Strata, Time Periods, Polystrate Trees and Evo Meanness

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.