The evidence clearly shows that they didn't happen in the past,
Which evidence shows that, Faith?
Take just one spot I'm familiar with, the southwest corner of Oklahoma. The present evidence there, from surface geology and several thousand oil and gas wells, shows that a major range of mountains grew there about 500,000,000 years ago, and slowly got eroded, with debris largely going into a body of water to the northwest, to deposit a big layer of sediment now called the Granite Wash. Rivers later cut into this sediment while it was dry land. Maybe 300,000,000 years ago it was submerged again under a different sea, and covered with a couple of miles of sediments. Rinse and repeat a couple of times....and we have the Granite Wash far beneath the surface up past Amarillo today.
Or did I misunderstand what "they" refers to in the quote from you above?