful presentation of the facts might help the argument fade from use within my own Christian community.

I was wrong. In the years since, I have continued to encounter the salty sea argument with discouraging regularity—at church seminars, in homeschool curricula, in conversations after Sunday worship, and in the comment sections of Christian apologetics blogs. Not long ago I heard it raised again at a gathering of believers where it was presented with the same confident simplicity it always carries: rivers dump salt into the ocean, the ocean isn’t salty enough, therefore the earth must be young. The audience nodded along, reassured that science was on their side.

I am not angry about this. I am dismayed. I am dismayed because this argument is not merely a scientific error—it is a pastoral problem. When the church stakes its credibility on arguments that are demonstrably wrong, it creates a crisis of faith for young believers who eventually encounter the actual science. If you are a regular reader you know I say this all too frequently but it bears repeating because I have watched this happen. I have received emails from college students who grew up in my own denomination or similar circles, who were taught the salty sea argument alongside the church catechisms, and who now feel that everything they were told about science and faith was a lie. That is the real damage done by arguments like this one. It is not that they fail as science—though they do, catastrophically. It is that they tie the credibility of the gospel to claims that cannot survive contact with an introductory geochemistry course. This is what I have called the gap-dependent faith problem: if your faith requires that ocean geochemistry be unsolvable, what happens when the geochemists solve it?

John Calvin, writing in the Institutes of the Christian Religion (2.2.15), offered a warning that I find myself returning to often:

“If we reflect that the Spirit of God is the only fountain of truth, we will be careful, as we would avoid offering insult to him, not to reject or condemn truth wherever it appears. In despising the gifts, we insult the Giver.” — John Calvin, Institutes 2.2.15

Despising the gifts of modern geochemistry—dismissing three decades of careful research because it contradicts a conclusion we have already decided must be true—is precisely the kind of insult Calvin warned against. We owe our congregations better. We owe our students better. And so, fourteen years after my original series, I am writing again—not because the science has become less clear, but because the argument refuses to die and the science has become overwhelmingly clearer.

What the Salty Sea Argument Claims

Before critiquing any argument, we have an obligation to present it as fairly as I can and in its advocates’ own words. If we cannot state an opponent’s position in terms they would recognize as accurate, we have no business responding to it. So let me lay out the salty sea argument as the three major young-earth creationist organizations present it and I understand it.

The argument rests on what appears to be a straightforward mass-balance calculation. Rivers carry dissolved sodium into the ocean at a measurable rate. Austin and Humphreys, in their 1990 paper “The Sea’s Missing Salt: A Dilemma for Evolutionists,” estimated this input at approximately 457–458 million tons per year. They then catalogued known mechanisms by which sodium is removed from the ocean—ion exchange with clay minerals, sea spray, pore water burial, and a few others—and estimated that these removal processes account for only about 122 million tons per year, roughly 27% of the input. The remaining 335 million tons, they argued, accumulates in the ocean each year with no known mechanism (or at least a sufficient mechanism) for removal.

From this imbalance, the arithmetic seems inescapable. If you start with an ocean containing zero sodium and allow it to accumulate at the estimated net rate, you reach the ocean’s current sodium content in approximately 42 million years. If you push every error bar in the direction most favorable to an old earth—minimizing inputs and maximizing outputs—the absolute upper limit stretches to approximately 62 million years. Since 62 million years is far less than the 4.5 billion years proposed by mainstream geology, the argument concludes that the ocean cannot possibly be as old as scientists claim.

The rhetorical power of this argument comes from its apparent simplicity. It looks like grade-school arithmetic. Rivers carry salt in, not enough salt goes out, therefore the ocean hasn’t been around long enough to accumulate billions of years’ worth. The logic seems airtight.

Answers in Genesis features this argument as item number nine in their “10 Best Evidences from Science That Confirm a Young Earth” series. Andrew Snelling, writing for AiG in 2012 (the article was last featured on the AiG website in August 2021), presents the argument this way:

If the sea had no sodium to start with, it would have accumulated its present amount in less than 42 million years at today’s input and output rates. This is well under the evolutionary age of the ocean, three billion years. The usual reply is that past sodium inputs must have been less and outputs greater. But calculations that are generous to evolutionary geologists still give a maximum age of only 62 million years. — Andrew Snelling, “Very Little Salt in the Sea,” Answers in Genesis (2012; last featured 2021)

The Institute for Creation Research maintains the same argument in its 2021 article “The Oceans Point to a Young Earth,” which includes a dedicated subsection on ocean salt content:

In the end, they determined that the ocean could be no more than 62 million years old. This is a far cry from the three billion years that secular scientists attribute to the ocean. — ICR, “The Oceans Point to a Young Earth” (2021)

Creation Ministries International publishes the same numbers in Jonathan Sarfati’s “Salty Seas—Evidence for a Young Earth,” first published in 2018 and updated as recently as November 2023:

Granting the most generous assumptions to evolutionists, the sea could not be more than 62 million years old—far younger than the billions of years believed by evolutionists. — Jonathan Sarfati, “Salty Seas,” Creation Ministries International (2018; updated 2023)

Jay Wile, whose Exploring Creation and Berean Builders textbook series are widely used in homeschool communities—including many within churches affiliated with my Christian tradition—listed the salty sea argument as one of his “Top Five Reasons for Believing in a Young Earth” on his blog in 2009, writing: “We have been studying this specific question for 300 years. That’s about THREE TIMES longer than we have been studying radioactivity.” That post remains accessible and continues to shape how a generation of homeschooled students understands ocean chemistry.

Note carefully: every one of these sources cites the same numbers. Every one traces back to the same 1990 paper. And every one presents the argument with the same air of settled certainty. This will become important.

The Historical Genealogy—This Argument Was Abandoned by Science Over a Century Ago

The idea of using ocean salinity to estimate the age of the earth is not a young-earth creationist invention. It is a method that mainstream science explored, tested, and ultimately abandoned—and creation scientists are recycling it as though the last 120 years of geochemistry never happened.

The concept was first proposed by Edmond Halley in 1715, in a paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Halley reasoned that rivers carry minute quantities of dissolved salts into the ocean, that evaporation removes only pure water, and that therefore the ocean should be getting progressively saltier over time. He suggested that if the rate of increase could be measured over several centuries, the elapsed time since the oceans were initially fresh could be calculated. Halley lacked the data to perform the calculation himself, but his conceptual framework—what we might call the “accumulation paradigm”—would persist for nearly two centuries.

The most rigorous application of Halley’s method came in 1899, when John Joly used the best available river discharge data and ocean volume estimates to calculate that it would take approximately 80 to 90 million years for the oceans to reach their current sodium concentration, assuming they started fresh. Joly’s work was initially taken seriously. It provided a physical age estimate for the earth that seemed to reconcile the vastly different numbers offered by physicists like Lord Kelvin and geologists using sedimentation rates. George F. Becker refined Joly’s calculations in 1910, arriving at 50 to 70 million years, while acknowledging uncertainties about initial conditions and the constancy of input rates.

Then came the paradigm shift. By the 1930s, radiometric dating methods had established that the earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old—orders of magnitude older than any salt-based estimate. Geochemists did not react by declaring the ocean a mystery. They reacted by recognizing that the salt calculation was never measuring an “age” in the first place. What Joly had calculated was the residence time of sodium in the ocean—the average amount of time a sodium ion remains dissolved in seawater before being removed by some geochemical process and replaced by another. D. A. Livingstone’s 1963 paper in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta was a key milestone in formalizing this distinction.

The residence time of sodium is currently estimated at approximately 40 to 80 million years, depending on the study. This is, not coincidentally, approximately the same number that Austin and Humphreys “discovered” in 1990 and proclaimed as a “maximum age.” They did not discover anything new. They rediscovered the residence time and misrepresented it as an age.

An analogy may help. Imagine you measure how long the average molecule of water stays in a swimming pool before evaporating, and you find it’s about three weeks. Would you then declare that the pool was built three weeks ago? Of course not. The pool has a continuous cycle of water entering and leaving; the three-week figure tells you about the rate of cycling, not the date of construction. This is exactly the error that the salty sea argument makes with the ocean—and it is an error that mainstream science identified and corrected more than sixty years ago.

The Modern YEC Genealogy—A Propagation Chain Built on One Paper

Understanding how the salty sea argument entered and spread through the young-earth creationist community is essential to understanding why it persists. The genealogy is remarkably linear.

Henry Morris and John Whitcomb made early use of ocean chemistry arguments in The Genesis Flood (1961), though they focused more broadly on accumulation rates for various dissolved substances. Morris later compiled a list of residence times for various elements in Scientific Creationism (1974), presenting them as “years to accumulate in the ocean” and arguing that their relatively short timescales proved the earth could not be billions of years old. This was, at best, a fundamental misunderstanding of what residence time means.

An early and revealing precursor appeared in 1973, when Stewart Nevins published “Evolution: The Ocean Says NO!” as an ICR Impact article. Nevins focused primarily on sedimentation and erosion rates rather than sodium specifically, but the article explicitly framed ocean properties as a challenge to long timescales—establishing the rhetorical template that Austin and Humphreys would later formalize.

The seminal event was the publication of Steven A. Austin and D. Russell Humphreys’ paper “The Sea’s Missing Salt: A Dilemma for Evolutionists” at the Second International Conference on Creationism in 1990. This paper attempted a detailed sodium budget, identifying eleven input mechanisms and seven output mechanisms. Its conclusion—that sodium removal accounted for only 27% of input, yielding a “maximum age” of 62 million years—has been the sole technical foundation for every subsequent use of this argument in YEC literature. Every one.

The propagation chain from that single paper is predictable and well-documented. Austin and Humphreys’ technical paper was summarized in popular articles in Acts & Facts (ICR) and Answers magazine (AiG). Those summaries were incorporated into homeschool textbooks—Jay Wile’s Exploring Creation series and his Berean Builders materials are the most prominent. The textbook claims became talking points in the seminar circuit, where speakers like Nathaniel Jeanson—whose PhD is in cell and developmental biology, not geochemistry or any earth science—presented the argument to audiences at churches and conferences as though it were settled science. Those audiences then repeated the claim to their friends, their children, their Sunday school classes, and the cycle continued.

Here is the key structural problem: no YEC organization has published any new empirical analysis of the ocean sodium budget since 1990. Thirty-five years of marine geochemistry have passed. Thousands of papers have been published on ocean chemistry, seafloor alteration, reverse weathering, paleosalinity, and satellite oceanography. And every YEC article on this topic still recycles the same numbers: 457 million tonnes input, 122 million tonnes output, 62 million year maximum. Not a single data point has been updated. This alone should give any thoughtful reader pause.

It is also worth noting what the major YEC organizations have not done. Both Answers in Genesis and Creation Ministries International maintain explicit lists of “arguments to avoid”—claims they consider too weak or too easily refuted for public use. The salty sea argument does not appear on either list. They still consider it a good argument. This is not a fringe claim being made by a few overeager speakers. It is an argument that the major organizations actively endorse and promote.

Why This Is Not Science

Let me be very direct. The creation science explanation of ocean salt is not science. It is a 35-year-old calculation built on inflated inputs, drastically underestimated outputs, and a conceptual framework that mainstream geochemistry abandoned more than a century ago. Let me lay out why.

The inputs were inflated. Austin and Humphreys’ sodium input figures relied on river data that did not account for anthropogenic increases in river sodium. This is not a minor technical quibble. Biebie et al. (2021, Science of The Total Environment, 889, 164138) found that human activity—agriculture, urbanization, road salt, industrial discharge—has increased global river sodium fluxes by approximately 86% above pre-industrial baselines. Modern river measurements dramatically overstate the geologically relevant input rate. When Austin and Humphreys used contemporary river data to estimate how much sodium “naturally” enters the ocean, they were including a massive anthropogenic signal that has no relevance to geological timescales.

Additionally, Austin and Humphreys listed submarine groundwater discharge as a sodium source. A landmark 2025 study has overturned this assumption entirely. Kiro (2025, Nature Communications, 16, 7082) demonstrated that density-driven seawater circulation through coastal aquifer sediments functions as a net sodium sink: cation exchange in the sediments strips Na⁺ from circulating seawater while releasing Ca²⁺ and Sr²⁺. The steady-state water flux through this process is estimated at approximately 960 km³/yr—a globally significant volume. This completely reverses one of Austin and Humphreys’ input terms. What they counted as a source is actually a drain.

The outputs were drastically underestimated—the “missing sinks” are no longer missing. This is the heart of the matter. The “missing salt” that Austin and Humphreys claimed the ocean could not account for was not missing. It was hidden in geochemical processes whose magnitude was poorly known in 1990 and has been dramatically revised upward in the decades since.

Consider high-temperature basalt alteration—the process by which seawater circulating through hot oceanic crust at mid-ocean ridges reacts with basalt to form the mineral albite, permanently incorporating sodium into the rock. Austin and Humphreys estimated this process removed only 0.44 × 10¹⁰ kg Na/yr. Modern estimates by Coogan and Dosso (2012), place this figure at approximately 13 × 10¹⁰ kg Na/yr—roughly thirty times their value. This single correction alone closes much of their supposed gap between inputs and outputs.

Low-temperature seafloor alteration provides another substantial sink. Coogan and Gillis (2018, Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 46, 21–45) showed that seawater circulating through cooler oceanic crust forms secondary minerals—celadonite, palagonite, zeolites—that scavenge sodium from the water, contributing an additional 2 to 5 × 10¹⁰ kg Na/yr in removal.

But the single most important post-2012 development is the rehabilitation of reverse weathering—the formation of authigenic clay minerals in marine sediments. This process consumes dissolved cations, including Na⁺, K⁺, and Mg²⁺, from seawater while releasing CO₂. First proposed by Mackenzie and Garrels in 1966 and long considered a minor factor in ocean chemistry, reverse weathering has undergone a dramatic reassessment in the past decade.

Michalopoulos and Aller (1995, Science, 270, 614–617) first demonstrated that authigenic clays precipitate on natural substrates in Amazon delta sediments within 12 to 36 months, consuming roughly 10% of the global riverine K⁺ flux from the Amazon shelf alone. Rahman, Aller, and Cochran (2017, Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 31, 1559–1578) used cosmogenic ³²Si as a tracer to show that 4.5 to 4.9 Tmol Si/yr is trapped in marine nearshore deposits as rapidly formed authigenic clay—two to three times previous estimates, accounting for 100% of the “missing silica sink” in the marine silicon budget. Because cations are co-consumed with silica during clay formation, this implies correspondingly larger removal fluxes for sodium, potassium, and magnesium than anyone had previously budgeted.

Isson and Planavsky (2018, Nature, 560, 471–475) elevated reverse weathering from a curiosity to a planetary-scale climate regulator, showing that it acts as a long-term stabilizer of marine pH and atmospheric CO₂. Most recently, Zhao et al. (2025, Science Advances) reported the formation of Fe(II)-bearing smectite and mica from biogenic silica in just 40 days—potentially requiring an order-of-magnitude upward revision of reverse weathering rates. Baldermann et al. (2025, Clay Minerals, 60(1)) provide the most current comprehensive review, confirming that reverse weathering accounts for more than 25% of known marine reactive silica sinks and that the cumulative sequestration of sodium, potassium, lithium, magnesium, iron, aluminum, and silicon is globally significant.

Continental shelf groundwater diagenesis adds yet another removal mechanism. Wilson, Osborn, and White (2024, Nature Communications, 15, 1143) proposed that large-scale groundwater flow through continental shelf sediments removes Na⁺ at rates comparable to mid-ocean ridge circulation—a previously unrecognized process that further tightens the sodium budget.

The cumulative picture is clear. Holland (2005, American Journal of Science, 305, 220–239) concluded that sodium loss rates match river input “within the uncertainty of the measurements.”  The subsequent reclassification of submarine groundwater discharge as a sink, the upward revision of reverse weathering, and the recognition of continental shelf processes push the budget even closer to equilibrium. The “missing salt” that Austin and Humphreys could not account for in 1990 was substantially hidden in authigenic clay minerals forming in marine sediments worldwide—a process whose magnitude was unknown in 1990 and has been revised sharply upward with each subsequent study.

The paleosalinity record shows the opposite of what the argument predicts. If the YEC model were correct and sodium has been accumulating since creation roughly 6,000 years ago—or even since the Flood roughly 4,500 years ago—then past oceans should have been significantly less salty than today. But the geological record shows the opposite. The oceans of the deep past were likely saltier than they are now.

Hay et al. (2006, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 240, 3–46) remains the most comprehensive Phanerozoic salinity reconstruction. By inventorying known evaporite deposits and tracking chloride partitioning between ocean and sedimentary rock, they documented a secular decline from approximately 50‰ in the early Paleozoic to 34.7‰ today. Their critical calculation: if all known evaporite deposits were simultaneously dissolved back into the ocean, salinity would rise to 57–73‰. This means the geological record preserves roughly half as much salt as currently dissolved in the ocean—and this is a minimum estimate, since many ancient deposits have been lost to erosion, dissolution, and subduction.

For the Precambrian (that would be Pre-Flood in the young-earth scenario), two competing models exist, and both contradict the YEC premise. Knauth (2005, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 219, 53–69) argued for initial Archean ocean salinity of 1.5 to 2 times modern values—approximately 52 to 70‰—remaining elevated through the Archean because stable continental cratons capable of sequestering giant halite beds had not yet formed. Marty et al. (2018, Comptes Rendus Geoscience, 350, 154–163), using noble gas analysis of fluid inclusions in 3.5 to 3.0 billion-year-old hydrothermal quartz, argued that Archean salinity was comparable to modern values. Under Knauth’s model, salinity has been decreasing for billions of years. Under Marty’s model, it has been roughly constant. Neither supports accumulation. Both contradict the fundamental prediction of the salty sea argument.

Massive episodic salt removal events demonstrate the system is not one-directional. The geological record documents spectacular episodes in which enormous volumes of salt were extracted from the ocean and locked in sedimentary deposits. Consider the Messinian Salinity Crisis, approximately 5.97 to 5.33 million years ago, when the Mediterranean Sea was nearly cut off from the Atlantic and repeatedly dried down, depositing an estimated 821,000 to 927,000 km³ of salt—roughly 4% of the total salt dissolved in the world’s oceans, removed in a single geological episode (Haq et al. 2020; Spatola et al. 2020; Krijgsman et al. 2024, Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, 5, 335–350). The Gulf of Mexico Basin, formed approximately 160 million years ago, contains roughly 2,400,000 km³ of salt—the single largest basinal deposit known. The Permian Zechstein Basin deposited up to 2,000 meters of evaporitic rock across northwestern Europe. The Neoproterozoic-Cambrian Hormuz and Ara Salt deposits represent arguably the largest volume deposited in the past 600 million years.

These events follow the Wilson cycle with approximately 200 to 500 million-year periodicity—salt is episodically removed at scales that dwarf any year-to-year river input. The YEC budget analysis completely ignores these events, because acknowledging them would require acknowledging the deep time in which they formed. This is circular reasoning: assume the world is young, therefore reject the mechanisms that remove salt, therefore conclude the world must be young because there is “too much” salt.

Modern observations show redistribution, not accumulation. The YEC argument implicitly predicts that the ocean should be getting measurably saltier each year. We are now in a position to test that prediction directly, with unprecedented precision—and the data show the opposite.

Since Durack et al. (2012, Science, 336, 455–458) established the “fresh gets fresher, salty gets saltier” pattern, a network of more than 4,100 Argo floats and multiple satellite missions (SMOS, Aquarius, SMAP) has confirmed that observed salinity changes reflect the redistribution of existing salt by the water cycle, not the accumulation of new salt. High-salinity subtropical regions are becoming slightly saltier as evaporation intensifies; low-salinity tropical and high-latitude regions are freshening as precipitation increases. Cheng et al. (2020, Journal of Climate, 33, 10357–10381) documented a surface salinity pattern amplification of 7.5% over 1960–2017.

Liu et al. (2019, Nature Communications, 10, 3445) provided perhaps the most relevant finding for this debate: full-depth analysis reveals a vertically layered structure of salinity changes, with freshening at some depths compensated by salinification at others. This is vertical redistribution of existing salt, not accumulation. Douville et al. (2024, Geophysical Research Letters, 51) further confirmed this, describing the pattern as “fresh gets fresher but salty hesitates.”

The only measurable change to total dissolved salt on short timescales is a tiny global freshening signal from ice sheet and glacier melt—the ocean is getting slightly less salty, not more. The fundamental prediction of the YEC model—that the ocean should be getting progressively saltier—is falsified by direct observation.

Why This Is Not Science—The Structural Problem

The specific errors catalogued above are damaging enough, but it is worth stepping back to address why the approach itself fails as science. The problems are not merely empirical—they are structural.

First, the argument cherry-picks which data count. The creation scientist must ignore massive evaporite deposits—the Mediterranean, the Gulf of Mexico, the Zechstein Basin—because acknowledging them would require acknowledging the deep time in which they formed. This is not a minor omission. These deposits contain volumes of salt comparable to significant fractions of the total salt currently dissolved in the ocean. Ignoring them is like calculating a family’s net worth while ignoring their mortgage.

Second, the argument has not been updated in 35 years. A living scientific hypothesis is continually revised as new data emerge. If a geochemist published a sodium budget in 1990 and never revisited it in light of three decades of subsequent research—research that included the discovery of entirely new removal mechanisms and order-of-magnitude revisions of existing ones—that geochemist would be laughed out of the profession. The fact that every YEC organization still cites the same 1990 numbers—without incorporating any of the advances in reverse weathering, basalt alteration, submarine groundwater discharge, satellite salinity observation, or paleosalinity reconstruction—is itself evidence that this is not functioning as science. It is functioning as apologetics.

Third, the argument confuses residence time with age. This error was identified and corrected in mainstream geochemistry by the 1960s. Austin and Humphreys rediscovered the residence time—approximately 40 to 80 million years, depending on the study—and presented it as if it were a new finding about the ocean’s age. Every subsequent YEC author has repeated this error because they are citing Austin and Humphreys rather than engaging with the geochemical literature directly.

Fourth, the argument assumes a one-directional system. It requires that salt only accumulates. But the ocean is a dynamic system with massive inputs and massive outputs that vary dramatically with tectonic activity, climate, and basin restriction. The geological record demonstrates this conclusively. The Mediterranean alone has swallowed and released enormous volumes of salt multiple times. To treat the ocean as a bucket that only fills is to ignore everything we know about how the earth actually works.

Fifth—and this is the point I find most frustrating—the argument is utterly void of explanatory power even on its own terms. It gives a “maximum age” of 62 million years. Not 6,000 years. Not 10,000 years. Sixty-two million years. YEC proponents must then wave away the remaining five orders of magnitude between 62 million and 6,000 with vague appeals to the Flood adding enormous quantities of salt. But if the Flood can add arbitrary amounts of salt to the ocean, then the entire calculation is meaningless—you cannot use the same catastrophic event both to explain why there is so much salt and to claim the salt proves the earth is young. The argument devours itself.

The Confirmation Bias Problem

Why does this argument persist despite being so thoroughly refuted? I reflected on this question at length in my 2012 series, and I believe the answer has not changed—it has only become more pronounced.

The argument propagates through a trust chain. Austin and Humphreys publish a technical-sounding paper. The major organizations—AiG, ICR, CMI—summarize it in popular articles. Seminar speakers incorporate it into their presentations. Textbook authors include it in curricula. Lay believers hear it repeated from multiple trusted sources and conclude it must be true, because so many people they respect affirm it. At each step in the chain, the audience trusts the authority of the speaker because they are fellow Christians with credentials. The PhD after someone’s name carries enormous weight in these communities, even when—especially when—the PhD is not in the relevant field.

I observed this firsthand in 2012 at the PCA General Assembly, where I attended a seminar at which the salty sea argument was raised as a question from the audience. The questioner had clearly heard it from a YEC speaker. A PhD geologist at the podium explained the history and the problems with the argument. Just weeks later, a Reformed blogger who had been at the same seminar reported enthusiastically on a YEC talk that featured the salty sea argument—apparently having forgotten or dismissed the geologist’s response entirely. This is confirmation bias at work: the argument that fits one’s existing worldview is remembered and amplified; the refutation is forgotten.

The irony is rich. YEC organizations like Answers in Genesis are fond of saying that “we all look at the same data”—the difference, they claim, is merely the interpretive framework. But in the case of the salty sea, they demonstrably do not look at the same data. They have not looked at any of the data published since 1990. They have not incorporated reverse weathering. They have not accounted for the reclassification of submarine groundwater discharge as a sink. They have not acknowledged the paleosalinity record. They have not engaged with satellite salinity observations. The claim that the disagreement is about interpretation rather than data is, in this case, simply false. The disagreement is about whether one is willing to read the data at all.

And the expertise mismatch compounds the problem. When a speaker like Nathaniel Jeanson—whose PhD is in cell and developmental biology—presents geology arguments to a church audience, the audience sees the PhD and assumes authority across domains. They do not recognize that a biologist presenting ocean geochemistry is operating well outside his training. I say this not to impugn Jeanson’s intelligence but to observe that the audience is not in a position to evaluate his claims, and he bears a correspondingly heavy responsibility to get those claims right. I do not believe he has met that responsibility.

Each repetition of the argument in a new venue—each seminar, each textbook chapter, each blog post—increases the listener’s confidence that it must be true. This is the spiral of confidence I described in 2012: cumulative reinforcement from trusted sources creates the impression of a settled scientific case, when in fact the case has been settled—decisively against the YEC position—for decades.

Pursuing Truth with Integrity

I return, at the end, to where I began: with pastoral concern.

My worry is not primarily about the science. The science is clear, and it is getting clearer with every passing year. My worry is about what happens to the faith of young believers whose confidence has been built, in part, on arguments like this one. When they encounter the actual science—as they inevitably will, in a college classroom or a conversation with a colleague or a late-night internet search—the argument does not just collapse. Their confidence in everything they were taught collapses with it. If the people I trusted were this wrong about ocean salt, what else were they wrong about? Were they wrong about the resurrection? About the reliability of scripture? About God himself? I have watched this spiral happen in real time, and it is heartbreaking.

This is the real damage done by tying the credibility of the faith to demonstrably false scientific claims. It is not science that threatens faith. It is bad science, presented with the authority of the church, that threatens faith. When we tell our young people that the ocean proves the earth is young, and when they discover that the ocean proves no such thing, the casualty is not their belief in old-earth geology. The casualty is their trust in the church.

The alternative is not capitulation. It is not a retreat from theological conviction. Most strains of the Christian tradition have always held that God’s providence works through secondary causes—the same natural processes that build mountains, erode canyons, and cycle salt through the world’s oceans. These processes are no less God-directed for being natural. They are, in fact, expressions of the very providence we confess every Lord’s Day. A faith that embraces what God has revealed in both Scripture and nature does not need to fear what the rocks and the oceans tell us. It does not need the ocean to be a mystery. It can look at the extraordinary complexity of the sodium cycle—the rivers carrying weathered minerals to the sea, the mid-ocean ridges cooking seawater into new rock, the authigenic clays quietly forming in the sediments of the Amazon delta, the Mediterranean drying down and filling up over millions of years—and see in all of it the hand of a God who sustains his creation through processes of breathtaking intricacy.

But if we are going to claim the authority of science in defense of our theological convictions, we bear the responsibility of getting the science right. The salty sea argument fails that test, and it has failed it for a very long time. We owe our congregations and our students better than a 35-year-old calculation that its own field abandoned a century ago. We owe them the truth—all of it, even the parts that require us to rethink assumptions we have held dear. That is what it means to follow the Spirit of God, the only fountain of truth, wherever that truth appears.

Blessings,

Joel Duff

References

Young-Earth Creationist Sources

Austin, S.A. & Humphreys, D.R. (1990). “The Sea’s Missing Salt: A Dilemma for Evolutionists.” Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism, 2:17–33.

Morris, H.M. & Whitcomb, J.C. (1961). The Genesis Flood. Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing.

Nevins, S.E. (1973). “Evolution: The Ocean Says NO!” ICR Impact Article. https://www.icr.org/article/evolution-ocean-says-no/

Sherwin, F. (2010). “The Ocean’s Salt Clock Shows a Young World.” Acts & Facts, 39(7). https://www.icr.org/content/oceans-salt-clock-shows-young-world

Snelling, A. (2012; last featured 2021). “Very Little Salt in the Sea.” Answers in Genesis. https://answersingenesis.org/evidence-for-creation/9-very-little-salt-in-the-sea/

ICR (2021). “The Oceans Point to a Young Earth.” https://www.icr.org/content/oceans-point-young-earth

Sarfati, J. (2018; updated 2023). “Salty Seas—Evidence for a Young Earth.” Creation Ministries International. https://creation.com/en/articles/salty-seas-evidence-for-a-young-earth

Wile, J. (2009). “My ‘Top Five’ Reasons for Believing in a Young Earth (Part 4 of 6).” Blog post, June 28, 2009. http://blog.drwile.com/?p=127

Scientific Literature

Baldermann, A., Banerjee, S., Löhr, S. C., Rudmin, M., Warr, L. N., & Chakraborty, A. (2025). Exploring reverse silicate weathering across geological time: a review. Clay Minerals, 60(1), 1-27.

Beibei, E., Zhang, S., Driscoll, C. T., & Wen, T. (2023). Human and natural impacts on the US freshwater salinization and alkalinization: A machine learning approach. Science of The Total Environment, 889, 164138.

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