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.

More evidence for the Flood

This is a unique geological phenomenon known as Danxia landform. These phenomena can be observed in several places in China. This example is located in Zhangye, Province of Gansu.

The color is the result of an accumulation for millions of years of red sandstone and other rocks. layered deposition of wet separated sediments by the Flood of Noah, distorted by tectonic forces set in motion during the same event, now hardened into red sandstone and other rocks.

Where Did All the Flood Water Go?

Yahoo! Another question answered.

Been listening to a discussion on Jan Markel's Understanding the Times radio, on the subject The Top Ten Creation/Evolution Issues with Eric Barger sitting in for her. He is interviewing creationist Jay Seegert, who has the website the Creation Education Center, where he addresses the usual problems in the creation-evolution debates with his own emphases. On the program they don't get to all the ten most frequently raised issues, only five of them.

The question that got answered in a way that so captivated me was Where did the water go after the Flood? I've never known how to answer that question and hadn't really given it much thought either, but now that I've heard Jay Seegert's answer I think how obvious it is!

The answer:

There is enough water on the earth right now that if the land areas were all flattened and completely evened out the water would cover it to a depth of 1.7 miles.

Creationists always say there were not such high mountains before the Flood as after, and that the high mountains were raised up after the Flood by plate tectonic movement set in motion as part of the whole Flood scenario, but I haven't seen that made the explanation for what happened to the Flood waters until now.

Of course, the land was rearranged after the Flood, the mountains were raised to spectacular new heights and valleys were formed to new depths, especially on the sea floor where deep trenches now lie. THAT's where all the water went.

Here's an experiment I dreamed up myself to demonstrate this: Make a thick clay type paste out of flour and water (or use modeling clay) and pat it down flat in a container to whatever depth you want, so it has a level surface. Cover it with water to a depth of oh a few inches or whatever. Don't let it stand too long or it will dilute the flour paste. Then pour out the water into a container so you have the same amount. Then gouge out deep valleys in the clay and make high mountains of the gouged-out material, keeping the same amount of clay as before. Pour back the water, the same amount of water as before. You'll have dry land and sea.

Same amount of land, same amount of water.

HOW CLEVER!

I would do a dance of joy and celebration if my arthritis didn't hurt so much.

Seegert also said that this mountain-and-valley-building event is referred to in Psalm 104 which made me skeptical at first.

The King James doesn't clearly say that:

KJV - Psa 104:8 - They go up by the mountains; they go down by the valleys unto the place which thou hast founded for them.

"They" refers to the flood waters, but there isn't anything here to suggest the mountains were higher or the valleys deeper than before.

But some of the other translations do say that. One of those few instances where the KJV translation IS inferior to the newer versions.

Some of the other translations say the same as the KJV, but most of them say the mountains rose and the valleys sank:

NKJV - Psa 104:8 - They went up over the mountains; They went down into the valleys, To the place which You founded for them.

NLT - Psa 104:8 - Mountains rose and valleys sank to the levels you decreed.

NIV - Psa 104:8 - they flowed over the mountains, they went down into the valleys, to the place you assigned for them.

ESV - Psa 104:8 - The mountains rose, the valleys sank down to the place that you appointed for them.

RVR - Psa 104:8 - Subieron los montes, descendieron los valles, Al lugar que tú les fundaste.

NASB - Psa 104:8 - The mountains rose; the valleys sank down To the place which You established for them.

RSV - Psa 104:8 - The mountains rose, the valleys sank down to the place which thou didst appoint for them.

ASV - Psa 104:8 - (The mountains rose, the valleys sank down) Unto the place which thou hadst founded for them.

YLT - Psa 104:8 - They go up hills -- they go down valleys, Unto a place Thou hast founded for them.

DBY - Psa 104:8 - The mountains rose, the valleys sank, unto the place which thou hadst founded for them; --

WEB - Psa 104:8 - They go up by the mountains; they go down by the valleys to the place which thou hast founded for them.

HNV - Psa 104:8 - The mountains rose, The valleys sank down, To the place which you had assigned to them.

[ May 22 update: After getting a typical rejoinder in my Comments section I have to add that despite all the attempts by creationists to come up with an unanswerable defense of the Flood or any other creationist claim there is always going to be an answer back that purports to be scientific. You can't "bullet proof" your Christian children as Barger and Seegert seem to expect, by having any kind of science-based answer to these things. What is your college student going to do after he's learned all these creationist answers and still someone comes back telling him he's ignorant of physics?

As Seegert points out, this area of science is historical science not the kind of science you can replicate in a laboratory, and historical science can never be proved the way laboratory science can be. So someone like my visitor can always come along and claim that the speed at which the tectonic plates would have had to move since the Flood only 4350 years ago would have generated so much heat that the oceans would have boiled and nothing could have lived afterward. He can't prove that, it's all speculation, but it sure SOUNDS scientific. Perhaps others can make calculations to counter him, but meanwhile your Christian college students are again left without a "scientific" answer.

They have to be fortified primarily with the word of God which tells us Noah and his family and many creatures did survive and go on to repopulate the earth, and, so that they won't be taken by surprise, made familiar with the fact that "science" about events in the prehistoric past cannot be definitively known, and that's the best we can do in the face of all the imaginative but unprovable speculations the other side can always generate against us.

Later yet: HOWEVER, this got me pondering what WOULD be the physics involved and I remembered some of my own speculations and other answers I'd heard in the past, and posted them in the Comments section.]

"Sea Monsters" -- antediluvian life forms or creatures evolved over millions of years?

Watching a film at Netflix by National Geographic titled Sea Monsters. (I tried but couldn't get the "embed" function to work for the trailer.)

The film shows some geologists on a fossil hunt in Kansas, finding bones of prehistoric reptilian dinosaurian type sea creatures. They also find the more common ammonite fossil -- and it's interesting to see this as I had no idea what size to picture those creatures, and the fossil is a lot larger than I had visualized, about the diameter of a good sized serving platter I'd say.

It's the ammonite fossils they say tell them when all these creatures in the same vicinity lived, which is of course based on their Geologic Time Table that layers the physical world in time periods, just as Dr. A does as quoted in the post below. They always speak of the time element as fact although it is nothing but an imaginative construct that they impose on the sedimentary and fossil phenomena.

Speaking of it as fact is what I call "word magic." They don't need the actual processes of science to reify an imaginative construct into Reality and enforce it with indignant denunciations as "anti-science" of anyone who isn't convinced. "The poetry of reality" as Dr. A says, although it's just the poetry of fantasy.

Most of the film is animation of the creatures reconstructed from their fossils and shown swimming in the seas that supposedly covered the area for some huge length of time in the "Cretaceous" period, and the "Triassic" and "Jurassic." They do show the sea that bisected the continent of North America at one time, and I have no doubt there is evidence in shorelines that identify such a body of water that stood long enough for such markers to be evident, but of course I don't buy the millions of years explanation for anything.

No, I'm watching this as an interesting imaginative reconstruction of life forms that lived before the Noachian Flood and that were no doubt transported by that Flood to their resting places where they were buried and fossilized and where these geologists now find them.

The "sea" that bisected the continent was of course a temporary stage of the Flood after it had receded or at least begun to recede, as were all the ancient extinct large lakes of western North America such as Missoula and Lahontan and Bonneville. Simply large lakes that stood for some time after the Flood and then finally drained away, in some cases suddenly and catastrophically, probably due to the tectonic forces that occurred after the Flood and also built the Rockies. The catastrophic draining of one such great standing body of water is one very plausible explanation for the carving out of the Grand Canyon. Not a feat any ordinary river could have accomplished.

One funny thing: A few large fossils were found with food in their stomachs, one rather "stuffed to the gills" as it were, which prompted the speculation that it must have died of gluttony. Of another the narrator wondered why it would have died so suddenly after a good meal. Of course they conjured an explanation out of a hat as usual, but duh, folks, obviously the most reasonable explanation is that they were all caught in the same catastrophic event at the same time, some having just filled their stomachs.

Same phenomena, different interpretation, just as reasonable, no, really, more reasonable than the establishment interpretation.

"Fatal Flaws of Flood Geology:" Old Red Sandstone -- the sheer madness of fantasy over fact

I found this article by a Chris Weber at a site called the National Center for Science Education, written in 1980 but I assume still relevant. He has collected some of what he considers to be the most unanswerable scientific claims that contradict the Flood. I want to put my mind to these as I get the time.

====================================

Flood Geology

Flood Geology believes that most of the layers of rocks we see are a result of Noah's flood.

The Fatal Flaws of Flood Geology.

Flood Geology is impossible because of:

Desert Deposits
Fossil Forests
Earth's Crust
Coral Reefs
Evaporites & Shales
Fossil Species (not mixed)

He starts with fossil desert deposits:

Desert Deposits

You don't need a Ph.D. in geology to know that desert dunes and other desert deposits do not form under roaring flood waters. These require not only time, but also dry land. The Flood of Noah supplies neither.

Uh huh, but nobody SAYS anything "formed" under the Flood except the deposition of the sediments that were dissolved by the flood waters and redeposited, along with a plethora of living things that the Flood was intended to destroy. If you're going to refute the Flood it would be nice if you'd get a reasonable idea of what such a flood would have done. It could MOVE things of course, including all the sand from dunes and other desert deposits.

The Old Red Sandstone, which looks for all the world like a collection of fossilized desert dunes, was formed in Devonian times. It has outcrops extending from the British Isles to Poland and Russia's White Sea, and from Germany to Norway (Gilluly, Waters, and Woodford, 1968). Outcrops have even been found in Greenland and North America. In Devonian times, before North America and Europe drifted apart, these dunes covered an entire semi-arid continent.

Must object here that the Old Red Sandstone does not in the slightest "look for all the world like a collection of fossilized sand dunes." This is geojargontalk of some sort. Go look at pictures of the Old Red Sandstone. No dunes there. It's a huge expanse of red ROCK for pete's sake. He has certainly NOT seen "an entire semi-arid continent." That is the conventional geological INTERPRETATION. As usual we're being fed an interpretation and not the evidence itself, not facts from which we could draw our own conclusions.

I can only suppose that he means that the sand of which the sandstone is composed shows characteristics of sand normally found in "desert dunes and other desert deposits" but this is what they should SAY. Their fanciful landscapes are just that: fanciful. The Flood most likely simply transported a lot of sand with the characteristics he attributes to desert dunes and dumped it in this place. Perhaps it DID pick up sand from desert dunes somewhere. But landscapes on the surface of this earth do NOT simply get covered over with one kind of sediment full of dead things that turns to rock, nice straight horizontal rock too. Doesn't happen. This is ridiculous.

He goes on:

Several lines of evidence derived from this great geologic formation create difficulties for the flood geology model. For instance, the interfingering of these sandstones with marine sediments shows that the shoreline of this continent advanced and retreated several times. Thus the desert rocks are entangled with rocks that the flood geology model says were formed within the one-year-long flood.

Again, the problem with this sort of presentation is that we are given no way of picturing what he is talking about. As above where he says the red sandstone "looks for all the world like fossilized desert dunes" we have to say "Huh?" We have to surmise he's NOT talking about its "looking" a certain way to the naked eye but only about the interpretation that comes to mind for the educated investigator of the contents of the rock. But this becomes mystification for the non-geologist reading this stuff.

What does this interfingering look like? It doesn't sound to me like something that would pose a problem for a Flood interpretation because one would expect that different sediments would be "interfingered" at various places if I understand what he means by this. He quite blandly states that this interfingering "shows that the shoreline of this continent advanced and retreated several times," apparently unaware that this is nothing but the interpretive party line and begs the question. A Floodist needs to know more about the actual phenomena, not merely how geologists interpret it.

Also, redbeds, consisting partly of rust formed above sea level, are also found in this formation. These would not have been formed in any catastrophic flood.

Um, how about after the Flood laid it all down? As I've pointed out before, the idea that anything "formed" in the Flood is a little misleading. Sure, the claim is that the strata were formed by the Flood as it carried the sediments and deposited them with their cargo of dead things, but all the Flood DID was move things around.

The Old Red Sandstones also contain typical playas, complete with their characteristic cubic salt crystal deposits.

Oh please. This is a huge slab of red ROCK you are seeing these "playas" in. Get real. Describe for us exactly what on earth you mean by such a statement because just as you are not seeing desert dunes in that red rock you are also not seeing playas. You must be seeing something when you dig into the rock that is normally associated with playas and this is what you must describe if you really want to communicate anything useful.

These are desert salt-pan deposits formed after the rainy-season lakes evaporate. Today, in the Mojave Desert, playas can become lakes for a couple of weeks, only to dry out again, leaving a crust of salt deposits like those found in the Red Sandstone.

Aargh just more mystification. So what ARE you seeing? You've found some salt in the rock? In what form? How much of it? Show it to us. Explain how you get from whatever bits and pieces you've dug out of that rock to a "desert salt-pan deposit." Also, if the ingredients are specifically indicative of such an environment, what's wrong with the likely explanation that the contents of this red rock were transported from a site with such characteristics and dumped all together in the strata where it lithified under pressure from similarly transported sediments above?

Although a few freshwater ponds did exist on this ancient semi-arid continent, they dried up from time to time.

This is what is laughably called "science," a fantastic scenario they've built from something they found in this rock that he doesn't bother to describe. All we get is the scenario, we don't get the facts from which to draw our own conclusions. And he calls this exercise in imaginative cobweb-spinning FATAL FLAWS OF FLOOD GEOLOGY????

So, we find fossil mud cracks in the shales that came from the dried-up pond bottoms, and we find fossil lungfish, a type of fish that can survive drought by building a mud cocoon in the pond bottom and breathing air. Hundreds of square miles of fossil sand dunes in these deposits contain cross-bedding and sand-blasted pebbles (ventifacts) of the sort found in modern desert sand dunes, and in no other kind of modern sediment. These different independent lines of evidence converge to show that the Old Red Sandstones almost certainly formed over thousands of years in a dry climate, not in any kind of flood catastrophe.

Oh balderdash! So some sand from an area of already-formed dunes was transported by the Flood. If you aren't going to give us the facts how am I to know what you mean by any of this? I have to guess. My guess is probably right but it's still a guess and I shouldn't have to guess. Your fanciful notion about the supposed previous landscape on this very spot does not convince me. Landscapes do not turn into slabs of rock over time. Except in the imagination of geologists for some reason.

This is just going on and on of course and my answers are just going on and on in the same way. But right now I'm pausing this post, intending to come back to it later, and of course get to his other supposed "fatal flaws," oh groan.

The Grand Canyon contains fossil desert dunes and other sediments that to all appearances were deposited on dry land.

The Grand Canyon does not and cannot possibly "contain" fossil desert dunes. When you say "sediments that ... were deposited on dry land" no problem. I would assume that MOST of the sediments that ended up in the strata were ORIGINALLY part of the pre-Flood DRY land mass.

The Permian Coconino Sandstones in the upper walls of the Grand Canyon have the frosted well-sorted wellrounded sand grains found only in land-deposited sand dunes (Shelton, 1966).

Fine, now you have stopped that idiotic talk about sand dunes being seen or contained in rock and are referring to GRAINS. Fine. That permits me to opine that the grains were TRANSPORTED BY THE FLOOD rather than being formed in place. Which is really really an idiotic idea when you try to think about those flat horizontal slabs of rock as if they were once landscapes on the surface of the earth exactly where they sit. As if sand dunes just somehow get their hilly character flattened down and compressed into rock over time? How could that happen? Any sediment being deposited on top of them would have to come from a higher elevation than the highest part of the dunes. But dunes are usually the highest point in the area. And if some sediment did somehow get deposited on or over them they'd conform to the hilly shape of the dunes, they wouldn't just lie flat. What are you people thinking anyway? Are you thinking at all? This landscape idea is so absurd it's hard to believe anyone ever entertained it for a second.

Furthermore, many of the laminae of the cross-bedding contain fossil footprints that could only have come from reptiles or other quadrupeds climbing up the face of a slightly damp sand dune in the open air. (Those climbing down the slopes left no tracks because they simply slid.) ICR geologist Dr. Steve Austin has taught the theory that amphibians resting between underwater dunes made the tracks. His theory is very interesting, but rather implausible since the Flood must have been violently dumping several meters' worth of sediment per day.

Wouldn't have to be violent, just soon enough after the footprints were made to fill them in to preserve them. And it does suggest that there was some time lapse between the deposition of one layer of sediments and another during the Flood, in order for animals to run across them. But WHY DUNES AT ALL? There is no need to imagine anything shaped like dunes DURING OR AFTER THE FLOOD having anything to do with the formation of the strata. Whatever dunes had existed before the Flood would have long since been saturated and carried away.

The Canyon's Supai and Hermit Shales, found today beneath the Coconino Sandstones, look exactly like river deltas that formed above sea level (Shelton, 1966).

Well here's another one of those mystifications, an interpretation instead of fact, that can only perplex somebody looking at the walls of the Grand Canyon and seeing nothing but layers of stone, no river deltas. Exactly where and exactly how do these rocks look like river deltas? Puhleeze, show us so we can see them too.

Back in Permian times,

QUESTION BEGGING!! Give us the phenomena, the simple facts, not the interpretation. You mean ON THE SURFACE OF A PARTICULAR ROCK LAYER? What exactly do you mean?

many quadrupeds (probably reptiles) left their footprints in the soft delta mud. As the mud baked hard in the sun, it formed cracks. The hardness of the baked mud preserved the footprints and mudcracks until the flooded rivers of the rainy season buried them in fresh mud. These fossil prints and mudcracks are found today, as well as iron oxides that form in the open air, showing that these shales formed above sea level.

Why is it we get these fanciful SCENARIOS instead of a simple description of the bald facts at the site in question?? It is possible that the cracks in the mud occurred even after all the strata were laid down as the rocks dried. Possible, I say. WHERE is this iron oxide? SHOW it to us. How do you know it wasn't either carried there on the flood or formed there as the rocks dried?

The pure quarz Navajo Sandstones of Triassic and Jurassic times

Quartz Sandstones will do just fine descriptively, Triassic and Jurassic are meaningless impositions of interpretation over the facts, sheer mystification.

in Zion National Park, Utah, also look exactly like desert sand dunes (Gilluly, Waters, and Woodford, 1968).

No they do not look exactly like dunes. They look like ROCKS.

They contain extensive cross bedding of the type found in sand dunes, and the frosted sand grains and sand-blasted pebbles found only in dunes formed on the land.

See all my reasoning above. This is absurd.

Certain formations in western Wyoming look exactly like deserts that bordered a fitfully receding sea in Carboniferous times (Houlik, 1973).

"Look exactly like??" Geology destroys language and plays with minds, that's all I can say. No, they look like ROCKS and you are imposing your interpretation on them based on some characteristics of their contents. ANY SCIENCE THAT IS REALLY A SCIENCE SHOULD STRICTLY GIVE FACTS.

THIS IS CRAZY.

In particular, the Mississippian Lodgepole Formation contains the type of carbonate deposits and evaporites found forming in tidal flats today. The Amsden formation consists of sabkhas and desert dunes. Sabkhas are a kind of hardpan that forms in deserts after hard water seeps up through the ground by capillary action and evaporates leaving nodules of calcite, andhydrite, and other salts. They are seen forming extensively in Saudi Arabia today. Unless Houlik has grossly erred, these sabkhas, casts of evaporite crystals, and fossil dunes show that these Carboniferous deposits formed in a desert, not a flood.

Again, it's hard to know what is being talked about here because precious little actual fact, in fact NONE, is given about how this formation "contains" these carbonate deposits and evaporites, that is, what this looks like in the rock itself. What does a carbonite deposit look like IN THE ROCK? Is it encased solidly within the rock, is it scattered throughout the rock, is it in any relation to other parts of the rock that cause it to imitate this assumed former landscape? Does it occur on the surfaces or is there space within the rock where it occurs?

Knowing these things and no doubt many other facts that I'm unable to think of could tell me whether the substances in question could have been transported with the other sediments in the Flood, or perhaps developed in the rock or on the rock after it was deposited and so on and so forth.

If all I'm given is this fanciful SCENARIO that ASSUMES their having been developed on the spot I am deprived of any means of thinking about the phenomena themselves. Sometimes it seems this is the objective of such descriptions, but probably it's just that the interpreters are so enamored of and so believing of their interpretation it doesn't occur to them that it IS an interpretation and that the actual facts or phenomena are required of them. Some science!

Several times at the end of the Miocene epoch (six to eight million years ago), the Mediterranean Sea dried up, leaving extensive desert deposits on the sea bottom (Hsu, 1972).

See now, this too is just an interpretation, but an interpretation of what facts is withheld from us. What are the characteristics of the rock that stands for "the Miocene epoch" that led to the interpretation of "several times" of drying up of the Mediterranean, and how do they determine the "sea bottom" from this rock and how "desert deposits" were left on it many times, from just looking at the rock, which is apparently all they are doing! This is mystification or obscurantism to the max, this is not science!

The Straits of Gibraltar opened and closed, causing these complex changes, as the Glomar Challenger discovered in 1970 by using echo soundings and deep-sea core samples. Each time the Mediterranean slowly dried up, first calcite precipitated around the rim of the basin of the Balearic abyssal plain, then anhydrites and gypsum further in, and finally rock salt in the center at the deepest point. This is just the order that these salts would precipitate if you set out a large saucer of sea water to dry. Successive dryings of the Mediterranean produced hundreds of meters of evaporites. Not only did evaporites form, but also land deposits like sun-baked mud cracks, wind-blown sand, and sabkha anhydrite nodules. Since algae can only grow where sunlight reaches, the stromatolites (a common algae deposit) found in deep sea core samples show that the Mediterranean sea floor, now two miles deep, was once dry land. The Rhone and Nile rivers cut their canyons thousands of feet below current sea level to feed the desiccated Mediterranean basin. Desert-style alluvial fans accumulated from debris washed by cloudbursts down the slopes of Sardinia; now these deposits lie far under the water. After the Mediterranean refilled with water for the last time, at the beginning of the Pliocene, sediments began to accumulate over the evaporites; the weight of these sediments forced evaporites up through weak spots in the sediments to form salt domes. Some of these salt domes are a few miles across, and hundreds to thousands of feet high. Even though such structures may not be forming today, a dried-up Mediterranean could have easily formed them, whereas flood geology is hard pressed to account for such things.

Zowie wowie, this is one long paragraph of nothing but mental castle-building without a SINGLE FACT for a person reading it to hold onto. WHERE ARE YOU GETTING ALL THIS STUFF? WHAT IS YOUR EVIDENCE FOR THIS? ARE YOU LOOKING AT ROCKS? WHAT ARE YOU SEEING IN THE ROCKS? I'm supposed to take this fantastic imaginative scenario as refutation of the Flood? You must be joking! WHAT PLANET DO YOU GUYS LIVE ON ANYWAY?

This kind of "science" justifies the title of my blog perfectly, it is all fantasy being presented as if it were science, speaking of their fantasy of the past as if it were known fact! Biological evolutionism does this and so does geological old-earthism. These guys should get out of the field and write for Hollywood.

http://www.bibleandscience.com/science/ageofearth.htm

http://ncse.com/cej/1/1/fatal-flaws-flood-geology

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.

===========
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.

Tectonic plate movements, more straw man distortions of creationist arguments

On the Seashells on Tops of Mountains thread roxrkool asked pandion what he meant when he argued that it's only the very high mountains in the west and not the low mountains that contain fossils. I wondered too but I was more interested in answering the accusation that creationists think all mountains contain fossils, which isn't the case. I was hoping pandion would come back and answer her but he's ignored her post so far.

Eventually some others have answered her, but it's a frustrating exchange. One of the creationists, Robert Byers, whose posts are hard to follow said this:

...Another answer , mine, would be that these low mts only appeared after the flood as a part of the great upheavel that occured a few centuries after the flood.
The whole backbone of North america exploded and crumpled and from this came many of the mts there.
So no seashells on top.*

I assume he's talking about the movement of the tectonic plates which creationists do believe built the mountains after the Flood, although not as long as centuries afterward. There are differences of opinion about when it occurred but the timing that makes most sense to me is that it started with the eruption of volcanoes at the very beginning of the Flood although the movement may have taken quite some time to get underway. Kurt Wise connects the very start of the heavy rain of the Flood with the heat of the volcanoes as I recall, but I still have to go back and digest his thoughts on this subject.

From my reading on these things I get the impression that the original volcanic action that split the continents and started them moving away from each other would have occurred at what are now the formerly connected edges of those continents or around what are now the ocean bodies between them, and I think this is factually the case -- some of the oldest now-extinct volcanoes are around the Atlantic rim for instance. There's plenty of evidence of former, now-extinct, volcanism in the British Isles for instance and along the North American east coast.

I don't know what Byers, the creationist quoted above, means about how the "backbone of North America exploded and crumpled" or where he got that idea. My impression has been that the volcanic energy that split the continents, along with the lateral spreading movement that energy set in motion, for instance at the mid-Atlantic ridge --where the sea floor spreads or grows in opposite directions, moving the continents of Europe-Africa and the Americas apart from each other-- is what caused the relatively gentle folding of the Appalachians at the outset of the continental movement, but that the more dramatic higher thrust of the Rockies was caused by the greater resistance to that movement by the intervening continental mass of North America as you move farther West from the source of the movement. I hope I'm getting that said clearly. I'd expect something similar on the European continent --gentler buckling near their west coasts and higher mountain thrusts farther east (Alps?), but I'm not familiar enough with their topography to speculate. On the other hand that's a far bigger mass that that would have put up a much greater resistance, which would account for certain differences in the topography.

Then new volcanoes -- release of magma from the ocean floor -- could have been triggered BY the movement of the continental plates so that now the most active ones are around the Pacific rim where the continents are moving toward each other rather than apart.

Well, that's how I've been picturing it for some time now based on different readings on the subject so I'm glad to try to spell out the whole thing, however inadequately.

A couple posts after Byers' noted above, Coyote is objecting to the idea that the "upheaval" described by Byers could have occurred only 4300 years ago especially since conventional geology isn't aware of it. Well, what can one say? They ARE of course aware of the upthrust of the Rockies, they simply conceive of it in a much slower time frame. They operate from a completely different set of presuppositions that determines what they are able to think about these things, and for them their dating methods set it all in concrete so that anything a creationist says about shorter time periods than they acknowledge is going to be met with incredulity. That's just how this debate goes.

Then along comes saab93f to call us "cretins" and decry our refusal to accept the establishment interpretation:

There are plenty of things that our cretin counterparts say that leave me breathless but this "upheaval" has got to be the utmost.

What he means, I must assume, is that he can't wrap his mind around the short TIME FRAME of the upheaval. Byers' post isn't very clear but I assume he's mostly referring to the building of the Rockies by the lateral motion of the spreading tectonic plates, and establishment geologists think of it the same way as I understand it so there's no cause for his breathlessness over the event itself. It's the timing of the event that creationists and old earthers argue about, not the event itself.

It is just so frustratingly incomprehensible when they are presented with the calculations of the amount of energy needed to raise the mountains and move the tectonic plates and they just shrug their shoulders - God did it anyway.

Look, mathematical calculations about energy expenditure from events in the past are just as liable to sheer mystification as any appeal to miracle could be but the usual creationist interpretation of the movement of the tectonic plates does not attribute any of it to God's intervention. With your mathematical calculations you can't possibly have taken into account all the variables involved, and we know you are biased against young earth thinking for starters, so whatever numbers you come up with can't really be respected as evidence no matter how convinced you are of your own mathematical prowess.

It is presumably quite OK to disagree on the ethical issues or on morality - whether it is based on the Bible on Gilgamesh or the Quran but to blatantly oppose the calculations....I guess the only way a religion stays intact is lying.

See, these calculations represent god to him and he's ready to throw us to the lions for refusing to bow down to them despite their dependence on a collection of wild unknowns, essentially pure spin from mental cobwebs spun by old-earth spiders. We're "lying" too of course, that's their favorite hex against our disagreements with them. Amazing.

I noted in Jerry Coyne's book Why Evolution is True, which is among other things a fascinating compendium of straw man caricatures of creationist arguments, his remark that the continents are separating much too slowly for creationist views to have any validity:

Now, thanks to global positioning satellite technology, we can even see the continents moving apart, at a speed of two to four inches per years, about the same rate that your fingernails grow. (This, by the way, combined with the unassailable evid4ence that the continents were once connected, is evidence against the claim of 'young-earth" creationists that the earth is only six to ten thousand years old. If that were the case, we'd be able to stand on the west coast of Spain and see the skyline of New York City, for Europe and America would have moved less than a mile apart!)

Sigh. The straw man arguments take up SO much of this debate. What's happening here is simply that Coyne has applied his own uniformitarianism, or his assumption of a constant rate of movement, to the separating of the continents, which of course requires a much much longer time than the 4500 years or so since the Flood for Europe and America to have separated to our current distance from each other.

But creationists are not uniformitarians and we figure the continents must have moved much faster at the beginning when violent volcanism originally split them apart, and have slowed down to their present rate over those 4500 years. As I sketch out above, the picture I have taken from my reading on these things goes like this:

• the continents started out joined and were split apart by what must have been a pretty violent eruption of a line of volcanoes along the split line some time after the Flood.
• This violent action would have thrust the land masses apart and buckled the land nearest to the erupting volcanoes into the Appalachians on the American side.
• The volcanic eruptions became the source of the spreading magma-to-basalt sea floor of the mid-Atlantic ridge which continued to spread the continents up to the present.
• This action would have been faster at the beginning, though probably because it had a great resistance of the land mass to overcome at the beginning it needed some time to gain the momentum to reach its maximum speed, and then over the millennia it gradually slowed down to its present rate.
• Its present rate is nevertheless enough to jostle things on the Pacific rim from time to time still, volcanoes and earthquakes for instance.

When Old Earthers aren't objecting that we're wrong because it would take a lot more time on their assumptions to arrive at the current distance between Europe and America, they are objecting to our claim that the movement was faster in the beginning and then slowed down. They get all feverish over the idea as supposedly requiring WAY too much energy and generating WAY too much heat for the planet to survive at all, or at least Noah and his family and animals on the ark. But again their calculations are just their own mental spin based on their own presuppositions, they can't possibly have anticipated all the variables that would have been involved, and we know they are biased, so their cogitations don't amount to a real objection we have to honor. Jerry Coyne's misrepresentations of creationism in his well-respected book on evolution ought to be a clue that their thoughts on the subject aren't to be taken very seriously, not to mention all the ridiculous straw-man stuff at EvC.

I'm certainly no mathematician but I spent some time trying to plot just what the speed would have to be when it started out -- assuming maximum speed at the beginning just to make the calculations easier even though I think it might not have reached its maximum for a while as it had to overcome the resistance of the inert land mass in order to pick up momentum.

So what I did was figure a rough distance of 3000 miles to be traveled in a rough 4500 years, starting at the Flood itself and using Coyne's current rate of 2-4 inches per year. From this I figured that the AVERAGE SPEED that would have to have been maintained to arrive at the current rough distance of 3000 miles apart would have been 3/4 mile in one year, or 3960 feet or 47,520 inches, or 11 feet per day, and I put that number at the midpoint of the time between the Flood and today, or roughly around 100 BC or so. I figure that's the speed at which the continents would have been separating in 100 BC. Before that they were separating at a faster rate that increases back to the beginning, and since then at a slower rate that decreases to the present rate of 2-4 inches per year.

What I arrived at was that at the time of the Flood the speed of separation, again assuming maximum speed at that time though it probably hadn't yet attained that, was one and a half miles per year, or 7920 feet per year, or 600 feet per month or 20 feet per day.

Is 20 feet per day such an outlandishly fast rate? That's ten feet of separation on either side of the mid-Atlantic ridge being generated daily or less than 6 inches hourly, and that was when the originating volcanic action was at its peak so that doesn't seem outlandish to me -- think of how fast a lava flow moves. The sea floor spreads from the uprising of magma all along the Atlantic ridge. That's got to generate quite a bit of pushing power.

The continents would have been within sight of each other for some years although I haven't calculated that aspect of the situation. How many miles can you see across an ocean anyway? Of course there wasn't anyone around at that time to witness it, though I wonder if the first descendants of Noah to get to the western coast of Europe would have been able to see North America across the Atlantic. I suspect not but as I said I haven't tried to calculate all that. [Later: It's hard to get an answer to this question through Google but I finally got some estimates from a chat board -- 7 miles on a perfectly clear day if you're at sea level, 10 if you're higher, up to 25 miles if the land on both sides is high -- how high not said. So separating at a rate of a mile and a half a year you'd lose visibility between the highest points on the best days at about sixteen years. I suspect Noah's progeny weren't anywhere near the European coast for a few hundred years at the very least.]

======================
*Concerning the demands for evidence at EvC:

Along comes Percy as Admin to challenge Robert Byers' post as not providing evidence but only speculating about what the Bible implies.

The idea here is to present positions that are supported by evidence, not speculations. We know you can describe scenarios consistent with Biblical accounts. Everyone concedes that you are able to do this. It is not in dispute.

What is being asked in this thread, and also in the recently closed Potential Evidence for a Global Flood thread, is whether there is any evidence that what you describe is what actually happened. Please present the evidence.

True, Byers refers to the Flood and to the Bible and that sets the tone of the post and doesn't fit what EvC requires for evidence, and the post is hard to decipher anyway, but if what he means by the "upheaval" and the exploding and crumpling "backbone of America" is simply the tectonic plate motion that built the Rockies, which is what I have to think he must mean, all he's said, really, that's different from what standard geology says is place it in a more recent time frame, perfectly standard creationism.

Excluding references to the Bible is an artificial requirement anyway, it seems to me. A witness report is evidence in itself, but they define it in such a way that it's just a "religion" and therefore inadmissible as evidence.

I'm so glad I have my own blog where I don't have to worry about tripping over their artificial rules all the time and can say what needs to be said.

If you want evidence for the more recent time frame, that's a matter of spelling out the whole picture, which would argue for instance that the strata could have been formed by nothing less than a worldwide flood, and that the strata obviously preceded the building of mountains that contain strata with fossils, and there is often evidence that volcanic mountains were formed after the strata were laid down too because there are magma dikes that penetrate up through the strata in the same areas and spill out over the top of them.

But there is no direct evidence possible to prove that all this happened within the last 4500 years that I know of. Again, it's a matter of finding the whole picture plausible or not -- and this is where it would help prevent reinventing the wheel over and over at EvC if some basic creationist presuppositions were simply recognized by all participants so they wouldn't have to be spelled out each time.

Of course if they simply want to exclude the creationist presuppositions because their own presuppositions disqualify them, which in fact is the reality there, then really it ought to be admitted that the debate is a charade anyway. The problem with the demand for evidence IS that evidence is defined within the presuppositions of Old Earth and evolutionary theory and is called Science too.

Posting as a creationist at EvC is a very weird experience of trying to avoid the boobytraps and Catch-22s all created by the enforcement of their assumptions that automatically preclude creationist assumptions. They call it "Science" which obscures their origin in the theories they are defending.

Yup.

Polystrate Tree Fossils

So I've been taking some side trips into other than my usual / favorite issues, and ran across the "polystrate trees." These are trees that have been fossilized in an upright position penetrating through MANY layers of sedimentary rock, or in terms of geological time, through millions upon millions of years, which of course is impossible. Yet this common creationist argument is treated by evolutionists as merely one of countless PRATTs, or "points refuted a thousand times." Of course they haven't refuted most of them, they are simply claiming they have. In the case of polystrate trees, as usual they act as if they've definitively answered the creationist argument but they've really merely sidestepped it.

As I discovered when I did a little reading on it:

At Wikipedia I found this completely evasive remark:

Geologists see no need to invoke a global flood to explain upright fossils. This position of geologists is supported by numerous examples, which have been found at numerous locations, of upright trees completely buried within either late Holocene or historic sediments. These buried upright trees demonstrate that conventional geologic processes are capable of burying and preserving trees in an upright position such that in time, they will become fossilized

Creationists certainly do argue for the Flood against the geologic time table of millions of years per flat horizontal slab of sedimentary rock, but referring to the Flood as if that were the only creationist argument about the significance of polystrate tree fossils completely evades the point.
The problem with polystrate trees is that given the enormous time spans assumed by current geology no tree could remain intact while the sediments were depositing, so as to appear whole after the millions of years it supposedly takes for them to deposit. But they do appear whole. Go look at the photos at the links. Their wholeness through what are supposed to be millions of years proves that the assumption of millions of years for sedimentation to occur is false.

[Later: It needs to be said in here that they claim that RAPID DEPOSITION occurred in the case of the polystrate trees. But rapid deposition of more than one layer normally identified as a time period of millions of years simply eliminates those millions of years altogether -- but it certainly fits the Flood, which somehow they manage not to notice. More on this farther down the post].

And yes, the far better explanation IS the worldwide Flood which would have rapidly buried them in a sequence of sediments in very short order, which is the necessary condition for fossilization of a whole upright tree buried in many layers of sediment.

Polystrate tree fossils DISPROVE THE TIME SCALE OF CONVENTIONAL GEOLOGY. This is "just another PRATT" only in the dreams of evolutionists.

I then went to the article on the subject at Talk Origins, probably the most famous website on the creation-evolution debate on the web, and found them being evasive in a more convoluted way (anything to mystify the reader I guess).

I next found a creationist discussing the Talk Origins article, which you can find at his site. Here he's elaborating the point I just made above:

...This argument craftily avoids the issues while claiming to explain them. The issues in question are:

1) How did the tree survive during multiple catastrophes without rotting or being knocked down?

2) How can anyone reasonably believe that a tree could stand for the length of time it takes to build up the additional layers?

3) How can a tree representing a short life span (on evolution’s geological time scale) stand erect through geological layers representing millions and often hundreds of millions of years?

This is not a problem for evolution? Regardless of how you slice it, the tree had to stand erect without rotting, falling or being knocked down for millions of years. The layers of strata have fossils representing different time periods according to the evolution model. It DOES pose a huge problem for evolution. If the tree was buried rapidly as Dawson hints toward and as creationists have said all along, evolution is out the window. If all layers were deposited together, then there is no such thing as millions of years. That would mean that all fossils were laid at the same time.

...If the trees were not covered rapidly, then there is no explanation as to how a tree could have embedded itself into layers of strata that accumulated over millions of years. The article does not attempt to answer any of these questions. Yet it claims (as all evolutionists do) to have the answers.

This writer also makes the intelligent point, which I unfortunately don't let myself believe sufficiently, that you cannot win the argument with an evolutionist. He won't listen to your argument for starters, he will simply bury you in his claims for "evidence" for evolution which he accuses the creationist of failing to appreciate and refusing to learn about, and aggressively drowns out all contrary ideas with as much abusive insulting language as he can muster.

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Here's DWise on this subject a couple years ago at EvC:

But even more telling was what that article said about rates of depositation. While Steve Austin was being paid by the ICR to get a post-graduate degree in geology (so that they could finally claim to have a degreed geologist on staff) he would write creationist articles for them using a pseudonym, "Stuart Nevins". As Stuart Nevins, he wrote an article in which he claimed that geologists believed that strata formed at a completely gradual and constant rate, even though even undergraduate geology students know full well that that is a complete and utter lie -- and Austin was writing that while he was a graduate student. He had to know better and yet he still repeated that lie!

Well, had Austin actually read that article (I learned to not make such an assumption about creationists with the ICR's NASA document moon-dust debacle), he would have learned what he should have learned years ago in his undergraduate classes: geologists can distinguish between layers formed by rapid depositation and layers formed by slow depositation. It's described in Broadhurst's article. Those "polystrate" tree stumps were buried in layers formed by rapid depositation.

Typical snide suspicious accusatory anti-creationist post from someone who hasn't the grace to give the benefit of the doubt on any point whatever, is willing to utterly trash anyone he disagrees with.

TELL US, MR. WISEACRE, HOW geologists distinguish between layers formed by rapid deposition and those formed by slow deposition. The question is HOW. Give us the "science" involved. You can't get away with a flat assertion and call it science. What exactly is it that tells them the difference? And give us all the independent tests that verify it too.

HOWEVER, since you admit that they were buried in rapidly deposited layers, THEN tell us how we are to distinguish the rock strata built up in such a fashion from those built up more slowly. Must be pretty subtle differences, Mr. Wise, of gossamer fine subtlety I suspect, mystifyingly fine just to stand back and look at a stack of strata and wonder which might have been which. Oh the ones with the polystrate trees in them, THOSE were rapidly deposited. Right.

HOWEVER AGAIN, we're talking about MANY LAYERS OF STRATA THAT ARE NORMALLY IDENTIFIED BY GEOLOGISTS AS ENORMOUSLY LONG TIME PERIODS. The "Carboniferous," the "Holocene" are specifically mentioned in connection with polystrate trees. Are these millions-of-years-long ages or not? Did the lower "age" deposit rapidly and then WAIT a few million years for the next "age" to start depositing, while the tree just sat there twiddling its thumbs instead of rotting away?

If you have three or four "time periods" all rapidly deposited around a tree trunk, guess what you have? You no longer have "time periods" at all, YOU HAVE THE WORLDWIDE FLOOD.

RAPID DEPOSITION IMPLIES THE WORLDWIDE FLOOD, and there is NO way they can talk their way out of the evidence of the polystrate trees against an Old Earth except of course by the usual evolutionist "scientific" methods of ridicule, accusation, snide put-downs, self-delusion and lies.

Dealing with some arguments against the Flood

D Wise who posts at EvC forums has his own site on the debate, or really, on what's wrong with creation science. He's amassed quite a collection of arguments against creationist arguments, many against the Flood. This is an improvement over the endless refrain at EvC that the Flood has been discredited many times over although most of the time all they offer is that refrain and leave it to the reader to figure out what evidence they have in mind. So it's helpful to see all the arguments mustered in one place, as D Wise does on this page.

It's a formidable collection and I'm sure I won't be able to address more than a few of them, but I'd like to do whatever I can, and I'll take them in the order he's presented them:

First, I just want to note that he's extremely offended at the statement of belief made by the late Henry Morris of the Institute for Creation Research:

Notice that they [some Christian geologists] suffered severe crises of FAITH, not of GEOLOGY! This should not come unexpected, considering Dr. Henry Morris' teachings about geological evidence, teachings which the ICR lives by:

"No geological difficulties, real or imagined, can be allowed to take precedence over the clear statements and necessary inferences of Scripture." (_Biblical Cosmology_, page 33)

"The data of geology, in our view, should be interpreted in light of Scripture, rather than distorting Scripture to accommodate current geological philosophy." (_Science, Scripture, and the Young Earth_, page 6)

In short, if it don't fit our theology, then either make it fit or ignore it. To that, his son and heir apparent, John Morris, has added (and many at the ICR seem to concur and actively teach): if it refutes the smallest part of our theology, then it disproves our entire theology. No wonder those students suffered so at seeing their faith crumble before them; this is one of the more distasteful and destructive consequences of the "Dark Side of the Farce."

Of course we can't expect an unbeliever to grasp the importance of the credal statement by Henry Morris, but all Christians should certainly embrace it -- it is the Light while the Dark Side is the offense taken against it. The Bible is God's word, not to be subjected to dissent or argument, that's the nonnegotiable foundation. And yes, we either have to find a way to reconcile science with it or simply leave science alone until enough is known to make the reconciliation. There is no other alternative, whether Wise and other unbelievers find this "distasteful and destructive" or not. Our faith and the world will always be at enmity.

Of course this assumes RIGHTLY reconciling science with scripture, although Wise accuses creationists of all manner of dishonesty, and I'm not going to get into that because I haven't followed all the creationist claims. The one time I specifically asked an evolutionist for an example of such dishonesty he described what was really only a confused wrong idea about what evolution teaches, not dishonesty at all. In fact I haven't yet seen an example of what I would have to agree is dishonesty. Not that it doesn't exist, I wouldn't know.

So I generally avoid those issues, but I'll weigh in on the basics. One of the basics is that God's word trumps ALL. Period.

That said, on to the science issues (I've added the headlines):

TIME NEEDED TO FORM GRANITE AND METAMORPHIC ROCK

Also speaking at the 1986 ICC was Harvard paleontology graduate student Kurt Wise (no relation, I'm sure), who surveyed what is known about the speed of formation of the three major kinds of rock. While he found that many kinds of sedimentary rock can form rapidly, igneous rock is another matter. While a small chunk of granite can conceivably form in a short time, many massive bodies are known, such as huge granite batholiths, some of them 10 kilometers in diameter, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Under the most favorable conditions, such formations would take about 100,000 years to cool, instead of the 6000 to 8000 years required by Flood Geology. Metamorphic rock is worse since it must first be formed as sedimentary rock, be heated, and then cool off.

During the question period, geophysicist John Baumgardner pointed out that Wise's figures had been very conservative and that much more time would be needed for rocks to form. He also offered sheer forces as a source of heat and pressure for metamorphic rock, but Wise countered that many metamorphic rocks show no signs of sheer.

[It's "shear" but anyway]. As I've been refining my view of the formation of the Grand Canyon I came to the question of how the granite and schist at the base formed. I've explained the Great Unconformity at the base as brought about by the volcanic eruption that is evidenced by the magma (granite) intrusions in all the illustrations as well as by the uplift of the area of the canyon itself, and logically the granite and metamorphic rocks were also formed by the same eruption.

There's heat and pressure generated by the volcano plus the weight of the strata overhead for that part of the transformation -- the metamorphic rock or in that case the schist -- and if all this occurred while the Flood waters were still on the earth, which I'm arguing was the case, there would have been plenty of water everywhere to exert a cooling effect on the rising magma. The strata would be saturated and oozing water for some time to come, a cooling effect on the order of a gigantic Wet Blanket some two to three miles deep in the Grand Canyon area.

I don't know about New Hampshire but granite batholiths form deep in the earth under the same blanket of strata everywhere -- there are many illustrations on the web that demonstrate this. They spread out horizontally to great distances, apparently kept from pushing upward by some barrier above, such as a few miles' depth of wet sediments. The magma does also push up through the strata in separate fingers that cool to dikes over time, burning through all the layers to the surface where lava overflows and making horizontal "sills" of magma between layers on the way up. (The computer I'm using doesn't have enough power to allow me to post some diagrams but eventually I'll try to put some up).

The batholiths would be relatively thin vertically and in contact with the wet rock above for their entire horizontal extension. The rock immediately above would heat up from contact with the magma, even while exerting a cooling effect in return, but there's plenty of water above that point of contact to keep trickling down through the layers to continue the cooling effect for a great while to come. Eventually the magma would be cooled to granite batholith, which it seems to me would occur appreciably faster under these conditions than the usual calculations take into account -- they assume dry rock -- though no doubt not nearly as fast as lava cools on the surface.

More to come from D Wise's list of arguments.

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Yes, I know geologists are used to encountering water underground. Would they recognize the effect of a few miles' worth of damp sediments on rising magma that occurred over 4000 years ago? And how would they recognize it?

Email correspondent gave me some calculations about how the weight of the strata wouldn't be sufficient to form metamorphic rock within the time span I'm allotting, or to cool the magma I think he also said but I'll have to reread it to be sure. Somebody is going to have to translate the math into descriptive English if they want me to accept any of it. For all I know it doesn't represent the situation I have in mind at all.

The trashed condition of planet Earth and the Christian explanation

GDR has expressed the view that the planet appears to have been designed with us in mind, made ready for us and Dr. A is responding:

Dr A writes: Made ready in what way? The lighting is intermittent, the heating likewise, often with lethal effect, the water mostly undrinkable, the sewage system non-existent, and the whole place is crawling with vermin. This is why we've had to make the whole place over in order for it to be habitable and tolerable.

Really, if you checked into a hotel room with half these defects and the manager assured you that he had made it ready for you, would you not suppose that he had done so under the impression that you had slept with his wife and run over his dog?

GDR answers: Just the same the vast majority of us aren't wanting to check out either. Have you got a better room on offer?

At any rate, the Christian answer is that it isn't finished yet.

I agree that the planet does for the most part look like it was designed with us in mind, since although it may not provide guaranteed protection from harm or death, nor all the comforts we'd prefer, it does provide the basic necessities for sustaining life -- and human beings were designed to make good use of the materials provided as well, another clue to a planned fit.

Still, the answer that it isn't finished yet is the wrong explanation for the discomforts. The Christian answer -- or what ought to be the Christian answer because it's Biblical, although it's not the usual answer -- is that the planet was pretty much trashed by sin and God's judgments against sin, particularly by God's great judgment, the Flood. The hostile environment is all part of the judgment against sin too. And, it's never going to be "finished" or corrected. It will eventually be replaced by a new heavens and a new earth.

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Continuing to read on that thread I see the creationist allowing that the Bible is "subjective" saying that the Koran is also. I have no idea what he thinks he's saying, maybe that belief in the Bible -- or Koran -- is subjective perhaps? That's also misleading. The Bible is mostly history, accounts of many events purported to have actually happened over some four thousand years. Either these accounts are true or they aren't -- there's nothing "subjective" about them. If they are true they are as objective as any statement of fact. (The Koran is not a history, by the way, it's a collection of sayings and instructions).

Then cavediver says the Bible isn't the only source of claims about God, that even his own brother claims to have met the incarnate God. Our creationist Chuck77 obviously has no idea what he's referring to but clearly he's talking about one of the Hindu "avatars," probably the demon-possessed Sai Baba who died recently. These supposed "God-men" are credited with miracles, usually pretty trivial stuff that is within the capabilities of demons (or magicians' simple tricks), manifesting baubles and trinkets out of thin air for instance. Anyone interested in Sai Baba can read a book by Tal Brooke about his own time as a follower of Sai Baba back in the late 60s, titled Avatar of Night. After a period of following this guru and beginning to recognize some very unholy activities at the ashram, Brooke eventually meets a Christian missionary couple and is saved, comes back to the US and writes his book.