The Fantasy of Evolution

"Sea Monsters" -- antediluvian life forms or creatures evolved over millions of years?

2012-01-25T17:09:00.000-08:00

Watching a film at Netflix by National Geographic titled Sea Monsters. (I tried but couldn't get the "embed" function to work for the trailer.)

The film shows some geologists on a fossil hunt in Kansas, finding bones of prehistoric reptilian dinosaurian type sea creatures. They also find the more common ammonite fossil -- and it's interesting to see this as I had no idea what size to picture those creatures, and the fossil is a lot larger than I had visualized, about the diameter of a good sized serving platter I'd say.

It's the ammonite fossils they say tell them when all these creatures in the same vicinity lived, which is of course based on their Geologic Time Table that layers the physical world in time periods, just as Dr. A does as quoted in the post below. They always speak of the time element as fact although it is nothing but an imaginative construct that they impose on the sedimentary and fossil phenomena.

Speaking of it as fact is what I call "word magic." They don't need the actual processes of science to reify an imaginative construct into Reality and enforce it with indignant denunciations as "anti-science" of anyone who isn't convinced. "The poetry of reality" as Dr. A says, although it's just the poetry of fantasy.

Most of the film is animation of the creatures reconstructed from their fossils and shown swimming in the seas that supposedly covered the area for some huge length of time in the "Cretaceous" period, and the "Triassic" and "Jurassic." They do show the sea that bisected the continent of North America at one time, and I have no doubt there is evidence in shorelines that identify such a body of water that stood long enough for such markers to be evident, but of course I don't buy the millions of years explanation for anything.

No, I'm watching this as an interesting imaginative reconstruction of life forms that lived before the Noachian Flood and that were no doubt transported by that Flood to their resting places where they were buried and fossilized and where these geologists now find them.

The "sea" that bisected the continent was of course a temporary stage of the Flood after it had receded or at least begun to recede, as were all the ancient extinct large lakes of western North America such as Missoula and Lahontan and Bonneville. Simply large lakes that stood for some time after the Flood and then finally drained away, in some cases suddenly and catastrophically, probably due to the tectonic forces that occurred after the Flood and also built the Rockies. The catastrophic draining of one such great standing body of water is one very plausible explanation for the carving out of the Grand Canyon. Not a feat any ordinary river could have accomplished.

One funny thing: A few large fossils were found with food in their stomachs, one rather "stuffed to the gills" as it were, which prompted the speculation that it must have died of gluttony. Of another the narrator wondered why it would have died so suddenly after a good meal. Of course they conjured an explanation out of a hat as usual, but duh, folks, obviously the most reasonable explanation is that they were all caught in the same catastrophic event at the same time, some having just filled their stomachs.

Same phenomena, different interpretation, just as reasonable, no, really, more reasonable than the establishment interpretation.

Dr. A's course in geology finally approaches the controversial questions

2012-01-25T11:46:00.000-08:00

I'm still following Dr. A's Geology presentations, though not intensively. Today he added a comment that is really the first time he's brought up anything controversial, so I have to at least note it.

There is an inordinate number of different kinds of sediment. This is just how it is. This makes the study of geology different from studying (for example) the theory of gravity. Instead of Einstein's single equation, geologists must study a vast variety of things that happen on the face of the Earth. Dust-storms blow, trees fall, the tide goes in and out, turbidity currents do their thing, glaciers do theirs, peat-swamps form, rivers dposit point-bars, inevitable chemical processes gnaw at the rocks, desert sand is piled up by the wind, coccoliths drift with immense slowness towards the seafloor, the tide makes flaser deposits ... and so on and so on.

And you don't quite see it all until you see it all. Before I undertook my own study of geology, I regarded sediment as the dirt one finds fossils in. Now I see landscapes. "Here" (we say) "are the remains of ancient mountains, long gone. Over their cloud-capped heads, the storm broke, and angry torrents flowed down and dwindled into the rain-shadowed desert when dinosaurs walked --- look, here are their footprints around the ancient oases. Vast was that expanse of sand, which the wind sifted for tens of millions of years. It was bordered by a great yet shallow sea ..."

In writing this textbook, I have to deal with this one sediment at a time, one ripple in the mud, one lamina in the sand, but when we look at it all together, we see vanished landscapes, lost worlds. Piece by piece we put it together, until we see the whole.

"Science is the poetry of reality."

This synthesis he makes from the great variety of geological phenomena, involving former "landscapes" that span huge periods of time, interpretive scenarios that he places in ancient time periods, is of course the standard Old Earth way of construing it. It's an imaginative construct laid over the phenomena, and of course the most predictable imaginative construct, and it is given without giving the logical steps by which he arrived at it. It's SOME kind of "poetry" but more like the poetry of biased imagination than the poetry of reality.

He promised to give the reasons "how we know" this or that as he goes, and he's been doing that but not on anything particularly controversial until now. In this comment he does not even try to say "how we know" about these landscapes, he simply says this is how he now sees it, how he puts it all together, which of course is how the establishment puts it all together.

But not how a Floodist would put it all together, and until he provides us with the logical steps that lead to his conclusion he deprives a Floodist of the necessary material to falsify his claims, just as this kind of "science" always does, always leaping to the imaginative Big Picture, always Telling the Story of past events as they dream them up and letting that stand for Science, while slighting the particular phenomena that led them to their interpretation.

THIS is where you need to tell us "how you know" all this, Dr. A., and of course this is exactly where you DON'T tell us that. Please correct course. Thank you.

Which side is "anti-science?"

2011-12-10T14:43:00.000-08:00

Saw a mention at EvC of the broadcast of an interview with eight Nobel prize winners --ONLY AVAILABLE FOR THE NEXT SEVEN DAYS -- so I listened to it. It was interesting in itself just hearing a bunch of science types talk about their work, until it came around to the familiar assumption that the objections of some Americans to evolution, to global warming and to stem cell research are "anti-science." This sort of "analysis" is stupid, just regurgitated bias that can never be answered. The objection to these particular "science" projects or theories is not an objection to science. There are thousands of scientific projects and achievements to which there is no objection whatever but in fact appreciation, but the bias prevails nevertheless.

The objection to evolution is two-fold: it contradicts God's word and THERE IS NO EVIDENCE FOR IT, it's all an edifice built out of conjecture and imagination that is circular and self-validating, that co-opts a lot of real science to it that is mistaken for validation though it just as well validates creationism instead. Evolution is a theory about past events which can never be positively proved or disproved. To call an objection to evolution "anti-science" is to betray a biased stupidity about the very nature of science, and it gets SO tiresome hearing all the lectures about what science is and does when NONE OF THEM APPLY TO THIS TOPIC. Word magic, not science.

The objection to global warming is that the science for it is extremely fuzzy and unconvincing as well as to a great extent politically motivated with dire consequences contingent on the not-so-scientific conclusions. For myself I don't know how far to accept any of it because the science just does not come across as convincing. The number of variables involved in global-scale phenomena should in itself be a caveat against coming to any glib conclusions. To justify implementing the political restraints on all kinds of human activities that believers in global warming think necessary requires a LOT MORE SCIENTIFIC CERTAINTY than is presently possible that human activity has much to do with a global warming trend if even such a trend can itself be established with certainty. There is nothing whatever that is "anti-science" about the objections, the whole issue is far more politics than science.

As for stem cell research, this is a moral issue, similar to the atomic bomb issue. Do you create life in order to kill it in order to save other lives? To call this position anti-science is to descend to an abysmal depth of barbarism and moral dementia. Ethics, not science.

Design needs a Designer despite evolutionist claims

2011-11-17T08:57:00.000-08:00

In a discussion at EvC about logical fallacies a creationist claims it is logically valid to say that biological information must have had a designer, and an evolutionist answered that that's not valid because it leaves out evolution as a cause of anything that looks designed. [I'm paraphrasing because I don't have time to track it all down at the moment, but maybe I can later].

Of course the designer is obvious in most cases where something appears designed, whereas evolution has never ever been shown to produce something that appears designed, it's simply assumed that it must have. They merely assert it, they do not, because they can not, prove it.

Now we have a slightly different twist on the argument:

[Creationist Mike the Wiz says] I am not dogmatic, but nobody has shown me any strictly logical reasons to give up the belief in information showing a designer.
[Evolutionist Dr. A answers] * coughs *

Yes I have, namely that we often see it being produced without one. When it comes to living things, we invariably see it being produced without one. Who designed your genome? We know that it was produced by reproduction, recombination, and mutation, don't we?

"Your" genome is not "the" genome. Just because once in operation it goes on reproducing itself is no proof whatever that the whole system in which self-reproduction is part of the design was itself designed without a designer but only by blind evolution. In fact there are many machines designed by human beings that once in operation go on operating without human input but only do so because their ability to go on operating without human input is what they were originally designed by human beings to do.

Silly silly silly Dr. A.

The Puny Fallen Human Mind Wins Against God?

2011-11-12T10:34:00.000-08:00

Kirk Bertsche is a physicist, a Christian and a creationist, who posts occasionally at EvC forums. I usually appreciate his thoughtful posts, but he believes in an Old Earth and that is a contradiction with the Bible. (Buzsaw is another creationist at EvC who believes in an Old Earth. In fact I don't think there is a Young Earth Creationist at EvC any more). This is sad. It means he's allowed science to triumph over God's word.

Today he posted on a thread about the speed of light as a challenge to Young Earth Creationism. He gives three possible answers to the challenge and pretty much concludes that the fact of the speed of light does indeed defeat the Bible:

1) the simplest answer: God created light in transit. But when one considers the vast amount of information which is contained in the light from a star, this makes God seem deceptive. (The spectrum tells us elemental composition, recessional velocity, rotational velocity, etc.) Thus some YECs have said this argument should not be used.

2) another answer is that the speed of light was much faster in the past. But the main evidence for this is an imaginative analysis of historical data by Setterfield, which has been questioned even by other YECs. Again, some YECs have said that this argument should not be used.

3) Jason Lisle has recently proposed an imaginative theory, that the speed of light moves instantaneously toward an observer, and at 1/2 c away from an observer. He claims freedom to do this because he believes that we can only measure the round trip speed of light, but not the one-way speed of light. But in this he is wrong. We have good measurements of the one-way speed of light, and devices such as particle accelerators and free-electron lasers would not work if the one-way speed of light were not c.

I think the speed of light is a good issue to raise with YECs. I have a YEC friend who became an OEC ("old earth creationist") after thinking about the explosion of SN 1987A.

Why isn't it immediately apparent to a generally good head like Dr. Bertsche, who does seem to be a true Christian, that what fallen humanity is able to think cannot be made God's judge?

The only right answer to this challenge is that we don't know how God did it -- perhaps one of the current YEC theories is correct for that matter though obviously it's not easy to determine that -- but if we believe God's word it is certain that NOTHING in His universe is going to contradict His Word.

This is only "a good issue to raise with YECs" because we don't have an answer to it, so it gives us the choice of rejecting science, which is cause for endless jeering by the unbelievers, or capitulating as his friend did who became an Old Earth Creationist. So by saying that, Dr. Bertsche shows his bias in favor of science against God. We have these and only these options: Choose against science or choose against God. Why is it that so many choose against God? WAY too much trust in our current state of knowledge and in the fallen human intellect.

No, issues we do not know enough to answer in a way that supports God's word have to be left alone. We have plenty we can answer very well, and if those were taken seriously they should in themselves force an honest person to rethink such claims as converted kbertsche's friend.

Geology course at EvC update

2011-11-11T08:29:00.000-08:00

Just want to report I've been following the Introduction to Geology thread at EvC and finding it interesting. I like the way he's organizing it. Nothing controversial for a Floodist so far, just a good presentation of the material. I'm collecting the posts but there's nothing to comment on yet.

Good overview of Biblical foundations for Young Earth by Albert Mohler

2011-11-06T10:35:00.000-08:00

Happened to hear Albert Mohler on the radio this morning, talking at last year's Ligonier conference on the subject of "Why does the earth look old?" He did a great job spelling out from the Bible why we have to be Young Earth Creationists

I was going to post some of my notes on it but found the talk well-represented by the notes here.

I'll just post a few of the comments from that site:

Mohler then asked this: what is the urgency of this question? The answer is that there is great urgency in adequately addressing this question. There are some recent developments that indicate why this is so. The controversy concerning Bruce Waltke is just one example—Waltke said recently that unless we embrace evolution, evangelicalism will be reduced to the status of a cult. Meanwhile, we are constantly faced with supposed facts that science presents a challenge that must be embraced by the church. The current mental environment in which we live is an environment shaped by the intellectual assumption that the world is very old. To speak in confrontation to that environment comes at a significant cost. Even greater urgency is pressed upon us by the new atheism...

Mohler proceeded to argue for the theological necessity of understanding a young earth and 24-hour calendar days. He presented two great issues that arise when we allow for a day-age theory or any other old-earth understanding of creation.

The first issue concerns the integrity of Scripture. He conceded that many of those who hold to a day-age view are seeking to believe it without doing violence to the inerrancy of Scripture. And yet there are many issues that must be addressed. What is sorely lacking in the evangelical movement today is a consideration of the theological cost of such a view. This entire conversation is either missing or marginalized in the church today. The exegetical issues are real and the exegetical evidence based on a Reformation understanding of Scripture leads to a natural understanding of 24-hour days in creation. Mohler would allow that it might be possible that he is over-reading the text in this regard. For this reason we must hear the warnings of those who hold to an older view of the universe since it is possible that we may be creating an intellectual problem that is not necessary. And yet he simply finds that the exegetical cost and the theological cost is just too high.

An old-earth review raises at least two important issues. First, it raises the issue of the historicity of Adam. Paul bases his understanding of human sinfulness and Adam’s headship over the human race on a historical Adam and a historical Fall. An old earth understanding has serious complications because the old earth is not merely understood to be old but also through its age telling a story. The story it is telling is of billions of years of creation before the arrival of Adam. How then can it account for a historical Adam? An old earth understanding requires an arbitrary intervention of God in suddenly creating Adam and depositing him in the world. This presents problems both in Genesis and Romans.

The second question it raises regards the Fall. We understand from Genesis 3 and the entire narrative of Scripture that what we know in the world today as catastrophe, as natural disaster, as pain, death, violence, destruction, predation—that all of these are results of the Fall. We end up with enormous problems if we try to interpret a historical fall in an old-earth rendering. This is most clear when it comes to Adam’s sin. Was it true that, as Paul argues, when sin came, death came? Keep in mind that if the earth is old, and we determine it is old because of the scientific data, it also claims that long before the emergence of Adam there were all the effects of sin that are biblically attributed to the Fall. No Christian reading of the Scripture alone would ever come to this kind of conclusion. And once you come to such a conclusion it is very difficult to reconcile with the Bible. If the animosity between the lion and the lamb predates the Fall, what joy or purpose is there in saying that they will be reconciled in the consummation?

The avoidance of this question about the age of the universe will come at the cost of our own credibility. But disaster ensues when the book of natural revelation is used to trump the book of special revelation. We would not be having this discussion today if these questions were not being posed to us by those who assume that general revelation is providing to us compelling evidence that forces us to reconstruct our understanding of the biblical text, that the assured results of science are forcing us to rethink what the Bible seems to say. Great caution is in order when we begin to cede to science. The assured results of science—what do they tell us about a virgin birth? About a resurrection? About sexual orientation? Are we going to submit special revelation to what science says in all of these areas? The end of this process is theological disaster.

When it comes to the confrontation of evolutionary theory and the gospel we have a head-on collision. It is our responsibility to give an answer to this question of why the universe looks old, but the most natural understanding comes to this: the universe looks old because the Creator made it whole. When he made Adam, Adam was not a fetus but a man. By our understanding this would have required time. But for God it did not. He put Adam in the garden, which was not merely seeds, but a fertile, mature garden. God creates and makes things whole. And secondly, it looks old because it bears the effects of sin, the flood, catastrophe. Creation is groaning and in its groaning it looks old and worn, giving us empirical evidence of the reality of sin.

In the end the conclusive answer to this question is known only to God. This is where we are left; and it is a safe place to be.

Biblically this is where we must stand.

But it would also help if we could demonstrate some solid scientific proofs. Trouble is I think we've demonstrated many already but the kind of theory we're dealing with is nothing but a complex convoluted self-validating myth that can morph into anything they need it to be to answer us.

AND of course, face it, too many creationists do come up with some untenable stuff.

More garbled nonsense on the Flood at EvC

2011-10-24T10:13:00.000-07:00

[dr a]Is mass fossilization the usual sequel in the locale of a localized non-magical flood? Please provide evidence that this is the case.

If not, then I would have no such expectation.
[Portillo]Thats exactly what happens when a flood occurs. Have you ever wondered why we dont find fossils of animals today, only the past? Thats because to be fossilised, an animal has to be laid down by water and buried quickly.

Well, Portillo has things backwards here. It appears that he just didn't stop to think things through. When he points out that we don't see fossils today but only in the past, clearly he is not thinking of everyday local floods but THE Flood, but what he actually SAYS refers only to local floods, and he's certainly wrong about them. Why is it that the evolutionists on the thread don't notice this discrepancy but just carry on as if he meant to say that local floods create fossils when clearly he didn't.

Portillo's sloppy post is one of the problems at EvC that makes the discussion there a torture to read, but the answers to him just compound the torture.

By the time we get to Pressie the topic is already a torturous mess, but he manages to make it even more torturous.

[portillo]Thats exactly what happens when a flood occurs. Have you ever wondered why we dont find fossils of animals today, only the past?
We actually find fossils, all over the world, today. Someone is finding a fossil, somewhere in the world, as you sleep. Do you think that a finding remains of a mammoth counts as a fossil or not? It didn’t just happen in the past.

SURELY Pressie could have figured out that Portillo isn't saying what he means. CLEARLY Portillo doesn't mean we don't FIND fossils today, he means they aren't FORMING today. Portillo should probably be put on probation until he can learn to say what he means, or be ejected from the debate for causing such confusion, but then the others by taking his confused message straight make things worse, and Pressie the worst of all.

[Portillo]Thats because to be fossilised, an animal has to be laid down by water and buried quickly.

This isn't true, Portillo, it's just one major way that fossils occur and the Flood provided this condition for billions of them to be fossilized. With that condition no longer occurring we DON'T see many fossils forming today. You aren't thinking before you write. But Pressie just takes him straight because he's not thinking either:

Not true. Even Wiki can tell you that this is false.
[Wiki I assume] Fossilization is an exceptionally rare occurrence, because most components of formerly living things tend to decompose relatively quickly following death. In order for an organism to be fossilized, the remains normally need to be covered by sediment as soon as possible. However there are exceptions to this, such as if an organism becomes frozen, desiccated, or comes to rest in an anoxic (oxygen-free) environment. There are several different types of fossils and fossilization processes.

Actually Wiki agrees with what Portillo apparently MEANT to say. Obviously the exceptions are rare, and otherwise "for an organism to be fossilized, the remains NORMALLY need to be covered by sedimehnt as soon as possible."

Then you want to have a rational conversation with specialists on the subject and also tell them all that they all are wrong? There’s a very good phsycological word for this, you know?

How about a word for what YOU are doing here? Something like "So consumed by taking offense he doesn't even know what he's taking offense at."

[Portillo]If not, then I would have no such expectation.
Ever thought of Amber, for example. No flood involved. You shouldn’t have any expectation. You know too little

. In this case Pressie didn't even notice that it was not Portillo who said this, but Dr. Adequate, whom Portillo was quoting. That's what happens when you let your rage get the better of you. Also, while amber and freezing and the other "rare" forms of fossilization do occur, they aren't particularly relevant to the Flood. The preservation of mammoths MAY be related to the Flood but for this discussion it's of little importance. What is of relevance here is the fossils IN THE STRATA which were obviously laid down along with wet sediments quite rapidly and they are the VAST MAJORITY of fossils as well.

[Portillo]Thats exactly what happens when a flood occurs. Have you ever wondered why we dont find fossils of animals today, only the past?
No, you should wonder about this. Ever heard what is required for mineralization to occur? Not just a flood. It happens lots of ways. A flood could be the first step, not in all circumstances. Pyroclastic deposits for example. It happens often.

Like Pompei I suppose. A whole different kind of fossil not all that common either by comparison with the fossils in the strata which exist in the billions. Why can't a creationist make the simple point that all those fossils in those strata look like they were laid down by a catastrophic Flood? It's a very simple point. True, Portillo garbled his post and perhaps doesn't sufficiently understand even what he was trying to say, but it's nuts for the evolutionists not to recognize what the creationist argument IS.

[Pressie]
However, there’s no evidence for a global flood to have occurred in the last 10 000 years. So, I guess, your “argument” doesn’t even exist.

Well, the argument is that the fossils in the strata could only have been created by a worldwide Flood event. Nothing Pressie said even remotely touched on this standard creationist claim. He's more concerned to get all the t's cross and the i's dotted on behalf of his profession, even against a guy who couldn't get his argument stated clearly.

[Portillo] Thats because to be fossilised, an animal has to be laid down by water and buried quickly.
Yeah, tell that to all those hundreds of thousands of specialists on the subject, who actually know what they are doing. Tell that to the guys who study amber, for example.

Portillo, we all know that, it doesn't matter how many times you are shown to be incorrect, you'll never believe it. Other people can be distinguish fiction from facts, you know?

My last few posts ought to demonstrate that Geology itself hasn't a clue what the difference is between fiction and fact. And Pressie, WE all know that you are not going to address the subject in any way that enhances the discussion but just have a tantrum every time a creationist dares to suggest geologists aren't God, however miserably inadequate his argument is.

More "Fatal Flaws of Flood Geology" -- under construction

2011-10-23T01:11:00.000-07:00

http://ncse.com/cej/1/1/fatal-flaws-flood-geology

FOSSIL FORESTS

In Yellowstone Park at Specimen Ridge, a nearby volcano buried 27 forests one atop the other in rocky debris in Eocene times. After a forest grew on top of some old volcanic debris, the volcano would shower fresh debris through the air on top of it and mudslides consisting of volcanic debris would flow through it. The trunks and branches left sticking above the volcanic debris rotted away. Then a new forest would grow on top all this new debris, repeating the cycle.

Wish to point out that this is the kind of scenario-spinning that I've been complaining about, nothing but interpretation and no description of fact. Yet this is supposed to refute the Flood, this pure invention out of who knows what.

Animal fossils are scarce because the animals living in the forests fled the area as soon as the volcanic dust made the air hard to breathe. However, the falling debris, which broke the branches off the trunks, preserved many fossil leaves and twigs (conifers, deciduous trees, and ferns). As the rock erodes today, the petrified trees (which erode more slowly) stand upright and project above the ground. Complete root systems have been found in many of these trees. This entire deposit took over 20,000 years to form, double the maximum age of the earth allowed by ICR, and 20,000 times too long to fit into the Flood of Noah.

But since it's all spun out of mental cobwebs it could only refute an equally imaginary Flood of Noah, and since the Flood was a reality it refutes nothing.

Erling Dorf (1964) has calculated all this. He noted that the oldest trees in each layer were about 500 years old when they were buried. Igneous rock requires 200 years to decay into a reasonable soil. Add these two figures, and we get the age per layer; multiply by 27 layers, and we get about 20,000 years, the minimum time in which a formation like this can arise.

I can't get a clear enough picture of this situation to have a definite opinion about it. Obviously the answer from the Flood perspective would be that the trees were uprooted and transported to their current situation, but there isn't enough information to decide this. There are creationist arguments such as this one that make this claim of course. One claim is that the trees do not have complete root systems which shows that they had been uprooted. One discussion concerns what happened as a result of the Mt. St. Helens eruption which apparently destroyed a forest, and some of the dead trees ended up planted upright at the bottom of Spirit Lake in progressively higher layers, in much the same kind of formation as is seen at Specimen Ridge. Sounds plausible to me, but as I said I haven't studied this enough yet.

Flood geologists, on the other hand, insist that Noah's Flood washed in heaps of uprooted trees between eruptions; they say the trees stand upright because dirt which became entangled in the roots weighted down the bottoms enough to hold the trunks upright. Nevertheless, uprooted trees today that wash onto a beach lie on their sides.

Yeah, but these trees got themselves rooted in water if the Flood was involved, and the fact that some 10% of the trees killed by the St. Helens eruption ended up in the upright position at the bottom of Spirit Lake is the apt comparison.

F. H. Knowlton (1914), referring to a 12-foot-tall 26'/2-foot-around fossil redwood, says, "The roots, which are as large as the roots of ordinary trees, are now embedded in solid rock."

Well, but that WOULD happen if the tree was uprooted and then "planted" in an upright position under water as sediment accumulated around it, later to solidify into rock.

William B. Sanborn (1951) says concerning two nearby pines, "Each stands about 15 feet, and shows a complete root system."

He says complete, the creationists say not, how do we find out for sure? I'm not totally convinced a tree couldn't have been uprooted WITH pretty much its entire root system intact anyway. The ground would have been thoroughly soaked by the Flood after all, making it pretty loose and giving little resistance, so that the tree wouldn't have had to be violently yanked to be pulled out. Trees topple over from waterlogged ground around their roots in ordinary storms. Millions must have toppled right into the arms of the Flood and just floated along to wherever it carried them, some getting weighted down in the root area and getting "planted" in the upright position under the water as did those in Spirit Lake.

Charles H. Brown (1961) says that one of the methods of finding exact forest levels was to find "the expansion of the base of an upright tree trunk immediately above the root system." One would expect the trees to be stripped of most of their roots and buried on their sides if they had been uprooted and buried in Noah's Flood.

What old-earthers expect of the Flood is hardly to be taken as the last word.

http://www.creationism.org/ackerman/AckermanYoungWorldChap10.htm
http://creationwiki.org/Yellowstone)

In an article in some obscure religious journal cited in Robert Kofahl's Handy Dandy Evolution Refuter, flood geologist Harry Coffin maintains that the tree rings within a given fossil forest layer do not cross correlate. Let's look into this.

Every year, a tree grows a new ring. If the rainfall varies from year to year where this tree grows, then all the rings in its wood will vary in diameter; the narrow rings grew during the dry years, and the wide ones during wet years. Dendrochronologists (tree-ring daters) correlate tree rings from different trees by comparing ring variation patterns in one tree with those in another to see whether they match.

Since Coffin says the petrified trees of Specimen Ridge have rings that vary enough in diameter to be worth trying to correlate, he implies that before the Flood, rainfall varied from year to year. In this, he contradicts the flood geology model without knowing it (if he assumes with Morris that no rain fell in pre Flood times). Also, since the trees all supposedly died within the same year in the Flood, the flood geology theory implies that if their rings vary in diameter at all, then all the trees everywhere in the formation should cross-correlate. Thus Coffin's claims do not stand up under analysis.

I don't think I understand enough of this to comment at all. I get the basic idea of trying to correlate rings from tree to tree by matching their width patterns but I don't get how that is being applied here. Yes, it does contradict what is usually considered to be the Biblical position that there was no rainfall before the Flood, just a mist, and I don't know if there were seasons then either, which could have been recorded in the rings apart from rainfall. All in all this is too garbled a subject to get into as stated here.

THE EARTH'S CRUST
Flood geologists claim that the ocean basins and the continents consist of essentially the same sort of crust; the main difference is that the ocean basins were lowered and continents raised along vertical faults. Their theory creates two problems.

Firstly, if the Flood washed over entire continents, then most of the sediments and sedimentary rocks of the world would be found in the ocean basins.

Why? Don't ocean waves throw up sediments over the land? Besides, how would the underwater sediments solidify into rock? Sediments, sure, but rock? They have to be compressed and they have to dry, don't they?

The eastern Washington Scablands show (on a small scale) what the continents should look like if flood geology is true (Shelton, 1966).

Yes, again, this is the commonsense view that doesn't take into account the layering and directionality of currents and streams within ocean water. The Scablands are what happened when a lake drained AFTER the Flood.

During the last ice age ...

Must note that there was only one ice age, the others exist only in Geologic Fantasyland.

...a glacier dammed up a lake called Lake Missoula.

What's the evidence for the glacier as the cause of the damming up? Not that it affects the YEC position, I would just like to know. It makes sense that there were standing lakes after the Flood, dammed by whatever. And it makes sense that there would have been an ice age caused by the Flood too, though I haven't yet digested all the thinking about this.

When that dam melted, 2,000 cubic kilometers of lake water catastrophically denuded thousands of square kilometers of eastern Washington.

Yes, this was a huge catastrophic but nevertheless limited local flood.

However, similar denuded igneous rocks are seldom found outside of Washington State.

Sure, it was a local flood peculiar to the circumstances in that place.

On the contrary, the continents and continental shelves are covered as much as 12,000 meters deep with sediments and sedimentary rock, whereas ocean basins always bear less (usually far less) than a kilometer of sediment except where they abut a continental shelf. The continental shelves gather most of the sediments dumped by rivers. Few sediments ever get to the deep ocean basins beyond. The continental drift theory leads us to expect exactly this result, as any good encyclopedia will show. However, it is exactly the reverse of what flood geology predicts.

How so? I'm not following this at all. The sediments redistributed by the Flood were picked up from the LANDMASS, why should they have been taken far out to sea and not deposited again over that same landmass? Why do the oceans carry sand and dump it on the beaches on the margins of the land areas instead of dumping it into the deep ocean basins? How much of the sand ends up with the sediments on or near the continental shelves?

Secondly, the continents are mostly slabs of granite about 30 to 60 kilometers thick. The granitic continental crust stands higher above the ocean basins while having roots more deeply sunk than those of the ocean basins because granite is lighter than basalt, and hence "floats" more buoyantly upon the viscous mantle of the earth. These facts about sediments and buoyancy, well known to any freshman geology student, cause grave difficulties for flood geology.

How so? I'm realizing there's something wrong with this article. He's not really making his points clear enough for an unindoctrinated reader to follow.

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CORAL REEFS
Huge coral atolls and reefs require many thousands of years to form because the individual corals that constitute them grow so slowly. Under ideal conditions, corals grow as fast as 1.0 to 2.5 centimeters per year, but conditions are seldom ideal, and reefs as a whole grow much more slowly than the individual corals that make them up. The surf pounds broken coral branches into sand, and the red and green calcareous algae cement this sand together into a form far more compact than the original corals, so a reef complex consisting largely of cemented coral sand actually grows much more slowly than the original corals, only millimeters per year. Such slow growth rates imply that coral atolls and barrier reefs (both fossil and modern) needed tens of thousands of years to grow into their present form; the flood geology model supplies only a fraction of the needed time. The modern Eniwetok atoll, the fossil Rainbow Lake reefs, and the complex geology of Hawaii are good examples to illustrate this.

As usual it seems completely addlebrained to think the Flood itself would have FORMED coral reefs. Who ever claimed such a thing? All the Flood would have done is dislodge them and move them elsewhere. If the claim is that there was not enough time in the PRE-FLOOD world to form them he's not saying that, but the answer I'd give is that conditions were apparently different enough in that world that we can't apply the knowledge of how corals grow under our current conditions. The pre-Flood world was apparently extraordinarily fecund, and conducive to every kind of growth to a degree we can barely imagine now. Much speedier coral growth should be expected of that first 1500 years or so.

H. S. Ladd (1960) has drilled deep holes on Eniwetok atoll to take samples of coral and coral derived rock. These core samples reveal a huge cap of coral that took millions of years to form.

Well here comes the fantasy, I'm starting to nod off.

Over a thousand cubic kilometers of coral reef rock cover a sunken basalt volcano cone. Millions of years ago, this cone formed a volcanic island; the parts above sea level were worn flat by erosion. As it slowly sank, the coral reefs that had been growing on its rim grew upwards fast enough to keep at the surface of the ocean, forming a huge coral cap. The cores taken from the drilling show that the deepest corals are so old that they have become chemically altered from aragonite to dolomite. Occasionally in geological history, the volcano temporarily ceased to sink, and lifted the coral cap many feet above sea level (the modern Tonga islands are also former atolls heaved many feet above sea level); the core samples clearly show gaps in the coral where the coral was being weathered above sea level. The deepest core sample of all revealed coral as thick as 1380 meters. Assuming that Ladd is accurate, let us grant ICR two generous assumptions: (1) the reef as a whole grows a centimeter per year, and (2) we ignore the time represented by erosional gaps. Given these assumptions, the atoll must be no less than 138,000 years old.

This is one of those frustrating presentations that include some of the actual facts but mostly a lot of interpretive scenario-building as if it were all the same thing. All the time calculations are done on the basis of standard assumptions but YEC assumptions would give a completely different time frame. Among other things to be pondered about this example, volcanoes are thought not to have existed until the time of the Flood. In any case we have to suppose the Flood merely moved all those corals to their present location. But as usual there isn't enough information here to make any clear determination.

The flood geology theory allows no more than about 8,000 years for all modern reefs to form, only 5% of the time that Eniwetok needed to grow to its present state. If flood geology is true, then the modern reefs started growing only after Noah's Flood was over with. After all, the Flood itself would have killed off all corals by kicking up a slurry of clay particles in all the ocean waters. These particles would have taken years to settle out. Corals require clear water and cannot stand any turbidity. Even though modern creationists allow gaps in the Biblical genealogies, standard ICR works like Scientific Creationism (General Edition) allow no more than several thousand years between Noah's Flood and today. To fit Eniwetok into their time constraints, the ICR creationists are forced to ignore the findings of Ladd.

The Flood didn't kill everything in the oceans, obviously many fish survived, although of course it killed a great deal. Again there isn't enough information in this description to come up with an independent thought and again, much of the discussion is the usual presentation of an interpretive scenario rather than the simple facts, that tendency to mystification and obscurantism I've noted before. If I find more information on these corals I'll post it.

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The fossil Rainbow Lake reefs formed in Devonian times where Alberta, British Columbia, and the Northwest Territories meet. As Hriskevich (1970), Langton (1968), and others show, these reefs trap important oil reserves. Since they are buried in and intertongue with other sedimentary rocks, they must have formed in the Flood of Noah, if flood geology is true. Nevertheless, they form solid winding barrier reefs consisting of intergrown dolomitized coral and coral-derived debris glued together by calcareous algae. In other words, they look just like modern barrier reefs, not like piles of loose coral that the tidal waves of Noah's Flood threw together by chance. One reef is over 240 meters thick. Unless petroleum geologists have grossly erred somehow, we calculate, using the generous growth rate of a centimeter per year, that this reef required 24,000 years of clear tranquil tropical surf to form, not a one year succession of muddy tidal waves.

If Harold T. Stearns' Geology of the State of Hawaii (1966) is correct, then the many coral reefs and other complex geological features of Hawaii form grave difficulties for flood geology. For instance, a strata sequence exposed at sea level near Pearl Harbor (illustrated on page 84 of Steams' work) took many years to form, far too long for the Flood. This sequence contains reef limestone above sea level, which covers volcanic ash that had buried trees growing in place, which in turn covers another layer of reef limestone. Also, on page 21, Steams describes a core sample taken from a hole drilled 332 meters into the ground somewhere else in Pearl Harbor. This sample revealed 15 coral reefs separated by fossil soils, lignite (brown coal), and beach rock. Steams' example of ocean terraces will require some explanation.

Stacked above and below each other, ocean terraces look like steps in a staircase leading out of the sea. Each terrace represents an old shore line above or below current sea level; as the land and sea rise and fall, the surf cuts terraces at the different sea levels. Elevated and submerged terraces in Hawaii, New Guinea, Jamaica, and other tropical seacoasts often bear dead coral reefs (Goreau, 1979). Since many of these reefs took thousands of years to form, and since different terraces formed at different times, the stack as a whole took at least several times as long to form. Recorded history (which begins only a couple thousand years after the alleged Flood) knows no sea level changes amounting to hundreds of feet, so these terraces do not seem to fit very well into the postFlood period. These terraces look exactly like the kinds of reefs and beaches forming today, not like debris thrown together in some catastrophe like the Flood of Noah.

Stearns, reporting about the coral-bearing terraces of Hawaii in some detail, points out that many terraces contain fossil-bearing marine conglomerates. To the orthodox geologist, this is no surprise; river floods, land slides, storm waves, and turbidity flows are only a few of the processes known to bury and preserve animals and plants before they rot away so they can become fossils. However, the ICR creationists insist that no processes except for catastrophes the size of Noah's Flood can bury dead animals fast enough to fossilize. If this theory is correct, and if these conglomerates were formed in the Flood, then the ICR creationists need to explain why these terraces look for all the world like the kinds of reefs and beaches forming by slow processes today.

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EVAPORITES AND SHALES
Several lines of evidence show that fine-grained evenly-layered shales and evaporites require many thousands -if years to form. Extremely fine sediment particles suspended in water settle to the bottom painfully slowly, and even slight turbulence keeps them in suspension. If you shake a jar full of dirt and water, the water will remain cloudy with clay particles long after the sand has settled out. Not only that, but the concentration of gypsum, calcite, and other dissolved salts in sea water is so low that thousands of cubic kilometers of sea water would have to evaporate to precipitate these salts as a typical evaporite deposit. These processes of sedimentation and evaporation are so slow that thick shale and evaporite deposits could scarcely have formed overnight. Since the flood geology model requires that all sedimentary rocks be deposited within one year during the Flood of Noah, the ICR creationists must somehow explain these facts away.

One way they might try would be to suggest that shale-forming clay would settle rapidly out of the flood waters if those waters were supersaturated with clay. ICR has already proposed (quoting Soviet geologist V. I. Sozansky) that evaporites formed rapidly from supersaturated volcanic waters. However, if either of these two theories are true, then thin even laminations extending over many square kilometers are an insoluble problem. The clays and evaporites would have almost certainly settled out in huge globs to form amorphous strata-free rock. The ICR theory that the laminations were caused by a rapid succession of turbidity flows does not satisfactorily explain how the fine stratification of the Green River shales or the Castilian evaporites could form in a one-year-long catastrophic flood. Let us discuss these two formations in more detail.

The finely stratified Green River shales of Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah are 600 meters thick. They accumulated at the bottom of a 30-meter-deep lake in Eocene times over a period of 5 to 8 million years (Bradley, 1929). Several lines of evidence show that each distinctly visible layer is a yearly deposit or "varve." The sedimentary deposits varied so much with the seasons that each varve clearly stands out. The average varve in this formation consists of a layer of clean microscopic clay particles alternating with a layer of hydrocarbons in the form of waxy pollen and spore particles (Clark and Steam, 1958). Apparently, the spring wind and rivers wafted spores and pollen to the middle of the lake, but during the rest of the year, the currents were too weak to carry anything but the finest clay to the center of the lake. In the varves of some of the near-shore limey sandstones in the formation, the sediment particles gradually decrease in size from 0.02 mm at the bottom of the varve to 0.006 mm at the top (Bradley, 1929). The width of the Green River varves varies in cycles of 11 1/2 years, 50 years, and 12,000 years, all superimposed on one another. The 11 1/2 – year cycle corresponds to the sunspot cycle, the 12,000-year cycle to the precession of the equinoxes. Both these processes affected the yearly rainfall, and hence affected the width of each varve. Bradley's concession that he cannot explain the 50-year cycle shows that he was not imagining these cycles. The same kinds of varves are forming today in Sakski Lake (Crimea), Lake Zurich (Switzerland), and Lake McKay (Ottawa, Canada). Only slow processes happening over many years can account for varve formation. Even if an occasional storm did stir up the sediments on the bottom, the sediments could not have settl, ed out so evenly unless the tranquil time intervals between storms were very very long and convective currents were largely absent.

Creationists (like Whitcomb and Morris, 1961) have argued against the varve interpretation of the Green River shales by citing the beautiful fish fossils it contains. Supposedly, about 200 years' worth of sediment would have to accumulate to, bury one dead fish, and by that time the fish would have long rotted away. However, the precipitates found in this formation show that the lake bottom was unusually alkaline (Press and Siever, 1974). Some shallow lakes in Florida today contain algal oozes that do not decay as long as no oxygen gets into them (Bradley, 1929). Under such circumstances, fossilization would be no surprise.

Since there are no huge evaporite deposits forming today, geologists have debated the precise mechanism by which they formed in the geological past. This gives many creationists the excuse not only to reject the traditional lagoon model of evaporite formation, but also to cite the authority of Soviet geologist V. I. Sozansky as long as his theories seem to support flood geology. Actually, Sozansky's article implicitly contradicts the flood geology model in a couple of particulars — and other geologists have come up with models that explain the observed evidence more easily than the traditional theory, Sozansky's theory, or the ICR theory.

The traditional evaporite theory states that evaporites formed in shallow lagoons in arid areas connected with the open ocean by only a narrow strait. As the water in the lagoon evaporated, precipitating salts in the process, water from the open ocean coming through the strait replaced it. But as the lagoon became more restricted and briney, first calcium carbonate (CaCO3) would precipitate out as aragonite or calcite (limestone), and then calcium sulfate (CaSO4) would precipitate out as gypsum or anhydrite, and finally, rock salt (NaCI) would precipitate out. If rain diluted the brines of the lagoon every rainy season, then a varve of carbonate (rainy season) and anhydrite (dry season) might form every year. This model accounts well for small evaporite deposits forming today, but not for the big ones that formed in the geological past.

Sloss (1969) modifies the traditional lagoon theory. He argues from the results of his experiments that evaporites formed from layers of water of different concentrations (ordinary sea water at the surface, highly concentrated brines on the bottom) that existed in a huge lagoon all at the same time. Schmaltz (1969) argues that huge evaporite deposits like the Castilian evaporites of Texas (450 meters thick and 20,000 square kilometers in area) and the Zechstein evaporites of Germany (600 meters thick) formed in deep basins like the Mediterranean Sea or Red Sea. If the straits connecting these modem seas with the open ocean were much shallower and narrower, then they would start depositing evaporites just like these ancient evaporites. His complex theoretical model explains in detail how several cycles of evaporite deposits separated by deep-ocean mud formed in the Zechstein evaporites of Schleswig-Holstein. It also explains the 1000 meters of evaporites now buried under deep-sea sediments at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. At the end of the Cretaceous when it first formed, the deep Gulf of Mexico basin was joined to the open ocean only by a narrow strait. Schmaltz's model predicts that the evaporites will be reasonably pure and free of other sediments because the river-deposited sediments would be deposited close to shore. These more recent theories explain all the evidence well using everyday laws of physics and chemistry.

The varves of the Castilian evaporites of Permian times in Texas (just like the Zechstein evaporites) are the strongest evidence that these evaporites took hundreds of thousands of years to form. These varves consist of calcite alternating with anhydrite (Anderson, 1972). In both examples, the calcite contains a lot of plankton and organic matter: fusulinids, possibly some algae, and possibly some shells. Even though mobile living things would swim away from the inhospitable brines, at least some plankton got pickled to death and fossilized. Many of the varves in this formation extend as far as 110 kilometers. Although Anderson insists that the yearly varve interpretation is not proved beyond all doubt, he adds that no one has yet suggested a better interpretation. The concentration of the brines never could have fluctuated many thousands of times during the one-year Flood to precipitate such fine yet extensive alternating layers of calcite and anhydrite. So many cubic miles of such microscopic crystals never could have settled out of the water in such even layers, all within a year's time. Since this formation contains over 260,000 couplets of thin calcite/anhydrite layers, the entire formation probably took 260,000 years to form.

ICR creationists who cite Sozansky's article to buttress flood geology have failed to account for his factual errors or for his statements that implicitly contradict their theory. In essence, Sozansky believes that the great evaporite deposits of the earth formed from volcanically heated brines erupting out of the ocean floor. He feels that the traditional lagoon model works fine for small modern deposits, but not for evaporites like the huge Castilian deposits. He argues that evaporites from such lagoons would contain fossils and other organic matter. He cites as an example the evaporites forming today in the Gulf of KaraBogaz in the Caspian Sea. The salt concentration kills, pickles, and preserves fish long enough for them to become fossilized in the evaporite deposits. Since the huge ancient deposits are allegedly free of organic matter, plankton, and so forth, Sozansky concludes that they formed by some totally different process.

Of course, the creationists would like to prove that the evaporites were catastrophically deposited by volcanic brines during the one-year flood. It is no surprise, then, that Scientific Creationism insists that "the studies of the Russian geophysicist Sozansky" have "shown almost conclusively" that orthodox geology is in error. However, Sozansky is a doubtful ally. For one thing, even if his theory is true, the creationists must still explain away the varve evidence. Sozansky never explicitly accounts for the varves. He would have to assume that each varve came from one big eruption, and that the eruptions were separated by enough time to let the salt crystals settle. Also, as we have seen, the Castile evaporites do contain a lot of plankton and organic matter. Schmalz's deepbasin theory shows why it does not contain fossil fish graveyards like those of the Gulf of Kara-Bogaz. Even so, Anderson's discoveries of plankton in the Castilian deposits contradict Sozansky's assertions that the great evaporite deposits are free of organic matter. Finally, the ICR creationists have insisted that "The very existence of fossils, especially in large numbers, is evidence of catastrophism at least on a small scale." (Scientific Creationism, p. 100.) They insist that fossils are not forming today because only a violent catastrophe can bury plants and animals in mud before they rot away. The work just cited quotes Sozansky whenever his thesis seems to support ICR creationism, yet never ever even mentions Sozansky's fossil fish graveyard, much less refute it.

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FOSSIL SPECIES
According to the flood geology theory, all "kinds" of plants and animals alive today (not to mention dinosaurs and mammoths and other animals now extinct) lived on the earth before the flood. The Bible says Noah was to take specimens of every type of living air-breathing land animal aboard the Ark (Gen. 6:19-21; 7:2, 3, 8, 9, 15). Thus flood geology predicts that the fossil record should consist mostly of animal and plant species alive today. The extinct fossil species should be mostly delicate types sensitive to environment, because the Flood and the rugged conditions inside the Ark would have killed such creatures off. These predictions fit poorly with the available evidence.

George Gaylord Simpson (1967), world famous paleontologist, says that nearly all fossil species and genera are extinct today. Very few modem species or genera are found as fossils at all. Even so called "living fossils' like the crossopterygian (lobe finned) fish are no exception. The fossil Paleozoic eusthenopteron and the modem latimeria are both lobe-finned fish. However, the latimera resembles the eusthenopteron no more than I resemble a gorilla. The creationists have yet to answer this objection.

Many delicate species of animal survive today in spite of the predictions of the flood geology model. Creationists have not been able to explain the technology by which Noah kept delicate koala bears and marmosets alive on the Ark. Pupfish survived a divine cataclysm only to be threatened with extinction by man-made reservoirs. We already saw how the muddy flood waters would wipe out corals (not to mention many other forms of sea life). The creationists have to postulate so many miracles to keep these creatures alive through the Flood that it would be much simpler and easier for God to create them all from scratch again after the Flood, and just forget the floating zoo.

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FLOOD GEOLOGY VS. ORTHODOX GEOLOGY
So far, we have covered a small sample of the many types of geological evidence that flood geology cannot easily explain. Personally, it persuades me that flood geology is totally erroneous. Nevertheless, ICR creationists are bound to argue, "So what if you evolutionists can come up with a few difficulties? There is no theory anywhere that is totally free of them. Besides, the problems with orthodox geology are far more serious than any of the real or imagined difficulties you can dream up against Biblical catastrophism. Can you explain how an even layer of sandstone, the Saint Peter Sandstone. which covers much of the United States, was formed? Can you explain how the fossils in the so-called `Lewis Overthrust' got into the wrong order for evolution? The evolutionist. excuse that the `older' rocks were shoved on top of the younger ones is lame because Genesis Flood and other creationist writings have conclusively proved that there is no trace of evidence that any sliding took place. Until you can answer these grave difficulties, how can I take your evolution theory seriously?"

Actually orthodox geology has no such difficulties. Creationists misunderstand the nature of sedimentary facies, and there is plenty of physical evidence having nothing to do with fossils that the Lewis Overthrust is genuine. Creationists often quote their sources badly out of context, sources that prove thrust faulting is very real.

But, it will have to be the task of a future article to investigate these and other alleged difficulties in detail. For now, it is sufficient to say there are fatal flaws in the creationist flood geology model, flaws that render it inadequate to scientifically support the Flood or tell us anything about the age of the earth.

More ponderings on attempts to debunk the Flood

2011-10-22T13:18:00.000-07:00

Another attempt to discredt Flood Theology, from Bible and Science.com:

Impossible Flood Geology!

There are many reasons why Noah's flood can not account for all the geology we have. The Bible says all life on earth was destroyed by the 40 days and nights of rain. There were no survivors! Genesis 7:21-23 says, "All flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing upon the earth, and every man: All in whose nostrils was the breath of life-and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark." If everything died how can there be millions of dinosaur tracks in different layers when 22 feet of water covered the earth. How can there be dinosaur nests with eggs, and young dinosaurs running around in the middle of the flood. According to the Bible all life was destroyed by the flood, yet there are many animal tracks, nests, ripple marks, and erosion between layers.

First, the Bible does not say "all life on earth was destroyed by the 40 days and nights of rain" which was just the very first stage, but by the Flood waters after they had risen to their maximum height (7:19-21). The tracks show that they hadn't died YET, that's all. They are in a layer that was covered over by others, right? The next one simply hadn't yet flowed in, but it would have to have been along fairly shortly and then the next above that and so on.

As for ripples and tracks impressed into a layer and the erosion of its surface, we have to assume there was some time lapse between the deposition of the strata and that the impressions were preserved before the full depth of the water was reached. But what is seen there wouldn't be life as usual but reflect desperation as the water rose.

However I do have to ask about nests between layers? Never heard that one before. The tracks and ripples and erosion simply represent some time lapse, if only of hours or days. But nests may need some other explanation. BETWEEN layers? What do these look like?

It took months for the waters to fully abate. It seems that there were two and a half months from the time the ark rested on Ararat (17th day of the 7th month of Noah's 600th year, Genesis 8:4) to the emergence to view of the tops of the mountains (1st day of the 10th month, v. 5). Forty days after that the earth was still covered with water and the dove found no place to land. From the emergence of the mountain tops it was four months and twenty-seven days until the ground was dry enough for them to leave the ark.

No time period is given for the rising of the waters to their maximum, just that they "prevailed upon the earth" 150 days, which would include the rising stages. It seems the receding took about seven months while the rising took something less than five, as it was exactly five months from their entering the ark to the point that the waters had receded enough for the ark to rest on Ararat. So it rose faster than it receded but still it could have taken four months or more to rise, maybe three before all the land was submerged (I'm making the most conservative guesses from very rough calculations based on the text), and during three months many people and animals would have died but still some that found high places and some kind of shelter could have continued living until there was no more land to cling to.

The first phase would have to have been the dissolving of the land from the heavy rain, which would have made mudslides and filled the rising water with sediments. And dead things. Layers of these sediments could have been accumulating from the early stages starting with the lowest areas as the rising waters brought them over the land. If they were brought in on tides they would have left the sediments in place until the next tide brought more to deposit over them. Animals could have run across them between tides. Or perhaps some other time factor is involved so that it took days between layers. And perhaps some were still being laid down even after the water had completely submerged the land, probably in that case by precipitation out of the water.

This is to answer the claim that the tracks and ripples would have been formed when the Flood waters had already covered everything.

The flood does not account for the thousands of annual layers of varies, thousands of layers of ice, coral reef growth, evaporates, and many layers of coal deposits (Wonderly 1987).

Nobody ever claimed that such things FORMED in the Flood, NOTHING formed in the Flood except the strata, things were moved around BY the Flood and living things DIED in the FLood. That's it. The many layers of varves and so on is something else. Coral reefs didn't grow in the Flood, they were already grown and were then uprooted and moved by the Flood. Coal, however, probably was formed AS A RESULT OF THE LAYERING which was formed by the Flood, as the water deposited prodigious amounts of the green things that were compressed into coal under the massive weight of the strata.

One of the greatest misunderstandings is that dinosaurs and humans lived together, and therefore Noah must have brought dinosaurs on the ark. There were no dinosaurs on the ark. Dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago.

Gotta rethink that time frame if you're going to think of the ark at all. If the Biblical Flood story is true so is the Creation as decribed in Genesis true, which appears to be about 6000 years ago, and there were no living things before that. Of COURSE dinosaurs and human beings inhabited the planet at the same time. There are no other possibilities if you believe the Bible. You can't mix the time frame of Geology and the time frame of the Bible, it's one or the other.

"Fatal Flaws of Flood Geology:" Old Red Sandstone -- the sheer madness of fantasy over fact

2011-10-20T07:28:00.000-07:00

I found this article by a Chris Weber at a site called the National Center for Science Education, written in 1980 but I assume still relevant. He has collected some of what he considers to be the most unanswerable scientific claims that contradict the Flood. I want to put my mind to these as I get the time.

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Flood Geology

Flood Geology believes that most of the layers of rocks we see are a result of Noah's flood.

The Fatal Flaws of Flood Geology.

Flood Geology is impossible because of:

Desert Deposits
Fossil Forests
Earth's Crust
Coral Reefs
Evaporites & Shales
Fossil Species (not mixed)

He starts with fossil desert deposits:

Desert Deposits

You don't need a Ph.D. in geology to know that desert dunes and other desert deposits do not form under roaring flood waters. These require not only time, but also dry land. The Flood of Noah supplies neither.

Uh huh, but nobody SAYS anything "formed" under the Flood except the deposition of the sediments that were dissolved by the flood waters and redeposited, along with a plethora of living things that the Flood was intended to destroy. If you're going to refute the Flood it would be nice if you'd get a reasonable idea of what such a flood would have done. It could MOVE things of course, including all the sand from dunes and other desert deposits.

The Old Red Sandstone, which looks for all the world like a collection of fossilized desert dunes, was formed in Devonian times. It has outcrops extending from the British Isles to Poland and Russia's White Sea, and from Germany to Norway (Gilluly, Waters, and Woodford, 1968). Outcrops have even been found in Greenland and North America. In Devonian times, before North America and Europe drifted apart, these dunes covered an entire semi-arid continent.

Must object here that the Old Red Sandstone does not in the slightest "look for all the world like a collection of fossilized sand dunes." This is geojargontalk of some sort. Go look at pictures of the Old Red Sandstone. No dunes there. It's a huge expanse of red ROCK for pete's sake. He has certainly NOT seen "an entire semi-arid continent." That is the conventional geological INTERPRETATION. As usual we're being fed an interpretation and not the evidence itself, not facts from which we could draw our own conclusions.

I can only suppose that he means that the sand of which the sandstone is composed shows characteristics of sand normally found in "desert dunes and other desert deposits" but this is what they should SAY. Their fanciful landscapes are just that: fanciful. The Flood most likely simply transported a lot of sand with the characteristics he attributes to desert dunes and dumped it in this place. Perhaps it DID pick up sand from desert dunes somewhere. But landscapes on the surface of this earth do NOT simply get covered over with one kind of sediment full of dead things that turns to rock, nice straight horizontal rock too. Doesn't happen. This is ridiculous.

He goes on:

Several lines of evidence derived from this great geologic formation create difficulties for the flood geology model. For instance, the interfingering of these sandstones with marine sediments shows that the shoreline of this continent advanced and retreated several times. Thus the desert rocks are entangled with rocks that the flood geology model says were formed within the one-year-long flood.

Again, the problem with this sort of presentation is that we are given no way of picturing what he is talking about. As above where he says the red sandstone "looks for all the world like fossilized desert dunes" we have to say "Huh?" We have to surmise he's NOT talking about its "looking" a certain way to the naked eye but only about the interpretation that comes to mind for the educated investigator of the contents of the rock. But this becomes mystification for the non-geologist reading this stuff.

What does this interfingering look like? It doesn't sound to me like something that would pose a problem for a Flood interpretation because one would expect that different sediments would be "interfingered" at various places if I understand what he means by this. He quite blandly states that this interfingering "shows that the shoreline of this continent advanced and retreated several times," apparently unaware that this is nothing but the interpretive party line and begs the question. A Floodist needs to know more about the actual phenomena, not merely how geologists interpret it.

Also, redbeds, consisting partly of rust formed above sea level, are also found in this formation. These would not have been formed in any catastrophic flood.

Um, how about after the Flood laid it all down? As I've pointed out before, the idea that anything "formed" in the Flood is a little misleading. Sure, the claim is that the strata were formed by the Flood as it carried the sediments and deposited them with their cargo of dead things, but all the Flood DID was move things around.

The Old Red Sandstones also contain typical playas, complete with their characteristic cubic salt crystal deposits.

Oh please. This is a huge slab of red ROCK you are seeing these "playas" in. Get real. Describe for us exactly what on earth you mean by such a statement because just as you are not seeing desert dunes in that red rock you are also not seeing playas. You must be seeing something when you dig into the rock that is normally associated with playas and this is what you must describe if you really want to communicate anything useful.

These are desert salt-pan deposits formed after the rainy-season lakes evaporate. Today, in the Mojave Desert, playas can become lakes for a couple of weeks, only to dry out again, leaving a crust of salt deposits like those found in the Red Sandstone.

Aargh just more mystification. So what ARE you seeing? You've found some salt in the rock? In what form? How much of it? Show it to us. Explain how you get from whatever bits and pieces you've dug out of that rock to a "desert salt-pan deposit." Also, if the ingredients are specifically indicative of such an environment, what's wrong with the likely explanation that the contents of this red rock were transported from a site with such characteristics and dumped all together in the strata where it lithified under pressure from similarly transported sediments above?

Although a few freshwater ponds did exist on this ancient semi-arid continent, they dried up from time to time.

This is what is laughably called "science," a fantastic scenario they've built from something they found in this rock that he doesn't bother to describe. All we get is the scenario, we don't get the facts from which to draw our own conclusions. And he calls this exercise in imaginative cobweb-spinning FATAL FLAWS OF FLOOD GEOLOGY????

So, we find fossil mud cracks in the shales that came from the dried-up pond bottoms, and we find fossil lungfish, a type of fish that can survive drought by building a mud cocoon in the pond bottom and breathing air. Hundreds of square miles of fossil sand dunes in these deposits contain cross-bedding and sand-blasted pebbles (ventifacts) of the sort found in modern desert sand dunes, and in no other kind of modern sediment. These different independent lines of evidence converge to show that the Old Red Sandstones almost certainly formed over thousands of years in a dry climate, not in any kind of flood catastrophe.

Oh balderdash! So some sand from an area of already-formed dunes was transported by the Flood. If you aren't going to give us the facts how am I to know what you mean by any of this? I have to guess. My guess is probably right but it's still a guess and I shouldn't have to guess. Your fanciful notion about the supposed previous landscape on this very spot does not convince me. Landscapes do not turn into slabs of rock over time. Except in the imagination of geologists for some reason.

This is just going on and on of course and my answers are just going on and on in the same way. But right now I'm pausing this post, intending to come back to it later, and of course get to his other supposed "fatal flaws," oh groan.

The Grand Canyon contains fossil desert dunes and other sediments that to all appearances were deposited on dry land.

The Grand Canyon does not and cannot possibly "contain" fossil desert dunes. When you say "sediments that ... were deposited on dry land" no problem. I would assume that MOST of the sediments that ended up in the strata were ORIGINALLY part of the pre-Flood DRY land mass.

The Permian Coconino Sandstones in the upper walls of the Grand Canyon have the frosted well-sorted wellrounded sand grains found only in land-deposited sand dunes (Shelton, 1966).

Fine, now you have stopped that idiotic talk about sand dunes being seen or contained in rock and are referring to GRAINS. Fine. That permits me to opine that the grains were TRANSPORTED BY THE FLOOD rather than being formed in place. Which is really really an idiotic idea when you try to think about those flat horizontal slabs of rock as if they were once landscapes on the surface of the earth exactly where they sit. As if sand dunes just somehow get their hilly character flattened down and compressed into rock over time? How could that happen? Any sediment being deposited on top of them would have to come from a higher elevation than the highest part of the dunes. But dunes are usually the highest point in the area. And if some sediment did somehow get deposited on or over them they'd conform to the hilly shape of the dunes, they wouldn't just lie flat. What are you people thinking anyway? Are you thinking at all? This landscape idea is so absurd it's hard to believe anyone ever entertained it for a second.

Furthermore, many of the laminae of the cross-bedding contain fossil footprints that could only have come from reptiles or other quadrupeds climbing up the face of a slightly damp sand dune in the open air. (Those climbing down the slopes left no tracks because they simply slid.) ICR geologist Dr. Steve Austin has taught the theory that amphibians resting between underwater dunes made the tracks. His theory is very interesting, but rather implausible since the Flood must have been violently dumping several meters' worth of sediment per day.

Wouldn't have to be violent, just soon enough after the footprints were made to fill them in to preserve them. And it does suggest that there was some time lapse between the deposition of one layer of sediments and another during the Flood, in order for animals to run across them. But WHY DUNES AT ALL? There is no need to imagine anything shaped like dunes DURING OR AFTER THE FLOOD having anything to do with the formation of the strata. Whatever dunes had existed before the Flood would have long since been saturated and carried away.

The Canyon's Supai and Hermit Shales, found today beneath the Coconino Sandstones, look exactly like river deltas that formed above sea level (Shelton, 1966).

Well here's another one of those mystifications, an interpretation instead of fact, that can only perplex somebody looking at the walls of the Grand Canyon and seeing nothing but layers of stone, no river deltas. Exactly where and exactly how do these rocks look like river deltas? Puhleeze, show us so we can see them too.

Back in Permian times,

QUESTION BEGGING!! Give us the phenomena, the simple facts, not the interpretation. You mean ON THE SURFACE OF A PARTICULAR ROCK LAYER? What exactly do you mean?

many quadrupeds (probably reptiles) left their footprints in the soft delta mud. As the mud baked hard in the sun, it formed cracks. The hardness of the baked mud preserved the footprints and mudcracks until the flooded rivers of the rainy season buried them in fresh mud. These fossil prints and mudcracks are found today, as well as iron oxides that form in the open air, showing that these shales formed above sea level.

Why is it we get these fanciful SCENARIOS instead of a simple description of the bald facts at the site in question?? It is possible that the cracks in the mud occurred even after all the strata were laid down as the rocks dried. Possible, I say. WHERE is this iron oxide? SHOW it to us. How do you know it wasn't either carried there on the flood or formed there as the rocks dried?

The pure quarz Navajo Sandstones of Triassic and Jurassic times

Quartz Sandstones will do just fine descriptively, Triassic and Jurassic are meaningless impositions of interpretation over the facts, sheer mystification.

in Zion National Park, Utah, also look exactly like desert sand dunes (Gilluly, Waters, and Woodford, 1968).

No they do not look exactly like dunes. They look like ROCKS.

They contain extensive cross bedding of the type found in sand dunes, and the frosted sand grains and sand-blasted pebbles found only in dunes formed on the land.

See all my reasoning above. This is absurd.

Certain formations in western Wyoming look exactly like deserts that bordered a fitfully receding sea in Carboniferous times (Houlik, 1973).

"Look exactly like??" Geology destroys language and plays with minds, that's all I can say. No, they look like ROCKS and you are imposing your interpretation on them based on some characteristics of their contents. ANY SCIENCE THAT IS REALLY A SCIENCE SHOULD STRICTLY GIVE FACTS.

THIS IS CRAZY.

In particular, the Mississippian Lodgepole Formation contains the type of carbonate deposits and evaporites found forming in tidal flats today. The Amsden formation consists of sabkhas and desert dunes. Sabkhas are a kind of hardpan that forms in deserts after hard water seeps up through the ground by capillary action and evaporates leaving nodules of calcite, andhydrite, and other salts. They are seen forming extensively in Saudi Arabia today. Unless Houlik has grossly erred, these sabkhas, casts of evaporite crystals, and fossil dunes show that these Carboniferous deposits formed in a desert, not a flood.

Again, it's hard to know what is being talked about here because precious little actual fact, in fact NONE, is given about how this formation "contains" these carbonate deposits and evaporites, that is, what this looks like in the rock itself. What does a carbonite deposit look like IN THE ROCK? Is it encased solidly within the rock, is it scattered throughout the rock, is it in any relation to other parts of the rock that cause it to imitate this assumed former landscape? Does it occur on the surfaces or is there space within the rock where it occurs?

Knowing these things and no doubt many other facts that I'm unable to think of could tell me whether the substances in question could have been transported with the other sediments in the Flood, or perhaps developed in the rock or on the rock after it was deposited and so on and so forth.

If all I'm given is this fanciful SCENARIO that ASSUMES their having been developed on the spot I am deprived of any means of thinking about the phenomena themselves. Sometimes it seems this is the objective of such descriptions, but probably it's just that the interpreters are so enamored of and so believing of their interpretation it doesn't occur to them that it IS an interpretation and that the actual facts or phenomena are required of them. Some science!

Several times at the end of the Miocene epoch (six to eight million years ago), the Mediterranean Sea dried up, leaving extensive desert deposits on the sea bottom (Hsu, 1972).

See now, this too is just an interpretation, but an interpretation of what facts is withheld from us. What are the characteristics of the rock that stands for "the Miocene epoch" that led to the interpretation of "several times" of drying up of the Mediterranean, and how do they determine the "sea bottom" from this rock and how "desert deposits" were left on it many times, from just looking at the rock, which is apparently all they are doing! This is mystification or obscurantism to the max, this is not science!

The Straits of Gibraltar opened and closed, causing these complex changes, as the Glomar Challenger discovered in 1970 by using echo soundings and deep-sea core samples. Each time the Mediterranean slowly dried up, first calcite precipitated around the rim of the basin of the Balearic abyssal plain, then anhydrites and gypsum further in, and finally rock salt in the center at the deepest point. This is just the order that these salts would precipitate if you set out a large saucer of sea water to dry. Successive dryings of the Mediterranean produced hundreds of meters of evaporites. Not only did evaporites form, but also land deposits like sun-baked mud cracks, wind-blown sand, and sabkha anhydrite nodules. Since algae can only grow where sunlight reaches, the stromatolites (a common algae deposit) found in deep sea core samples show that the Mediterranean sea floor, now two miles deep, was once dry land. The Rhone and Nile rivers cut their canyons thousands of feet below current sea level to feed the desiccated Mediterranean basin. Desert-style alluvial fans accumulated from debris washed by cloudbursts down the slopes of Sardinia; now these deposits lie far under the water. After the Mediterranean refilled with water for the last time, at the beginning of the Pliocene, sediments began to accumulate over the evaporites; the weight of these sediments forced evaporites up through weak spots in the sediments to form salt domes. Some of these salt domes are a few miles across, and hundreds to thousands of feet high. Even though such structures may not be forming today, a dried-up Mediterranean could have easily formed them, whereas flood geology is hard pressed to account for such things.

Zowie wowie, this is one long paragraph of nothing but mental castle-building without a SINGLE FACT for a person reading it to hold onto. WHERE ARE YOU GETTING ALL THIS STUFF? WHAT IS YOUR EVIDENCE FOR THIS? ARE YOU LOOKING AT ROCKS? WHAT ARE YOU SEEING IN THE ROCKS? I'm supposed to take this fantastic imaginative scenario as refutation of the Flood? You must be joking! WHAT PLANET DO YOU GUYS LIVE ON ANYWAY?

This kind of "science" justifies the title of my blog perfectly, it is all fantasy being presented as if it were science, speaking of their fantasy of the past as if it were known fact! Biological evolutionism does this and so does geological old-earthism. These guys should get out of the field and write for Hollywood.

http://www.bibleandscience.com/science/ageofearth.htm

http://ncse.com/cej/1/1/fatal-flaws-flood-geology

Some of the vagaries concerning Flood definition and timing

2011-10-20T03:15:00.000-07:00

On the thread Evidence for a Recent Flood, Coyote answered by Kbertsche:

[Coyote]But the flood had to occur at some time in the past. And that time had to include humans.

This would seem to eliminate the Cambrian and the K-T boundary, two time periods favored by posters here but millions of years before humans walked the earth.

Unfortunately there are so many non-YEC creationists who have capitulated to the geologic time table Coyote can make this point quite fairly. Perhaps his reply should be regarded as the definitive answer to them that should shake them off their ridiculous capitulation. He's right, if one accepts ANYTHING about the geo time table, such as the notion of the "Cambrian" or the "K-T boundary" then you have to accept the whole thing, which includes the idea that there were no human beings around at that time. It's really quite a good point and it ought to wake up some of these so-called creationists.

What it comes down to is that flood has to be at some specific time--it can't always be "not here, over there!" -- which is what we get from many creationists.

That's the old shell game.

So at some point creationists should figure out when the flood occurred and let us all look for the evidence at that time.

Otherwise one might begin to think that it's all a myth.

Quite true. The problem IS that creationists disagree about the timing, and that's a BIG problem.

Since I'm convinced the Flood accounts for the entire column of strata and its fossils, and that it occurred when the Bible says it occurred, which I understand to be about 4500 years ago, I wish all Biblical creationists would see the logic of this and agree about it. THEN we could maybe proceed to a real discussion about it.

There is of course a problem with Coyote's idea that "creationists should figure out when the flood occurred and let us all look for the evidence at that time" because of course he's committed to the timing notions of conventional geology and he has a very limited idea of what sort of evidence the Flood would have left as well. A layer deep in some archaeological dig perhaps. Won't do. The evidence for the Flood is all over the earth and quite visible for the most part.

[kbertsche]Yes, I agree. As you probably know, many evangelical scholars think that the biblical account is describing a local or regional flood, not a worldwide flood. Some (e.g. Dick Fischer) would put this recently, in the last 10,000 years. Others (e.g. Glenn Morton) would associate it with the infilling of the Mediterranean, and push it back much further. Still others (e.g. Paul Seely) would make it semi-mythical but based on a real, local flood.

These creationists are a sad bunch. The language of the Bible couldn't be clearer. This Flood covered the entire earth and anything else is playing fast and loose with God's word. Also I have no idea where they get their 10,000 years. No matter how you cut it the time comes down to about 6000 total. The Jewish calendar gets it close.

But again, these various interpretations are the purview of Bible study, not science. You are right to restrict this science thread to a single, popular interpretation.

However, nobody really discussed that interpretation that I've seen and the disagreements among the creationists make it impossible anyway.

Where are all of the YEC Flood Geology advocates? Why aren't they here defending their views? I would have expected them to try to present some sort of evidence for their position (e.g. Sir Leonard Wooley's flood layers at Ur).

Yeah, those "flood layers at Ur" show the usual inability to envision what a worldwide flood would have done, as if it would have left barely discernible traces that have to be sought deep in an archaeological dig.

Then Pressie responds to kbertsche:

Hi Dr Bertsche
Yes, I would love to talk to them, too. The problem here is that not even one of the YEC's here have any geology training at all.

I would love to see one of the handful YEC's with geological training in the world (maybe ten?), to come and defend their positions. My only guess is that they don't want to try it on forums like this, because they know they will get slaughtered. They just want to preach to novices!

"Getting slaughtered" really just means getting ganged up on to such an extent that your voice doesn't get a hearing, it doesn't mean the evidence has defeated you.

I do know that Dr. John Baumgardner tried to do it once on a similar forum. The problem with him is that he has no geological training, but is an Engineer with a Ph.D. in Geophysics. Boy, did he get slaughtered! In the end he tried outright untruths (like referring to a real expert on dating methods as a "self-styled specialist"). Then he mentioned something about "no respect for the Word of God" (or something to that effect) and then he disappeared from the forum.

I guess we won't get anything better than that. That's all they have.

Would very much like to hear more about the Baumgardner event, some quotes, or a link.

But as long as they are insisting on their dating methods we probably can't get anything said. My angle is to try to make the case for the Flood well enough that they will have to rethink their dating methods in the end to accommodate the other overwhelming evidence for the Flood. I think I've already collected quite a bit of killer evidence for it.

Why are underground rivers supposed to be a problem for YECs? Ancient surface landscapes? Ha!

2011-10-19T18:02:00.000-07:00

I ran across this argument on another site earlier and it reminded me I've seen it before. I've been aware of underground rivers for years and they never seemed to me to be a problem for my creationist views. I lived in a town that had many underground creeks.

If, as I can only suspect, they have the idea that it's somehow proof of ancient landscapes that were once on the surface I can only groan with disbelief. They're underground, they've always been underground, the water seeks existing space between upper and lower formations and it just runs along like any river where it has that space. It runs like a river, acts like a river, leaves sediments and other evidence just as any river does, right where it is.

If they are talking about dried-up former rivers where only their bed remains deep underground they are either underground rivers that dried up underground or they are the evidence of water running across the surface of a layer before the next layer was deposited during the Flood.

There's no way new sediments could have been laid over an existing landscape and the landscape been preserved. Sometimes I wonder what planet these scientists live on anyway.

Just a collection of anti-creationist sentiment

2011-10-19T05:38:00.000-07:00

The time has some for Summaries on the thread, My huge problem with creationist thinking, a thread that I've generally ignored as it doesn't interest me at all. The summaries are somewhat interesting, however, so I went and read the opening post plus a few that followed it. The OP is about how there are many different creationisms and it's unfair to impose one over another, even racist to do so. On such a topic you can be sure that the First Amendment was invoked many times to claim that America is a secular nation and not a Christian nation and that no one religion should be allowed to dominate.

Here's a summation by Omnivorous in Message 327

My main problem with creationism is the compulsion that creationists both suffer and seek to impose: that their story of origins is literally correct and must be taught to children in public schools.

Well, there was a time in America, in the UK, in Europe in general, when the Bible was the foundation of all education, of children and in the universities. How far we've come since then. It was also the foundation when the First Amendment was written, and it remained the foundation for many years afterward because the First Amendment was meant to PROTECT religion, specifically the Christian religion, not abolish it. But alas, a secular revisionist mindset now aggressively misuses it and hardly anyone knows how to object.

I don't really care about it otherwise. I don't care about the difficulties presented by debate with creationists because there is no debate with creationists.

Whatever line of approach a reasoning person takes, the reply remains essentially the same--God showed me the way and told me to spread the word by any means necessary. Creationists are the jihadists of discourse, and I just don't care.

From a fine long history of Christian tlhought in the development of civilization to ... this. Not that today's creationism is that great a representation of our illustrious history, I need to add.

The creationist approach to debate is repetition. Creationists reject science, and reason won't persuade them to do otherwise: the irony of rejecting science's methodology while enjoying its benisons is matched only by possessing an evolved brain that they refuse to use for anything other than superstition.

But I don't care about that, either. My problem is not with creationist thought, but creationist action.

A big fat lie. Western science owes everything to Christian thought, and creationists do not reject science, only the fake science that supports evolution.

Then Dr. A in message 326, first complaining about a particular poster:

He soon reverted to form, though, with mere whining about evolution and statements such as: "For me it does not matter which creation model is correct, as long as none of my ancestors were apes."

It matters a LOT which creation model is correct, sad that there are creationists who think otherwise. As for having an ape type for an ancestor that never bothered me before I was a Christian, but what DID bother me was the fact that it became an excuse to treat human beings as mere animals, and it seems to me that attitude has had far-reaching negative consequences on human society.

I suppose credit should be given to IamJoseph, who produced the foolowing staggering monstrous falsehood as a reason for his partiality to Genesis: "Genesis, unlike other ancient writings, includes names, places, dates, numbers, rivers, mountains, geneologies ..." OK, it's a load of cobblers, nor would it be a convincing argument even if it was true, but it is a reason. Credit where credit is due.

I don't want to get into this as it's not an argument I would pursue myself, but while IamJoseph usually has little to say I can agree with in this case I think he's right. He just didn't go far enough explaining what he means. Genesis has historically accurate information in other words while other creation myths really are myths. I'm sure Dr A would dispute the claim of historical accuracy even with evidentiary support, of course, but he'd be wrong.

The difficulty of answering the question stems directly from the nature of creationist apologetics. 99% of creationism is not, nor ever has been, an attempt to validate creationism. No-one's out there trying to find evidence that snakes could once talk, or that fish were created four days after light.

These things do not impinge on the scientific questions. The Bible contains many things that pertain only to God and not to the playing out of His natural laws on this planet.

Creationism goes: "Evolution is wrong because [insert common creationist error here]. Therefore ... magic!" And even if this line of reasoning was correct, there would be no reason to infer any particular brand of magic, nor even that the magician should be of the order of being that we would classify as a god.

he doesn't care to be accurate apparently. Much of Creationism DOES address science and attempts to stick to scientific issues and leave the Bible out of it, which is a perfectly valid approach even though Kurt Wise considers it to be devious. It isn't at all, most scientific principles can be discussed without reference to the Bible. Perhaps they shouldn't be, it's something imposed on creationists by establishment science, and there was a time when nobody had a problem referring to the Bible when discussing science. They may not have been right in their understanding, but whenever they understood some phenomenon to be an effect of the Flood they had no problem saying so -- because western civilization used to be Christian.

This explains why some people have given up on creationism in general and advocated ID. ID might be defined as that subset of creationism which consists only of saying: "Evolution is wrong because [insert common creationist error here]. Therefore ... magic! Oh, or maybe space aliens if a judge is listening." (Making ID the only idea in the history of ever which has tried to gain intellectual respectability by invoking space aliens.)

I'm almost surprised at Dr. A that he would descend to such a comment. ID spends most of its time trying to demonstrate that complex biological systems had to be created by an intelligent agency.

Even so, ID is still partial in a way that would be unwarranted by the IDists own (overt) premises: for example, when did you ever see an IDist use the phrase "designer or designers"? Arguably, then, their rhetoric still discriminates without scientific basis in favor of monotheists over polytheists.

So far have we degenerated from our Christian past we aren't allowed to favor the Christian God in anything. This is of course why the west is deteriorating and will go on deteriorating, but those who don't see the handwriting on the wall will of course explain it some other way -- probably make it the fault of Christians.

Dr. A's course in geology: some questions

2011-10-18T07:35:00.000-07:00

This is from his post, Igneous Rocks.

We should perhaps add a note on the presence of komatiite (extrusive ultramafic rock) in our diagram, as some textbooks omit it entirely from such diagrams. Komatiite is never observed forming today: as ultramafic magma rises from the hot interior of the Earth to its cool surface, it will fall below its melting point before it gets near to the surface, forming peridotite, komatiite's intrusive counterpart. Consequently komatiite is found only in rocks dated to over 2.5 billion years ago, consistent with geologists' belief that the Earth was hotter at that time.

What I'd like to know is where I might see some of this komatite, or how would I recognize a rock "dated to over 2.5 billion years ago." I suppose they're pretty deep rocks of course.

In the diagram, we have shown the layers of rock lying flat, except around the lacolith (item (6) on the diagram) and so we have shown the sills as horizontal structures. However, layers of rock can be folded by tectonic activity. When a sill intrudes into rocks like this, it intrudes between the layers of rock (this is the definition of a sill) and so will itself be contorted.

Are you thinking of magma intruding between the layers after the distortion? How would you know if that happened or if it had intruded before the distortion and was folded along with the sedimentary rocks?

[That bulge of sedimentary rock over the laccolith is interesting because it's similar to the much larger bulge of the strata into which the Grand Canyon is cut, shown in cross sections of the area, which is clearly (according to me) the result of the intrusive magma beneath the base of the canyon. The volcanic event that produced that magma bubble clearly displaced the rocks that make up the "Great Unconformity" and is evidenced by the granite in the form of magma fingers that also always appears on such diagrams at the base of the canyon. The point? 1) The unconformity was created while all the strata were in place, not, as is commonly believed, before. 2) The sedimentary rocks follow the curve of the magma intrusion in both cases, showing they were already in place when it erupted, which nobody is doubting in the case of the laccolith, and that they were still damp because they conform to the shape.]

He goes on to answer the question "How do we know" about the igneous nature of granite among other things. That's all good of course, as there must have been such questions about its origin or nature early on in the study of rocks, but I'd be more interested in knowing how they think they know that "the Earth was hotter 2.5 billion years ago."

Then in the following discussion Pressie raises questions that suggest he doesn't know what Dr. A. means by his wanting to emphasize the history of the rocks. But the constant refrain appears that we know how such and such a rock was formed because we see it forming before our eyes. Now THIS is going to require a lot more description than he may be planning to give. Exactly WHAT is "forming before their eyes" anyway? Exactly WHAT are they seeing? Has anyone actually seen a rock form? Has anyone seen a STRATUM of rock form?

In message 49 Dr. A says:

What I meant was, geologists don't merely collect and classify. They have a theory. This theory has predictive and explanatory power.
---
Take aeolian sandstone as an example.

Theory: such-and-such sedimentary structures are aeolian.

Prediction: when we find fresh sediment having these structures, it will be on dry land; when we watch it forming in real time we shall see the wind forming the structures.

Observation: consistent with the prediction.

Explanatory inference: when we find these structures in sandstone, we should infer that it was formed in the same way.

Another prediction: hence if we find sandstone with these structures, then if we find fossils in it they should be terrestrial and not marine.

Observation: We do, hurrah!

Explanatory inference: but if we find no fossils, we should come to the same conclusion, since the theory works every time we can test its predictions.

It may be bleedin' obvious, but it is still an example of a scientific theory which we establish as true by testing its predictions and from which we can then make inferences which rest on the theory rather than on direct observation.

Now it is precisely this aspect of geology which I wish to emphasize.

Theory, fine, let's see what it actually means in reality.

What I really really want explained is such things as where all the sediments came from to build the enormous depth and breadth of strata in, say, the Grand Canyon/Grand Staircase area, what sort of processes could have made it possible for an aeolian (air or wind-formed) layer to sit atop or between some water-originated layers and look for all the world like they were all created by exactly the same processes, and how an aeolian layer could ever have come to be conformed to the flat hard horizontality of a water-made layer, and how any of the layers could ever have turned into rock unless there were LOTS of layers above them compressing them soon after they were laid down, and so on and so forth.

More on the Flood, inadequate comparisons with local floods 2

2011-10-16T05:22:00.000-07:00

People are still responding to that one post by Portillo about the billions of fossils as evidence of the Flood. Along comes Pressie now to make that same straw man objection he made earlier:

[Portillo]If a flood occurred, what would you expect to find? Billions of dead things, which we call fossils, laid down by water all over the world.
[Pressie]There's lots of areas all over the world with no fossils at all. Therefore, those fossils are not all over the world. Therefore, no such flood.

It is no problem for the Flood that there are places where there are no strata or fossils. Why should that be a problem? They object that such a flood wouldn't create strata or fossils at all, then they object that it would have created more than it did.

The next post is creationist ICANT making HIS ridiculous argument about the Bay of Fundy's very high tides, which he thinks demonstrates what a worldwide flood would have done -- pretty much nothing, no evidence, no destruction, nada. Then as I've noted in earlier posts Moose picked that up as a supposedly wonderfully refreshing creationist position which actually made me cry over the stupidity and irrelevance and how far this debate is from anything that could ever make any sense. Unfortunately a great deal of the silliness in this debate does come from the creationist side, and it just snowballs from there. I'm sure that is partly because there isn't an established creationist position on some of the questions, but only partly, because some of the creationist arguments at EvC, such as ICANT's, are so far out in neverneverland it makes that basic difficulty far worse than it has to be. However, I have my own hobbyhorse positions as well, which also differ from some of the main creationist organizations, so I guess I can't complain too much. Except of course I think mine make sense and theirs don't.

So of course many are now answering ICANT's claim. I'm not sure why Moose was so taken with it as most of the other evos can see what's wrong with the idea.

Panda eventually comes along and answers Pressie quite effectively:

There are flowers all over my lawn - but my lawn is not 100% covered in flowers.

Except of course he has to get in a dig too:

This 'wiggle room' will allowed the statement to be 'adjusted' whenever someone tries to pin it down.

I dunno,why should any wiggle room be needed?

But of course Pressie isn't giving up:

[Portillo writes]: If a flood occurred, what would you expect to find?
In one big global flood occurring at the same time all over the world, covering the entire world in water, I would expect to find at least one stratum of sedimentary deposits with comparative characteristics that covers the entire world. From pole to pole. It would contain unsorted debris all in one layer. In laymen's terms, all mixed up.

Sure, this is a version of the commonsense expectation. The problem is this isn't what actually happened as anyone can see. Probably most of us would expect something like a jumbled mess of both dead things and sediments, not the layering we actually see, but commonsense thinking about something in the distant past that nobody has ever seen the like of can't be trusted.

Also, the commonsense view really is an uneducated view. The ocean has powerful streams in it that can carry things quite a distance. It also has layers of its own. And currents and waves to boot. There is no reason to expect it to homogenize everything just because the land has been submerged for a few months. The ocean doesn't leave the same debris on beaches all over the world, it leaves specific things in specific places, specific kinds of sand for instance. Currents and waves in one place will have different effects from the currents and waves in other places. The ocean has many separate circulating systems going on in it, it isn't just one big mass of water.

But it's also something to think about that if we turn the tables and ask what should we expect of a planet that simply went on its daily business as usual for a few billion years, had some local floods but no worldwide flood, evolved all kinds of life from something primordial and so on, my answer would certainly NOT be stacks of sedimentary rocks that just happened to preserve a neat record of the stages of that evolution, it would be something just as chaotic as they are imagining for the Flood. Jumbles of things everywhere, maybe some fossils but not necessarily many, maybe some signs of bodies of water that came and went, but never would anyone dream up the strata and its contents for that scenario. Or in other words the strata and its fossils are really quite extraordinary with respect to anything we're familiar with or have normal means of explaining. They're always trying to claim they see the strata forming today. No they don't.

Floodists don't have to bother with commonsense guesswork, we can SEE what the Flood did even if conventional geology can't because they've got it all tied up in their false theory. No other agency could have created those strata but a worldwide Flood. No other agency could have produced the conditions for the burial and fossilization of so many living things. It could not have happened piece by piece over hundreds of millions of years. THE WHOLE POINT OF THE FLOOD WAS TO KILL LIVING THINGS. What more evidence do you want than the worldwide graveyard of the strata?

And yes it IS worldwide, in the sense Panda said -- it's everywhere just like the dandelions in his lawn, without implying it covers every square inch of the planet. However, much of the strata was broken up and washed away as the Flood was receding and draining away, which must account for some of that. And the enormous quantities of sediments that were washed away had to get strewn somewhere if they didn't all make it to the ocean which no doubt a great deal didn't. That would cover up layers downhill or downstream to a great depth in some places. Then the tectonic forces occurred in the final stages of the Flood or some time afterward, not entirely clear about the timing, and there had also to be places where for whatever reason layers didn't form. Also there are parts of the planet that look peculiarly like they were formed from water just spreading hither and thither in swirls and whatnot. I posted a satellite view of that sort of thing some time back.

There was also a lot of volcanic action that followed the stratification. We know it followed it because it vents upwards through the strata in every diagram I've ever seen, shoots up dikes of stuff through those strata and spreads out sills between the existing strata as well. (Shouldn't that make evolutionists wonder why volcanism waited so long, even until recent time* to occur? Is that accounted for in conventional geology or is it even noticed?

Same thing with tectonic distortion of great blocks of strata, clearly already in place for supposed millions of years, right? The most dramatic example of this kind of action AFTER all the strata were in place is the Grand Canyon-Grand Staircase area where clearly the volcanoes in the area erupted after the strata were all in place, up to "recent" time in the Staircase, and clearly all the canyons and the steps of the staircase were formed after all the strata were in place -- up to the "Permian" in the Grand Canyon. The strata beneath are all neatly horizontal throughout the whole area, only minimally distorted or tilted as a whole by the general uplift of the area.

Clearly no more of those horizontal strata will ever be laid in that region. None are being laid and none could be laid that would conform to the existing stack because of all the volcanism and tectonic disturbances that have made the area no longer quietly horizontal as it clearly was for those supposed billions of years until the canyons were cut. Why should strata stop being built if the geo time table is correct? Shouldn't the planet just go on accumulating these markers of the supposed time periods indefinitely? Well, clearly it's stopped in the GC/GS region and can never be resumed.

Shouldn't that make evolutionists wonder why all the disturbances, volcanic, tectonic, etc., WAITED until recent time to occur? Why the strata are all so neatly horizontal and undisturbed until recent time? It should, it should. Sure was one quiet planet for all those billions of years until all at once in "recent time" all that activity suddenly began to occur. This is a fact that makes no sense on conventional geology's time table and should be recognized to utterly trash it.

I started off that rant wanting to make the point that volcanic action would also destroy strata in some places. But what I got said instead is more important than that.

In fact I think I'll stop here. The rest of that EvC thread just goes on with silly meaningless posts from Pressie and ICANT and nothing sensible is being said anyway.
====================================================

*Need to clarify: I don't say all that volcanic action waited until say the "Permian" period which is the uppermost layer of the Grand Canyon because clearly the whole area was originally covered with strata up to the highest "recent" time period of the Grand Staircase to the north of the Grand Canyon, and all those upper strata were broken up and washed off the area of the Grand Canyon, leaving the Kaibab plateau (representing supposed "Permian" time) as the uppermost surface at its rims. The magma of course vented at that level because that's what was there after all the rest washed away, while at the Grand Staircase it climbed all the way to the uppermost "recent" level where the lava pooled.

There are plenty of places where it could be supposed that the tectonic or volcanic activity occurred in the supposed time period that forms the uppermost layer of a particular block of strata, but my argument would be that there had originally been strata above that level that washed off there too. That's a long argument of course, but at least this should make clear what I'm trying to get at. ALL THE STRATA all over the world were laid down BEFORE volcanoes erupted through the column or tectonic forces distorted it.

More on the Flood, inadequate comparisons with local floods

2011-10-15T14:05:00.001-07:00

There have been half a dozen posts at EvC recently, mostly on the Flood, that I've wanted to respond to but haven't been able to get to them, don't know if I will yet. But here's a new one:

Portillo says: Billions of dead things, which we call fossils, laid down by water all over the world.
And Panda answers: Although true: that is far too a general statement to be useful.

The following sentence is also true:

If 1000's of small floods occurred over millions of years, what would you expect to find? Billions of dead things, which we call fossils, laid down by water all over the world. And what do we find? Billions of dead things, which we call fossils, laid down by water all over the world.

Sorry, but this sentence is NOT true. Perhaps Portillo should have been more detailed in his remark but that probably wouldn't faze the sophists at EvC either. But anyway, No, from small floods even in the millions we could NOT get the billions of dead things that we find as fossils in the worldwide strata and we certainly do not get the depth and extent and amazingly consistent appearance of the strata themselves, an appearance that suggests to anyone really thinking that they all had to have been created in ONE event, not a series of events, and not a hodgepodge of little floods over time. This is just evo sophistry run amok.

There needs to be something to separate your claim from the more mundane floods that we see regularly, all over the world.

So, although correct, you statement needs to be more specific to rule out the everyday events.

As I've stated above.

And Dr. A adds his own two cents in the next post:

[Portillo]If a flood occurred, what would you expect to find? Billions of dead things, which we call fossils, laid down by water all over the world.
[Dr. A]Why? Is mass fossilization the usual sequel in the locale of a localized non-magical flood? Please provide evidence that this is the case.

If not, then I would have no such expectation.

Interesting. He's implying a disagreement with Panda's implication that local floods COULD have produced all those fossils. He's right, they could not. Mass fossilization is NOT the usual sequel to local floods, there is no comparison, which just highlights Panda's sophistry.

But he's also committing the error of thinking the Flood of Noah can be compared to local floods. About the only effect that they can be used to demonstrate is the destructiveness of even small floods, which ought to get across that there had to be huge effects from the worldwide Flood. And there are: The entire world has a wrecked and tumble-down appearance, but also the strata and the fossils around the world testify to it to anyone with eyes to see. NOTHING could have created all that BUT the Flood of Noah.

Earlier in the same thread Dr A responds to someone's claim that the Channeled Scablands of Washington show what would happen in the Flood:

[Coyote]One example of this is the evidence left by the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington.
[Dr. A] I think I've expressed my doubts about the Channeled Scablands before, but this is a new thread, so I'll do it again.

The snag is that they were caused by the breaking of a natural dam so that a lot of pent-up water swept laterally across the landscape. Rather than by a lot of rain. Sure, it's a catastrophic flood, but is it a good model for the Flood

And in another post down a bit:

[Coyote] The massive amounts of rain would quickly seek lower levels, and we know from recent disasters how devastating that can be.
[Dr. A] Devastating, yes. Producing channeled scablands, no.

And if I'm following this correctly -- it's not as clear as it might be-- he's right, the Flood would not have created the Channeled Scablands. The Flood wouldn't carve land like that, simply destroy it, at least in the initial stages from the heavy rains -- but the Flood and ONLY the Flood could have deposited the strata -- in a later stage. As current Geology convincingly says about the Scablands, they were created by the breaking of a dam that released a massive amount of water from a standing lake. THAT kind of water flow COULD carve such channels.

However, in a sense it IS still all the Flood's doing, as a Floodist regards that enormous lake, known as Lake Missoula, to be water left after the Flood had drained away, along with other giant lakes such as Lahontan and Bonneville in the same general area. It's also seemed to me that a trigger for the breaking of the dam and the release of the water from not just Missoula but all the lakes could likely have been the tectonic forces that came into play some time after the Flood. They built the Rockies, pushed up the land, could have dumped the lakes as well. Something like that is surely what carved the Grand Canyon and Grand Staircase area. The canyon appears to have been formed first by deep volcanic eruption which raised the land in that area and cracked the upper strata which had been laid down to a depth of two miles or more originally. That admitted the residual standing Flood waters as an enormous cataract pouring in from all sides of the crack. Certainly something like that had to have been the case. The Colorado river even swollen to the max could not have done such a thing in billions of years.

LATER ADDITION:
Then Coyote, who repeats his mantra about the age of the strata and the fossils because he can't think any other way. He regards it all as fact to such an extent that his mind can't even produce a contrary thought.

Anyway, here's his comment:

If a flood occurred, what would you expect to find? Billions of dead things, which we call fossils, laid down by water all over the world. And what do we find? Billions of dead things, which we call fossils, laid down by water all over the world.
One problem with this scenario is that these fossils are spread over a billion or so years; they are far from being the same age.

Sorry, we believe your methods of dating are all wrong, don't believe a word of it. They ARE all the same age, you just have to learn to see with new eyes.

Another problem is that we can see evolution in the fossils. These layers of different ages show a progression of critters from older to younger. This progression had to take a lot of time to develop.

They SEEM to but you are of course ignoring anything that contradicts that perfect scenario and you are INTERPRETING the differences between varieties of the same type to be evolution of that type when all they are is VARIETIES that form from the BUILT-IN gene code for that species. Trilobites for instance obviously had a broad range of variation possible built into their genome. And there is really nothing about them to justify your categorizing those higher in the strata as younger or "more evolved" than those lower, that's just an artifact of your theory / figment of your imagination. I'm sure you can rationalize it but without any real justification, only by noting certain factors while ignoring others. And if you are talking about different species in the sense of Kinds (they're called something different from the other species) being older or younger with respect to each other, again that is PURELY an artifact of your theory, something you can possibly rationalize by making certain comparisons and ignoring others, but in reality they are simply SEPARATE SPECIES with their own species-specific gene code.

Also, floods don't produce fossils.

That is true, the ordinary everyday floods that go on in our time do NOT produce fossils. But the Flood of Noah did, because it moved such prodigious amounts of sediments and living things and deposited them in such thick layers all over the earth it created the ideal conditions for fossilization.

Shellfish fossils are produced in oceans, and sometimes lakes or marshes.

HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT? Meaning what is your evidence. But of course one would expect seashells to come from the ocean so that part's obvious. But the FLOOD WAS AN OCEAN FER PETE'S SAKE. You know, ALL THE WATER ON THE PLANET KINDA SORTA MINGLED TOGETHER IN THAT EVENT. As for "sometimes" lakes or marshes, HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT? Kindly give us the evidence that any lake or marsh since the Flood has produced a fossil. I don't say it's impossible, only that any of the billions of fossils in the strata were NOT produced by a lake or a marsh.

The most a flood could do is move a fossil.

This was not just "A FLOOD," this was THE Flood to end all floods. It did not MOVE fossils, it MADE fossils.

Ignoring the two problems above, what are the odds that the fossils could be ripped up from their original locations and sorted out by time and type in their new locations by chaotic flood waters?

The fossils weren't, but the question applies somewhat to the living things themselves that were buried by the Flood. The TIME element of course does not apply, that's just your usual presupposition that you can't seem to suspend even for a moment's consideration of another point of view, but the sorting by type is mostly a SEEMING sorting by type as I say above. However, the Flood wasn't as chaotic as you seem to think. Ocean water has layers and currents and streams in it and these carry things. We can only suppose that the living things were sorted by some physical factors as well as their original habitat and their having been found all together in one place at the time of the Flood.

===========
And now Nuggin following Coyote:

If a flood occurred, what would you expect to find? Billions of dead things, which we call fossils, laid down by water all over the world. And what do we find? Billions of dead things, which we call fossils, laid down by water all over the world.
When floods occur, they kill everything that can not get away. They sweep all the dead things downhill to form giant piles of dead things.

As is the case with most here, you are picturing an ordinary flood limited in space and time compared to THE Flood which covered the entire planet and lasted a year. It rained 40 days and 40 nights during which time mudslides would have occurred and living things would have sought higher ground, most likely flocking together in their own groups. When they are swept up in a mudslide they are all together with perhaps the odd misfit as well. They do not form just a bunch of giant piles because there is too much water. Some may stay buried but as the water rises it's going to continue to erode away the land including all the mud with the dead creatures in it and carry them in the water along with the sediments. We know water sorts sediments, and apparently there was enough of it in the Flood that it also sorted everything else and carried it along in its layers and currents and streams until whatever law of physics came into play at whatever was the right phase of the Flood and dropped them on the now-denuded land mass in interestingly separated layers of sediments with their peculiar creaturely contents.

Those dead things are not sorted.

Not in an ordinary little local flood. Think bigger, Nuggywuggy.

If you flood Upstate New York, you are going to get dead people, dogs, cats, horses, cows, deer, coyotes, raccoons, mice, rats, snakes etc. All the things in the environment.

When we look at fossil beds we do not see a vast collection of "everything". We see certain groups of things clustered together and then other groups of things clustered together in different strata.

If "The Flood" were to occur, we'd expect to find elephants AND mammoths AND mastadons AND rabbits AND T-Rex AND zebras all in one big piles
We never find that. Ever.

So, unless "The Flood" included magic sorting water, your claim just doesn't.... carry water.

. Yeah well you've got the usual commonsense notion based on no knowledge whatever or even a reasonable imagination of what a worldwide Flood would do that lasted an entire year, just the usual itty bitty flood you've seen with your own eyes on television. And it has its plausibility as an exercise of fallible human imagination but that's all it has.

Actually your objection to the way things are sorted is just as much an objection to the evolutionist explanation. OK you've got the strata sorted VERTICALLY into time periods so you can get away with explaining the sorting of the fossils in terms of time, but there's nothing in evo theory that accounts for the HORIZONTAL sorting that is also seen in the strata. There is some mixture, sure, but there are also whole beds of one family of creatures from trilobites to dinosaurs, sometimes so ridiculously packed together the idea that they died in anything other than an enormous catastrophe is just ludicrous. Why should that be? Do animals all go to the same place to die? Not in our world. They die willy nilly just as you picture those creatures from New York dying in your tiny little flood.

No, SOMETHING sorted all of it. Seems to me the Flood is the only reasonable explanation. Something to do with the characteristics of a huge body of water, not magic.

RAZD/Zen Deist's strange argument against the Flood

2011-10-14T12:56:00.000-07:00

I absolutely do not understand what RAZD/Zen Deist is thinking of when he writes this stuff as supposedly a proof against the Flood:

Seashells cannot be evidence of a global flood, because:

•The seashell fossils found, range in age from 1 to 30 years old.

How on earth does this argue against the Flood? What is he imagining? Why wouldn't ALL the creatures that died in the Flood be of all ages the way all creatures are in life after all? What IS he imagining?

•The seashells are found in multiple layers.

Perhaps he has in mind one of the creationist notions that the Flood occurred at only one layer or below a certain layer or that sort of thing. Then perhaps he would have a point. But those notions make no sense. ALL the layers MUST have been laid down by the Flood as they are all identical in form and no other process could possibly have done it.

•Each layer shows mature marine growth of entire ecosystems.

Yeah, and the Flood picked up the whole array of ecostuff and moved it and buried it, what's the problem?

•Later layers grow on the debris of previous layers.

I have no idea what this refers to factually. Need a description of what is actually seen. This is just a flat assertion. Evidence evidence evidence! Was any given in the body of the thread?

•Layers of seashells extend deep inside mountains.

As they should if the strata were laid down in the Flood chock full of sea creatures, hardened and then raised into the mountain.

•The combined age of the layers extends into decades if not millenia.

Based on what? No, the whole kaboodle was laid down in the same event, over days, weeks, months perhaps, but the same event. Evidence evidence evidence! HOW DO YOU KNOW THIS! (This is the sort of thing Dr. A needs to address above all in his geology course, just another flat-out claim without anything to back it up).

•The purported duration of the biblical flood (~100 days) is too brief for any marine growth to occur, other than what one would see on a ship (some weed and slime).

Here's that silly idea spelled out in so many words. Why is he expecting GROWTH to occur at all in a Flood? The whole point of the Biblical Flood was to destroy all living creatures because of sin, nothing GREW in it.

•The type of growth on ships in a 100 day period is not the type of growth seen in the fossil seashells layers.

Same silliness. Is anybody going to point this out there?

Just more restatement of the evolutionist faith about mutations and transitionals

2011-10-13T21:38:00.000-07:00

Dr. A objects to creationist doubt concerning transitionals, as in why do we see distinct species then, or things producing the same things:

But we don't see things producing the same things. We see reproduction with variation.

Within the species only, where it was designed to stay.

Now it is trivially the case that enough mutations will turn any genotype into any other genotype.

Mutations are changes in the genes that belong to the particular species. Mutations do not create new genes, which would be the minimum task for evolving a new species from an old. Not to mention that the vast majority of mutations are deleterious -- there is a long long list of genetic diseases which are the known result of mutation, while the whole idea that mutations ever produced anything useful to any organism is only an article of faith, an assumption.

Obviously we do not see, in our own lifetimes, the quantities of evolution which (given the rate at which mutations occur) must necessarily take millions of years. But we do see exactly what we would see if this had occurred, in terms of morphology and genetics and embryology and biogeography and the fossil record and behavioral ecology and so forth. The inference is as clear as, for example, inferring that a man with a bullet in him, and an entry wound in a corresponding position, and power burns on his clothing around the wound, and a smoking gun lying next to him, has been shot. We don't need to have seen it. We see the evidence. Now if someone wanted to assert that the man had been struck down by a miraculous act of God, he would also have to assert that God had deceitfully covered his tracks to make it look like an ordinary shooting.

If it were that clear we'd all see it. But contrary to Dr. A's sense of certainty, the evidence fits the creationist assumptions better. 1) There are distinct species, which even evolutionists have to recognize (this is acknowledged by Darwin and by Jerry Coyne at least), that have never been anything but those distinct species; it is only theory/faith/fantasy that they were or could be anything else. 2) We don't see mutations doing what the theory says they are supposed to do because the genetic structure is built into the organism and did not evolve, which is what the creation model assumes. What we do see is the deterioration of the genetic structure brought about by mutations, which are mistakes, not any kind of engine that could drive evolution but an agent of the breakdown of the built-in genetic code as the Fall works its death in every species.

This piece of fantasizing by Dr. A is on that thread that introduces the video interview with David Berlinski on the preposterously nonscientific character of evolutionism. Others on that thread have offered their own fantasies in answer to Dr. Berlinski. Really pretty funny some of it.

Berlinksi muses that the changes required to turn, say, a cow into a whale are mathematically impossible, and our intrepid evos simply answer with the typical mode of fantasizing that evolutionism is known for, as if their simple ability to imagine a sequence makes it reality. Dawkins does this kind of thinking all the time, and they call that stuff Science. Hey instead of a cow, they offer, picture a land mammal that already looks sort of like an aquatic beast, then you can imagine it evolving into a whale easier than a cow could. I don't know, ask Berlinski how many structural changes he thinks evolution would have to accomplish between the -- what is it, an otter or a weasel or what? -- and the whale and whether THAT is any more mathematically possible than the cow.

On that same thread, and in fact in Dr. A's post, another article of the evo faith is asserted, that transitional types are quite sufficiently demonstrated to answer all the objections on that account. But Darwin recognized that a superabundance of transitionals should be seen in the fossil record if evolution were true and his lame answer was only that the fossil record is incomplete. But the fact is that the fossil record shows distinct species with variations among them just as today's living creatures do. This is such an easily recognizable fact that Stephen Jay Gould and others felt it necessary to postulate genetic LEAPS from one species to another instead of the infinitesimally small gradations originally expected. There is no such evidence, there is no evidence of the transitional types that evolution requires despite the assertions of such as Dr. A.

Dr. A's course in geology

2011-10-10T19:25:00.000-07:00

Glossary: to be updated as needed

#1 Minerals & Rocks: Definitions

Pressie's definitions.

#2 Silicate Minerals

#3 Rocks: Igneous, Sedimentary, Metamorphic

Comment so far: I've already picked up a fair amount of this information from my own internet researches on geological questions, but it gets more detailed than I have an interest in learning, so I'll just keep the posts for reference in case they're useful later.

My overall impression of Dr. A's teaching style is that he's doing a good job. But he doesn't explain enough for the novice. For instance, we need more of a definition of felsic and mafic. What does a felsic or mafic mineral look like? How would I recognize it in the field? Such words should be defined more than once in such a study if we are to really learn what they mean.

Similarly, putting up a chart with names of minerals doesn't help the person who isn't familiar with those things in the real world. I've many times looked up rocks and minerals myself to see pictures of them, and in a study like this one you should at least give links to pictures since you can't bring the objects to school to pass around. Names are meaningless without some idea of what they look like in reality.

The only controversial point so far is in the Rock Cycle diagram in #3 on the three classes of rocks. There's no problem with the basic formation of the rocks, knowing them by their history, only with 1) the implication that the earth repeats this cycle over and over to account for the millions of years of the assumptions of establishment geology, and with 2) the implication that sedimentary rocks of the vast extent we see in the Geologic Column could have been formed by the small local processes implied.

Here's a page geared to children on the subject of the Rock Cycle, with the parts a creationist would question bolded:

The Rock Cycle is a group of changes. Igneous rock can change into sedimentary rock or into metamorphic rock. Sedimentary rock can change into metamorphic rock or into igneous rock. Metamorphic rock can change into igneous or sedimentary rock. Igneous rock forms when magma cools and makes crystals. Magma is a hot liquid made of melted minerals. The minerals can form crystals when they cool. Igneous rock can form underground, where the magma cools slowly. Or, igneous rock can form above ground, where the magma cools quickly.

When it pours out on Earth's surface, magma is called lava. Yes, the same liquid rock matter that you see coming out of volcanoes.

On Earth's surface, wind and water can break rock into pieces. They can also carry rock pieces to another place. Usually, the rock pieces, called sediments, drop from the wind or water to make a layer. The layer can be buried under other layers of sediments. After a long time the sediments can be cemented together to make sedimentary rock. In this way, igneous rock can become sedimentary rock.

In principle I suppose there's nothing wrong with this description, except that it implies that such slow and unpredictable processes could have formed the vast rock layers of the Geologic Column, which is just plain impossible.

All rock can be heated. But where does the heat come from? Inside Earth there is heat from pressure (push your hands together very hard and feel the heat). There is heat from friction (rub your hands together and feel the heat). There is also heat from radioactive decay (the process that gives us nuclear power plants that make electricity).

So, what does the heat do to the rock? It bakes the rock.

Baked rock does not melt, but it does change. It forms crystals. If it has crystals already, it forms larger crystals. Because this rock changes, it is called metamorphic. Remember that a caterpillar changes to become a butterfly. That change is called metamorphosis. Metamorphosis can occur in rock when they are heated to 300 to 700 degrees Celsius.

When Earth's tectonic plates move around, they produce heat. When they collide, they build mountains and metamorphose (met-ah-MORE-foes) the rock.

The rock cycle continues. Mountains made of metamorphic rocks can be broken up and washed away by streams. New sediments from these mountains can make new sedimentary rock.

Sure, on a small scale, but not on the scale of the Geologic Column. And the idea that any mountain has ever eroded down to the flat plains so often shown in geological diagrams, nothing but wild theory. Never happened. Couldn't even really happen with millions of years to accomplish it.

The rock cycle never stops.

So ALL the rocks ALWAYS get recycled according to this theory and the earth is just being constantly changed from one to the other. Highly unlikely. Of course in principle they no doubt can and do go through all the changes illustrated, but not any great proportion of them as imagined by Old Earth geology.

As usual, among the facts that really are facts and the science that really is science there is this indigestible lump of theory or really, bald assumption, that's just *there* with nothing to support it, no discussion of it. Will Dr. A at some point address the question "How do we know?" with respect to this?

David Berlinski, a non-Christian critic of evolution

2011-10-09T08:54:00.000-07:00

Wonderful! Never heard of him before. He's great.

Chuck77 introduced the videos of an interview with him. This is the first of three and there are some shorter ones at You Tube as well to follow up with.

Another interview with Berlinski by the Discovery Institute. Apparently he was in the film "Expelled" which they are discussing. I guess I'll have to finally see that.

Also saw some bits of a debate between Berlinski and Hitchens in which Hitchens waxes indignant to the max at Berlinski's saying Nazism was inspired by Darwinism, and carries on at a fever pitch about all the Christian trappings of Nazism. Which were in reality just Hitler's attempt to keep the Christians under his control. Darwin WAS a main inspiration of Nazism. So was Neitzsche. Margaret Sanger's eugenics program that became Planned Parenthood was directly inspired by evolutionism, as she advocated ridding the human race of inferior types, most of whom were black. That bit of history has of course been swept under the rug since. But the affinity between her thinking and Nazism's eugenics program of ridding the world of Jews, Slavs and others they defined as inferior is quite straightforward. Simple historical fact.

Index Fossils continued: evidence or interpretation?

2011-10-09T03:36:00.000-07:00

On that same thread about index fossils I posted on below, Percy as Admin responds to Dr. A:

Dr Adequate writes:
Fossils Are Dated By Theory
But you see this is nonsense from beginning to end; as its author could have found out by some such expedient as reading a beginners' textbook on geology and noticing what it actually said.
[Percy writes] You may be implying the same thing, I can't be sure, but to me it seemed that Buz was confusing evidence itself with the interpretation of evidence within a theoretical framework.

Dr. A should have been called down for not describing what exactly was wrong with the information linked by Buz, as should Rox and Paul K too for that matter, as it's impossible to know what they think they were saying. Exactly HOW is it "nonsense" Dr. A? What on earth do you think a geology textbook would say that contradicts what the creationist said? It's a fact that certain fossils are used to identify the age of rocks, you certainly can't object to that.

But to respond to Percy's point about confusing evidence with the interpretation of evidence, I'd say that's not Buz's problem or the creationist's at the site he linked either, I'd say it's the old-earther/evolutionists' problem. The website was not wrong about the facts as I show in my previous post: the fact is that certain fossils are identified as index fossils that can be used to identify the age of a certain layer by their appearance there. That is fact, Buz didn't get that wrong, neither did the creationist who wrote the article at that link.

What you all must be objecting to is how that fact is used within the creationist paradigm. It's YOUR confusion, not the creationists.' That is, from the creationist perspective the Geologic Column that defines the supposed ages of all the strata and their fossil contents is wrong, at the very least a huge unproven theory. The Flood explains the strata and the fossils. And the evidence for the time periods of the conventional geological model is just about nonexistent. But they take it as proven fact to the extent of identifying these particular fossils for the purpose of defining the age of any particular rock they happen to be found in. It's the AGE question that's the unproven theory. On the creation model the strata and their contents are to be identified in terms of their position in relation to each other, their depth, their location. They were all laid down in the same event so age is not relevant.

However, it's interesting, I think, to consider that the index fossils that identify age according to conventional geo theory COULD be used to identify depth or location on the creationist model just as they are used to identify age on the old earth model. That is, there is enough predictability of the location of certain fossils to make the chosen ones useful for identifying the kind of rock you are looking for that normally occurs at a certain depth in the strata. It's not AS predictable as they usually claim but it is nevertheless predictable ENOUGH for that purpose whether to define the age of a rock or simply its depth. Either concept should be just as useful for finding whatever you are looking for, whether oil or coal or whatever. What is important is identifying the right rock at the right level.

What the creationist is objecting to is the circular reasoning that supports the age interpretation. He's right.

Another example of paradigm collision in which the creationist is defined out of the picture: Buz got it right about index fossils

2011-10-08T23:40:00.000-07:00

Referring to a previous post by Buz, Rox says to Buz:

Buz, that link does not at all help your case here. It is nothing but a declaration of ignorance by someone who hasn't a clue as to how geological studies are actually conducted. There is not one ounce of truth there. It wouldn't take but a few short minutes of Googling *just* USGS reports on paleontological studies to show you how asinine the link's and your conclusions are, but I don't want to waste my time. I am truly embarassed for you.

As such, I'm with jar in that I think there is much value in providing the willfully ignorant with a stage. The audience has an excellent opportunity to compare and contrast faulty and ignorant arguments with ones that are well reasoned and well supported.

So now I'm curious. What link did Buz offer that was so embarrassingly unscientific anyway?

Well, here's Buz's offending post: Turns out the link is to a creationist site where evolutionist views of fossils are being criticized, from which Buz took the remarks about "index fossils" as a dating method used by evolutionists that claim the method is nothing but circular reasoning that depends upon theory, not anything that could be considered to be empirical science.

Here's that offending link he put up which so many on that thread are objecting to, from which he quoted this:

FOSSILS ARE DATED BY A THEORY—But now comes the catch: How can evolutionist geologists know what dates to apply to those index fossils? The answer to this question is a theory! Here is how they do it:

Darwinists theorize which animals came first—and when they appeared on the scene. And then they date the rocks according to their theory—not according to the wide mixture of fossil creatures in it—but by assigning dates—based on their theory—to certain "index" fossils.

—That is a gigantic, circular-reasoning hoax!

"Fossils provide the only historical, documentary evidence that life has evolved from simpler to more and more complex forms."—*Carl O. Dunbar, Historical Geology, 2nd edition (1960), p. 47.

The conclusions about which fossils came first are based on the assumptions of evolution. Rock strata are studied, a few index fossils are located (when they can be found at all), and each stratum is then given a name. Since the strata are above, below, and in-between one another, with most of the strata missing in any one location,—just how can the theorists possibly "date" each stratum? They do it by applying evolutionary speculation to what they imagine those dates should be.

This type of activity classifies as interesting fiction, but it surely should not be regarded as science. The truth is this: It was the evolutionary theory that was used to date the fossils; it was not the strata and it was not "index fossils."

"Vertebrate paleontologists have relied upon ‘stage of evolution’ as the criterion for determining the chronologic relationships of faunas. Before establishment of physical dates, evolutionary progression was the best method for dating fossiliferous strata."—*J.F. Evernden, *O.E. Savage, *G.H. Curtis, and *G.T. James, "K/A Dates and the Cenozoic Mammalian Chronology of North America," in American Journal of Science, February 1964, p. 166.

On that same thread, before Rox's comment, Dr. Adequate says this about that site:

But you see this is nonsense from beginning to end; as its author could have found out by some such expedient as reading a beginners' textbook on geology and noticing what it actually said.

And PaulK had this to say:

Seriously, anybody who honestly thinks that rocks are only dated by index fossils and index fossils are dated solely by evolutionary theory is scarcely any less ignorant and deluded than Buz. (And that only because index fossils are one method of relative dating).

So apparently this is an egregious offense against science committed by the creationist Buz quotes and by Buz in quoting him.

HOWEVER, I WOULD POINT OUT THAT EXCEPT FOR PAUL K BUZ'S CRITICS DO NOT DISCUSS THE CONTENT OF THE ARGUMENT AT ALL, SAY NOT A WORD ABOUT WHY IT'S WRONG ABOUT INDEX FOSSILS. ALL ROX DID WAS ACCUSE BUZ OF IGNORANCE, GAVE NO CONTENT WHATEVER. Paul K at least gives the hint that the objection may be to the implication that

that rocks are ONLY dated by index fossils and index fossils are dated SOLELY by evolutionary theory.

Well, is this the substance of everybody's objection or not? Why is it so hard to get anything truly SCIENTIFIC out of these people anyway? They posture and prance about how unscientific the creationist is and GIVE NO CLUE AS TO WHERE HE FAILED AT THAT.

Poor Buz has been raked over the coals for weeks now for his supposed inability to grasp what evidence is. But truly as I recall that's all anybody has had to say: Buz doesn't know what evidence is. It's a mantra, a chant. I haven't followed those discussions very far so I don't really know much of what he's been arguing with them, and I still don't know HOW Buz has failed to understand what evidence is. For some reason they leave that part of the accusation out.

But I did follow up this topic of index fossils a bit.

Here's what Wikipedia has on the subject:

Index fossils (also known as guide fossils, indicator fossils or zone fossils) are fossils used to define and identify geologic periods (or faunal stages). They work on the premise that, although different sediments may look different depending on the conditions under which they were laid down, they may include the remains of the same species of fossil. If the species concerned were short-lived (in geological terms, lasting a few hundred thousand years), then it is certain that the sediments in question were deposited within that narrow time period. The shorter the lifespan of a species, the more precisely different sediments can be correlated, and so rapidly evolving types of fossils are particularly valuable. The best index fossils are common, easy-to-identify at species level, and have a broad distribution—otherwise the likelihood of finding and recognizing one in the two sediments is minor. . .

Geologists use both large fossils (called macrofossils) and microscopic fossils (called microfossils) for this process, known as biostratigraphy. Macrofossils have the advantage of being easy to see in the field, but they are rarer, and microfossils are very commonly used by oil prospectors and other industries interested in mineral resources when accurate knowledge of the age of the rocks being looked at is needed....

Here's this notion that to find oil, or coal, or perhaps other items known to occur in certain strata, you need to know the AGE of the rocks, and they are so used to operating this way their minds are closed up tight against any suggestion that age has nothing to do with it. The Old Earth presuppositions work for them and that's all they care about. Well, that makes sense. But a creationist knows that what they think of as age is merely depth or location of the rocks they want. It's the same thing as far as finding the right rocks goes, but the whole idea of age is eliminated. ALL the rocks were laid down in the Flood, associated with particular fossils in many cases, and it shouldn't be any less useful to think in terms of location and depth than age. But that's a side point in this context.

Rox suggested that Buz should check with USGS (US Geological Survey) information only so I went here and found the same chart I found at Wikipedia with this intro:

Keyed to the relative time scale are examples of index fossils, the forms of life which existed during limited periods of geologic time and thus are used as guides to the age of the rocks in which they are preserved.

Also this from the USGS:

Mollusks have many of the properties of good index fossils: The hard shells of many mollusks means they are generally well-preserved, and they are often one of the few fossils found in certain environments. Sometimes they are only preserved as molds or casts in ancient limestones, but they can still be identified and used to establish the age of the rocks.

Another USGS page had a broken link for index fossils so that one I couldn't follow out, but what I've noted above ought to be sufficient, it seems to me, to demonstrate that the creationist Buz linked to got his facts right.

That is: Certain fossils ARE used to date the strata. THIS IS SIMPLE FACT, confirmed by the references above, not creationist interpretation, so what on earth are all these people objecting to anyway? That it leaves out the fact that other methods are ALSO used? That's pretty lame if so. Clearly index fossils are considered to be a very useful method of dating strata no matter what other methods are also used, and the impression I get is that they are the SOLE method of dating in most circumstances.

And what the creationist said about this method is of course true: THE AGE OF THE INDEX FOSSILS IS DETERMINED COMPLETELY BY THEORY, BY THE THEORY OF THE GEOLOGIC TIMETABLE. On the geologic timetable THE AGE OF EVERYTHING IS DETERMINED STRICTLY BY THEORY because that's what the Geo Timetable IS -- a representation of the THEORY OF AGES IN WHICH THE CREATURES REPRESENTED BY THE FOSSILS SUPPOSEDLY LIVED as decided by where they are usually found located in the strata. ACCORDING TO THE THEORY CERTAIN FOSSILS, BEING FOUND PRIMARILY IN CERTAIN STRATA MORE THAN IN OTHERS, CAN BE RELIABLY DATED TO THE AGE THAT THE THEORY HAS DETERMINED FOR THAT STRATA AND CAN THEREFORE BE USED AS A DATING MARKER THEMSELVES.

There's nothing wrong with what Buz linked to, there's nothing wrong with what the creationist said.

The problem must be that the evolutionists don't know that the Geological Timetable is nothing but theory for which creationists have a perfectly legitimate completely different explanation. Evolutionists like to call their theory "fact." That has to be the problem here. Thus do the presuppositions of the evolutionists determine what can be called Science, simply precluding all creationist interpretations a priori. The creationist at that site Buz linked to is quite right: it's all circular reasoning -- enforced by aggressive ridicule and chest-beating on behalf of what they laughably call Science -- and there's no way out of it except by being COMPLETELY outside it as creationists must be.

Restatement of a couple of old-earth misreadings of the Flood

2011-10-08T00:16:00.000-07:00

Moose's topic proposal which I discuss in a post three or four down inspires me to make a list of some creationist concepts he and other old earthers get all mangled up.

1. TEENY TINY INCONSEQUENTIAL WORLDWIDE FLOOD: The waters of the Flood itself are thought of as strangely inconsequential, hardly leaving the slightest mark of their having come and gone, despite the fact that small local floods we know about are often devastating to their local environment. A mere few days of very heavy local rains can produce dangerous mudslides, tsunamis take out whole villages, but a flood that covered the entire earth for a whole year, well there's no evidence of THAT. **Hint: (whisper) the strata the strata the strata the fossils the fossils the fossils.**

2. THE STRATA COULDN'T BE EVIDENCE FOR THE FLOOD BECAUSE THEY CONTAIN SOME SEDIMENTS AND CREATURES THAT COULD ONLY FORM OR LIVE IN AIR. This simply imposes their own interpretation of the strata on Floodists, their assumption that they represent the way things were at that very spot in the past. They study the composition of individual strata to determine what sort of environment supposedly existed during the supposed epoch it represents according to standard geological theory. They think that the complexity of the contents of the layer that shows a variety of conditions under which the creatures must have lived and the sediments must have formed disproves the Flood because most of them couldn't have been formed in a Flood. But of course we don't claim the Flood formed anything -- except the strata themselves of course. Whatever is discovered about the original situation of the strata contents describes their disposition in the pre-Flood world before the Flood occurred. All the Flood did was wash them down hills in midslides or scoop them up, uproot them in some cases, and move them to their final grave in the strata.

That's all just to state the basic confusions. As for evidence for the creationist view of the strata, all I can say is that there's something utterly absurd about the standard idea that enormous layered stacks of rock could possibly represent eras in earth's history.

The geologist, the creationist, exploding mountains and other exciting geological phenomena

2011-10-07T09:39:00.000-07:00

Roxrkool comes back to this thread where she originally challenged pandion concerning his claim that the smaller mountains in the western US don't have fossils in them, and he hasn't yet been back to answer her so Robert Byers is on the block instead:

Rox writes:
RB writes:
Another answer , mine, would be that these low mts only appeared after the flood as a part of the great upheavel that occured a few centuries after the flood.
Do you have evidence that limestone, which has specific depositional requirements, can form under catastrophic upheaval and massive flooding conditions? Because much of the world's fossils occur in limestones, which can be found anywhere in the world from the highest mountains to the lowest valleys.

Um, roxrkool has the order of things backwards here. Byers was at least clear that the "upheaval" came long AFTER the Flood so the limestone strata were already laid down long since. The "upheaval" which I assume he is referring to -- and it's very odd to find myself defending Robert Byers who is one of the least articulate and most confusing creationist posters at EvC but anyway -- the upheaval refers to the tectonic uplifting of those mountains of the American Cordillera -- that chain of mountains that runs down the western side of both north and south America -- after the Flood by a few centuries according to him, and merely pushed up the whole column of strata, limestones and all, into mountains. The Flood was long since over with.

But concerning their formation, why is anything more required for the formation of limestone than a massive collection of calcium carbonate creatures dumped together in the same place and then compressed between the layer below and the layer above? Da Flood don't offer no delicate "specific depositional requirements," it just picks the stuff up in its currents and streams and drops it wherever happens to be handy, whether it's a bunch of coccoliths or trilobites or nautiloids or sand dunes or Lucy the Ape.

The whole backbone of North america exploded and crumpled and from this came many of the mts there.
So no seashells on top.
Are you suggesting that the American Cordillera has no fossils? While not exceedingly common, fossils do exist (See below: 1 - 4).

Just to be clear, rox, Byers said nothing about the existence or nonexistence of fossils, that was said by pandion whom you were originally challenging about it, and all Byers did was accept what pandion said and propose an explanation assuming pandion correct. It is pandion who needs to come and answer your challenge.

Where they may not exist are in intrusive igneous rocks, which of course never have fossils. And igneous plutons and batholiths form the core of much of the Sierra Nevada.
Please provide physical evidence that the American Cordillera "exploded?"

This should be interesting. But I've been assuming all he meant by that rather hyperbolic term was that the mountains were thrust up in a fairly short period of time compared to the standard geologic time period, and for that as I say in my previous post there is no direct evidence. You either find the whole creationist scenario plausible or you don't.

But maybe he'll surprise me and turn out to mean something even more dramatic by the term "exploded."

Tectonic plate movements, more straw man distortions of creationist arguments

2011-10-07T02:43:00.000-07:00

On the Seashells on Tops of Mountains thread roxrkool asked pandion what he meant when he argued that it's only the very high mountains in the west and not the low mountains that contain fossils. I wondered too but I was more interested in answering the accusation that creationists think all mountains contain fossils, which isn't the case. I was hoping pandion would come back and answer her but he's ignored her post so far.

Eventually some others have answered her, but it's a frustrating exchange. One of the creationists, Robert Byers, whose posts are hard to follow said this:

...Another answer , mine, would be that these low mts only appeared after the flood as a part of the great upheavel that occured a few centuries after the flood.
The whole backbone of North america exploded and crumpled and from this came many of the mts there.
So no seashells on top.*

I assume he's talking about the movement of the tectonic plates which creationists do believe built the mountains after the Flood, although not as long as centuries afterward. There are differences of opinion about when it occurred but the timing that makes most sense to me is that it started with the eruption of volcanoes at the very beginning of the Flood although the movement may have taken quite some time to get underway. Kurt Wise connects the very start of the heavy rain of the Flood with the heat of the volcanoes as I recall, but I still have to go back and digest his thoughts on this subject.

From my reading on these things I get the impression that the original volcanic action that split the continents and started them moving away from each other would have occurred at what are now the formerly connected edges of those continents or around what are now the ocean bodies between them, and I think this is factually the case -- some of the oldest now-extinct volcanoes are around the Atlantic rim for instance. There's plenty of evidence of former, now-extinct, volcanism in the British Isles for instance and along the North American east coast.

I don't know what Byers, the creationist quoted above, means about how the "backbone of North America exploded and crumpled" or where he got that idea. My impression has been that the volcanic energy that split the continents, along with the lateral spreading movement that energy set in motion, for instance at the mid-Atlantic ridge --where the sea floor spreads or grows in opposite directions, moving the continents of Europe-Africa and the Americas apart from each other-- is what caused the relatively gentle folding of the Appalachians at the outset of the continental movement, but that the more dramatic higher thrust of the Rockies was caused by the greater resistance to that movement by the intervening continental mass of North America as you move farther West from the source of the movement. I hope I'm getting that said clearly. I'd expect something similar on the European continent --gentler buckling near their west coasts and higher mountain thrusts farther east (Alps?), but I'm not familiar enough with their topography to speculate. On the other hand that's a far bigger mass that that would have put up a much greater resistance, which would account for certain differences in the topography.

Then new volcanoes -- release of magma from the ocean floor -- could have been triggered BY the movement of the continental plates so that now the most active ones are around the Pacific rim where the continents are moving toward each other rather than apart.

Well, that's how I've been picturing it for some time now based on different readings on the subject so I'm glad to try to spell out the whole thing, however inadequately.

A couple posts after Byers' noted above, Coyote is objecting to the idea that the "upheaval" described by Byers could have occurred only 4300 years ago especially since conventional geology isn't aware of it. Well, what can one say? They ARE of course aware of the upthrust of the Rockies, they simply conceive of it in a much slower time frame. They operate from a completely different set of presuppositions that determines what they are able to think about these things, and for them their dating methods set it all in concrete so that anything a creationist says about shorter time periods than they acknowledge is going to be met with incredulity. That's just how this debate goes.

Then along comes saab93f to call us "cretins" and decry our refusal to accept the establishment interpretation:

There are plenty of things that our cretin counterparts say that leave me breathless but this "upheaval" has got to be the utmost.

What he means, I must assume, is that he can't wrap his mind around the short TIME FRAME of the upheaval. Byers' post isn't very clear but I assume he's mostly referring to the building of the Rockies by the lateral motion of the spreading tectonic plates, and establishment geologists think of it the same way as I understand it so there's no cause for his breathlessness over the event itself. It's the timing of the event that creationists and old earthers argue about, not the event itself.

It is just so frustratingly incomprehensible when they are presented with the calculations of the amount of energy needed to raise the mountains and move the tectonic plates and they just shrug their shoulders - God did it anyway.

Look, mathematical calculations about energy expenditure from events in the past are just as liable to sheer mystification as any appeal to miracle could be but the usual creationist interpretation of the movement of the tectonic plates does not attribute any of it to God's intervention. With your mathematical calculations you can't possibly have taken into account all the variables involved, and we know you are biased against young earth thinking for starters, so whatever numbers you come up with can't really be respected as evidence no matter how convinced you are of your own mathematical prowess.

It is presumably quite OK to disagree on the ethical issues or on morality - whether it is based on the Bible on Gilgamesh or the Quran but to blatantly oppose the calculations....I guess the only way a religion stays intact is lying.

See, these calculations represent god to him and he's ready to throw us to the lions for refusing to bow down to them despite their dependence on a collection of wild unknowns, essentially pure spin from mental cobwebs spun by old-earth spiders. We're "lying" too of course, that's their favorite hex against our disagreements with them. Amazing.

I noted in Jerry Coyne's book Why Evolution is True, which is among other things a fascinating compendium of straw man caricatures of creationist arguments, his remark that the continents are separating much too slowly for creationist views to have any validity:

Now, thanks to global positioning satellite technology, we can even see the continents moving apart, at a speed of two to four inches per years, about the same rate that your fingernails grow. (This, by the way, combined with the unassailable evid4ence that the continents were once connected, is evidence against the claim of 'young-earth" creationists that the earth is only six to ten thousand years old. If that were the case, we'd be able to stand on the west coast of Spain and see the skyline of New York City, for Europe and America would have moved less than a mile apart!)

Sigh. The straw man arguments take up SO much of this debate. What's happening here is simply that Coyne has applied his own uniformitarianism, or his assumption of a constant rate of movement, to the separating of the continents, which of course requires a much much longer time than the 4500 years or so since the Flood for Europe and America to have separated to our current distance from each other.

But creationists are not uniformitarians and we figure the continents must have moved much faster at the beginning when violent volcanism originally split them apart, and have slowed down to their present rate over those 4500 years. As I sketch out above, the picture I have taken from my reading on these things goes like this:

the continents started out joined and were split apart by what must have been a pretty violent eruption of a line of volcanoes along the split line some time after the Flood.
This violent action would have thrust the land masses apart and buckled the land nearest to the erupting volcanoes into the Appalachians on the American side.
The volcanic eruptions became the source of the spreading magma-to-basalt sea floor of the mid-Atlantic ridge which continued to spread the continents up to the present.
This action would have been faster at the beginning, though probably because it had a great resistance of the land mass to overcome at the beginning it needed some time to gain the momentum to reach its maximum speed, and then over the millennia it gradually slowed down to its present rate.
Its present rate is nevertheless enough to jostle things on the Pacific rim from time to time still, volcanoes and earthquakes for instance.

When Old Earthers aren't objecting that we're wrong because it would take a lot more time on their assumptions to arrive at the current distance between Europe and America, they are objecting to our claim that the movement was faster in the beginning and then slowed down. They get all feverish over the idea as supposedly requiring WAY too much energy and generating WAY too much heat for the planet to survive at all, or at least Noah and his family and animals on the ark. But again their calculations are just their own mental spin based on their own presuppositions, they can't possibly have anticipated all the variables that would have been involved, and we know they are biased, so their cogitations don't amount to a real objection we have to honor. Jerry Coyne's misrepresentations of creationism in his well-respected book on evolution ought to be a clue that their thoughts on the subject aren't to be taken very seriously, not to mention all the ridiculous straw-man stuff at EvC.

I'm certainly no mathematician but I spent some time trying to plot just what the speed would have to be when it started out -- assuming maximum speed at the beginning just to make the calculations easier even though I think it might not have reached its maximum for a while as it had to overcome the resistance of the inert land mass in order to pick up momentum.

So what I did was figure a rough distance of 3000 miles to be traveled in a rough 4500 years, starting at the Flood itself and using Coyne's current rate of 2-4 inches per year. From this I figured that the AVERAGE SPEED that would have to have been maintained to arrive at the current rough distance of 3000 miles apart would have been 3/4 mile in one year, or 3960 feet or 47,520 inches, or 11 feet per day, and I put that number at the midpoint of the time between the Flood and today, or roughly around 100 BC or so. I figure that's the speed at which the continents would have been separating in 100 BC. Before that they were separating at a faster rate that increases back to the beginning, and since then at a slower rate that decreases to the present rate of 2-4 inches per year.

What I arrived at was that at the time of the Flood the speed of separation, again assuming maximum speed at that time though it probably hadn't yet attained that, was one and a half miles per year, or 7920 feet per year, or 600 feet per month or 20 feet per day.

Is 20 feet per day such an outlandishly fast rate? That's ten feet of separation on either side of the mid-Atlantic ridge being generated daily or less than 6 inches hourly, and that was when the originating volcanic action was at its peak so that doesn't seem outlandish to me -- think of how fast a lava flow moves. The sea floor spreads from the uprising of magma all along the Atlantic ridge. That's got to generate quite a bit of pushing power.

The continents would have been within sight of each other for some years although I haven't calculated that aspect of the situation. How many miles can you see across an ocean anyway? Of course there wasn't anyone around at that time to witness it, though I wonder if the first descendants of Noah to get to the western coast of Europe would have been able to see North America across the Atlantic. I suspect not but as I said I haven't tried to calculate all that. [Later: It's hard to get an answer to this question through Google but I finally got some estimates from a chat board -- 7 miles on a perfectly clear day if you're at sea level, 10 if you're higher, up to 25 miles if the land on both sides is high -- how high not said. So separating at a rate of a mile and a half a year you'd lose visibility between the highest points on the best days at about sixteen years. I suspect Noah's progeny weren't anywhere near the European coast for a few hundred years at the very least.]

======================
*Concerning the demands for evidence at EvC:

Along comes Percy as Admin to challenge Robert Byers' post as not providing evidence but only speculating about what the Bible implies.

The idea here is to present positions that are supported by evidence, not speculations. We know you can describe scenarios consistent with Biblical accounts. Everyone concedes that you are able to do this. It is not in dispute.

What is being asked in this thread, and also in the recently closed Potential Evidence for a Global Flood thread, is whether there is any evidence that what you describe is what actually happened. Please present the evidence.

True, Byers refers to the Flood and to the Bible and that sets the tone of the post and doesn't fit what EvC requires for evidence, and the post is hard to decipher anyway, but if what he means by the "upheaval" and the exploding and crumpling "backbone of America" is simply the tectonic plate motion that built the Rockies, which is what I have to think he must mean, all he's said, really, that's different from what standard geology says is place it in a more recent time frame, perfectly standard creationism.

Excluding references to the Bible is an artificial requirement anyway, it seems to me. A witness report is evidence in itself, but they define it in such a way that it's just a "religion" and therefore inadmissible as evidence.

I'm so glad I have my own blog where I don't have to worry about tripping over their artificial rules all the time and can say what needs to be said.

If you want evidence for the more recent time frame, that's a matter of spelling out the whole picture, which would argue for instance that the strata could have been formed by nothing less than a worldwide flood, and that the strata obviously preceded the building of mountains that contain strata with fossils, and there is often evidence that volcanic mountains were formed after the strata were laid down too because there are magma dikes that penetrate up through the strata in the same areas and spill out over the top of them.

But there is no direct evidence possible to prove that all this happened within the last 4500 years that I know of. Again, it's a matter of finding the whole picture plausible or not -- and this is where it would help prevent reinventing the wheel over and over at EvC if some basic creationist presuppositions were simply recognized by all participants so they wouldn't have to be spelled out each time.

Of course if they simply want to exclude the creationist presuppositions because their own presuppositions disqualify them, which in fact is the reality there, then really it ought to be admitted that the debate is a charade anyway. The problem with the demand for evidence IS that evidence is defined within the presuppositions of Old Earth and evolutionary theory and is called Science too.

Posting as a creationist at EvC is a very weird experience of trying to avoid the boobytraps and Catch-22s all created by the enforcement of their assumptions that automatically preclude creationist assumptions. They call it "Science" which obscures their origin in the theories they are defending.

Yup.

Old Earthers need to break habits of the mind in order to rightly imagine the Global Flood of Noah

2011-10-05T08:58:00.000-07:00

So the Moose is now proposing a new thread on the Flood in which he refers to that ridiculous comparison with the Bay of Fundy he accepted so readily. He doesn't want the topic promoted yet as it's currently a work in progress but of course I'd like to think about it a bit now anyway and I'll adjust accordingly as his thread proposal takes shape.

He refers to a previous post of his own for the basic shape of the topic he's proposing, and here's that post:

I am a geologist by training, if not by occupation. I see this topic as being independent of young Earth or old Earth considerations. What I see as the essential time frame consideration is that the creationist perspective is that alleged flood event duration was about a year, and in that year vast amounts of sediment was eroded from an unknown source and redeposited as an uncertain but considerable portion of the Earth's various stratagraphies (not to mention all kinds of other geologic processes also having happened).

I think I'm starting to get a feeling for why evolutionists and old-earthists do such a miserably lousy job of grasping the proportions of the global Flood of Noah. Just the descriptions Moose is using suggest a mental set about the forms of the earth that's been part of their habits of thought for so long, that getting them to reorganize those habits would tax their imaginations to the utmost. Add to that basic difficulty their ingrained prejudice against creationism for lots of reasons, some very bad reasons but unfortunately some good reasons as well, and what we're up against here is trying to get someone to rearrange mental furniture that's bolted into a concrete floor that they've lived with since childhood and have no interest in rearranging even if they could. Or something like that.

Yes, the topic can be discussed independently of young or old Earth considerations, focusing only on what might be expected of a worldwide flood of a year's duration no matter how long ago it occurred, yes, but anti-creationists always come up with the most absurdly inadequate ideas of what such a flood would have done quite apart from when it occurred. As if they just have no ability to imagine it or simply refuse to try. (High tide in the Bay of Fundy?? You MUST be joking. Unfortunately apparently not). But recently it has begun to seem to me that this could possibly be explained partly as a result of habits associated with Old Earth thinking, that is, assumptions about time requirements built into that frame of reference that unconsciously determine their conclusions. Paradigm conflict at least. I doubt this accounts for all of this odd inability to visualize the reality of what such a flood would have done, as most of it must be a simple refusal to make the effort, but at least perhaps some part of it. And if I think of it this way I'm less inclined to lose my temper over it, so I guess that's a plus.

Moose's saying that "vast amounts of sediment" were "eroded from an unknown source" first of all made me so annoyed and impatient that epithets such as "stupid" started to come to mind, but really, Moose is simply showing his ingrained geology training that can ONLY imagine what they taught him about how the strata formed slowly over millions of years from sediments washed down from a series of mountains that just grew up and eroded down one after another over those millions of years and the like. This is some of that mental furniture I have the job of persuading him to rearrange, although he hasn't one iota of motivation to even try to do such a thing.

Also, in his mental set one year is a very tiny length of time. Although even the biggest most destructive floods in our time last no more than a few days or maybe weeks at the outside, still the idea of "one year" seems minuscule to him, because apparently in his mental set the Flood doesn't get compared with the time frame of ordinary floods but with Old Earth preconceptions about how the geologic column took millions of years to form. This is another piece of mental furniture that needs to be unbolted.

If I say that the entire land mass of planet Earth was of course the source of the sediments that built the Geologic Column on the Flood model would that be sufficient source material in his mental set? The entire land mass of the Earth, you understand.
E N T I R E l a n d m a s s . . . all those continents all over the earth . . .
All of it. Just off the cuff it seems to me there's no way MORE of a source could be supplied for that purpose but perhaps the habit of old earth thinking just keeps imagining more and more stuff coming out of nowhere to build the strata. I mean if you have new mountains forming every few million years there has to be a source of material for them to form, doesn't there?

Anyway, on the Flood model the source isn't an "unknown source" but the entire land mass of Earth. ALL OF IT would have been broken up and dissolved in a Flood that covered every high point of the land, ALL OF IT would have been subjected to the effects of gravity causing mudslides, and those mudslides would have contained the bodies of animals that had been on the high areas and everywhere else on the land. The mudslides would have been flowing down and pouring into the sea soon after the heavy rains started and combining with uncountable sea creatures already, and then the land and its uncountable land animals would also be caught up in the water as the water rose and finally reached the level where it covered everything. So this land mass would then also have been subjected to the movements of ocean water with its layers and currents and streams and tides and waves. Presumably the layering and currents and streams and other mechanical properties of the water had something to do with the sorting into groups of their own kind that is commonly found among the fossils, but the sorting would also been determined by the location of the normal pre-Flood habitat of the creatures and the propensity of "birds of a feather to flock together."

It also seems to me that this KNOWN source of the sediments accounts for not merely "an uncertain portion of the stratigraphies" as he puts it, but ALL OF THEM, but this has to do with the different ideas about which of the layers was formed in the Flood which is a problem among creationists. Seems to me they all had to be and I don't get the thinking that divides them into some from the Flood and some from other causes but that's a different subject for now.

Meanwhile the point here is that the source of the sediments was the ENTIRE PRE-FLOOD LAND MASS OF THE PLANET. Seems sufficient to me.

Studies of the various sediments and other events show evidence of a vast array of processes. The reality is that some of these would happen underwater, some would not, and some are independent of water cover considerations. All this points to a very long and complicated process, yet the creationist perspective is that it all was done by a 1 year flood event.

And here is another set of mental furniture that needs some rearranging. Evolutionists are thinking of the ORIGIN of the contents of the strata while Floodists are thinking of the TRANSPORTATION of already formed contents by the Flood to their final disposition. Evolutionists ASSUME that the contents, both sediments and fossils, occurred in situ, that is, they grew there, they lived and died there, in the places they are now found. Whole landscapes and scenarios are attributed to the layers with their fossils. So the "vast array of processes" Moose is talking about include the great variety of situations in which different sediments and living creatures originate. They are assumed to have occurred ON THE SPOT as the creatures lived and died in that place at some time in the very distant past. Some sediments were slowly deposited there under water and living creatures died and fell into them and were fossilized there; other sediments had supposedly been formed above water, such as sand dunes. Such a habit of thinking is so utterly different from Floodist thinking I can see how hard it could be to unbolt and rearrange it.

Very very few if any of the layers of sediments with their fossils seem to a Floodist to fit that picture of formation where they are found. To a Floodist, both the sediments and the fossils would have originated in a variety of different locations and conditions elsewhere, perhaps far, perhaps not so far, but not in this same place in any case, some having been formed on land, some near or in the ocean and so on. All the Flood did was sweep them up and carry them elsewhere. Even a local flood will carry everything from plants out of someone's garden to a teddy bear that was left on a porch six houses up from that garden and deposit them near each other downstream and nobody would suspect they had originally "lived" there together, and that's what the Flood did with the strata and fossils of the Geologic Column. The Flood does not discriminate -- it picks up everything in its path whatever its original location or disposition, and carries it wherever it happens to be headed, in its separate layers at different depths, in streams and currents and waves and tsunamis, apparently sorted into the various groups we actually find, and deposits them all in the stratified form we now find them.

The creationist perspective is that the flood, directly or indirectly, can do pretty much anything and can do it in an incredibly short amount of time. That doesn't make sense regardless of when said flood happened, be it 5000 years ago, 4.5 billion years ago, or at any point in between.

Had to come back to this paragraph to ponder what he means by "do pretty much anything" as I'd first read it simply to refer to a much bigger effect than the kinds of floods we encounter now. But perhaps he's got in mind the fact that creationists connect the Flood with other catastrophic occurrences that affected the whole Earth in the same time frame, such as the beginning of volcanism and tectonic plate movements. I'm not sure, this is something he'll have to clarify as he polishes his topic proposal. The only thing I'd say at this point is that it's misleading to say the Flood itself DID any of these things, the idea is that the covering of the earth by water was the main effect observable by human beings during a period of catastrophic upheavals that involved grand-scale planet-wide destructions mostly focused on disruptions of the sea floor. Those disruptions did more than contribute to the flooding of the planet in other words. (Kurt Wise describes a system in which volcanic heat triggered the intense rain the Bible describes as the beginning of the Flood. I have yet to ponder his thinking on this).

But insofar as Moose is simply saying that Floodists attribute huge effects to the Flood that he himself isn't able to visualize or believe possible, my answer to that is simply that he's underestimating THIS Flood and that's an understatement. He isn't really letting himself THINK ABOUT how water covering ALL the land mass of the earth would affect it, and covering it for an entire year yet.

Think about just a tiny little local flood that starts from a few days of very heavy rain and affects just one village somewhere. It lasts only a few days, but it creates mudslides that destroy everything in their path. Then multiply that image by mudslides at millions of locations around the world over a year, not just a few days, and visualize the mudslides as going on underwater as well. In this picture a year is a very very long time, and a depth of water that covers everything a much greater destructive force than the deepest flood from the heaviest rain in our own time.

Or think about the Japanese tsunami that carried the buildings of whole villages with it even though it was only a few feet deep. We all saw those pictures. Multiply that image by thousands of tsunamis that COVERED EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE, that kept coming over the land for an entire year, not the short period of days and weeks in which already so much destruction occurred.

Or think about the floods that so often devastate parts of the American midwest. Just the swelling of one river takes out bridges and dams and levees and drowns whole towns over a period of days, but a Flood that covered the entire world for a year seems to you like it couldn't have left much of an impact on the planet? There wouldn't be the remotest hint of a levee left after such a flood, there wouldn't even be a river course left you could trace, it would all be obliterated completely.

YOU CANNOT COMPARE THE GLOBAL FLOOD OF NOAH WITH ANYTHING YOU'VE EVER WITNESSED ON EARTH. You have to multiply the effect of all those common everyday floods and water disasters by an enormous factor and many unknowns to even begin to imagine what the Noachian Flood would have done.

The true story of the creation and the reworking of the creation can be discerned by looking at the creation. The true story is "written in the rocks". Moose

It sure is but you have to know how to read what the Flood wrote there and so far your comparison with the Bay of Fundy shows a disastrous inability to decipher the language. Maybe you aren't going to spend more time on that comparison in this thread but consider it for a moment. Take these pictures of the Bay of Fundy: and instead of comparing the global Flood with the daily quiet filling and emptying of this placid channel add fifteen or twenty feet of water to the tide that comes in so that it covers up the sides of the channel completely. If not on the first tide, certainly after a number of them have flowed into and out of this area, the water will have knocked down that wooden bulwark and all the buildings in the area and smashed the boats, and when it retreats it will drag all the broken stuff back to sea with it -- then of course eventually return and throw it all up on the land. There is no way a worldwide flood can be compared to a nice quiet little bay no matter how high its tides. That is a failure of imagination that should never have been entertained for a moment.

But back to Moose's post:

Added by edit:
Minnemooseus, above, writes:
All this points to a very long and complicated process, yet the creationist perspective is that it all was done by a 1 year flood event.

Not only not done by a 1 year flood event, not done by any single flood event regardless of its duration.

Yeah, well, apparently this is going to be just another futile exercise in inability or simple stubborn biased unwillingness to grasp the proportions of a worldwide Flood.

He continues with his new thread proposal:

2 – This presumes the “rained for 40 days and 40 nights” and “the fountains of the deep”. The source of the water and the disposal of the water are presented as unexplained miracles, and are not issues in this topic. Yes, I know that is an unrealistic presumption, but so be it.

OK he doesn't want this to become an issue but I have to register the fact that creationists don't think of these things as miracles but physical geological events based on some great differences between the pre-Flood and post-Flood worlds that can only be speculated about. Kurt Wise seems to have thought this out a great deal but since I haven't absorbed all his reasoning yet I'll have to bring that in at some later time.

The standard perspective from both the creation and evolution side is that “The Great Flood” would have some sort of significant impact on the geologic record.

From the creation side the impact was enormous, utterly transformed the planet altogether from its former condition and is now inescapably evidenced everywhere you look, at the very least in the strata which can only have been laid down by an absolutely unprecedented and unrepeatably prodigious amount of water, as well as by their fossil contents which evidence massive sudden death of uncountable living things.

At least this is the view of the creationists I agree with. And I have to say I'm not entirely sure there are any who see it quite as I do. I think Morris and company included only some of the strata in their Flood model, but I'd have to check to be sure. Kurt Wise and Steve Austin apparently think the uppermost strata were not laid down in the Flood and possibly the lowermost strata as well. I think I understand that they exclude the highest strata because the fossils in those layers are more like modern creatures than they think had developed before the Flood.

But I can't see anything different in the actual physical geological form of those strata compared to any of the rest so I can't see how they could have been created by any other process or mechanism than those considered to have been laid down in the Flood.

To mainstream geology, the vast thickness and complexity of the so called “geologic column” is much of the evidence of the Earth being far older that the young Earth creationist (YEC) perspective. The creation side in turn tends to attribute this vastness and complexity as being a product of the flood.

You got this right. Afterthought: Well... not the "complexity" so much if you have in mind that "vast array" of different conditions of the contents of the strata you mention above -- that was already formed and all the Flood did was pick it up, perhaps combine it with contents from other locations, and move it to its final resting place in one of the strata beds.

I believe that the roots of this YEC perspective is not so much the desire to use the “geologic column” to support the reality of the flood, but rather to use the flood to explain the reality of the “geologic column”.

This also sounds right.

OK, let's see where he takes this.

============
Note: as often happens I have gone back and added and rewritten certain parts of this since I posted it, in the hope of making it clearer.

Musings on recent encounter with a rabid evolutionist

2011-10-04T21:44:00.001-07:00

Why am I always surprised at the sheer meanness that comes out of anti-creationists? Why do I always expect at least some degree of civility or even an honest attempt to be fair to creationist interpretations of the facts? I really ought to know better by now but I never quite give up nevertheless.

What is it about anything I said to "Pressie" that deserves his calling me mentally deficient, mentally disturbed and a liar? I call lots of things people SAY at EvC crazy or insane or stupid, but I don't call the PEOPLE there by those names. Must say, however, that Pressie himself began to look like someone who had lost his marbles by the end of the email exchange with me. I'd post some of it but since he didn't post any of it at EvC I guess it's better to leave well enough alone.

Didn't I make the extreme straw man misrepresentations of creationism clear enough?
These are straw man arguments:

to say we think the Flood built the mountains,
to think it would be problem for the Flood that there are places on the earth where there aren't any strata,
to think it would be a problem for the Flood that there are mountains on the earth that have no marine fossils,
or to claim that we haven't noticed that the seashells in the mountains are IN the mountains and not just on the surface, therefore the Flood didn't put them there?
to think you can compare the Flood to the Bay of Fundy's high tides is maybe not exactly a straw man, but something crazier

Is this sort of silliness ENTIRELY the result of the incompetence of the creationists they have there recently?

Or is it just the refusal of evolution-geared people to give even a moment's thought to creationist claims?

Again, it does seem to me that if you want to have a debate between evolutionism and creationism that serves any purpose other than ridiculing creationism it should be conducted between people who can pass a minimal test on what are considered to be the main arguments on both sides. I suppose that could be a discussion in itself simply trying to identify them of course.

And as soon as I say that I recognize it's impossible. The debate is a fraud and shouldn't even be attempted at all.

More straw man arguments about the Flood

2011-10-04T01:29:00.000-07:00

Pandion thinks Pressie's questions make sense:

What an excellent question! Creationists believe that a great FLUD washed sea creatures up from the bottom of the sea to the tops of mountains, and somehow embedded them inside the mountains. What a display of ignorance of the principles of science. Floods do not wash things up - floods wash things down.

Another example of such blithering ignorance of creationist arguments it does nothing but expose the true character of EvC, but of course there's nothing new about that. It's just been getting to me lately. Of course unfortunately no well-prepared creationist will go to EvC any more, so they have some excuse. Not much, though. A website that purports to have a debate about these things should be able to do much better.

Anyway, sigh: Creationists do NOT think the Flood put fossils in mountains, creationists know the mountains were built from strata already laid down in the Flood, and this is SO well known it's offensive in the extreme that such stupidities can even be expressed at EvC.

I grew up surrounded by mountain ranges and spent lots of time in those mountains as a student biologist. From a hill outside of town I could see the snow capped peaks of five different mountain ranges in July (Pryor (8,822 ft.), Crazy (11,214 ft.), Beartooth (12,807 ft.), Absaroka (13,153 ft.), and Bighorn (13,167 ft.)). As far as I know, no sea shells have ever been found in or on any of these ranges. Compare that with the Himalayas. Wikipedia lists 13 peaks that are twice as high as the highest peak of the Beartooth, and 25 peaks that are higher than any of the ranges I listed. I suspect there are more.

And yet, sea shells are found on all of the peaks that tower 4 and 5 miles above sea level while none are found in the smaller ranges of the western United States. How do creationists explain this?

This isn't even a straw man, it's pure fantasy beyond the usual fantasizing silliness.

If creationists are giving such an impression get rid of the creationists because they are misrepresenting creationism, but although I've seen some pretty bad creationism at EvC I can't consider this an excuse for the majority contributors to propagate it. As I've been saying, the quality at EvC is so bad it shouldn't even exist. Has it deteriorated over time? I'm not sure, maybe, but it's been getting to me lately.

WHY IS THIS EVEN A QUESTION? WHY SHOULDN'T THERE BE SOME MOUNTAINS WITHOUT FOSSILIFEROUS STRATA? I LIVE NEAR THE SIERRAS, A VOLCANIC RANGE WITH NO STRATA AND NO FOSSILS. Where are these people getting these straw man arguments from anyway?

All it does is prove beyond a doubt that creationists should STAY AWAY FROM EvC.

And the rudeness of Pressie in dealing with my argument below just confirms everything I've said about the attitude to the debate at EvC. Of course I couldn't resist playing gadfly because of his particularly stupid straw-man misrepresentations of creationism. Alas, it appears that pandion has equalled him in that.

He even somehow connects my comment about how participants should be required to know something about both evolutionist and creationist arguments to this particular thread about fossils in mountains? Does the guy think at all?

It's really really sad to see what passes there for scientific debate. "Straw man" hardly gets at even a tenth of the problems there. What a bunch of smug know-nothings they are there.

============

Oh brother, another comment from Pressie:

Sorry, got another e-mail from Faith G where she (it's a she apparantly) threatens to keep on commenting on her blog about us! Be warned. She is going to overturn every natural science in the world on her blog!

Na, Pressie me lad, I just want you to know the blog is here, because nothing intelligent is being said at EvC as it is here. But of course you are beyond the ability to make such a judgment. Sad.

What's REALLY REALLY sad is that what I'm objecting to is the NON-SCIENCE of the comments at EvC. THEY are the ones destroying science.
===============

Well, too bad. An email exchange with Pressie went nowhere. He kept accusing me of lying and being mentally ill and didn't give a single example of anything I've written in the emails or on my blog that is an example of either. I guess I walked into that one. Unfortunately of course it simply confirms my judgment of the spirit of EvC, there is no real interest in fact or science there, all they want to do is get rid of creationists.

Oh and hi back to Percy who sent me "fond wishes." How sweet.

=================

AND THEN DR. A had added his own straw man to that thread earlier which I'm just now getting around to noticing:

And yet, sea shells are found on all of the peaks that tower 4 and 5 miles above sea level while none are found in the smaller ranges of the western United States.
Well since creationist water washes sediment upwards, clearly those mountains aren't tall enough to have any marine deposits. The layers of seashells must be somewhere above them, and presumably have thus far been mistaken for clouds by godless scientists blinkered and prejudiced by their uniformitarianismist assumptions about gravity.

Apparently it's OK with Percy and everyone else that lies about creationist arguments are posted on "science" threads? And RIDICULE is regarded as "scientific" argument too?

blah de blah blah blah EvC blah de blah

2011-10-03T08:38:00.000-07:00

Can't resist, can I?

Pressie is one of the bigger know-nothings about creationism:

This is one thing I would like to know from creationists: why do we find sea shells both "on top" and in some mountains, but no sea shells either "on top" or within other mountains?

Did the "global flood" miss those mountains with no sea shells? How does a global flood explain all those "shell-free" mountains? Just missed by the "flood"?

This guy is a SYE-UN-TIST, geewhilikers!

Hey, the answer is A FLOOD DOESN'T HAVE AN AGENDA, IF THERE ARE NO SEA SHELLS TO BE PICKED UP IN A CERTAIN NEIGHBORHOOD IT CAN'T DEPOSIT THEM WHERE THEY MIGHT HAVE ENDED UP IN A MOUNTAIN.

ALSO, some mountains are volcanic and don't have strata or fossils.

On another thread recently he asked a similar equally stupid question, which I think was: How does a global flood explain all the places there AREN'T sediments?

AND THE ANSWER IS: It's the EVOLUTIONISTS who should have a problem with the absence of a complete geologic column, NOT FLOODISTS. Again a Flood doesn't have an agenda, it picks up what is there to be picked up and deposits it; if there are no sediments or fossils to be transported at a particular location it doesn't deposit any.

Also, clearly much of the strata were washed away by the receding Flood waters, and would have left prodigious piles of rubble along their path to the sea or whatever might have been their destination, so there should be lots of piles of inchoate rubble besides strata all over the earth.

DO YOU WANT TO HAVE A HIGH QUALITY DEBATE, PERCY? Then get rid of people like this who can't think their way out of a paper bag.

Make everyone pass a test of some sort too. Basic evolution as well as basic creationist arguments. Otherwise that debate is laughable.

Or do you merely want to convert lurkers even if it's by bullying and manipulation, because that's all it really is? Hey, maybe you do. My mistake then.

Then Percy contributes this:

Another way of looking at it is that while there are many websites that accurately present the current state of scientific knowledge, if you want the original data from which this knowledge is distilled then you often have to go to the technical literature. Websites often present what we know without explaining how we know it. This is a general tendency that Dr Adequate is attempting to avoid in his Introduction To Geology thread.

In my experience it's not just "websites" it's books and science magazines as well that fail to give the evidence for evolutionary interpretations. Lots of glossy pictures of dinosaurs and ape-men with some side shots of skeletons and fossils and that sort of thing, nothing that tells you where and how and why and why it matters. And the scientific journals are jargon-ridden -- that's true of even the online abstracts -- very narrow in focus too, and in my case beyond my budget as well.

Can't wait to see if Dr. A has a clue about providing the evidence that is so sorely lacking in most evolutionary / old earth presentations. I see he finally got his next installment up.

CREATIONISTS: GET OUT OF EvC.

2011-10-03T04:29:00.000-07:00

Why do you stick around a place that talks about creationists like this?

If you want evidence, try peer-reviewed scientific literature. Not websites. . .

If you want something on pseudeo-science, try the creationists website sources. They're always and mostly exclusively on the internet and in churches, and as has been showed to you; they alwys tell porkies. Always. They pretend to be "scientific", while they are anti-science. They pretend to be "scientific": they're not. They pretend to be peer-reviewed: they're not. They tell porkies. That's it.

In scientific literature, porkies are pointed out. Quickly. Not to be repeated. On the internet, porkies are repeated again and again. That's why creationists flourish on the internet. That's also why porkies are all creationists have. They've got nothing else.

The prejudice is so thick there is no way a creationist will ever get a fair hearing. If YOU care about the science involved in the creationist point of view THEY don't and will never treat anything you say with the slightest respect. You don't need it. It doesn't serve the cause of science and it doesn't serve the cause of Christ to stay there.

GET OUT OF THERE.

==============

OK, I guess I need to stop this. Every time I go there all I see is futility and meanness and incomprehension. Guess I'm expecting too much. What, an actual reasonable discussion about creationist science? I must be out of MY mind. Time to take a break.

WHY DON'T YOU GUYS LEARN WHAT CREATIONISTS ACTUALLY THINK?

2011-10-03T01:38:00.000-07:00

You're always screaming at us to learn something (then it turns out I already know as much geology as applies to the topics in hand and more anyway), but you argue nothing but straw men. What a bust of a debate!!!

Perhaps it should be pointed out again, for the benefit of Chuck77, that the seashells in question are not "on top of mountains", but rather IN the mountain tops. It should also be noted that none of the species represented are currently extant. Moreover, many of the species represented are Ammonites, an extinct subclass of the Cephalopoda. The youngest example of an Ammonite fossil has been reliably dated to 65.5 million years. That's about 10 million years before the Indian tectonic plate collided with the Asian plate and scraped up the bottom of the Tethys Sea to the top of the Himalayas. Thus, 10 million year old fossils were scraped up some 7 miles, from the bottom of a sea to the top of the Himalayas. And yet, creationists would have us believe that this happened in a single year.

NO WE DO NOT! Creationists DO NOT believe that MOUNTAIN BUILDING HAPPENED DURING THE YEAR OF THE FLOOD!

OR IF SOME DO THEN YOU NEED TO QUOTE THEM AND REFERENCE THEM.

And poor Chuck77 may not know that the sea fossils are IN the strata that make up the mountain top, BUT MOST CREATIONISTS DO!

AND IF YOU KNEW ANYTHING ABOUT WHAT WE BELIEVE YOU'D KNOW THAT THE EXTINCT CREATURES IN THE "FOSSIL RECORD" ARE REGARDED BY US AS CREATURES THAT LIVED BEFORE THE FLOOD AND DIED IN THAT FLOOD. SHEESH!

AND YOUR DATING ASSERTIONS ARE NOTHING BUT QUESTION-BEGGING AS WE DO NOT ACCEPT THEM.

EvC, What a disgusting place

2011-10-02T23:56:00.001-07:00

Just a brief one:

Decided I need to try to learn more about the different creationist positions so I've been reading a book by Kurt Wise and watching some videos of Steve Austin (Here's one for instance. I already knew something about his nautiloid find and it was interesting to hear more about it.

So after digesting some of their thinking I went to EvC and did a search on "Steve Austin" and guess what I found?

NOT ONE MENTION OF ANY OF THE SCIENTIFIC POINTS HE HAS ARGUED, NOT ONE! Oh well, maybe I didn't look far enough, that's possible.

But what I DID FIND is:

one remark that his work on the Grand Canyon was nonsense or something to that effect, no content, just a slur,

comments about how his being a YEC (Young Earth Creationist) disqualifies him from the getgo,

some claims that the Institute for Creation Research BOUGHT his degree for him,

and that he lied about what geologists believe about the time frame of sedimentary deposition. "Lied." It never occurs to anyone at EvC that a creationist probably has a GOOD SOURCE for his information and I'm sure Austin had one.

ALL SLANDER AND SLURS, NO EVIDENCE, NO QUOTES, NO REFERENCES, NO CONTENT! NOBODY DISCUSSED ANYTHING STEVE AUSTIN HAS TO SAY ABOUT FLOOD GEOLOGY! NOBODY!

THIS IS TYPICAL. MANY TIMES WHEN I'VE SEARCHED FOR SOMETHING SUBSTANTIVE AT EvC THIS IS WHAT I'VE TURNED UP.

SCIENCE, HA!!!
THEY DO NOT DISCUSS SCIENCE, THEY DO NOT CARE ABOUT SCIENCE. No integrity or serious purpose among them. All they care about is getting rid of creationism ANY WAY THEY CAN.

Right now there is not one decent creationist and maybe only five or six reasonably qualified evolutionists at EvC and that's probably being generous. If I eliminated everyone who made snarky remarks or wrote contentless posts when they should be giving substantive scientific comments there might be none left.

Practical geology versus theoretical geology

2011-10-02T13:59:00.000-07:00

I'm sure roxrkool is quite right about what she says here:

Creationists will often accuse non-Creationists of bias and having their own atheistic agenda. False. In truth, geologists, like the rest of the general population, could not care less about the religious implications of their work. Yes, many of us are atheists, but we don't have time to sit around coming up with ways to ruin Christianity. We are nerds. We don't care about religion. We sit around arguing whether skarn is a rock or an alteration and how it should be coded it in our models.

This no doubt does describe working geologists. A case could probably be made that many are atheists at least partly because the presuppositions of their science support atheism, but in general it isn't working geologists who have the philosophical agenda that creationists sometimes accuse them of, it's the original theoreticians who had that. Lyell HAD to have given up on the Bible in order to accept Hutton's old earth theory for instance. It's at THAT stage that the religious issues come up. After that you just have working geologists who use the theories to help them find what they are looking for and if they work that's what matters to them. As roxrkool goes on to say:

Something to consider... who makes money off geology? Professional geologists. We do not EVER use 'Creationist geology' to find economic deposits of oil, gas, or minerals. We use traditional, old earth geology because it works and it makes us billions of dollars. We use ancient depositional systems and tectonic terranes to guide us in finding the next major gold deposit, not Flood Geology.

Some time I'd really like to see all this spelled out in a way I could grasp. Just exactly HOW does the "ancient" part of the formula work to help them find gold or whatever they are looking for? I have the feeling they might not be able to say, it's just something they take for granted. While I would expect it to be better interpreted a different way. That doesn't interest them, how it's interpreted, that's the "religious" question to them, what interests them is the practical efficiency of the theory.

There IS no "Flood Geology" yet, though, so there's nothing that could be used yet. And whatever Flood Geology there might eventually be would have to take into account just those practical considerations she's talking about, although of course they would not be interpreted in terms of an old earth.

Meanwhile this is being said on a thread where poor Chuck77 is being squashed between his apparently inadequate exposure to creationist thinking and the aggressive evolutionists he's now dealing with. You CAN'T venture into EvC with just a superficial grasp of the creationist arguments as he apparently did and have any hope of surviving as a creationist. You have to have made those arguments your own through SOME grappling with the evolutionist arguments against them. Too bad, he's a sitting duck now.

More Flood idiocy

2011-10-01T18:33:00.000-07:00

Granny Magda says:Hi Chuck,
Chuck says: Couldn't the time it took to form the mountains, while in the process of going upward with all of the catastophic events going on have accumulated/incorporated all that marine life thoughtout the mountains while forming?

Oh Chuck, if you are going to argue creationism you need to find out at least SOMETHING of what creationism says about these things. Granted there are different views but the one that is the best explanation is that ALL the strata were ALL laid down in the one event of a worldwide Flood, some of them chock full of dead things. The whole stack was compressed fairly rapidly by the weight of the strata above, but the highest strata eventually broke up or washed away completely -- the effects of which can be seen very clearly in the Grand Canyon /Grand Staircase area. That may be my own observation, not sure. Some time after the Flood tectonic movement split the continents and raised the mountains, which would most likely have increased the compression of the strata but that's about the only possible relation between the fossiliferous strata and the mountain building. The fossils were already there when the mountains were raised.

Granny Magda answers: The problem is that we see plenty of fossils that preserve marine organisms like crinoids and articulate brachiopods; organisms that spent their lives anchored to the sea-bed. We see these fossils in "life assemblages", i.e. they are fossilised in the positions they occupied in life. This could not happen as the result of a flood.

Oh but it did. And stop calling it "a flood" as if the like of it has ever been seen on this earth. It hasn't, the Flood is absolutely unique and did things NOBODY has ever witnessed. Turf was lifted and removed with all its roots intact, whole coral reefs were removed and transported, no reason ANY "anchored" organisms would not have been similarly removed with their entire environment intact. The anchoring, same as the rootedness, keeps it all of a piece. Easily lifted as a whole from its location by rapid water movement.

Another type of problematic (for creationists) fossil is the trace fossil. There are countless examples of fossilised tracks, footprints, burrows and so on. these are incredibly commonplace. It is very hard to picture how these could have been formed in a flood.

At first blush it seems to be a problem but at second thought there is no way those tracks would have been preserved under normal conditions; the Flood explains that. Presumably there was some short period of time between depositions during which animals and people ran for their lives on the surface of the previous deposition. And burrows are no problem at all. Burrowing creatures got buried and continued burrowing. Only now there was no way out.

This problem is compounded by the fact that there are multiple layers of such fossils. Only one layer can be the flood layer after all.

If there is ONE thing everyone needs to recognize about the Flood it's that it COVERED THE ENTIRE EARTH TO AN ENORMOUS DEPTH with sediments dissolved from the former land mass, containing bazillions of dead and dying creatures. This idea that the Flood was confined to only one or even only SOME layers is INSANE.

ALL THE STRATA LOOK THE SAME. There is no point below which or above which the strata have a different appearance from the others of the column. They are identical in form. The only mechanism that could have laid down such a prodigious mass of sediments and dead things IS the worldwide Flood. It HAD to have laid down ALL of them, there is nothing in their presentation to suggest anything else. Today there is nothing occurring on the scale of the strata over the earth; there are isolated areas where you can see layering of sediments on a MUCH SMALLER SCALE, such as in river deltas. That confirms that water does indeed deposit sediments in separated layers, but it hardly suffices for a model for the worldwide geologic column, which needed a LOT more water than any river could ever provide. It's ABSURD to think that a hundred thousand square miles of sediment such as the Coconino of the Southwest were laid down by any normal processes that are ongoing today -- let alone the bizarre idea that it was once an environment right where it is found. Yeesh, the very fact that anyone can seriously THINK such a thing produces a despair in me that there are many people left with any sense of reality.

The basic problem for you here is that fossils tend to preserve whole ecosystems, with a range of creatures that inhabited a particular environment. They do not show the jumbled mess that we might expect from a single catastrophic event.

What YOU "expect from a single catastrophe" isn't worth a second thought. What we actually SEE, the FACTS, the EVIDENCE, is of an ENORMOUS one-time catastrophe that covers the entire earth. Actually we DO see jumbled messes in separate fossil beds wherein masses of creatures were obviously tumbled and died together in heaps. Yes, heaps of the same kind of creature, but jumbled heaps nevertheless, not neat ecologic scenarios, which are very rare. Dinosaur beds for instance, are such jumbled heaps. The Dover cliffs are a jumbled mass of calcareous creatures that were heaped together. Why they were all heaped together with their own kind I don't know but the ocean is layered -- read a bit in oceanography -- and crisscrossed with currents and streams at all levels, and there had to be some sorting process going on that is not yet understood. But it's absolutely certain that no ORDINARY processes would account for the prodigious depths of compressed fossils we actually find.

Why can't this excuse for a debate at least get to a reasonable idea about the Flood instead of all this strawman stupidity that is allowed to pass for argument and the constant reinventing of the wheel from scratch every time a new thread is opened.

And yet more to come.

Huge Flood Escapes Detection by miraculously shrinking to fit into tiny minds

2011-09-29T05:16:00.000-07:00

The wilful obtuseness of some of the evolutionists at EvC, such as exhibited in Percy's summation on a thread about the Flood is SO wearying. Really there's no point in that debate AT ALL. Good grief! Not that the creationists on that thread were particularly astute either but that's really beside the point. The obtuseness of the evolutionists is really something to marvel at.

This thread provided a showcase for the strong correlation between ignorance of all things geological and misinterpretation of geological evidence. The less you know the crazier the explanations that make sense to you.

I have no idea if there's anything fair about this statement or not since I didn't go back and review the thread and he gives no examples.

This thread also highlighted the inability or unwillingness of creationists to address evidence that was brought to their attention, for instance the fine sedimentary layers of varves

Often this is because the good evidence given by the creationists has been ignored or mangled beyond recognition and makes the claims on the other side irrelevant anyway. Beyond that, not having an answer for some of the multitudinous claims the evos make is to be expected. But the evidence FOR the Flood is prodigious without them, and they just have to be put aside for later. Meanwhile the evidence that HAS been given for the Flood needs to be acknowledged. Like years ago already.

or the miles of limestone that both require quiet water and the passage of much time.

This kind of statement is typical and ridiculous. It merely begs the question, assuming formation in situ, which fits evolutionist assumptions, not Floodist assumptions. The Flood concept assumes that the calcareous creatures that eventually made up the limestone, such as in the cliffs of Dover, were transported there on the Flood just as all the sediments were that make up the geologic column, and formed into rock in short order by the enormous pressures of the strata that were laid on top of them, that were washed away by the receding flood water. In other words the limestone deposits only "require quiet water and the passage of much time" to be FORMED IN PLACE. But the living creatures that make up the formation were not formed in place, that is, they did not live and die at that location. In fact how does one explain such an enormous dense concentration of them on such a supposition anyway? No, they were carried there from elsewhere, piled up together in one massive graveyard and then solidified by pressure from above, just as the other strata of the geologic column were.

Or how a flood could deposit the layers of the Grand Canyon and crush them into stone under a great weight, then erode the canyon itself.

I've explained this quite well in many blog posts here, but also at EvC, to deaf ears. I'd repeat it if the prospect of speaking to deaf ears weren't so tiring at the moment.

But evidence for the flood? Nowhere to be seen.

Talking to the deaf and blind is a lost cause. Get off EvC, creationists. Leave them to their delusions.

I can see a successor thread being useful.

The very thought of another exercise in bad creationism answered by ignorant evolutionism makes me SO tired I can hardly keep my eyes open.

===========
Next day. They are continuing to summarize the thread without giving any actual information about what was said on the thread, just their empty opinions about it, so it's hard to take any of it up substantively.

There ought to be a rule that a summation at least describe the points made on the thread that they are answering or supporting, for the sake of readers who didn't have time to read the whole thread. Otherwise what's the point of a Summation at all. Oh, propaganda I suppose.

But I would like to comment on RAZD's summation, in which he's proposing a follow-up thread that focuses on evidence from particular fossils and from known floods, apparently oblivious to the fact that he's begging the question from the getgo: One thing the Noachian Flood would NOT be, is similar to any known local floods.

Coyote follows that with another typical evolutionist begging of the question when he treats the dating of the strata as a foregone conclusion.

He does remind me that the creationist arguments were badly off target by identifying a particular sedimentary layer as the limit of the Flood. Utterly ridiculous. The Flood MUST account for ALL the layers, there's no way anything BUT such a Flood could explain any of them.

Then Dr A gives his usual contentless snarky sum-up.

At least Coyote gave some actual content from the thread, which is more than can be said for any of the rest of them. Oh, okay, Dr. A did mention that one creationist made the KT boundary his Flood level. It's important to have these things recognized. Beyond that Dr A just speaks in snarky analogies.
========

Alas, the Great Flood has escaped detection even by two of the creationist participants on the thread, ICANT and IamJoseph who deny that the Flood would have done what obviously it did. One of them thinks the Flood's effects can be compared with the work of the periodic filling of the Bay of Fundy, ONE tiny inlet on planet earth. Sigh. The other thinks the Bible says the Flood was regional. Sigh. A mess of a thread altogether, and they are thinking of a follow-up thread? Oh give us a break.

==========
9/30 1:30 AM I could cry my eyes out. Moose has given ICANT a post of the month nomination for his "refreshing" observation about the Bay of Fundy in his comment:

But if the Bay of Fundy can rise 55 feet in 6 hours and then fall 55 feet in 6 hours and you can't see everything washed away, why would anyone assume that if the water rose a few hundred feet in 40 days it would leave any sign that it did so?

I'm aghast, I'm stricken. I can hardly believe a person would HAVE to point out the stupidity of this comparison -- the ENTIRE EARTH COVERED WITH WATER FOR MONTHS AND MONTHS, saturating ALL the dry land on the entire planet, dissolving it, breaking it up into fine sediments, moving it rapidly down slopes along with all the living things that had inhabited that dry land, carrying it all plus the dead sea creatures as well, in its currents and waves and tides -- compared to the filling and emptying of a channel that undergoes this daily, routinely, a tiny little channel long since carved out by the elements. Truly I want to cry. A Noah's Flood of tears. For days, weeks.

===
And yet another day and RAZD (now Zen Deist, keep forgetting) adds another summation. Are these people thinking at all?

Hi everyone,
Message 63 presents what I consider would be the best evidence for a global flood, mass extinctions, and also why the number and timing of such events is not consistent with a biblical flood.

Of course he may be talking to one of the creationists who has the absurd idea that the Flood level can be marked by a particular layer of sediment, but in any case he thinks you can see extinction events in differences between the fossil contents of particular strata, which of course you can't because they were laid down by the Flood waters and ALL the fossils within ALL of them are evidence of the huge extinction brought about by the Flood.

Likewise Trilobites, Mountains and Marine Deposits - Evidence of a flood? presents why I consider fossil evidence of marine life to be evidence of normal marine growth on ocean bottoms, as occurs today, and not evidence for a biblical flood.

Sigh. Here's the post he's referring to:

There are fossil marine deposits on virtually every mountain, including Mt Everest.
These fossil deposits are all of mature marine life, clams many years old, etcetera. If they are evidence of a world wide flood then:

(1) the flood was much longer in duration than is the published conjecture, or

(2) the marine environment was unusually productive, in which case we come to the problem of trilobites ... and all other extinct marine fauna and flora from the Precambrian through the marine dinosaurs ... not surviving the flood.

Thus you have a logical contradiction.

Evidence of multiple layers of mature marine environments on mountains is rather evidence of long ages -- ages to form mature marine environments, ages to cover them, ages for the other mature marine environments to form, and ages for the sedimentary basin to be pushed up into mountains by tectonic activity.

Unbelievable. They are "mature" therefore they couldn't have been deposited there by a Flood, or the Flood must have been of much longer duration? What are these people thinking? All the Flood did was MOVE things around, it was not an ENVIRONMENT IN WHICH THINGS LIVED for pete's sake. The clams were mature wherever the Flood found them. The "marine environments" were ALREADY formed during the time preceding the Flood. What IS the matter with these people?

And go read the next few posts in that thread as well to find out they think that the sheer volume of dead marine life within the sediments within mountains REFUTES the Flood? Nay, it CONFIRMS it. I cannot fathom the bizarre mentality here.

And on the Flood model there IS no "Precambrian" period because it is simply the lowest rocks of the stack of strata. I can only sit here and shake my head. And none of the creationists on that thread objected to this stupidity? Well, perhaps they did, I haven't taken the time to read through it, but if they did nobody was paying any attention. He goes on:

Floods do not build mountains and floods do not sort debris.

"Floods?" How can anyone in their right mind even think for half a minute that the earth's being completely covered by water for a year can be compared to ordinary floods? What is the matter with their heads? And nobody said the Flood built the mountains. What we all say is that tectonic movement occurred as part of the Flood scenario, as volcanoes did as well, triggering such movements. The mountain building went on for some time after the Flood waters had drained away or mostly drained away -- many huge lakes were left standing probably for many years afterward. The mountain building occurred in the post-Flood period. What STUPIDITY to say anyone thinks the Flood itself BUILT the mountains!

Erosion from impounded water breaking through levees do not create the patterns seen in the Grand Canyon and other canyons, and especially do not produce the erosion patterns that winds produce.

Huh? Words fail me. All I can do is cry at the nonsense, the futility of such discussions.

The erosion from these kinds of events is more consistent with the scablands: wide flat scoured troughs. Thus a biblical flood cannot explain the evidence of the Grand Canyon, the evidence of many long years of gradual erosion by wind and rain and the undercutting of the river at the bottom.

The years of erosion SINCE the FLood are NEVER confused WITH the work of the Flood by any sane thinker. And anyone in his right mind should know a mere river could not have cut that canyon. YOUR FLOOD IS TOO SMALL!!! GOOD GRIEF!

I agree with ICANT (Message 317) that it is unlikely that a flood of such short duration as the biblical flood would need to leave any significant evidence of the flood -- it is too short a time for marine growth to occur in the manner shown by the fossil evidence. This is why evidence for mass extinction is more critical, and Message 63 shows why that argument fails.

MARINE GROWTH???? Where does this STUPID idea about GROWTH of anything come from in relation to a worldwide Flood that only KILLED things? Or extinction events as interpreted by a lack of fossils in a slab of sediment. Something is so wrong with people's heads at EvC they should shut the whole thing down. It's insanity at such a level it's hard to know where to begin. The only sensible thing to do is cry your eyes out over such a misuse of the mind.

Geology course at EvC

2011-09-19T19:19:00.000-07:00

Somebody got the message about how science (in this case Geology) SHOULD be presented but I wonder if he'll do what's needed with it.

Dr. Adequate has acknowldged the problem I've objected to over and over here about how all we're ever given is the CONCLUSIONS Geology (or Evolutionary Biology) has arrived at without the thinking that led to them.

He even acknowledged that the textbooks we creationists are always told to read don't address these questions but just try to cram what they consider to be established dogma into the reader.

On second and third thoughts and pondering his list of topics I'm less than thrilled with the course design, as noted below. It's nice to have the familiar problem acknowledged that he's outlined above but I'm now doubting that he's really going to address it where it counts. Wait and see I guess.

Introduction

Course objectives

The objective of this course is to show how it is possible to reconstruct the past history of the Earth from our present observation of the rocks.

It will differ from other textbooks in that it will place a strong emphasis on asking and answering the question: "How do we know?" Most textbooks report certain aspects of geological knowledge simply as things that are known: for example, that granite is an igneous rock, or that sandstone with certain properties is aeolian; or that the Earth's core is iron; but without addressing, or at least without systematically addressing, the question of how these things are known in such a way as to satisfy the doubts of the skeptical or the inquisitiveness of the curious.

As a result, the average geology textbook does fairly poor service to the skeptical, or to those who wish to debate and convince the skeptical. It also, in my view, does a disservice to the science of geology itself: for the story of geology is in effect the world's longest-running detective story, and it is more interesting if geology is presented as such than as a collection of facts handed down from on high.

Course outline

Finding the right order in which to structure a course in geology is perhaps the most perplexing decision facing its author. No solution is ideal, because (with the exception of the definition of basic terms, which clearly should come first) it would be best if every topic could be discussed last, so that the reader can come to it with the rest of the course as context. As this is impossible, some sort of compromise has to be made.

The contents of the course will be as follows:

(1) Rocks and minerals: in which I explain what is a mineral, what is a rock, what are sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic rocks.

Very basic stuff which I believe I know quite well from various trips around the internet as needed.

(2) Weathering and erosion: a look at mechanical weathering, chemical weathering, and erosion.

Not sure this discussion would add anything to my store of knowledge either.

(3) Sedimentology: a systematic look at all the different types of sediment and their corresponding sedimentary rocks --- peat and coal; glacial till and tillite; deserts and aeolian sandstone; coccoliths and chalk; etc, etc, etc.

I also believe I'm up on all these categories just as phenomena. But perhaps he'll touch on some area that is controversial for a Floodist. We'll see.

(4) Plate tectonics: in which we describe how it is known that plates move, what is know of the mechanisms, and what effects this has in terms of faulting, folding, orogeny, ophiolites, terranes, etc.

I believe I'm up on these things too with the exception of ophiolites, which a quick glance at Wikipedia takes care of anyway.

Second thought, terrane is a complicated subject that would be interesting to see discussed but I have no reason to think it poses any particular difficulties for a Floodist

(5) Stratigraphy: a discussion of actualism, of Steno's principles, of way-up marks, of cross-cutting relationships, of the geological column, of index fossils, and so forth. This may also be a good place to discuss paleoclimatology.

I guess it depends on what he does with this stuff whether it's going to be of any use to a Floodist or not.

(6) Absolute dating: those dating methods other than the relative methods of stratigraphy. This will include a look at some of the methods of more doubtful value, such as fluoride dating and racemization.

I'm pretty sure I'm not going to get much out of this discussion because I'm familiar with how it goes with evolutionists. But again, we'll see.

At that point I shall have done what I set out to do, in that the reader will then have a grasp of the principles of historical geology. However, it may be that the readership will have further questions. In particular, the reader may want to see some historical geology actually done, or in other words to see some case studies. It may be possible to continue the discussion along these lines.

Awfully awfully basic as presented here.

Note on sources

It will not be necessary to give references for notions which are the common property of geologists, such as the definition of a mineral or the fact that granite is felsic. However, I shall provide references to the more abstruse or particular facts to which I allude.

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due to Pressie for volunteering to review the material. Any remaining errors are, of course, my fault.

If nothing else, probably I'll be able to conclude that I didn't need the geology course after all that the evolutionists keep telling us we need. I didn't think I did because I've picked up so much off the internet over the years, but it would be nice to have it confirmed that a course isn't really going to offer anything different.

The question How do they know? isn't crucial for such things as how rocks form but for how they arrive at conclusions such as the claim that a particular rock layer was formed in air while another was formed in water, and mostly all the claims about ancient landscapes -- how they identify ancient deserts or bodies of water and how long they supposedly persisted. It's the unwitnessed past abaout which they make such flat-out assertions of knowingness that really needs the answers to How do they know this or that, not so much the factual stuff like what rocks are made of.

And although I know there is no sensible answer, there are also the questions of how they got themselves convinced that the fossils represent creatures that lived and died on that spot, how they think a series of flat slabs of rock could represent a time period at all, how they think loose sediments deposited in some cases over a hundred thousand miles of area could become such flat horizontal rock without enormous pressure from above, how they think that a bit of loose gravel at the interface between two flat slabs of rock constitutes the sort of erosion that occurs on exposed surface of land.

A Creationist Appreciation of Darwin Part 2

2011-09-18T13:35:00.002-07:00

Darwin spends much time on the question of just what exactly constitutes a species as opposed to a variety. In Chapter 2, Variation Under Nature, he writes:

Many years ago, when comparing, and seeing others compare, the birds from the separate islands of the Galapagos Archipelago, both one with another, and with those from the American mainland, I was much struck how entirely vague and arbitrary is the distinction between species and varieties. On the islets of the little Madeira group there are many insects which are characterized as varieties in Mr Wollaston's admirable work, but which it cannot be doubted would be ranked as distinct species by many entomologists. Even Ireland has a few animals, now generally regarded as varieties, but which have been ranked as species by some zoologists.

Richard Leakey, who wrote the introduction and edited the abridgment of the edition of the Origin I've been reading lately, says:

[Darwin's] opponents believed that each species had been separately created by God, but that varieties had arisen within these species by natural variation.

This would be a reasonable distinction from the creationist point of view today as well, if there were any way to know which was which with any certainty, but even now when we have the science of genetics it isn't always possible to know. In Darwin's day it was entirely a matter of the degree of difference in appearance from other groups as subjectively judged. When a new distinct group was known to have descended from another it was called a variety, but in most cases this was not known for wild species, so naturalists determined which was which according to the degree of difference they thought they could identify from observation.

It's tempting to quote Darwin at great length where he describes the species-variety confusions of his day because it's really quite fascinating to see how they thought about these things in those days, but Darwin's main intention in spelling it all out was to lay the groundwork for his theory of how a species can evolve into another species, as Leakey says:

Hence Darwin's overriding objective is to minimze the distinction between species and varieties

Where to draw the line between species and varieties is still the problem for creationists, though no longer for evolutionists, who have found an objective way of defining a species -- not necessarily true of course, but objective at least. As Leakey puts it: (62)

Modern biologists would define a species as a group of individuals all of which can potentially interbreed one with another. This is a working definition which holds good in the majority of cases. There are anomalies however, some of which Darwin deals with ...

So evolutionists have a definition of species that sounds fairly definite and objective although of course they maintain that a species can eventually change to the point of producing another species. But at least since a species in Darwin's time was subjectively determined by judgment from the appearance of the creature, meaning there was no way to establish it as fact, so now there seems to be a criterion that works and at least puts a stop to the subjective uncertainties.

But now creationists have been deprived of the very term species. It has now been defined to support the theory of evolution, assuming endless ability to change from one species to another, where it used to imply the immutability attached to special creation. Consequently, creationists have had to scramble to find a different term to refer to the Biblical created kinds, sometimes resorting to "type" or "group," and sometimes using that very Biblical term, kind. The problem is that all the relevant terms are more or less interchangeable. Species simply means "kind" or "class" or "type."

But the earlier creationists had already stretched the concept of the Biblical created kinds to such an extent that it had lost all meaning anyway. Creationist naturalists had no problem splitting many of what today would be considered to be immutable separate Species -- such as Cats or Dogs or even possibly Birds -- into several species rather than varieties, considering them to be special creations in their own right, judging subjectively by the appearance of their differences. Creationists in those days could very easily have accepted Darwin's many "species" of finches for instance, regarding them as separate creations. (And this way of artificially multiplying species, which evolutionists continue to do today, is the reason for the challenge by evolutionists that there would have been far too many species ever to have fit on the ark. But if most of what are now called species are really just varieties of an original Kind, room on the ark for the species of that ancient time is not a problem).

But these days the evolutionist redefinition of species now precludes this kind of classification for creationists. And that's a good thing. This is one of the effects of Darwin's work for which I think we should thank him. It seems to me easy to sympathize with Darwin's objection to the arbitrariness of the subjective distinctions of his day. There was clearly a need for a more objective system to distinguish a species from a variety, and not only biology in general but also creationism could only stagnate under the imprecise subjectivity of classification he criticized.

Of course creationists must object to the evolutionist definition, but thanks to that definition we are now forced back to the Biblical perspective. The unbiblical idea of separate creations after the original creation described in Genesis had to be abandoned, the readiness to assume that striking differences between groups make them species as opposed to varieties had to go, the glib explaining-away of odd phenomena as simply having been created for some purpose had to give way to an empirical way of thinking about those things.

A Creationist Appreciation of Darwin Part 1

2011-09-17T14:10:00.001-07:00

Despite creationist objections to Darwin and to the theory of evolution that developed from his work, it really ought to be recognized and acknowledged that some of Darwin's observations have been of value to creationism, as well as to biology in general. I just realized this after some rereading of his Origin of Species and being reminded of the impression I had when I first read it back before I was a Christian. I enjoyed the book enormously then. I always enjoyed reading someone who could lead me through a well-presented argument and Darwin does that in his careful measured way. He's a genuine thinker. His observations are well described and well used in the service of his theory; his conclusions are logical and easy to follow.

This time around I have an entirely different perspective, of course. I notice things I wouldn't have noticed forty years ago; I have objections I didn't have then. But in spite of all that I find myself again impressed with his methodical presentation of evidence and clear arguments.

This time around I was also struck by some ideas for which I think he should even be thanked by creationists. The creationism of Darwin's day was a pretty subjective affair that needed the sharp kicks Darwin administered in his Origin. Special Creation as it was called then was such a feeble excuse for a scientific position it didn't take much to topple it, and even his first edition changed many minds, as he indicates in the Preface to a later edition:

Until recently the great majority of naturalists believed that species were immutable productions, and had been separately created.

"Until recently" means "until the publication of the first edition of the Origin of Species."

I'm sure it seems that a creationist should grieve at the success of Darwin's argument for evolution, but the creationism he reveals in his book is not the creationism it should have been. For one thing, the idea of special creation of immutable species was used to explain anything and everything. Whatever was observed was attributed to the organism's having been created for that purpose. At the beginning of Chapter 9, Hybridism, for instance, Darwin says:

"The view commonly entertained by naturalists is that species, when intercrossed, have been specially endowed with sterility in order to prevent their confusion."

That is, sterility is observed in some hybrids and the explanation from special creation is that they were made that way for a purpose. It's the sort of answer that would stop all thought in its tracks rather than stimulate further investigation into the reason for the sterility.

In Chapter 13, Geographical Distribution, he says something that suggests that the belief in special creation included the unbiblical idea of continuing or periodic creation over time, which is far from the once-for-all-time creation as described in Genesis.

Here he's commenting on an island devoid of mammals and remarks:

"It cannot be said that there has not been time for the creation of mammals; many volcanic islands are sufficiently ancient...."

Of course there would be no question of the time needed if the prevailing creationist view was that all living things had been created at once as reported in Genesis 1 and not created for particular locations at later particular times.

And he goes on to demonstrate the uselessness, even the absurdity of the creationist understanding:

"Although terrestrial mammals do not occur on oceanic islands, aerial mammals occur on almost every island..." "Why has the supposed creative force produced bats and no other mammals on remote islands?"

He answers that the most probable explanation is they weren't created just for the islands, it's simply that bats could have flown the distance whereas terrestrial animals had no way to get there.

At the end of Chapter 5, Laws of Variation, he is objecting to an idea about the genus that includes horses that was prevalent in his time, that

"...each [equine] species was independently created with a tendency to vary ... so as often to become striped like the other species of the genus," and "created with a strong tendency, when crossed with species inhabiting distant quarters of the world, to produce hybrids resembling in their stripes, not their own parents, but other species of the genus.

To admit this view is, as it seems to me, to reject a real for an unreal, or at least an unkonwn, cause. It makes the works of God a mere mockery and deception; I would almost as soon believe with the old and ignorant cosmogonists that fossil shells had never lived, but had been created in stone so as to mock the shells living on the sea-shore.

I have to say that I agree. Even back then it would have been far more reasonable to consider that the separate "species" in the genus were in fact varieties of the same species, and that the striping showed up as a reversion to a characteristic of the species closest to the original. It comes off as a cop-out, or intellectual laziness, to invoke God's purpose to explain such a phenomenon.

It looks like Darwin has done quite a good job of thoroughly trouncing some of the creationist ideas of his day, and it seems to me they needed to be trounced. The creationist ideas were subjective and silly, but more important, they weren't Biblical. They had already been much compromised by what naturalists of the day thought science had proved, which is always the big danger for creationism. Creationists had been rationalizing the Biblical revelation away to accommodate the current interpretation of the evidence, and this still goes on among some who consider themselves creationists. Seems to me Darwin illuminated a problem and to a great extent even solved it, so that biology could move in a more constructive direction and creationists could regroup from a Biblical perspective, which they must do if they are to hope for any success in answering evolution.

That same polystrate trees thread continues to accumulate hot air

2011-09-17T13:16:00.000-07:00

What is the point of allowing this sort of tedious evasiveness to continue?

Dr A refuses to connect with what Just Being Real means about about the burying of the polystrate trees and I doubt that if JBR had said it even as precisely as possible he'd respond more to the point anyway:

JBR: No I totally get that you are saying the layers were laid down quickly, what I don't get is that they are sepperated by ...millions of years.
Dr. A: No they aren't. This is why no-one ever ever ever said they were.
JBR: That sir, I do not get at all.
Dr. A: The fact that the scenario which you have made up in your head seems implausible even to you might serve as a hint that it is not the scenario asserted by geologists.

Again, why is this kind of exchange allowed? Dr. A. and all the other evolutionists must know what the creationist objection is even if the creationist doesn't have all his i's dotted and t's crossed in his description.

The trees penetrate through TWO OR MORE LAYERS, layers that are normally identified by geologists by time period names that are assigned to periods of millions of years EACH. If the lower layer is supposedly 300 million years old and the layer above it supposedly 200 million years old then we have a time elapse of 100 million years between the two layers that no tree could possibly have survived intact if exposed to the elements for any part of that time. The lower part of the tree would have been fossilized in the lower layer, but the upper part would have had to wait for the upper layer to be deposited. Even evolutionists should be startled if they find part of a fossil protruding out of its "time period" into another.

THIS is what you should be answering, Dr. A. Your flat-out denial is actually against the rules at EvC, and someone should slap your wrist.

RAZD did give what may be the preferred geological explanation, which I note in the post on this subject below, that the first layer completely covered the tree and fossilized it at that time. Then, after becoming stone I assume (which itself is impossible without the weight of higher layers), it was eroded down to its current level and the next layer was deposited on top of it. That would fit the usual thinking of geologists who invent erosion between strata where obviously there was no erosion of any recognizable sort that normally occurs on this planet, the evidence against such a conjecture being the nice neat horizontal interface between the two layers.

No answers yet to the polystrate trees challenge, just the usual impossible fantasy answers and the usual flat-out bullheaded denials.

A little exercise in fantasy science

2011-09-14T12:00:00.000-07:00

(This entry has been heavily rewritten since first posting.)

Typical "Scientific" Mystification as expressed at Wikipedia about the supposed formation of the Grand Canyon:

Geology of the Grand Canyon area
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The geology of the Grand Canyon area exposes one of the most complete and studied sequences of rock on Earth. The nearly 40 major sedimentary rock layers exposed in the Grand Canyon and in the Grand Canyon National Park area range in age from about 200 million to nearly 2 billion years old.

Considering the highly speculative history of determining the age of rocks you'd think they'd be a little more circumspect in their oh-so-definite assertions of this sort.

Most were deposited in warm, shallow seas and near ancient, long-gone sea shores in western North America.

Now I'm sure this is all based on an interpretation of some of the contents of the various strata but why do they only give us their conclusions in such flat-out assertive language instead of some discussion of how they arrived at it? What genuine Science talks like this? I'd really like to see the evidence for the warm shallow seas -- contents of the rocks that normally LIVE in warm shallow seas or what? And for the long-gone sea shores. Are there shoreline rings and that sort of thing somewhere? See, I'm a believer in the Flood, so I'm going to have a very different interpretation of whatever the evidence is that they interpret as warm shallow seas and sea shores. For instance, if it's the fossil contents of the rocks that lead to warm shallow seas because that is those creatures normal habitat when alive, the Flood interpretation would say that they were carried there and died there and didn't live on that spot. If there is evidence of old shorelines near the Grand Canyon, I have no doubt they represent a body of water that was left standing after the Flood for some period of time, long enough to leave the shoreline marks.

Both marine and terrestrial sediments are represented ...

Ah, a factual statement amidst the fantasy. That goes nowhere though. I'm sure they can say what makes the sediments marine or terrestrial, but if they were transported there on the Flood all that distinction refers to is their place of origin. It certainly wasn't the walls of the Grand Canyon.

...at least including fossilized sand dunes from an extinct desert.

And now back to speculative interpretion. You know this how? Your evidence is what? Any creationist writing like this would be scathingly dismissed as an idiot. Again, whatever the evidence that leads them to fossilized sand dunes, their sand had to have been transported on the Flood to their present resting place. And again, why don't they describe their evidence?

There are at least 14 known unconformities in the geologic record found in the Grand Canyon area.

Another of the very rare factual statements, presented without a hint as to their relevance or scientific import. Second thought: Depends on what sort of unconformity they're talking about. There is certainly a huge "angular unconformity" at the base of the canyon which I've discussed many times before, but there is also a purely fictional "unconformity" that is a "missing" layer, that is, a layer of fossilized sediment that their theory says is supposed to be there but isn't. Of course there isn't the faintest sign that such a layer was ever there; the strata are all just as neatly and tightly and horizontally stacked through those "periods" of "unconformity" as everywhere else in the column.

Uplift of the region started about 75 million years ago during the Laramide orogeny; a mountain-building event that is largely responsible for creating the Rocky Mountains to the east. In total the Colorado Plateau was uplifted an estimated 2 miles (3.2 km). The adjacent Basin and Range province to the west started to form about 18 million years ago as the result of crustal stretching. A drainage system that flowed through what is today the eastern Grand Canyon emptied into the now lower Basin and Range province. Opening of the Gulf of California around 6 million years ago enabled a large river to cut its way northeast from the gulf. The new river captured the older drainage to form the ancestral Colorado River, which in turn started to form the Grand Canyon.

You see how they talk as if this is observed fact rather than
interpretation of various geological formations. Obviously we're expected to just sit quietly and receive it unquestioningly as revelation from Those Who Know, without a discussion of how they arrived at it, without evidence or anything to engage us in thinking about it.

Anyway, again, I would really like to know what the evidence is for this mountain building period, and actually I don't doubt that there IS evidence, what I doubt is their interpretation of the evidence. Especially of course the time factork, how it got associated with a particular block of sediment layers. And I love thinking about this stuff. I've many times wondered about the formation of the Great Basin as well as the Grand Canyon, love to look at maps that show the topography clearly.

The interpretation from the Flood perspective includes volcanic and tectonic activity as part of the Flood event, perhaps causing it to some extent or caused by it, in any case associated with it. It's frustrating to read the descriptions from the establishment point of view that don't provide enough fact for a Floodist to think about. All you get is the Official Party Line. If I could afford a good geology book or an online course in geology MAYBE it would give the evidence behind such things? Or maybe not -- probably not part of a basic course. Ideally one could ask a geologist about all these things but they are a prickly bunch with creationists. For all their supposed interest in educating us stupid creationists at EvC, if you start asking questions to clarify such things for your own purposes, forget it, they don't want to give you a free education, go take a course.

Wetter climates brought upon by ice ages starting 2 million years ago greatly increased excavation of the Grand Canyon, which was nearly as deep as it is now by 1.2 million years ago. Volcanic activity deposited lava over the area 1.8 million to 500,000 years ago. At least 13 lava dams blocked the Colorado River, forming lakes that were up to 2,000 feet (610 m) deep. The end of the last ice age and subsequent human activity has greatly reduced the ability of the Colorado River to excavate the canyon. Dams in particular have upset patterns of sediment transport and deposition. Controlled floods from Glen Canyon Dam upstream have been conducted to see if they have a restorative effect. Earthquakes and mass wasting erosive events still affect the region

What might have some basis in reasonable deduction from evidence is so mingled with what is most likely sheer conjecture based on nothing but assumption, and the possibly reasonable deduction is presented so utterly devoid of evidence for it in any case, EVERYBODY should object to this sort of thing, not just creationists. But no, anti-creationists accept it as wisdom from on high and offered as science, expect a creationist to swallow it without question or else be branded an anti-scientific ignoramus. How ironic, how sad. I really want to see the signs of the lakes that were backed up behind lava dams, what traces did they leave? What is the evidence of ice involvement?

Well, the rest of the article goes on in the same vein, a mix of a few facts that just stick out like islands among one description after another of purely fantastical ancient deserts and seas and so on that of course nobody was there to witness and can therefore be nothing but speculation based on who-knows-what, and the who-knows-what is of course not given, because this is NOT science, this is Fantasy.

Sigh.

Here's a thread of my own at EvC that spun off one on the Grand Canyon, in which I take pains to be clear about what I mean about the difference between conjecture and fact. Unfortunately here and there I wasn't quite as clear as I thought I was being and I'd make some changes now, but the basic idea is still there. But all anyone did in response to my pains was make absurd straw man arguments.

I'll try to state it again now:

The reason references to ancient landscapes, deserts, inland seas and whatnot are conjecture as opposed to fact is that there is no way to validate (or invalidate) the interpretation. It conjures up a scenario in the distant past that is described almost as if it had been seen, but nobody witnessed it so there is no way to corroborate the conjecture; it remains forever a conjecture although they treat it as a fact.

There's nothing wrong with conjecture of course, it's the normal first step to a scientific explanation; perhaps it should be called a hypothesis. The problem is that any other possible interpretations of the same facts that led them to a particular conjecture are pre-empted when they don't bother to describe the facts and that renders the favored interpretation unfalsifiable.

Exactly what is the factual evidence that leads them to the scenario of an inland sea on the North American continent, for instance? I'd really like to know but that part they normally leave out of the discussion. Of course I suspect that "inland sea" would be well interpreted as a stage of the receding Flood. A slow-draining leftover body of water could probably explain the facts quite nicely if only the facts were available. Not a sea that stood for millions of years, but perhaps weeks or months or a few years.

Someone on that old thread compared my argument to an argument whether the claim that Henry the 8th was King of England was fact or conjecture. There is no comparison and it was irritating to have someone try to hang that on me. Henry the 8th had witnesses galore, histories written about him and no doubt all kinds of vestiges of his existence and influence remain in English institutions as well. Paintings of his royal self abound. Show me a photo of the ancient landscape you've conjured up. An "ancient desert" has NOTHING from its own time to show for itself. Henry the 8th had corroborating evidence; inventions of ancient scenarios have nothing to corroborate them. And really, it is STUPID to make such a comparison.

Where's the data that should be available to scientists who want to test your theory? Laboratory science is replicable by anyone. This kind of "science" remains conjecture forever although ordained as Fact.

Strata, Time Periods, Polystrate Trees and Evo Meanness

2011-09-12T01:57:00.000-07:00

The insanity on the Polystrate trees thread at EvC is beyond me right now timewise and patience-wise. The sheer meanness is part of it, the obtuseness, possibly willful, another part. Just Being Real made a somewhat muddled but otherwise reasonable post on the subject and he's being torn to shreds. He hasn't stayed around and frankly I hope he never comes back. There's nothing positive to be gained from continual beating of a brick wall, and that's what they are there.

Just Being Real opened his post with this:

Many Geologists say that the strata layers of the geologic column are representative of millions of years of time. In this discussion I will refer to them as uniformitarian geologists, but with the understanding that not all conventional geologists are “strict” uniformitarians. In opposition is a group of geologists who believe that the strata was laid down during a world wide geologically recent global flood. I will refer to them in this discussion as creation geologists or YEC geologists.

It's a little garbled perhaps but you'd think by now after years of debate the evolutionists would know what he means to say and recognize it as a correct reading of what Geology teaches. But no, they have to deny that Geology ever taught such a thing as that the strata represent millions of years of time. The obtuseness with which they manage to distort this simple point is astonishing really, however typical.

Here's Dr. A's nastily obtuse rendering:

No-one, anywhere, ever, has claimed that a single distinct sedimentary layer in a sedimentary formation necessarily corresponds to millions of years of time.

JBR of course was not referring to a single distinct sedimentary layer but to a block of sediments assigned to a time period. But it's in Dr. A's sadistic interest not to be able to fathom JBR's somewhat vague way of putting it.

Here's Moose's:

All of those links go to illustrations of the geologic time scale (aka "THE geologic column").

There are no strata (rock) layers in those illustrations. They say nothing about sedimentation rates.

Well, there may not be any strata in those illustrations of the geologic column but there are in this one:

And in fact in this illustration there is a single distinct sedimentary layer ascribed some millions of years of time -- the Redwall Limestone = The Mississippian period lasting from 359 to 318 millions of years ago, or 41 million years according to Wikipedia.

Then Boof has no idea what might be meant by a "uniformitarian geologist."

If the communication problem is that bad there is no point in having a debate at all. By now all those responders should know what JBR is getting at and instead of just denying that it has any meaning discuss what they think Geology DOES really say. Dr. A accuses JBR and everybody else of ignorance of Geology but as usual doesn't offer one word of information about what he thinks Geology does say. Which always suggests it's one huge bluff really.

Then Pressie thinks he's finally understood something about how creationists must think a single sediment equals a time period,

Apparently creationists are required to know exactly what jargon Geologists use but evolutionists don't have to know anything about the history of the creationist side of the argument at all.

As usual lately I'm very tired and preoccupied with other things and wish I could spend more time answering this, hope maybe I can come back to it and get into more of it later.

Meanwhile, JBR really should stay away. There is nothing positive to be gained from that kind of treatment.

The Genetic Markers of the Flood Bottleneck

2011-09-05T18:20:00.001-07:00

Here comes JAR with his usual wrongheaded assertions (no, no evidence here) against the Flood of Noah.

To mention "fossils" when talking about the Biblical Flood is of course simply silly. The Biblical Flood, if it had happened, was far too recent to have anything to do with fossils.

Too recent to have anything to do with fossils? 4500 years isn't enough time? Even though evolutionists claim that fossils are being formed every day in our own time in far more mundane circumstances than the global biblical Flood? Excuse me? The Flood buried bazillions of living things which would have been made into fossils in a lot less time than 4500 years. I've seen discussions, probably creationist of course since evolutionists are committed to not knowing such things, that show the process occurring in a matter of years in caves that drip calcium carbonate. If I find such a discussion I'll post it.

The Biblical Flood myths say that all the critters on land and in the air with the exception of those critters on the fictional ark were killed during a very short period.

If that were true, then every land and air critter living today, plant or animal, would be descended from the few critters on the ark.

Very true and they are.

That would leave a genetic bottleneck marker in EVERY single living species of plant of animal, and the marker would be only a relatively few generations back.

If the Biblical Flood happened, then that marker MUST be there.

It ain't.

Case closed.

I've heard this bit of evolutionist lore many times by now, but I have NEVER ONCE SEEN AN EXPLANATION OF EXACTLY WHAT "MARKER" WOULD POINT TO A BOTTLENECK. Perhaps I merely missed it but I've been looking for some time whenever this subject comes up and all that's offered is this assertion, perhaps some ridicule and choice epithets along with it, BUT NO CLUE AS TO WHAT THE MARKER MIGHT BE THAT WOULD DEMONSTRATE THE BOTTLENECK IN QUESTION.

Now that it's come up again perhaps I'll be motivated to make a more dogged search for such information.

But meanwhile I wanted to highlight JAR's post because of something I just learned about these things that opens up a new answer to the question. I've been rereading Morris and Parker's What Is Creation Science? over the last few days, one of the first books on creationism I read after becoming a Christian, and besides recognizing many points they make that I've made my own in this debate although I'd forgotten their source, I've also run across some points that illuminate some things I hadn't digested and am only now beginning to think about.

One of them suggests an answer to just what WOULD be the genetic indicators of the bottleneck at the Flood and they aren't the sort of "marker" that would jump out at you but something a geneticist today would simply take for granted as the normal state of the genome. Whenever I've gone that far into this part of the debate I find myself wondering about a formerly much bigger genome --polyploidy for instance, which never really fit but now I have a better understanding anyway -- from which it would be easier to imagine descent of all the life forms we see today and extravagantly more varieties before the Flood as well, which certainly must have been the case BECAUSE of such an extreme bottleneck.

No, not a bigger genome, but a different genetic situation along more ordinary lines:

Parker describes how all the varieties of humans and animals are easily accounted for by simple Mendelian genetics combining a given built-in array of genes for various traits. The example he gave was of two parents with "medium" or "average" skin color, expressed as AaBb, with the capital letters representing the darkest and the lower case the lightest, saying that EVERY shade of skin that we see on earth can be produced from those two parents, from the darkest African (AABB)to the lightest Scandinavian (aabb). When you think of every other trait as genetically expressed by the same formula, it becomes clear that an enormous variety of combinations would produce an enormous variety of types or varieties or races -- of people and animals of all kinds -- which would become characteristic of groups as they migrated and became geographically isolated from one another.

And all this incredible variety requires is normal sexual recombination AND HETEROZYGOSITY of the traits.

He also gave this statistic on page 112: "[evolutionist Francisco Ayala] says that human beings are "heterozygous" for 6.7% of their genes, on the average. That means that 6 or 7 times in a 100, the pair of genes for a given trait differ like the genes for brown or blue eyes, or for rolling or not rolling the tongue. Now this may not seem like much. But Ayala calculates a single human couple with just "6.7% variety" could produce 10 to the 2,017 children ...before they would have to produce an identical twin..."

He goes on to say that the whole spectrum of skin color we see today would be easily produced IN ONE GENERATION with just this 6.7% heterozygosity for that trait. Combining that with the same breadth of possibilities for size, hair or fur color, bone type, muscle type, and so on and so forth, would certainly yield an enormous variety of individuals within each created kind or type.

So I figure this 6.7% heterozygosity is what remained on average to all creatures after the Flood, or perhaps it was somewhat more then and has decreased since then. It's still enough to produce enormous variety, everything we see today.

Well, what does a bottleneck do genetically anyway? Doesn't it produce HOMOZYGOSITY for a number of traits? Isn't that what happened to the cheetah -- it has reached the point genetically where most of its genes are fixed and no variety is possible at all. Since the cheetah is of course descended from the cats on the ark, with their already drastically reduced heterozygosity -- perhaps comparable to the 6.7% of human beings -- a later bottleneck would have reduced it even further to the current state of almost 100% fixed loci, so that each individual is almost a clone of all the others, and further variation is as good as impossible.

THERE'S YOUR "MARKER" JAR. Not what you were expecting but there it is. It wouldn't be recognizable in the genome because nobody is looking for it. The average heterozygosity seen today would be accepted as the norm for all human beings for all time. It wouldn't be suspected as a marker of anything, although the basic principle is quite well known.

So instead of the genetic complexities I was trying to imagine to account for the necessity of an enormously greater variety among humans and animals before the Flood, I now appreciate that simple ordinary everyday heterozygosity can account for it all, but presumably there would have been much MORE heterozogosity for a much greater number of genes or traits before the Flood. 100% back at Adam and Eve? 50%?

And to that I would like to add another "marker" of the bottleneck, one of my favorite topics, JUNK DNA -- which makes up something over 90% of the genome. You wouldn't suspect that as a sign of the bottleneck at the Flood, would you, JAR? But if it's what I keep thinking it must be, the record of the genetic death brought about by that bottleneck, as well as all the accumulated death from other causes of course, then its mere existence in the genome is very glaring evidence of the Flood, now to be added to the other marker, the very low incidence of heterozygosity that resulted from all that death. This genetic junkyard or graveyard is a hint at enormously more genetic possibilities at the Creation than exist today.

May I please have my Nobel Prize now?

Evolutionist duplicity, disingenuousness, evasion as usual.

2011-09-04T23:25:00.000-07:00

Evolutionists are so often maddeningly duplicitous. The "debate" is laughable enough without such sleazy stuff. Here's our friend Dr A pretending the perfectly apt term "polystrate" has something wrong with it just because creationists invented it:

Another poster says: The only sites that seem to mention polystrate fossils are creationist sites.
Dr. A says: That's 'cos polystrate is a word creationists made up, not a term in real geology.

Well, it's obviously an accurate term for an object that penetrates vertically through two or more rock layers, so geologists would do well to adopt it, and if they weren't such hidebound stuffy evolutionists they probably would.

And another evolutionist has this to say about that:

I also think that they are the only people who claim that "geologists say that these sediments were deposited over millions of years".

I am a geologist and I don't.

Uh huh, but how disingenuous of you. Two peas in a pod you and Dr. A there.

Anyway.

Any normal person happening upon the many illustrations of the rock strata all neatly labelled ACCORDING TO WHAT GEOLOGISTS CALL TIME PERIODS OF MILLIONS OF YEARS -- dramatic case in point any diagram of the strata in the Grand Canyon -- ought to be treated with RESPECT for drawing the NATURAL INFERENCE that deposition must have occurred over those millions of years. Not to give that much basic respect is just a sign of the evolutionists lack of commitment to science and interest only in falsely calling creationists stupid.

HOWEVER, IF in the case of the polystrate trees you have SOME GOOD REASON to see the strata there laid down rapidly, THEN NOBODY AS YET HAS GIVEN THAT GOOD REASON BUT SIMPLY RESORTS TO NAMECALLING AND RANK-PULLING. Blech. AND, besides giving your reasons IN THAT PARTICULAR CASE for determining rapid deposition AND DISTINGUISHING THAT PARTICULAR case from other cases where the deposition is perhaps considered to be much slower, YOU ALSO MUST EXPLAIN how it is that two or more layers of rock, including a layer of coal, NORMALLY IDENTIFIED AS AGES OF MILLIONS OF YEARS, in this particular case are not to be so designated. BECAUSE: Even if the lower layer deposited rapidly, if it represents millions of years then the layer above it didn't BEGIN to deposit for those millions of years and that means the GEOLOGIC COLUMN ALL SO NEATLY LAID OUT IN TERMS OF SUCH MILLIONS OF YEARS PER SLAB OF ROCK IS BOGUS.

Oh but I don't expect an explanation from you. You like to posture and ridicule rather than make cogent points about such things, especially something that ought to be treated on the face of it as a SCIENTIFIC point for creationism.

============
Next day: So some explanations are now being offered but first it's interesting to see that Pressie, the second evolutionist quoted above, really doesn't understand the creationist argument at all. I wonder how many evolutionists that's true of, because for all their arrogant sound of certainty they act as if they haven't a clue:

Sorry to interfere, but I’ve never understood creationist “arguments” on the so-called “polystrate” fossils. Maybe Just Being Real could enlighten me on this.

Just Being Real writes:
Each layer is usually said to be several million years old.
If the dating methods indicate that a “layer” is millions of years old, then that “layer” is millions of years old.

Just Being Real writes:
But this conclusion falls apart by the hundreds of polystrate fossils (like vertically fossilized trees) which pierce through the various layers. (Sometimes several layers)
This is the piece of creationist “argument” I really don’t understand. Why couldn’t a “layer” be deposited in a few days or weeks or years and is millions of years old now? Please Just Being Real, explain it to me.

He really DOESN'T get it. Amazing.

There is more than one layer, EACH separately designated by current Geology an era of time, EACH separately dated to some millions of years, the higher layer defined to be that many millions of years more recent than the lower. Any object that penetrates through BOTH layers, supposedly laid down so many millions of years apart from each other, would not have survived the wait for the upper layer to get laid down.

Pressie continues:

Just being real, I looked at your source here. Your source claims, in the second paragraph:

AIG writes:
Some geologists have claimed that even if all the vegetation on earth was suddenly converted to coal this would make a coal deposit only 1-3% of the known coal reserves on earth.
I see that there’s no reference to these “some geologists”. Do you have any reference, or is this a straw man being set up?

AIG writes:
Hence at least 33 Noah’s Floods are needed, staggered in time, to generate our known coal beds. Therefore a single Noah’s Flood cannot be the cause of coal formation.
I doubt that any scientist would even look into Noah’s flood, as there’s absolutely no empirical, objective evidence for it. The only people who would do this, would be Christian-creationists who abandoned the scientific method, but pretend to do science by using sciency-sounding terms.

Oh, and by the way, I see that your source didn’t even discuss the geology of coal deposits in any form in his religious article. He didn’t even mention the word “layers” (I might be mistaken, could you direct me to the word “layer” in that article?).

The word “layer” is a very bad layman’s term for some strata, anyway. How do you get to the words “strata layers” from that article? How does coal relate to "most" strata layers? In my country we have hundreds of thousands of strata, just in the coal-bearing sequences, with only very thin zones of coal-bearing strata dispersed amongs them.

Oh dear, these scientists can be so stuffy about their jargon. A layer IS a stratum. The one is English, the other is Latin.

The point, Dear Pressie, is in the AGES assigned to the strata. In many cases only one kind of rock is designated as a particular time period, in others there may be many layers within a time period. There can be many thin layers of coal interspersed between many kinds of sedimentary rock all designated as one time period. You fail to indicate what time period has been assigned to the strata in question in your country. The thickness or thinness of the layer is not important to the point being made. The question is whether there is a line of demarcation that separates one age or time period from another, and if an organic object is found to have penetrated through both "time periods" or more than two, it casts serious doubt on the very system of dating itself. That is, the polystrate fossils show that these are NOT time periods at all, but sedimentary layers all deposited within a brief period of one another. And they ARE rightly called layers, all of them. They are all found to have been laid down horizontally originally, sedimentary layers and coal layers both.

And now in the next post here comes RAZD to try to clear up Pressie's problem:

Hi Pressie
Sorry to interfere, but I’ve never understood creationist “arguments” on the so-called “polystrate” fossils. Maybe Just Being Real could enlighten me on this.

Message 189: I also think that they are the only people who claim that "geologists say that these sediments were deposited over millions of years".
I am a geologist and I don't.
Nice to see another geologist on the forum.

In essence what they are doing is (a) finding fossils that extend through several layers of deposition, and (b) claiming that each layer was formed "over millions of years" thus creating an apparent paradox for the preservation of the fossil.

Excuse me, but creationists are not "claiming" anything that has not first been stated by establishment Geology. If we understand FROM GEOLOGY that a particular layer or sequence of layers is designated by a particular time period name (say "Mississippian") and identified as having persisted for such and such millions of years, and identified as well by its specific fossil contents, which are said to have lived in that particular "era" or time period, which is what Geology says about the strata everywhere you look, we draw the LOGICAL CONCLUSION that any fossil found out of its particular time period calls in question the whole scheme of attributing time periods to the rocks at all. This is one of those phenomena that OUGHT to falsify the whole scheme, but evolutionists can always make up SOMETHING to rationalize it away.

The problem is that (b) hasn't been shown to apply to the cases that involve (a), AND there are other explanations for preserved fossils extending through many layers of sediment.

Right. When you find something that doesn't fit the scheme, simply declare that something to be an exception to the rule. But since ALL the other discussions of the strata assign time periods to them, paste the Geologic Timetable over them, it is rank duplicity to pretend that those that most clearly call the whole system into question are *really* outside that system.

You owe an explanation for this phenomenon and you are not giving one. In fact you owe EVIDENCE that anything of this sort occurred.

A fossil specimen can be buried by soft materials\sediments during the fossilization process, and this softer material can subsequently be eroded away before the next layer of sediment is deposited -- creationists often ignore (or are ignorant of) erosion as part of the process.

No, the fact is that there is not one SHRED OF EVIDENCE for the periods of erosion claimed by mainstream geology. ALL the strata, including all the coal bearing strata, sit flat one on top of another everywhere you look at strata, there is absolutely NOTHING between the strata to indicate erosion beyond the minuscule disturbance caused by runoff between the layers. In fact I find it so absurd that geologists make such a claim in the face of the glaring evidence against it you needn't ask me again why I don't "respect" science -- look no further.

There are preserved trees in Michigan that are covered by sand dunes and periodically uncovered and recovered. They are still standing upright.

What is your evidence for this? The pictures at the link prove nothing about anything.

http://michpics.wordpress.com/...-forest-sleeping-bear-point Several layers of sediment have and can continue to form around these trees, and if buried by subsequent processes, this can lead to the formation of polystrate fossils in these cases.

SUCH a handy little just-so story. Again, where is your evidence? Aren't you scientists supposed to be enamored of evidence? According to yourselves anyway. In reality you are really enamored of your own imagination.

Alternatively, a fossil specimen can be deposited on the bottom of an anaerobic pond or streambed and become mummified before it is fossilized, this then keeps the specimen intact as various layers of fine sediment are deposited in several layers around it. The fossils of fish in the green river varves show the characteristics of fossilized mummies with subsequent sedimentary deposits around them.See http://www2.asa3.org/archive/asa/199801/0011.html for and ex-YEC article on the Green River varves.

We aren't talking about evolutionist fantasies about the Green River here. Give some evidence for your claim that the polystrate trees were first fossilized in a depth of sediment that covered them completely and then eroded away before the next layer got deposited.

But there is no end to the scenarios you can imagine to rationalize your belief in evolution. It's all one huge edifice of fantasy without a shred of evidence. Utterly amazing.

But I DO note that RAZD uses the word "layer" Pressie, so get off your high horse in criticizing creationists for it.

Fossilized Ripples

2011-09-02T16:28:00.000-07:00

Another gem of self-convinced evolutionist "evidence" that evidences nothing against the Flood and quite a bit for it, from EvC:

Creationist says: That means if you know of just one example that shows how normal flood conditions (not catastrophic events like a 4 or above VEI volcano) could produce fossilized surface ripples, then I'd love to here it.

Evolutionist answers: You don't even need "flood conditions" to produce ripples.

Not to produce RIPPLES, no, but to produce FOSSILIZED ripples?

He goes on to give some pictures of different kinds of ripples both fossilized and unfossilized, which of course prove absolutely nothing against the Flood, since such phenomena would very likely have occurred as part of the Flood, and he gives no idea how they managed to get fossilized in "normal flood conditions," but the worldwide Flood is certainly a very likely suspect.

-----
GENERAL PRINCIPLE that never seems to be recognized in this debate: Often the Flood DOES account very well for the phenomena claimed for it but the evolutionists never acknowledge that, simply propose their own scenario to explain it, often local floods. They don't have any evidence that local floods can do what they say they can do but they insist on it anyway. Where's the evidence in anything Dr. A has said on that thread? He has offered none, but somehow this doesn't get noticed. Meanwhile the phenomena that Just Being Real attributes to the Flood of Noah are very well explained by such a flood. Even if the evolutionist can manage to come up with a more or less plausible alternative explanation it's still ONLY an alternative explanation, a possibility, a plausibility, not actual proof against the Flood interpretation. When he says that the sediment layers through which polystrates lie were laid down rapidly he hasn't accounted for the standard claim that the strata represent different eras of millions of years, simply ignored it. Sediments COULD have been laid down rapidly during any of the time periods in question, but no half-buried living thing is going to wait around for the rapid sedimentation of the next million-years period to begin before rotting away to dust. Dr. A needs to explain this.

Creationist offers of scientific evidence are NOT welcome by evolutionists so forget it creationists

2011-08-31T20:04:00.000-07:00

Sad example of a creationist offering evidence at EvC that is simply trashed by an evolutionist:

First I would point out how interesting I find it that most who reject a global flood, overlook the fact that fossils require an anoxic environment in which to even form.
This is, of course, not true. That's what's required for soft-tissue preservation. Which is extremely rare.

Dr. A is here stretching a point to obscure it. Of course oxygen deprivation is also necessary to fossilization of bones and shells.

And that this type of environment usually only occurs in nature, in rapid sedimentary deposit situations. Which of course only occur in "flood" conditions.
That's an interesting use of the phrase "of course", but back in the real world we can see rapid sedimentary deposition without floods.

Very rarely and never on anything like the scale of the geologic column. And why, I wonder, don't you describe an example of what you assert exists "in the real world?" You know, "evidence."

Secondly, there's often burrows preserved and fossilized that are oriented starting from lower strata and moving upward. These are like what you would expect had an animal been buried by the sediment and tried to dig its way out. They are very different from the normal type which are oriented in all directions.
If you are trying to say that under normal conditions burrowing animals never burrow up or down, then you are wrong.

He described burrows oriented from lower to higher, Dr. A, which does indeed imply an attempt to dig out as opposed to burrows begun from the surface, which again you are obfuscating with your irrelevant comment.

If you are saying that there's a greater proportion of such burrows than there should be, then we need a couple of figures from you:

(a) What proportion of burrows in the fossil record have a vertical component?
(b) What should the proportion be, if geologists were right about geology?

Please give references for (a) and show your working for (b).

Amazing how you miss the point, Dr. A. He's describing a situation that shouldn't ever occur under normal conditions, burrows that ORIGINATE from under the sediment.

A third thing to notice while looking at the geologic record, is that it consists mostly of "rocks" but very few paleo-soils. Normally, poorly consolidated rocks aren't considered to be made of ancient materials that have ever been actual soils. Evolutionary thinking in geology says that land surfaces supported an abundance of life for hundreds of millions of years. So where's all the paleo-soils in the record that supported that life? It's not there!
If you are trying to say that there are too few paleosol deposits, I should like you to present your figures for:

(a) How many there are.
(b) How many there should be if geologists were right about geology.

Please give references for (a) and show your working for (b).

His point is that there are hardly ANY at all, Dr. A., which is observable to anyone who takes a look at the strata in say the Grand Staircase where millions of years are supposed to have been inhabited by bazillions of land animals, the strata there being just as devoid of soils as the strata full of marine contents where they aren't to be expected.

Fourth, consider what we see evidence in the Coconino Sandstone of the Grand Canyon area. Uniformitarian geologists date this sandstone to be around 270 myrs old. It was believed to be an ancient desert. If you didn't know, the Coconino covers more than 100,000 square miles. However fossilized amphibians tracks have been found in the sandstone. This is evidence that it was laid down by water.
Perhaps in Opposite World the tracks of land animals with, y'know, feet, are only deposited underwater. In the real world, not so much.

Amphibians are generally associated with water, Dr. A, the point here which again you choose to obscure by referring to feet.

Fifth, we can further conclude that the Coconino was not laid down under a dry desert condition, by noticing that directly under it is a "blade edged" thin layer of Hermit shale. The shale had to have uplifted at least high enough to create a desert. But if that had occurred then normal erosion processes wouldn't have left the top of the layer so virtually flat as is observed today. The top of the shale exhibits no signs of erosion. How's that possible if it remained exposed to the surface for sand to begin to accumulate 10 myrs later?

Sixth, these blade edged flat layers, such as the Hermit, completely diminishes the idea of long passages of time between deposits, (regardless of what index fossils are found in them). Contact layers between rock layer units show the same knife edged characteristics and are seen just about everywhere. There's really only two reasonable scenarios that explain these characteristics. Either continuous and rapid deposition took place with almost instant current shifts, or deposition after spaces of sheet erosion from rapidly flowing water at an equal depth over a huge area that had equally eroding sediment taking place in all areas. Either case would need the WWGF scenario described in the Bible.
Your point is obscure, can you clarify it? It contains terms not to be found in geology textbooks, or at least not the ones I've read.

The point is only obscure because Dr. A insists on obscuring it. Alas, Dr. A finds it impossible to follow a description of phenomena in nontechnical English when it suits him for purposes of dismissing a creationist's point. The point about the noneroded surface of the shale actually also applies to all the strata -- they are all flat and obviously free of normal erosion in a way that could only have occurred under water, including all those claimed to have been deposited aerially.

Seventh, consider the existence of polystrate fossils in coal beds for example, which are often separated by layers of lime stone. Each layer is usually said to be several million years old.
But not to have taken several million years to form, a distinction which creationists seem unable to grasp, because they are idiots.

Even if a particular lower layer was rapidly formed, if the idea is that the layers represent millions of years of time then the layer that formed on top of it would have had to wait those millions of years before depositing. Polystrate fossils prove that ALL the strata had to have been deposited in the same event.

Eighth, consider how at the Green River Formation, many fossilized catfish have been found with skin and soft parts preserved. Many are even oriented to traverse through several laminations of shale deposits. The kind of deposits that Uniformitarians normally interpret as being representative of several season cycles of sediment.
Or several days, depending on the circumstances under which they were laid down.

By the way, weren't you pretending it was "millions of years" in the last paragraph? Yes, yes you were.

He's answering conventional geology, which says millions of years in the one connection, and seasonal laminations in the other. Very interesting how you consistently seek to obscure his point.

Ninth is the lack of bio-turbation between conforming layers of strata. If millions of years really took place between the deposits of conformable layers, why are their surfaces so scarce of millions of years of life? By that I mean things like burrows, root formations, etc... are mostly missing from the record.
So now you're complaining that there aren't enough polystrate fossils?

Seriously?

Well, again, we need a couple of figures:

(a) How many are there?
(b) How many should there be if geologists were right about geology?

Please give references for (a) and show your working for (b).

Go look at some slabs of rock called time eras and see that what he's describing is simple fact that shouldn't be the case if the rock represents millions of years -- or even a thousand, a hundred, ten years. The evidence of the activities of life doesn't even approach that of a broad prairie over a year in our own time frame.

This exchange ought to demonstrate that no creationist should ever bother posting at EvC forums. Dr. A should have been trounced by the admins for this nonresponse to a creationist's offering of evidence.

=======================

Admin's comments on the creationist's post certainly confirm what I say above. Moderator Moose who did consider it to be evidence for the Flood had it right. But this comment ought to demonstrate the absolute futility of a creationist's ever posting anything at EvC:

Concerning being on-topic in this thread, I don't think Adminnemooseus and I are in agreement, but I don't think unanimity amongst moderators can always be expected. Coyote's Message 138 did fail to address any of JBR's points, and he did repeat points he has made many times in the past, but on the other hand the thread's topic is about evidence for the flood, none of JBR's points were evidence for the flood, and I do think Coyote's message was on-topic.

To this moderator JBR's points appeared to be criticisms of widely accepted views within geology containing no positive evidence for the flood. They also appeared to be unattributed rephrasings from creationist websites, not cut-n-pastes, but not exactly his own words, either. This moderator believes that responding to JBR's points would risk diverting the thread's topic to a defense of modern geological views instead of an examination of flood evidence, but I'm a participant in that thread, not a moderator (except when it comes to IamJoseph, who I'd been following around from one science thread to the next asking him to stop arguing the Bible and start arguing the science).

I don't know that there's a best response to JBR's points. Some replied with circumspection, asking him if there is any point in particular he'd like to focus on. Others replied by trying to identify specifics of the flood viewpoint, like when it happened. Others replied by pointing out that JBR had not actually offered any positive evidence for the flood. These all seem to have potential as possibly fruitful directions for discussion.

"Truth" according to Postmodernism

2011-08-14T23:27:00.000-07:00

Amazing:

"Truth" is subjective. It belongs in philosophy.
Science is OBJECTIVE. It deals with facts.

...except when it's dealing in conjecture and speculation and calling them facts, which happens all the time in evolutionary "science" going back at least to Hutton who imagined an old earth out of whole cloth (and was wrong, as I've proved in my posts on angular unconformities) and got the scientific establishment to declare it a fact. Or except when it's dealing in sheer obfuscation as when it refuses to acknowledge the obvious implication of polystrate trees as utterly disproving the old earth, as shown in my previous post. Or when it invents "beneficial mutations" to fuel evolution and treats them as fact although there isn't any evidence that this has ever occurred beyond a few flukes that are really a benefit at the cost of a detriment anyway, as in the sickle cell's immunity to malaria. Or when it loudly proclaims evolution itself to be a "fact" despite all the evidence against it.

A pox on "science" and all its lies.

There are not "truths" learned in science, only facts. An individual can hold the facts to be true or untrue. It doesn't change the facts.

I'll give him that, there are no truths learned in science, certainly not evolutionary science, it's ALL a pack of lies, aka UNtruths.

Again, truth is subjective. You can't really "teach" truth. You can teach ABOUT "truth", but each student will ultimately decide their own truth.

Such a statement reinvents language and must even destroy brain cells by its poisonous irrationality. Wow, we can't even say that the theory of evolution is true or false? If it really DID have the facts on its side, then it would be true. But it doesn't have the facts on its side so it's untrue.

This makes truth a fairly useless subject for education.

Pity the next generation.

The reason this all relates to evolution is the following:Creationists are upset because their TRUTH disagrees with the facts. They want to replace the facts with their truth.

Actually the facts ACCORD with creationist views, and when the facts accord then the creationist view is true and we have a grip on the truth.

Creationists don't understand that their truth is irrelevant and that the facts are all education cares about.

Actually this is a lie, an untruth, not a fact. The facts support creationism, and you can't care about facts without caring about truth. But such is the insanity among the evolutionists why should I expect anything better?

Polystrate Tree Fossils

2011-08-14T14:16:00.000-07:00

So I've been taking some side trips into other than my usual / favorite issues, and ran across the "polystrate trees." These are trees that have been fossilized in an upright position penetrating through MANY layers of sedimentary rock, or in terms of geological time, through millions upon millions of years, which of course is impossible. Yet this common creationist argument is treated by evolutionists as merely one of countless PRATTs, or "points refuted a thousand times." Of course they haven't refuted most of them, they are simply claiming they have. In the case of polystrate trees, as usual they act as if they've definitively answered the creationist argument but they've really merely sidestepped it.

As I discovered when I did a little reading on it:

At Wikipedia I found this completely evasive remark:

Geologists see no need to invoke a global flood to explain upright fossils. This position of geologists is supported by numerous examples, which have been found at numerous locations, of upright trees completely buried within either late Holocene or historic sediments. These buried upright trees demonstrate that conventional geologic processes are capable of burying and preserving trees in an upright position such that in time, they will become fossilized

Creationists certainly do argue for the Flood against the geologic time table of millions of years per flat horizontal slab of sedimentary rock, but referring to the Flood as if that were the only creationist argument about the significance of polystrate tree fossils completely evades the point.
The problem with polystrate trees is that given the enormous time spans assumed by current geology no tree could remain intact while the sediments were depositing, so as to appear whole after the millions of years it supposedly takes for them to deposit. But they do appear whole. Go look at the photos at the links. Their wholeness through what are supposed to be millions of years proves that the assumption of millions of years for sedimentation to occur is false.

[Later: It needs to be said in here that they claim that RAPID DEPOSITION occurred in the case of the polystrate trees. But rapid deposition of more than one layer normally identified as a time period of millions of years simply eliminates those millions of years altogether -- but it certainly fits the Flood, which somehow they manage not to notice. More on this farther down the post].

And yes, the far better explanation IS the worldwide Flood which would have rapidly buried them in a sequence of sediments in very short order, which is the necessary condition for fossilization of a whole upright tree buried in many layers of sediment.

Polystrate tree fossils DISPROVE THE TIME SCALE OF CONVENTIONAL GEOLOGY. This is "just another PRATT" only in the dreams of evolutionists.

I then went to the article on the subject at Talk Origins, probably the most famous website on the creation-evolution debate on the web, and found them being evasive in a more convoluted way (anything to mystify the reader I guess).

I next found a creationist discussing the Talk Origins article, which you can find at his site. Here he's elaborating the point I just made above:

...This argument craftily avoids the issues while claiming to explain them. The issues in question are:
1) How did the tree survive during multiple catastrophes without rotting or being knocked down?

2) How can anyone reasonably believe that a tree could stand for the length of time it takes to build up the additional layers?

3) How can a tree representing a short life span (on evolution’s geological time scale) stand erect through geological layers representing millions and often hundreds of millions of years?
This is not a problem for evolution? Regardless of how you slice it, the tree had to stand erect without rotting, falling or being knocked down for millions of years. The layers of strata have fossils representing different time periods according to the evolution model. It DOES pose a huge problem for evolution. If the tree was buried rapidly as Dawson hints toward and as creationists have said all along, evolution is out the window. If all layers were deposited together, then there is no such thing as millions of years. That would mean that all fossils were laid at the same time.

...If the trees were not covered rapidly, then there is no explanation as to how a tree could have embedded itself into layers of strata that accumulated over millions of years. The article does not attempt to answer any of these questions. Yet it claims (as all evolutionists do) to have the answers.

This writer also makes the intelligent point, which I unfortunately don't let myself believe sufficiently, that you cannot win the argument with an evolutionist. He won't listen to your argument for starters, he will simply bury you in his claims for "evidence" for evolution which he accuses the creationist of failing to appreciate and refusing to learn about, and aggressively drowns out all contrary ideas with as much abusive insulting language as he can muster.

==============

Here's DWise on this subject a couple years ago at EvC:

But even more telling was what that article said about rates of depositation. While Steve Austin was being paid by the ICR to get a post-graduate degree in geology (so that they could finally claim to have a degreed geologist on staff) he would write creationist articles for them using a pseudonym, "Stuart Nevins". As Stuart Nevins, he wrote an article in which he claimed that geologists believed that strata formed at a completely gradual and constant rate, even though even undergraduate geology students know full well that that is a complete and utter lie -- and Austin was writing that while he was a graduate student. He had to know better and yet he still repeated that lie!

Well, had Austin actually read that article (I learned to not make such an assumption about creationists with the ICR's NASA document moon-dust debacle), he would have learned what he should have learned years ago in his undergraduate classes: geologists can distinguish between layers formed by rapid depositation and layers formed by slow depositation. It's described in Broadhurst's article. Those "polystrate" tree stumps were buried in layers formed by rapid depositation.

Typical snide suspicious accusatory anti-creationist post from someone who hasn't the grace to give the benefit of the doubt on any point whatever, is willing to utterly trash anyone he disagrees with.

TELL US, MR. WISEACRE, HOW geologists distinguish between layers formed by rapid deposition and those formed by slow deposition. The question is HOW. Give us the "science" involved. You can't get away with a flat assertion and call it science. What exactly is it that tells them the difference? And give us all the independent tests that verify it too.

HOWEVER, since you admit that they were buried in rapidly deposited layers, THEN tell us how we are to distinguish the rock strata built up in such a fashion from those built up more slowly. Must be pretty subtle differences, Mr. Wise, of gossamer fine subtlety I suspect, mystifyingly fine just to stand back and look at a stack of strata and wonder which might have been which. Oh the ones with the polystrate trees in them, THOSE were rapidly deposited. Right.

HOWEVER AGAIN, we're talking about MANY LAYERS OF STRATA THAT ARE NORMALLY IDENTIFIED BY GEOLOGISTS AS ENORMOUSLY LONG TIME PERIODS. The "Carboniferous," the "Holocene" are specifically mentioned in connection with polystrate trees. Are these millions-of-years-long ages or not? Did the lower "age" deposit rapidly and then WAIT a few million years for the next "age" to start depositing, while the tree just sat there twiddling its thumbs instead of rotting away?

If you have three or four "time periods" all rapidly deposited around a tree trunk, guess what you have? You no longer have "time periods" at all, YOU HAVE THE WORLDWIDE FLOOD.

RAPID DEPOSITION IMPLIES THE WORLDWIDE FLOOD, and there is NO way they can talk their way out of the evidence of the polystrate trees against an Old Earth except of course by the usual evolutionist "scientific" methods of ridicule, accusation, snide put-downs, self-delusion and lies.

Dealing with some arguments against the Flood

2011-08-08T23:34:00.000-07:00

D Wise who posts at EvC forums has his own site on the debate, or really, on what's wrong with creation science. He's amassed quite a collection of arguments against creationist arguments, many against the Flood. This is an improvement over the endless refrain at EvC that the Flood has been discredited many times over although most of the time all they offer is that refrain and leave it to the reader to figure out what evidence they have in mind. So it's helpful to see all the arguments mustered in one place, as D Wise does on this page.

It's a formidable collection and I'm sure I won't be able to address more than a few of them, but I'd like to do whatever I can, and I'll take them in the order he's presented them:

First, I just want to note that he's extremely offended at the statement of belief made by the late Henry Morris of the Institute for Creation Research:

Notice that they [some Christian geologists] suffered severe crises of FAITH, not of GEOLOGY! This should not come unexpected, considering Dr. Henry Morris' teachings about geological evidence, teachings which the ICR lives by:
"No geological difficulties, real or imagined, can be allowed to take precedence over the clear statements and necessary inferences of Scripture." (_Biblical Cosmology_, page 33)

"The data of geology, in our view, should be interpreted in light of Scripture, rather than distorting Scripture to accommodate current geological philosophy." (_Science, Scripture, and the Young Earth_, page 6)
In short, if it don't fit our theology, then either make it fit or ignore it. To that, his son and heir apparent, John Morris, has added (and many at the ICR seem to concur and actively teach): if it refutes the smallest part of our theology, then it disproves our entire theology. No wonder those students suffered so at seeing their faith crumble before them; this is one of the more distasteful and destructive consequences of the "Dark Side of the Farce."

Of course we can't expect an unbeliever to grasp the importance of the credal statement by Henry Morris, but all Christians should certainly embrace it -- it is the Light while the Dark Side is the offense taken against it. The Bible is God's word, not to be subjected to dissent or argument, that's the nonnegotiable foundation. And yes, we either have to find a way to reconcile science with it or simply leave science alone until enough is known to make the reconciliation. There is no other alternative, whether Wise and other unbelievers find this "distasteful and destructive" or not. Our faith and the world will always be at enmity.

Of course this assumes RIGHTLY reconciling science with scripture, although Wise accuses creationists of all manner of dishonesty, and I'm not going to get into that because I haven't followed all the creationist claims. The one time I specifically asked an evolutionist for an example of such dishonesty he described what was really only a confused wrong idea about what evolution teaches, not dishonesty at all. In fact I haven't yet seen an example of what I would have to agree is dishonesty. Not that it doesn't exist, I wouldn't know.

So I generally avoid those issues, but I'll weigh in on the basics. One of the basics is that God's word trumps ALL. Period.

That said, on to the science issues (I've added the headlines):

TIME NEEDED TO FORM GRANITE AND METAMORPHIC ROCK

Also speaking at the 1986 ICC was Harvard paleontology graduate student Kurt Wise (no relation, I'm sure), who surveyed what is known about the speed of formation of the three major kinds of rock. While he found that many kinds of sedimentary rock can form rapidly, igneous rock is another matter. While a small chunk of granite can conceivably form in a short time, many massive bodies are known, such as huge granite batholiths, some of them 10 kilometers in diameter, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Under the most favorable conditions, such formations would take about 100,000 years to cool, instead of the 6000 to 8000 years required by Flood Geology. Metamorphic rock is worse since it must first be formed as sedimentary rock, be heated, and then cool off.

During the question period, geophysicist John Baumgardner pointed out that Wise's figures had been very conservative and that much more time would be needed for rocks to form. He also offered sheer forces as a source of heat and pressure for metamorphic rock, but Wise countered that many metamorphic rocks show no signs of sheer.

[It's "shear" but anyway]. As I've been refining my view of the formation of the Grand Canyon I came to the question of how the granite and schist at the base formed. I've explained the Great Unconformity at the base as brought about by the volcanic eruption that is evidenced by the magma (granite) intrusions in all the illustrations as well as by the uplift of the area of the canyon itself, and logically the granite and metamorphic rocks were also formed by the same eruption.

There's heat and pressure generated by the volcano plus the weight of the strata overhead for that part of the transformation -- the metamorphic rock or in that case the schist -- and if all this occurred while the Flood waters were still on the earth, which I'm arguing was the case, there would have been plenty of water everywhere to exert a cooling effect on the rising magma. The strata would be saturated and oozing water for some time to come, a cooling effect on the order of a gigantic Wet Blanket some two to three miles deep in the Grand Canyon area.

I don't know about New Hampshire but granite batholiths form deep in the earth under the same blanket of strata everywhere -- there are many illustrations on the web that demonstrate this. They spread out horizontally to great distances, apparently kept from pushing upward by some barrier above, such as a few miles' depth of wet sediments. The magma does also push up through the strata in separate fingers that cool to dikes over time, burning through all the layers to the surface where lava overflows and making horizontal "sills" of magma between layers on the way up. (The computer I'm using doesn't have enough power to allow me to post some diagrams but eventually I'll try to put some up).

The batholiths would be relatively thin vertically and in contact with the wet rock above for their entire horizontal extension. The rock immediately above would heat up from contact with the magma, even while exerting a cooling effect in return, but there's plenty of water above that point of contact to keep trickling down through the layers to continue the cooling effect for a great while to come. Eventually the magma would be cooled to granite batholith, which it seems to me would occur appreciably faster under these conditions than the usual calculations take into account -- they assume dry rock -- though no doubt not nearly as fast as lava cools on the surface.

More to come from D Wise's list of arguments.

=====================
Yes, I know geologists are used to encountering water underground. Would they recognize the effect of a few miles' worth of damp sediments on rising magma that occurred over 4000 years ago? And how would they recognize it?

Email correspondent gave me some calculations about how the weight of the strata wouldn't be sufficient to form metamorphic rock within the time span I'm allotting, or to cool the magma I think he also said but I'll have to reread it to be sure. Somebody is going to have to translate the math into descriptive English if they want me to accept any of it. For all I know it doesn't represent the situation I have in mind at all.

The programmed stupidity of scientific reasoning when it leaves its proper sphere

2011-08-07T16:08:00.000-07:00

What can you do when the evolutionist side of the argument simply flatly refuses to accept as evidence such an obvious statement as that "law, order, identifiable purpose and design are proof of a creator?"

It's utterly absurd but they simply flatly deny this obvious statement. Such obvious products of intelligence are certainly proof of a Creator, it's insane of them to try to make them the products of insensate nature, yet they go on and on and on demanding that evidence be SHOWN FOR this claim that "law, order, identifiable purpose and design are proof of a Creator." Totally schizophrenogenic. Insanity reigns so pervasively there is no getting through to them.

Here's the dialogue:

[DB] law, order, identifiable purpose and design are proof of a creator.
[Taq] Evidence please.
[DB] Of course both positions are equal in evidence,. . .
[Taq] No, they are not. You have yet to support the argument that law, order, and identifiable purpose are signs of creator and a creator alone with evidence.
[DB] Please demonstrate how nature or natural causes is anything more than a display of nature?

please demonstrate how natural causes is an explanation of soley natural causes
[Taq] Natural causes are just that, natural causes. You are suggesting supernatural causes, and are doing so without any observations of supernatural causation, nor evidence of it.

[DB] Law, order and purpose are more that sufficient and on the same equalitywith nature causes (as you use the term) to provide evidence of a designer
[Taq] Why? How are law, order, and purpose evidence of a designer? It would seem to me that law, order, and purpose are evidence of law, order and purpose in the same way that natural causes are evidence of natural causes.

DB has given EVIDENCE of a supernatural cause, he has not merely suggested it. The devotees of the natural explanation can only counter that natural causes may be argued to explain such phenomena, but they can't claim to have the superior argument, nor better evidence either for the natural explanation, since on the face of it intelligence is absolutely the necessary explanation for law, order and purpose.

It just goes on and on like that for pages, with DB insisting he's provided the evidence asked for, which he has, and all the rest of them denying it. Here's one from Percy many pages later:

[DB] Since I have now provided what you requested it is your obligation as an debater to respond to that rebuttal
[Percy] You provided evidence of the creator and of how he influenced evolution? Really? Where? Oh, and did God turn out to be Christian, Islam, Hindu, Buddhist or other?

I think you're providing wonderful examples of a couple of the creationist approaches to debate: making claims that you've proved things you've never proved, and misunderstanding how evidence works.

See how creationist evidence, genuine evidence, is simply done away with at EvC? With of course a little added ridicule thrown in. If it is agreed that "law, order, purpose and design" are evident in phenomena, that IS the evidence asked for. Yes, it can be alternatively interpreted by the materialist camp, not very well of course and that is the best they can do. In itself it IS evidence for an intelligence as the cause of such phenomena. Eventually the admins will be fed up with the discussion, and who will they blame? The creationists of course.

Truly there is something wrong with the mind that is shaped by materialist Science, something utterly perverted that prevents it from recognizing the difference between properties of Mind and properties of Matter.

Junk DNA supports creationism better than evolutionism

2011-07-23T05:54:00.001-07:00

There’s a proposal for a new thread at EvC mostly about junk DNA

A rising trend among creationists/intelligent design advocates is to imply, or state outright, that all DNA (i.e., junk DNA/noncoding DNA) has function. While this is already demonstrably untrue, many such folk maintain this line, including Jonathan Wells in his new book, 'The Myth of Junk DNA'. [The book is at Amazon of course, and the comments on that page are interesting -- Faith].

On a related note, it is claimed by YEC/IDC 'information' types that functional DNA possesses CSI, and further they claim that CSI is indicative of creation/design. Further, I have been told by a YEC that CSI is determined by calculating the Shannon information of the DNA sequence (which is a function of its number of base pairs) and adding its 'meaning' which is premised on its function (I've been trying to get creationist information types to tell me how to quantify 'meaning' for some time, but to no avail).

Taking the YEC/IDC position to its logical conclusion, this must mean that an organism with a genome larger than humans possess more CSI than humans do.

Thus, the marbled lungfish, with a genome of 133 billion bps, has ~44 times the CSI [something "specific information" -- Faith] that humans do (if YEC/IDCs are correct).

Which means that the Creator/Designer put more effort into creating them than us.

How can YEC/IDCs reconcile this with their beliefs that humans are 'special'?

I mean without special pleading....

I'm always surprised to find creationists arguing that junk DNA must have a function. I suppose some of it may retain some function after all, I haven't studied the science involved, but its not having a function makes it compatible with the Biblical scenarios of the Fall and the Flood, which imply so much death, and that's how I've been thinking of it for some time -- as the DNA cemetery. Death entered the world because of sin. It makes sense the DNA would die too. The creationist arguments for its functionality are probably due to the fact that evolutionists have claimed its nonfunctionality supports evolution, but really it supports Biblical creation better.

Evolutionists have claimed that junk DNA is evidence for evolution because it must reflect the many genetic trials by natural selection that didn't work out in the long history of evolution (or possibly, the record of previous adaptations that were later obsolesced?) I dunno, seems to me that given the enormously long history they postulate, 98% of the DNA is an awfully small record to show for it, it ought to be more like 99.9999999%. But the idea that 98% of human DNA is functionless or dead is perfectly compatible with the biblical history of the Fall in Eden and the Flood of Noah, as it could be regarded as a record of all the death that was the result of those events, and the time period of 4500 years since the Flood bottleneck is a more reasonable number than millions of years too of course.

[Aug 12, want to add here that at EvC someone or other is always claiming that if there had been a bottleneck 4300 or so years ago that would be apparent in the DNA. I've never caught anyone saying exactly what in the DNA would indicate such a bottleneck, so I can only just shrug off such comments until they do, and since they habitually think in terms of millions of years and can't seem to help themselves, whatever they come up with would have to be taken with a great deal of skepticism anyway. But the Junk DNA seems to me to be a fine indicator of such a bottleneck.]

As for marbled lungfish or any other creature with a genome larger than the human, that also has to be explained by the Fall and the Flood. It doesn't reflect Creation but the destruction after the Fall, and Creationists should recognize this. Some creatures were less affected by the fall of humanity and God's judgment than others, and would have retained more genetic vitality for that reason. The land creatures that were taken on the ark probably lost about the same amount of DNA for their Kind as the people on the ark did, but sea creatures either lived or died without benefit of the ark, and some no doubt survived in greater numbers than others and retained more living DNA for that reason.

Yes, this is all just speculative musing on my part and I can't very well insist on it, it just seems to fit the biblical account while the claim of functionality for the junk DNA doesn't.

Anonymous Comment insists on definitional word magic

2011-07-20T08:16:00.000-07:00

Got an Anonymous Comment on an older blog post and thought I'd bring it up front:

Anonymous Poster quotes me:

"THIS IS NOT EVOLUTION, THIS IS NORMAL BUILT-IN VARIATION, OTHERWISE SOMETIMES IRRITATINGLY KNOWN AS "MICROEVOLUTION." MICROEVOLUTION SAYS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING FOR THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION!"

And answers me:

You can't just go around redefining the word "evolution". That normal variation is exactly what evolution is. That is ALL evolution is. There is variation, and some of the variants survive better than others, and that's natural selection. I'm sorry, but that's.. just the definition.

And I answer Anonymous there, and here with a few differences:

Dear Anonymous, thanks for your comment. I appreciate your being polite.

What you are saying illustrates another point I try to make here, which is that a great deal of the evolution side of this dispute is definitional, or to put it another way, it's "word magic" which asserts as fact something that is really contrary to reality: If you simply DEFINE evolution as normal variation then you blind yourself to what is really going on.

As I've argued over and over here, there is a NATURAL end point to normal variation that is the TRUE definition of it, beyond which no further evolution is possible. In reality. In fantasy it is assumed without warrant that the observed variations that are called "microevolution" simply continue indefinitely. They cannot. There is a natural end point which is the true boundary line that separates the Kinds, the end point brought about by the ACTUAL FACT that genetic variability must decrease as new phenotypic forms emerge.

Every time you get a new variant, it has emerged because some genetic variability has been lost in the process of bringing to phenotypic expression the particular genetic codes underlying the new variant. It can't happen any other way, as I've argued here in many posts. You have to lose competing genetic variations in order for a particular phenotypic variation to become established in a population. The more refined, or distinctive, a variant, the more specific the genetic code for it and therefore the greater the loss of genetic competitors. Eventually a point is reached where further variants are no longer possible at all, and evolution has come to an end for that line of variation. The very processes of evolution that bring about new variants naturally lead to a point beyond which evolution is impossible. That's the outer boundary of "microevolution." Microevolution is how Kinds vary within themselves. There is no macroevolution possible at all. Evolution defeats evolution, as I like to say.

There is also the ACTUAL FACT that there is no such thing as "beneficial" mutations capable of driving evolution, which is what is usually posited as the remedy for the situation I describe. If mutations did in fact occur as supposed, you could never have an identifiable variant at all, as mutations would constantly interfere with the specific coding for such a variant. The whole idea of beneficial mutations is just another huge piece of word magic, an assumption or belief for which there is no evidence, while there is very good reason to believe they can't happen, as I just said. In reality, known mutations only interfere with normal genetic processes and there is absolutely no evidence that they do anything at all beneficial. Evolutionism simply invents mutations to fuel the continuing changes required by the theory, nothing but invention, nothing but fantasy.

So, I recommend to you that you stop believing in definitional word magic and join creationists in recognizing reality.

The trashed condition of planet Earth and the Christian explanation

2011-07-17T21:56:00.000-07:00

GDR has expressed the view that the planet appears to have been designed with us in mind, made ready for us and Dr. A is responding:

Dr A writes: Made ready in what way? The lighting is intermittent, the heating likewise, often with lethal effect, the water mostly undrinkable, the sewage system non-existent, and the whole place is crawling with vermin. This is why we've had to make the whole place over in order for it to be habitable and tolerable.

Really, if you checked into a hotel room with half these defects and the manager assured you that he had made it ready for you, would you not suppose that he had done so under the impression that you had slept with his wife and run over his dog?
GDR answers: Just the same the vast majority of us aren't wanting to check out either. Have you got a better room on offer?

At any rate, the Christian answer is that it isn't finished yet.

I agree that the planet does for the most part look like it was designed with us in mind, since although it may not provide guaranteed protection from harm or death, nor all the comforts we'd prefer, it does provide the basic necessities for sustaining life -- and human beings were designed to make good use of the materials provided as well, another clue to a planned fit.

Still, the answer that it isn't finished yet is the wrong explanation for the discomforts. The Christian answer -- or what ought to be the Christian answer because it's Biblical, although it's not the usual answer -- is that the planet was pretty much trashed by sin and God's judgments against sin, particularly by God's great judgment, the Flood. The hostile environment is all part of the judgment against sin too. And, it's never going to be "finished" or corrected. It will eventually be replaced by a new heavens and a new earth.

====

Continuing to read on that thread I see the creationist allowing that the Bible is "subjective" saying that the Koran is also. I have no idea what he thinks he's saying, maybe that belief in the Bible -- or Koran -- is subjective perhaps? That's also misleading. The Bible is mostly history, accounts of many events purported to have actually happened over some four thousand years. Either these accounts are true or they aren't -- there's nothing "subjective" about them. If they are true they are as objective as any statement of fact. (The Koran is not a history, by the way, it's a collection of sayings and instructions).

Then cavediver says the Bible isn't the only source of claims about God, that even his own brother claims to have met the incarnate God. Our creationist Chuck77 obviously has no idea what he's referring to but clearly he's talking about one of the Hindu "avatars," probably the demon-possessed Sai Baba who died recently. These supposed "God-men" are credited with miracles, usually pretty trivial stuff that is within the capabilities of demons (or magicians' simple tricks), manifesting baubles and trinkets out of thin air for instance. Anyone interested in Sai Baba can read a book by Tal Brooke about his own time as a follower of Sai Baba back in the late 60s, titled Avatar of Night. After a period of following this guru and beginning to recognize some very unholy activities at the ashram, Brooke eventually meets a Christian missionary couple and is saved, comes back to the US and writes his book.

The Flood is Evident Everywhere Pt. 3

2011-06-23T20:10:00.000-07:00

On that same thread, Taq replies to creationist Chuck77:

[Chuck77]I have no proof of the worlwide flood when it comes to "regular" Science.
[Taq] Wouldn't there be scientific evidence if the entire Earth were covered by water just 4,500 years ago? I would think that such evidence would be obvious and abundant. Don't you?

Of course there would be and there is, an abundance of it, a copious abundance even, an in-your-face indisputable abundance of it. Hidden only by the assumptions of establishment geology which misinterpret it, as I've said SO many times here, and lately in the previous two posts and now this one.

It is sad that so many creationists have so many different ideas about the Flood and so few focus on the most salient facts that demonstrate it. This situation is quite similar to earlier Flood geology which was all too easily overthrown by the Old Earth theorists simply because there was no developed coherent Flood theory. By now there should be. I believe I've been hammering away at the most important pieces of evidence, and that's what we should be doing. We may not be able to answer all the various claims and challenges but we ought to be able to simply point to the obvious evidence of the Flood in the strata themselves and their fossils, pointing out the necessity of explaining them by such an event and the absurdity of the current explanation. Then the other issues should gradually fall into place as well.

Is it possible that all of the waters from the flood are in the oceans today? The mountains were "hills" before the flood and didn't "sprout " up till afterwards because of plate tectonics?Or catastophic plate tech? The earth's surface was maybe a little more level back then. Also the water poured into the deep valleys in the oceans afterwards when tectonic movement took place.
I would like to approach these questions from a different angle than the posters above. What type of geologic formation would demonstrate that this didn't happen? IOW, how does one falsify the idea of a recent worldwide flood (in your eyes)?

Said the spider to the fly.

My list of absurdities in Part 1 of this series should sufficiently falsify the current Old Earth theory, let's stick to that.

The sequence of posts on that thread started back with this one, which is a frustrating rehearsal of the false expectations that are allowed to dominate this discussion. Chuck77 has shown himself to be completely out of his depth and a very tempting morsel for the spider's wiles when he supposes that the Flood should have been evidenced in ONE layer of the earth's surface. His question is badly misconceived and the answers are only going to take advantage of his ignorance:

So, I guess if I were to rephrase my question it would simply be, where is the flood layer? Maybe? . So, is it at all possible since most of the world is covered by water, a lot of the evidence of the flood could be barried under the ocean floors, if in fact we aren't finding any evidence on land? Or "enough" on land? Im sure almost everywhere in the world has been under water at some point in time and that there are areas that would say so but can it be certain it wasn't all at once at some point in time
When dealing with the "flood" we aren't looking at geological layers, but soil layers. The dating of the flood is ca. 4350 years ago, not in distant geological time. This is the conclusion of biblical scholars.

So the assumptions of the geologic time table are brought out to answer our hapless creationist, the assumption that the worldwide strata reflect time periods such that the Flood should be located at whatever depth they would identify as 4500 years ago, which of course completely begs the question. The establishment insists on such things as looking at "soil" layers and ignoring the miles deep strata themselves, which are all neatly tied up in their theory to such an extent that they can't think outside that framework. But the Flood laid down ALL the strata with ALL their fossils, the timetable is wrong, the whole time-focused system is false.

An early lesson in archaeology states, "if you want 10,000 year-old sites, look in 10,000 year-old dirt." For the flood we have to look in 4,350 year-old dirt.

Yeah right. The current theory defines how old the dirt is and this definition blinds everyone to the simple sheer fact that the entire geologic column had to have been created by the Flood. But he's shifted the focus from geologic time to archaeologic time. The latter spans ONLY the time SINCE the Flood, being built ON the strata that were laid down by the Flood. In some parts of the world -- not all -- human settlements have been layered over and built one atop another in that short time period, a completely different kind of layering from that laid down in the Flood.

Fortunately that is easy to find. You probably have some in your back yard.

The easiest place to find and analyze 4,350 year-old dirt is in archaeological sites where there are a lot of different time markers.

Total misdirection based on a false assumption based on a blind acceptance of the current theory.

I have tested probably over a hundred sites that cross-cut that time period, and have found neither evidence of massive erosion nor depositions from a flood at the appointed time.

Of course not, because his assumption is wrong. The Flood completely rearranged the crust of the earth into that huge depth of strata that is found in bits and pieces and occasionally very deep deposits all over the earth.

My colleagues around the world have tested tens of thousands of sites with the same results.

Looking for the Flood in all the wrong places, alas!

But we do find evidence of localized floods. The channeled scablands of eastern Washington state are a good example. These are about three times older than the 4,350 year date ascribed to the "flood" but they are clearly seen by archaeologists and geologists. See this website for some good details:

http://www.uwsp.edu/...ticipants/dutch/vtrips/scablands0.htmLet me know what you think.

Which I already addressed in Part 1.

Poor Chuck77.

The Flood is Evident Everywhere Pt. 2

2011-06-22T11:25:00.000-07:00

Some more from that same EvC thread:

[Dr. A] Genesis 7:19 makes it clear that there were "high mountains" pre-flood; and Genesis 8:7 and 8:13 describe the water as drying up from the fac of the Earth, not flowing away.

First consider the massive evidence indicated in my previous post which is foundational to any answer to these questions.

Either the expression "high mountains" refers to the highest of the pre-Flood hills or to the mountains that were built afterward that the new generations no doubt assumed had always been there. "High mountains" was written a thousand years after the Flood, and most likely no one had witnessed their building, nor been affected by the tectonic forces involved except perhaps as by an earthquake at a great distance. Most of the mountain building went on in parts of the world where Noah's descendants migrated much later.

"Drying up from the earth" describes how it appeared to those at land level, it doesn't purport to describe the mechanisms that took the water away. Some of it no doubt DID flow away, but the upshot was that the land got dry.

As for catastrophic tectonic events, might they not have been a little too catastrophic? I don't see what you're describing happening without tsunamis, which would have been inconvenient for Noah.

Not if he was up on a mountainside in the middle of a land mass rather than near the water.

Myself I don't think creationists need to try to hard to explain the how of the Flood, since your hypothesis involves a god with miraculous powers who can take care of these details. But the question of whether it happened at all is much more awkward.

There is no hint of anything miraculous occurring in the Flood scenario except that God apparently herded all the animals in Noah's direction.

[Percy] As I'm fond of saying, things that actually happen leave evidence behind. If around 4500 years ago water covered the Earth, and if the mountains rose and the valleys deepened, then there must be evidence of these events. Every geological event of Earth's history is accepted by geologists because of evidence, and they'll include the flood as one of those events as soon as evidence of the flood is discovered.

The evidence is everywhere but they interpret it away.

Evidence of the Flood is the worldwide strata chock full of fossils (see previous post), about as evident a mass of evidence as you'll find for any event. Evidence of mountain building is the strata of the mountains themselves and the marine fossils found at mountaintops, at the very least.

[Jonf]...the big problem with condensing events such as plate tectonics into a short time period is that there are certain characteristics of the events that cannot be scaled. E.g., radioactive decay releases heat and radiation, and X amount of radioactive decay releases Y amount of heat and radiation no matter the time period, so accelerated nuclear decay would leave subtle traces such as a molten Earth and all life destroyed twice over.

Similarly, mountain building by plate tectonics is inefficient (thermodynamically speaking) and releases heat, and creates earthquakes and tsunamis. It's difficult if not impossible to quantify the effects of catastrophic plate tectonics but it's pretty certain no life could survive it. And that's not even considering the extreme silliness of the scenarios that have been proposed for catastrophic plate tectonics.

IOW, the fact that we are here is strong evidence that plate tectonics and nuclear decay and other process have taken place over time scales many orders of magnitude greater than YEC time scales.

Whatever occurred did so in a period when there were few human beings on the earth, all of them concentrated in a small piece of geography by comparison with the whole planet. You don't know what happened, you are merely speculating of course, and if you are going to speculate you need first to take into account the MASSIVE evidence of the existence of the strata and their fossil contents, which can only be reasonably accounted for by a worldwide Flood (see previous post) and adjust your speculations accordingly. Obviously, whatever happened did NOT destroy Noah and his descendants.

[Jar says] I have yet to find a YEC that can explain how the lowest exposed material at the Grand Canyon got formed.

I've answered this many times both here and at EvC. The granites and schists were formed by underground volcanic activity toward the end of the strata-building of the Flood, compressed by the weight of the then-two-mile depth of strata above; the Great Unconformity was formed by the force of that same volcanic activity displacing the originally horizontal strata beneath the upper strata -- the upper strata remained more or less horizontal although raised by the force.

The dates for the local post-ice age floods fit within an overall framework, which includes fauna and flora, geology, sedimentation rates, and so on. The whole package fits together nicely, as worked out by scientists over 100+ years.

There are all kinds of absurdities involved in this supposedly neatly fitted scenario, as I note in my previous post. It's all concocted to fit the theory but if you think about the reality it's utterly absurd to suppose slow sedimentation rates, to turn fossils that were clearly catastrophically dumped into their current beds into time-period flora and fauna and so on.

If there were any real dating problems you can bet that various scientists and advanced students would be all over them, trying to figure out where the problems were.

Sounds good but apparently they are mesmerized by the theoretical edifice that has already been built. Their only option would be to turn YEC and if they do that they'll lose all credibility with the establishment.

A good way to become well-known quickly in a field is to find the answer to a long-standing puzzle. But at this point, the dating of the post-ice age floods is pretty well understood, as that site I referred you to shows.

It's pretty well accepted as understood, despite the holes in it as indicated in my previous post.

You note that you find no proof for the worldwide flood in "regular" science and that you get your support from creationist sources. That should be a clue.

Keep checking out the real science sites, and perhaps you will learn a few things. The information is out there, in plain sight.

The dogma is out there in plain sight of course, and the weight of establishment adherence to it can sway a half-educated person in its favor. It is accepted as evidence but it's very shaky evidence in reality. (See previous post and all my others on this subject).

The Flood is evident everywhere, odd they can't see it

2011-06-21T22:20:00.000-07:00

Another example of this odd blindness from EvC:

[Coyote]But we do find evidence of localized floods. The channeled scablands of eastern Washington state are a good example.
[Dr. A] Arguably they're not a good example of what creationists should be looking for, since they were caused by a natural dam breaking and a sheet of water sweeping laterally across the landscape.

The question is, what results would Noah's flood have had if it had happened? I think not very much (in geological terms, biogeography is a whole other question).

Such blindness to the obvious is clear evidence that nothing anyone says is going to open their eyes short of an intervention by God.

The entire "geologic column," all the strata, all their fossil contents, is proof of the Flood. The current interpretation is sheer absurdity from many different points of view -- the absurdity of the idea that time periods could be characterized by discrete sediments; the absurdity of the idea that such an abundance of tossed and tumbled bunches of fossilized life forms, often found in beds of one kind alone, could have occurred piece by piece over millions of years, and in such slowly developing circumstances fossilization would be nearly impossible; the absurdity of explaining the worldwide distribution of marine fossils in such extravagant abundance as the result of many former localized changes in sea level; the absurdity of many risings and fallings of land and/or sea level at all; the absurdity of thinking in terms of billions of years for strata in some places a mile deep or more, that are clearly undisturbed by normal weathering and erosion all the way up to the top layers (absurdly considered to be "recent time" as opposed to ancient time), when and only when such disturbances finally occurred -- tectonic distortions, foldings and tiltings, breaking and canyon formation, volcanic distortions, liftings and tiltings, etc. etc.

But a worldwide Food and the tectonic / volcanic disturbances that followed it account quite well for all of it.

How odd they are so completely blind to it, something so obvious.

That's the evidence for the worldwide Flood. The "local floods" such as the one mentioned above that made the Washington scablands are clearly former huge lakes that broke through natural dams -- Lahontan, Missoula, Bonneville -- lakes most likely left after most of the Flood had drained away, dams that most likely broke under the tectonic and volcanic disturbances that followed the Flood, possibly even years afterward.

Yes, I know I'm repeating myself. But then that's all they do over at EvC too. Our positions are pretty well established by now. Either they get their eyes opened or the "debate" just continues along the same old lines indefinitely.

I do hope I have time eventually to get back to Lyell. That got shelved by what is known as "real life" outside the internet.

=========================

Oh, and a side note on another EvC absurdity: Buzsaw got banned from the science forums for the mere infraction of correcting somebody's misunderstanding of his point of view. Simply describing his point of view, which is clearly all that is called for under such circumstances, is insufficient according to EvC administration, which is quite blandly insensitive to context.

Here's Buz explaining his position to Zen Monkey, who had gotten it wrong:

Zen, my position has never been that the rain or flood skewed the dating. It has always been that the implications of the make-up of the pre-flood planet and atmosphere would be the reason for skewing the conclusions reached via research methodology of conventional science.

A perfectly simple direct statement of his position which ZM had misunderstood, and a standard creationist position too.

And here's Admin completely missing the point:

Hi Buz,

It wasn't so long ago that you were restricted from posting in the science forums because of your inability or unwillingness to argue from evidence. You were permitted back in to the science forums after committing to keep your arguments focused on evidence, but you're not doing this. Efforts to reach an understanding with you about what was desired in terms of evidence have not been successful.

...You leave me no choice but to reinstate your restriction from the science forums. Please do not participate in threads in the science forums from this time forward.

Of course Buz is only too familiar with this sort of treatment, as is any creationist who hangs out there very long. I decided there was no point in continuing to subject myself to it, but Buz seems to manage to keep on keeping on despite it all.

Carbon Dating only proves what evolutionists want it to prove

2011-06-07T08:37:00.000-07:00

Ah, good ol EvC does it again, this time on carbon dating.

Chuck77 writes:
Huh??? Im not sure they EVER carbon dated any dino bones because that would prove they existed recently. they wont do it.

And Coyote answers:

Dinosaur bones have been Carbon-14 dated, and returned measurable amounts of C-14.

Which would normally date those dinosaur bones to a few thousand years, not millions. But rather than accept the normal reading they simply interpret it away as follows:

But the results are meaningless. When you are dealing with objects at or past the usable range of the method contamination and equipment error become the major factors.

Uh yeah, but this is a monumental begging of the question. The test shows the bones are only a few thousand years old but you contradict it with your mere assumption -- which as usual is all that the ToE has to go on though it is treated as science gospel -- that the bones are millions of years old which REQUIRES the interpretation that the reading is "method contamination and equipment error." Thus is actual evidence dismissed on the basis of mere belief.

Questions occur: How many attempts have been made to date dinosaur bones by Carbon-14, and how many of those attempts showed measurable amounts of C-14, and how many of those attempts involved efforts to be sure there was no contamination of the equipment? If contamination is suspected in a great number of cases, what's to say it isn't present in all cases of attempts to date anything by any radiometric method?

They have also dated diamonds and found trace amounts of C-14. That was an experiment to determine how much residual contamination resulted from the interior of the C-14 measuring equipment. Those results do not show there was C-14 in the diamond.

Of COURSE not, as long as you "know" the diamonds are millions of years old and can simply insist on that and ignore what the test actually says, the kind of test that evolutionists otherwise insist on when their readings confirm their bias. SO clever. NO science could EVER falsify the evolution fantasy since all they have to do is assume it against all the evidence.

But in their desperation for anything which will support their beliefs, creationists take these results out of context and claim they support a young earth.

Pretty silly, eh?

In their insistence on interpreting everything to support their beliefs, evolutionists take these results out of context, which clearly proves much younger dinosaur fossils and much younger diamonds than their beliefs will allow, and claim "contamination" from the measuring equipment. They don't have to prove contamination, they merely assert it based on their belief in millions of years. They even MEASURE it based on their belief in millions of years. They assume the millions of years as their measuring rod and measure the only objective measuring tool they have by it.

Pretty silly for sure.

Evolutionists never have any problem proving creationists wrong. All they have to do is interpret their science to fit their theory and all is well.

Angular Unconformities, Part 3: Lyell on how the rocks were tilted

2011-05-15T12:22:00.000-07:00

Continuing in Chapter 5 of Lyell's Elements of Geology here he is discussing the expectation that folded strata would be likely to break under the tension rather than simply fold:

It would be natural to expect the fracture of solid rocks to take place chiefly where the bending of the strata has been sharpest, and such rending may produce ravines giving access to running water and exposing the surface to atmospheric waste. The entire absence, however, of such cracks at points where the strain must have been greatest, as at a, Fig. 63, is often very remarkable, and not always easy of explanation. We must imagine that many strata of limestone, chert, and other rocks which are now brittle, were pliant when bent into their present position. They may have owed their flexibility in part to the fluid matter which they contained in their minute pores, as before described p. 62 and in part to the permeation of sea-water while they were yet submerged. [my emphasis]

Here I just have to comment on his assumption that the rocks must have been damp in order to bend without breaking, which makes perfect sense, just as modeling clay will bend while it's still wet, but break when it has hardened. Some years ago at EvC someone objected to my making this obvious point so I'm happy to see Lyell had the same expectation I had, that rocks must have some water in them in order to bend. Of course even damp clay will break under extreme tension so there must be a limit to the folding tension that could probably be measured.

This is also a welcome observation because it fits with the expectation that the strata were laid down in the Flood. At the very least, since geology also affirms that horizontal strata had to have been formed in water, if the rocks are still damp this does contradict the idea of extreme slowness and the long time span that is supposed to have been needed for the formation of the folds. Lyell himself could have made this deduction from his own observations, but he was under the spell of Hutton's old-earth theory by this time and continues to insist on it despite its being contradicted by his own facts.

Next I'm quoting him on how tilted or upright strata that appear to have been broken off were originally folded, the folds then having been "denuded" -- which was his word for what we would now call "eroded."

We have already explained, Fig. 69, that stratified rocks have usually their strata bent into parallel folds forming anticlinal and synclinal axes, a group of several of these folds having often been subjected to a common movement, and having acquired a uniform strike or direction. In some disturbed regions these folds have been doubled back upon themselves in such a manner that it is often difficult for an experienced geologist to determine correctly the relative age of the beds by superposition. Thus, if we meet with the strata seen in the section, Fig. 72, we should naturally suppose that there were twelve distinct beds, or sets of beds, No. 1 being the newest, and No. 12 the oldest of the series. But this section may perhaps exhibit merely six [87]beds, which have been folded in the manner seen in Fig. 73, so that each of them is twice repeated, the position of one half being reversed, and part of No. 1, originally the uppermost, having now become the lowest of the series.

These phenomena are observable on a magnificent scale in certain regions in Switzerland, in precipices often more than 2000 feet in perpendicular height, and there are flexures not inferior in dimensions in the Pyrenees. The upper part of the curves seen in this diagram, Fig. 73, and expressed in fainter lines, has been removed by what is called denudation, to be afterwards explained.

I had also wondered about this possibility but I'd tended to think that in the case of angular unconformities the strata had been broken and forced upright in one direction, then sheared by the friction between them and the horizontal strata above which formed a sort of ceiling. Instead the strata may have been folded and the bent section sheared off in the same way.

In that case the order of the strata as Lyell describes them, those on one side of the fold reversing the order of those on the other, would be the evidence. But where the strata are identical, as in the case of Siccar Point, that might not be easy to determine. At Siccar Point, however, the formation does continue far enough to show a section where the strata were folded, as in Lyell's Fig. 78, making the evidence in that case.

Also Siccar Point demonstrates my own expectation that the layer right above the tilted section would be a different kind of rock, which it seems to me would allow for easier sliding between them when pressure is exerted against the lower strata. At Siccar Point it's red sandstone in the horizontal strata above and greywacke in the tilted strata beneath. Most of Lyell's comments and illustrations also indicate that there were once more strata above that have eroded away, which also fits the model of angular unconformities I have in mind. Here's the whole model spelled out:

The strata were ALL in place before the tilting occurred, the entire geologic column.

The rocks were still damp which explains their folding rather than breaking, so it was not long after the Flood that the tilting occurred.

The folding occurred in a lower section of the strata under pressure from the side or beneath, either volcanic or tectonic.

The force was dissipated at a point where the upper strata were resistant because of their great weight. That is, at a point where the weight of the upper strata was about equal to the force from beneath as it reached that level.

The immediately superior layer was of a different type of rock, most probably a harder sediment, than the immediately lower one, allowing for slippage between the sections.

The eroded area usually seen between the lower tilted and upper horizontal sections was produced by the abrasion between them as the lower buckled and slid beneath the upper.

Where only a few layers or even only one remain over the tilted part of the rock the higher layers were most likely removed by remaining waters of the Flood.