Practical geology versus theoretical geology

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.