The bad "creationism" of the 19th century unfortunately gave an excuse for the idea of evolution

Here is a letter by Wallace to the British Quarterly about controversy being raised over Darwin's theory. What interested me in particular was his remark in the first paragraph that shows that the standard "creationist" understanding of the day was very far from a Biblical understanding.  They asserted that God created AGAIN AND AGAIN, though the Bible is clear that God RESTED after creating all things.

The 'British Quarterly' and Darwin (S107: 1865)

   [[p. 77]] Allow me to call the attention of your readers to a very gross attempt, in the last number of the British Quarterly Review, to mislead the unscientific public. At p. 143, in an article on the 'Supernatural,' after disposing of Hume, Strauss, Baden Powell, and such small fry, in a few lines each, the reviewer claims physical science as his ally, and calls into the witness-box 'the geologist' (one of a type now happily almost extinct), who, he says, will tell us that again and again the special interference of a Creator has been required, and who finally 'will tell you that this same "development" or "origin of species by natural selection" is an unblushing intruder into the domain of science, unlicensed and unrecognized.'

Darwin commented on this wrong creationist thinking in his Origin of Species, which I mention in a post about Darwin a while back.  This is unbiblical and it needed to be criticized and overthrown, for which we could even thank Darwin since it forced Christians back to the Bible.  Darwin of course didn't criticize it as unbiblical, nor does Wallace here, but that is what was wrong with it. 

If the creationists had been true to the Bible it might have been possible to prevent the theory of evolution from ever happening!

It is certainly true that the forces of evil are going to treat Christianity as inferior anyway, but in this case it's pretty clear that such unbiblical approaches to science did give them an excuse. I don't know if the liberalizing influences had simply undermined Biblical doctrine to such an extent or what.

It's sad to read the rest of that letter Wallace wrote because he just goes on and on about the stupidity of another witness they were able to muster for the "creationist" side:

This, however, is not strong enough. The model 'geologist' is sent down, and a new witness is specially called in a note, which is so 'unblushing' that I give it entire.

'Let us hear a word on the subject of development from one who has won scientific laurels by a life of study and thought:--"All the great living and recently deceased masters of physical science reject it. Does it appeal to anatomy and physiology? Cuvier, Owen, and Carpenter cry out against it. Does it evoke the aid of chemistry? Berzelius, Turner, and Liebig see its shallowness. Does it call on zoology for aid? Agassiz and Ehrenberg can refute its claims. Does it search the archives of geology for support? Sedgwick, Miller, Lyell and D'Orbigny can show how certainly it will fail. Or, finally, does it appeal to botany? Hooker and Lindley, Torrey and Gray, know that it will certainly glean nothing to sustain it in that flowery field. The fact is that it is only here and there a second-rate naturalist will sympathize at all with such dreamy views." (Dr. E. Hitchcock, in "Bibliotheca Sacra," vol. xi. p. 789.) We do not think anything in this extract unwarranted, even though Mr. Darwin has added his name to the roll of non-theistic theorists; for though he is distinguished as a naturalist in the department of [[p. 78]] observation, his book exhibits philosophic abilities of the lowest order. Nothing can be more significant than his entire abandonment of geology; nothing more foolish than the supposition that some strata are so lost that no trace of them can be found; and nothing more unscientific than to help his theory to take its absurd shape out of the barely possible but utterly unknown.'

Either the writer of this article knew that at least four of the persons here mentioned--Carpenter, Lyell, J. Hooker, and A. Gray--so far from rejecting or crying out against 'development' and 'the origin of species by natural selection' are its strongest supporters, or he did not know it. He is, therefore, either imposing a deliberate and wilful misstatement on the public, or he is incredibly ignorant of the subject he is writing upon. Again, when he talks of Darwin's 'entire abandonment of geology,' does he know that almost all the great modern geologists are converts to his views? and when he stigmatizes Darwin's work as 'foolish' and 'absurd,' does he know that John Stuart Mill has adduced it as one of the most wonderful examples of logical reasoning extant?

It is hardly worth while to break such a fly upon the wheel, but it is well to make known as widely as possible to what weak subterfuges those who attempt to stem the flood of modern thought with the worn-out theological mop are at last driven.

At the very least can it be said that the abandonment of an aggressive BIBLICAL creationist argument, along with abandonment of scholarship in general by Christians, gave license to this sort of attack?

I think so, and I also think this same abandonment of Biblical creationism and general ignorance of the scientific context are all too apparent these days as well. In fact you may get called all sorts of names by Christians for simply trying to keep up with these things at all.  

The weakness and irrelevance of creationism today is demonstrated all too clearly at the debate forum, EvC, or Evolution versus Creationism, where the "creationists" are a sad and sorry lot of misinformed people, and many of them argue from wildly unbiblical positions.  Very few hold to the Biblical Young Earth position (earth around 6000 years old), hardly two of them agree with each other about anything at all, and the few who do seem to be truly biblical creationists who also know their science get into such technical areas of discussion the average Christian couldn't possibly follow their arguments anyway.  I know I can't. 

The usual mindless assumption about unconformities

Dr. A. has the usual idiotic geological diagram of what supposedly creates unconformities in one of his recent posts.
http://www.evcforum.net/dm.php?control=msg&m=675135. 

It's of course all hypothetical because nobody has seen this happen, and it CAN'T happen.  That is, the third picture down can't happen.  You aren't going to get the curved rock to erode flat like that, not even as merely relatively flat as the picture shows.  You'll get water runoff that erodes from high to low, exaggerating the vertical rather than smoothing it out, not sheets that erode flat.  Which doesn't even happen when you start with a flat terrain.   Not to mention that the difference in hardness between the layers will contribute further to a nonhorizontal result.  The supposed flatness in ALL the geological diagrams of the creation of nonconformities SIMPLY CANNOT BE CAUSED BY EROSION. 

As one of Lyell's illustrations demonstrated, which I posted on some time ago, what really happens is, yes, first Picture One, the laying down of the horizontal strata, though including the upper layers as illustrated in Picture Four as well -- all at once of course in the Flood, not according to Lyell but according to me -- but then Picture FOUR is what happens next, as the tectonic force pushes the lower layers laterally UNDERNEATH the upper layers that remain horizontal, eroding the contact between the two. 

It's obvious to anyone who can really think scientifically.  

[Oct 15] He follows this with a mind-numbingly obvious post about determining relative age from certain features, in a post titled Cross-Cutting Relationships. I suppose it has to be stated but does it need a separate post?

Dr. A's Course in Geology: Actualism.

Dr. Adequate's Course in Geology at EvC has overall been an extremely good presentation, interesting and even fun to read.

Although the evolutionists like to complain that creationists don't educate themselves about the sciences, including Geology, I have to say that most of what he has covered I had already researched myself, so I was already familiar with most of the concepts and terminology. That wouldn't stop them from screaming "learn something" at me of course, because what they mean is "give up and accept the Old Earth" and other tenets of evolution-related science. Nothing in the actual facts of Geology, so far presented in his course, requires me to accept an Old Earth.

Now he is getting to an area that does involve some controversy, in his post on Actualism.. This is controversial because, well, consider this quote from his post:

The reason why it [actualism] is mentioned particularly in geological textbooks is a historical one. For many centuries people have been trying to explain geology in terms of non-actual, magical processes: explaining, for example, that the Earth's strata were produced by God turning off the force of gravity and then turning it back on; or that God created fossils when he made the Earth so that coal-miners even when underground would have visible signs of his presence. Various religious sects still promote non-actual concepts of geology to this present day.

This is really a nasty bit of straw-manning or poisoning the well against creationism. You will note that he doesn't say WHO ever held such ideas, or who holds them today, or WHEN, or HOW MANY, and the like. I hadn't heard the one about the gravity theory of the strata, but I do know there were some pretty silly ideas about fossils a couple or so hundred years ago held by a few who studied such things, but there were also reasonable theories alongside the silly theories, and MOST of the scientists in those days were "creationists" at least in the sense that most believed in a Creator God they vaguely associated with the Bible.

However, as I've also pointed out about some ideas in biology as Darwin encountered them in his day, the "creationist" type of thinking was NOT biblical, and I even say that I think Darwin did us a favor by putting an end to that kind of nonsense once and for all. Unfortunately his own theory was a much bigger disaster for science and humanity than the stupid "creationist" nonsense ("creationist" in quotes because, again, it was not the same creationism as today's, which IS Bible-based.)

Likewise with Hutton, the "father" of modern Geology, who decided one day by contemplating a particular pile of rocks on the coast of Scotland that the earth had to be very very old. Through Lyell's popularization of Hutton's Old Earth views they eventually took hold and have dominated Geology ever since. As with Darwin, his theory did bring to an end some very silly ideas, about fossils among other things, but was also a much bigger disaster even than the unbiblical "creationist" notions. (Really, nothing could be sillier than the current explanation of the strata in terms of millions of years per slab of lithified sediment). I have a series of posts in which I examine Hutton's reasoning about Siccar Point and prove he was wrong that such a formation requires a very old Earth, but of course now we have radiometric dating which says he was right even though he was wrong.

Here's another ridiculous straw man from this post of Dr. A's:

If, on the other hand (for example) we split open two leaves of slate and found therein the first chapter of Genesis written in quartz, then this would falsify actualism; we could not even imagine that one day we would find any ordinary physical process that would explain the phenomenon: we know too much about the way in which the world works to consider that even for a moment.

Waste of breath, there, Dr. A., unless your intention is as I suspect, merely to poison the well.  But anyway, actualism is explaining things in terms of known real processes as he goes on to say. Sounds like a solid scientific theory to me.

As we have said, actualism (considered as the assertion that the geological record can be explained in terms of real processes) should be regarded as a scientific theory. Why? --- because it is testable. We can look at the rocks, and we would recognize if there was something in the geological record which could not be explained in terms of real processes.

Perfectly reasonable statement, and he continues from there with some perfectly unobjectionable examples of how this principle operates, which wouldn't be contested by anyone with the slightest grasp of how science operates, which includes most creationists. Maybe not some of the "creationists" who show up at EvC for some reason, but true Biblical creationists who accept the entire Bible as written (King James version anyway).

But he goes on insinuating that there is such a thing as Some People denying the principle of appeal to real processes (again, he never quotes them, just parodies them, which allows him to construct his straw man unhindered by reality):

Considered as a methodological principle, actualism may be stated in the phrase that we have used repeatedly in our articles on sedimentology: "If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's a duck."

Take aeolian sandstone, for example. It looks exactly like lithified aeolian sand; we can understand it perfectly well in those terms. Therefore, this is the most parsimonious way to understand it.

Now, there are some people who (for religious reasons) dislike this: they wish that aeolian sandstone was something else altogether. These people, let us hasten to say, are perfectly entitled to their own beliefs. But they are not entitled to pass such beliefs off as scientific: when they daydream about alternative magical processes that might have formed something that looks exactly like lithified aeolian sand formed by actual processes, they have abandoned the scientific method in favor of wishful thinking.

For the proposition: "If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's a duck" stands at the heart of all scientific thought. We may imagine that it is not a duck; we may imagine that it is in fact a magical fairy disguised as a duck.

Hokey dokey, let's take a look at this aeolian sandstone accusation. What he is talking about is sandstone layers that have diagonal striations across them, which is the evidence for original aeolian formation, which means formation in the air as opposed to in water. Sand dunes, for instance, display this characteristic even in the individual grains as their being blown by the wind and scraped against other particles shapes them so that all together they lie in this diagonal pattern.

He puts up a nice picture of same on his next post, which I will copy here:
Click to enlarge picture, to see the cross-bedding more clearly.

The problem with his way of characterizing the creationist objection to aeolian formation of sandstone is that the objection is not to the original formation of the sand but to the explanation from Geology that these strata represent former landscapes made up of sand dunes that existed in some period of time identified in terms of millions of years ago. They read the sand as sand dunes that were in that same place some millions of years ago. They picture this as a landscape with a "horizon" that existed before the upper layers now in place formed above it, which in the picture were whole other sets of "sand dunes" apparently, sand dunes neatly horizontally laid upon sand dunes and hardened into rock, presumably each layer representing a long long period of time. They have the job of explaining how those layers managed to form in such neat horizontality sand dunes on top of sand dunes which are normally a bit on the bumpy-dippy-wavy side but I'm sure they're up to such a task of fantasizing, which Dr. A points out is a characteristic of human imagination. They just don't think of their own "scientific" reasoning in such terms, alas.

So, it's not the original formation of the sand itself that is in question -- very probably it WAS originally wind-shaped, but the way the sand has been laid down just as all other layers have been, in nice flat horizontality, suggests layering by water, just as do all the other layers of all the other kinds of sediments. The characteristic orientation of the original wind-formed sand is still preserved in the sandstone, in the "crossbedding" or diagonal striations within the perfectly flat slab of sandstone.

But you don't get the LAYERS without the water, catastrophic in timing too. THAT's the creationist objection. Listen up, Dr. A, 'cause this is how real processes really work in the real world rather than in the geological fantasyland of in situ ancient romantic landscapes of sand dunes. REAL science. Actualism.

As Dr. A goes on with his discussion of Actualism he explains it as the term preferred over "uniformitarianism" which according to him is misrepresented by Some People, presumably creationists.

The view which we have called "actualism" is sometimes (perhaps more commonly) known as uniformitarianism...

The term "uniformitarianism" is misleading in itself: for when modern geologists call themselves uniformitarians, what are they claiming to be uniform? No more or less than the laws of nature themselves --- but not necessarily anything else. Every geologist will insist that many things have not been uniform over the course of the Earth's history: its flora and fauna, for example, have not stayed the same; its temperature has not stayed the same; the composition of its atmosphere has not stayed the same; the arrangement of continents has not stayed the same; the global climate has not stayed the same.

What has apparently stayed the same is that throughout all this change the laws of nature have been uniformly unbroken, and only actual processes have taken place. In modern parlance, a "uniformitarian" geologist asserts no more than that; he or she has no general belief in uniformity, merely in actualism.

Ah ah ah, now Dr. A. Are you really this ignorant of what the REAL objections to "uniformitarianism" are all about? You are indulging in a little play on words here. It's interesting that he wants to change the term if only because "uniformitarianism" HAS been a bone of contention with creationists and apparently he wants to sweep the whole controversy aside.

"Uniformitarianism" includes the idea of processes of slow formation over millions of years that are so dear to the hearts of Geologists. It was really Hutton's new Old Earth geology that brought in this concept, as he thought that Siccar Point demonstrated very very slow processes of building up of layers, then tilting of the stack, then slow layering going on above the tilted layers, which would take probably millions of years to accomplish as he theorized. This is the real "uniformitarianism" that creationists object to, not "actualism" as Dr. A is defining it, which is a perfectly reasonable description of scientific thinking. Uniformitarianism is on the other hand a leap of the imagination into the deep past to explain such formations as Siccar Point, based on a notion of processes going on at the same slow rate observed today. Which contradicts the Biblical presentation of a young earth. The young earth is not challenged by any TRUE principles of science, but it is challenged by the false ones such as Hutton's Old Earth theory. So I showed in my posts on that subject, using some very interesting drawings in Lyell's discussion of the phenomena of formations like Siccar Point, that an old earth is not at all needed to explain Siccar Point.

Anyway, that's what the REAL flap about "uniformitarianism" is all about, and it continues to be a real flap and Dr. A's attempt to dispense with it by renaming it Actualism is, well, a bit devious perhaps.

Just a little tour of evolutionist anti-Flood speculations they treat as fact

http://www.evcforum.net/dm.php?control=msg&m=652616

there's absolutely no geological evidence that water simultaneously covered all of continental Australia within the last 10 000 years. This negates the claims of a global flood within the last 10 000.

As the creationists have said on that thread there's plenty of evidence that all parts of the earth have been under water. How can you claim to know the time frame for this lack of something?

Creationist: 95% of the fossil record are marine inverbrates.

Evolutionist: That's because fossils form best in aquatic sediments, not because of any spurious flood.

OK, aquatic sediments. Just what you'd find a whole bunch of from the worldwide Flood. Amazing how they can give what is merely an alternative explanation that fits their own theory and treat it as fact in such tones of certainty and get nasty with the creationists who continue to maintain their own explanation.

In fact, it gives the lie to your flood geology; if fossils exist as a result of the great flood, we would see far more terrestrial animals in the sediments than we do. We ought to see many land-based animals mixed in with the marine. The fact that we generally see marine creatures in marine sediments and freshwater fossils in freshwater sediments ought to tell you that those sediments record a living ecosystem, that layed down its fossils over a period of years, not in a single catastrophic event.

But this is all speculation and he doesn't seem to recognize it. They have no idea what the Flood would have done, they just prefer their own scenarios.

Fossils are buried in mass sediments that sometimes cover several American states! What kind of streams are we talking about?

And fossils are buried in discrete layers that place the most ancient species at the bottom and the most recent at the top. Can you tell me how a flood would do that? Can you tell me how a flood could put all the trilobites toward the borttom of the pile, but leave all the whales close to the top?

Since it's all speculation you can dream up whatever you like. There is no evidence to prove you wrong. Or right. The very idea of a "most ancient" species is a product of theory, pure conjecture. On the Flood model all the fossils are from the same time period, none is more ancient than another. Why whales near the top? I don't know and neither do they.

The fossil record shows us a clear story of living things changing and diverging. It does not opresent the jumble that we might reasonably expect from a flood. That's just a fantasy.

Odd. What he "might reasonably expect" is pure conjecture his own fantasy. Again, they just make up what a Flood would and wouldn't have done to suit their own expectations. THAT's "fantasy." Sorry but since we KNOW there was a worldwide Flood some 4300 years ago, naturally we simply know your conjectures must be wrong. It may not be what you'd expect but obviously the Flood DID layer the sediments and sort the fossils.

And here comes somebody else's set of conjectures to explain away the same observation:

95% of the fossil record are marine inverbrates.

This is because land, being higher, tends to erode at the hands of the elements. The products of erosion from the land are carried by wind, rain, streams and rivers to the lowest points where they are deposited, which is usually, but not always, in quiet streams, rivers, ponds, lakes, seas and oceans.

Does this fit with the "aquatic sediments" conjecture or not? I can't tell. In fact I don't think I even know what this conjecture is trying to say. But anyway, whose conjecture shall we accept?

Simply on the face of it, the fact that 95% of the fossil record are marine invertebrates is excellent evidence for a worldwide Flood no matter how many scenarios they can conjure up to explain it away.

Fossils are buried in mass sediments that sometimes cover several American states!

You're not specific, but if you're referring to the states in the Colorado area, much of this region lay beneath a quiet sea for millions of years. It also spent some millions of years above sea level. The Grand Canyon contains a record of much of the geologic history of this region, showing when it was beneath a sea, and even when parts of it were coastal regions and how those coastal regions moved back and forth across the landscape as the region rose and fell. It also shows when an area was under a quiet sea, or was only some miles off a coast. And it shows when the region was above sea level, though these layers are more rare and typically not complete since land is often an area of net erosion.

Wonderful how they can go on and on with their completely made-up scenarios as if they were fact, all in the service of explaining away the Flood, call it all "evidence" and bully and insult the creationists who continue to see the same phenomena as better evidence for the worldwide Flood.

What kind of streams are we talking about? Sounds like a catastrophic extinction with lots of water.

Sediments would remain suspended in active flood waters. A flood would jumble everything up instead of producing a progression of gradual change

.

See it's all what WOULD have happened according to their own presuppositions. They like their scenariom, they can't prove it, but they can enforce it with ridicule and arrogant certainty.

Another offering to explain the creationist's statement:

Fossils are buried in mass sediments that sometimes cover several American states! What kind of streams are we talking about?

In answer we are now given the picture of North America's supposedly long-lived "interior seaway:"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Interior_Seaway

The Western Interior Seaway, also called the Cretaceous Seaway, the Niobraran Sea, and the North American Inland Sea, was a huge inland sea that split the continent of North America into two halves, Laramidia and Appalachia, during most of the mid- and late-Cretaceous Period. It was 2,500 feet (760 m) deep, 600 miles (970 km) wide and over 2,000 miles (3,200 km) long.

The Seaway was created as the Farallon tectonic plate subducted under the North American Plate during Cretaceous time. As plate convergence proceeded, younger and more buoyant lithosphere of the Farallon Plate started to become subducted. This caused it to subduct at a much more shallow angle, in what is known as a "flat slab". This shallowly-subducting slab exerted a traction on the base of the lithosphere, pulling it down and producing "dynamic topography" at the surface that caused the opening of the Western Interior Seaway.[1] This depression and the high eustatic sea levels existing during the Cretaceous allowed waters from the Arctic Ocean in the north and the Gulf of Mexico in the south to meet and flood the central lowlands, forming a sea that transgressed (grew) and regressed (receded) over the course of the Cretaceous.

Yes, but of course a creationist will look at that picture and see a phase of the Flood before it all drained away. And please note the only facts given here are some dimensions, but otherwise it is all interpretation and there is no evidence given for that. It's remarkable how they can talk so glibly about the unwitnessed past. All interpretation, all conjecture. Based on what? What leads them to identify it as "cretaceous" for instance? They don't say. They merely give their interpretive scenario and we're supposed to accept it uncritically. Probably the actual evidence is sound enough as description of this water formation except for the timing, but since it isn't given -- SO rare they ever give actual facts -- who can say?

One of the more spectacular dinosaur fossil finds of recent years was of a Late Cretaceous specimen of Oviraptor that was found in a sitting position directly over its nest. This find, a wonderful combination of trace fossils and a body fossil, represents one of the most compelling pieces of evidence for brooding behavior in dinosaurs. This fossil find is currently on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and was illustrated in a National Geographic article.

Nests that would have washed away in a flood.

Except that they didn't and therefore they wouldn't. And how might that have been? Probably because they were instantly buried as opposed to being subjected to rushing water. That's my reasonable guess. Well, guessing is all you do too. You guys can guess and make pontifical pronouncements about how thus and so would or wouldn't have occurred in the flood of your own imagination, and so can we and with far more justification.

Next guy wants to know why the creationist thinks the fact that 95% of the fossil record are marine inverbrates supports the great flood.

Surely under the flood scenario, in which (nearly) every living thing is killed we would expect to see a much greater proportion of other animals in the fossil record?

Just a minor quibble really given that none of the other scientific evidence supports the flood, but your use of that particular factoid piqued my interest as to your thought processes.

1) What he is calling "scientific evidence" that supposedly doesn't support the flood is what I've been showing here as nothing but their own assumptions and speculations and fanciful scenarios reified into Fact.

2) Why don't we see what you expect to see? Because we don't, that's all. I might expect to see other things that didn't happen myself, but what happened is what happened and all you or we can do is speculate about why, neither of us can prove anything definitively. It's a war of plausibilities. Too bad you guys won't acknowledge that but have to carry on as if you are in possession of Truth.

I KNOW the Flood occurred and the evidence for it out there is awfully obvious it seems to me no matter how many made-up scenarios you can invent to explain it away.

As for speculation the most obvious explanation why 95% marine fossils fits the Flood is that the Flood was the OCEANS covering the land for months on end. You know, MARINE stuff.

Why so relatively few fossilized land animals? I don't know.

I kind of think it has something to do with their having been on higher ground. Looks to me like the upper layers laid down in the Flood in the Grand Canyon area all washed away as part of the canyon-cutting event. Perhaps the land animals were exposed in the tumbling and rotted away, or got washed into the sea. Where the strata remained in place the fossils were preserved. Just my reasonable guess.

Fossils are found in sedimentary rock which is formed by flowing water ...

... with just a few exceptions, such as glacial till, aeolian sediment, volcanic ash, nearshore sediments, coal, siliceous ooze, calcareous ooze, pelagic clay, evaporites ...

Since you don't explain what you mean but require me to go look it up, forget it. Question: 1) How much of the fossil record is found in these forms of sediment? Question 2) Are they all formed in still water? Well, hey, there was no doubt plenty of that during the Flood year too.

Tell me something. It is clear that you have never studied geology. And you must know that you have never studied geology. In which case why do you not draw the obvious corrolaries that (a) you don't know anything about it and (b) you should therefore not presume to go around lecturing other people on it?

Because he has studied the Bible and that trumps Geology any day. I'm serious. He knows there was a flood and the geological evidence he IS aware of supports it: the abundance of marine fossils, in fact the abundance of fossils, period. All your theories are wholly inadequate to explain this abundance, plus the original horizontality of the sedimentary layers known as the Geo Time Scale. Your explanations are in fact idiotic to the max -- talk about ad hoc! -- while a worldwide Flood suffices quite nicely.

95% of the fossil record are marine inverbrates

.You figure that these sea-creatures drowned in a flood? Is that the usual effect floods have?

No, it's the effect a worldwide Flood would have.

Fossils are buried in mass sediments that sometimes cover several American states! What kind of streams are we talking about?

Obviously when a kind of sediment covers several American states, we're not talking about streams. We're talking either about deserts, seas, or major volcanic eruptions, depending on the type of the sediment. The Navajo sandstone, for example, extends over 400,000 square kilometers of northern Arizona, northwest Colorado, Nevada, and Utah. Analysis of its sedimentary structure shows that it's a former desert.

Yeah, well this is typical geological nonsense. I sometimes have a hard time believing that normally intelligent people believe this sort of thing --this sort of explanation for such a huge extent of horizontally laid down sediment, quite markedly and abruptly separated from sediments above and below it, which is simply not how anything happens in the real world especially over millions of years, but that doesn't bother you does it? It should but it doesn't.

Enough is enough. It just gets personal after this.