More Flood idiocy

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.