Wednesday, January 25, 2012

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

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.

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