More on the Flood, inadequate comparisons with local floods

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.

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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.