More on the Flood, inadequate comparisons with local floods

There have been half a dozen posts at EvC recently, mostly on the Flood, that I've wanted to respond to but haven't been able to get to them, don't know if I will yet. But here's a new one:

Portillo says: Billions of dead things, which we call fossils, laid down by water all over the world.

And Panda answers: Although true: that is far too a general statement to be useful.

The following sentence is also true:

If 1000's of small floods occurred over millions of years, what would you expect to find? Billions of dead things, which we call fossils, laid down by water all over the world. And what do we find? Billions of dead things, which we call fossils, laid down by water all over the world.

Sorry, but this sentence is NOT true. Perhaps Portillo should have been more detailed in his remark but that probably wouldn't faze the sophists at EvC either. But anyway, No, from small floods even in the millions we could NOT get the billions of dead things that we find as fossils in the worldwide strata and we certainly do not get the depth and extent and amazingly consistent appearance of the strata themselves, an appearance that suggests to anyone really thinking that they all had to have been created in ONE event, not a series of events, and not a hodgepodge of little floods over time. This is just evo sophistry run amok.

There needs to be something to separate your claim from the more mundane floods that we see regularly, all over the world.

So, although correct, you statement needs to be more specific to rule out the everyday events.

As I've stated above.

And Dr. A adds his own two cents in the next post:

[Portillo]If a flood occurred, what would you expect to find? Billions of dead things, which we call fossils, laid down by water all over the world.

[Dr. A]Why? Is mass fossilization the usual sequel in the locale of a localized non-magical flood? Please provide evidence that this is the case.

If not, then I would have no such expectation.

Interesting. He's implying a disagreement with Panda's implication that local floods COULD have produced all those fossils. He's right, they could not. Mass fossilization is NOT the usual sequel to local floods, there is no comparison, which just highlights Panda's sophistry.

But he's also committing the error of thinking the Flood of Noah can be compared to local floods. About the only effect that they can be used to demonstrate is the destructiveness of even small floods, which ought to get across that there had to be huge effects from the worldwide Flood. And there are: The entire world has a wrecked and tumble-down appearance, but also the strata and the fossils around the world testify to it to anyone with eyes to see. NOTHING could have created all that BUT the Flood of Noah.

Earlier in the same thread Dr A responds to someone's claim that the Channeled Scablands of Washington show what would happen in the Flood:

[Coyote]One example of this is the evidence left by the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington.

[Dr. A] I think I've expressed my doubts about the Channeled Scablands before, but this is a new thread, so I'll do it again.

The snag is that they were caused by the breaking of a natural dam so that a lot of pent-up water swept laterally across the landscape. Rather than by a lot of rain. Sure, it's a catastrophic flood, but is it a good model for the Flood

And in another post down a bit:

[Coyote] The massive amounts of rain would quickly seek lower levels, and we know from recent disasters how devastating that can be.

[Dr. A] Devastating, yes. Producing channeled scablands, no.

And if I'm following this correctly -- it's not as clear as it might be-- he's right, the Flood would not have created the Channeled Scablands. The Flood wouldn't carve land like that, simply destroy it, at least in the initial stages from the heavy rains -- but the Flood and ONLY the Flood could have deposited the strata -- in a later stage. As current Geology convincingly says about the Scablands, they were created by the breaking of a dam that released a massive amount of water from a standing lake. THAT kind of water flow COULD carve such channels.

However, in a sense it IS still all the Flood's doing, as a Floodist regards that enormous lake, known as Lake Missoula, to be water left after the Flood had drained away, along with other giant lakes such as Lahontan and Bonneville in the same general area. It's also seemed to me that a trigger for the breaking of the dam and the release of the water from not just Missoula but all the lakes could likely have been the tectonic forces that came into play some time after the Flood. They built the Rockies, pushed up the land, could have dumped the lakes as well. Something like that is surely what carved the Grand Canyon and Grand Staircase area. The canyon appears to have been formed first by deep volcanic eruption which raised the land in that area and cracked the upper strata which had been laid down to a depth of two miles or more originally. That admitted the residual standing Flood waters as an enormous cataract pouring in from all sides of the crack. Certainly something like that had to have been the case. The Colorado river even swollen to the max could not have done such a thing in billions of years.

LATER ADDITION:
Then Coyote, who repeats his mantra about the age of the strata and the fossils because he can't think any other way. He regards it all as fact to such an extent that his mind can't even produce a contrary thought.

Anyway, here's his comment:

If a flood occurred, what would you expect to find? Billions of dead things, which we call fossils, laid down by water all over the world. And what do we find? Billions of dead things, which we call fossils, laid down by water all over the world.

One problem with this scenario is that these fossils are spread over a billion or so years; they are far from being the same age.

Sorry, we believe your methods of dating are all wrong, don't believe a word of it. They ARE all the same age, you just have to learn to see with new eyes.

Another problem is that we can see evolution in the fossils. These layers of different ages show a progression of critters from older to younger. This progression had to take a lot of time to develop.

They SEEM to but you are of course ignoring anything that contradicts that perfect scenario and you are INTERPRETING the differences between varieties of the same type to be evolution of that type when all they are is VARIETIES that form from the BUILT-IN gene code for that species. Trilobites for instance obviously had a broad range of variation possible built into their genome. And there is really nothing about them to justify your categorizing those higher in the strata as younger or "more evolved" than those lower, that's just an artifact of your theory / figment of your imagination. I'm sure you can rationalize it but without any real justification, only by noting certain factors while ignoring others. And if you are talking about different species in the sense of Kinds (they're called something different from the other species) being older or younger with respect to each other, again that is PURELY an artifact of your theory, something you can possibly rationalize by making certain comparisons and ignoring others, but in reality they are simply SEPARATE SPECIES with their own species-specific gene code.

Also, floods don't produce fossils.

That is true, the ordinary everyday floods that go on in our time do NOT produce fossils. But the Flood of Noah did, because it moved such prodigious amounts of sediments and living things and deposited them in such thick layers all over the earth it created the ideal conditions for fossilization.

Shellfish fossils are produced in oceans, and sometimes lakes or marshes.

HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT? Meaning what is your evidence. But of course one would expect seashells to come from the ocean so that part's obvious. But the FLOOD WAS AN OCEAN FER PETE'S SAKE. You know, ALL THE WATER ON THE PLANET KINDA SORTA MINGLED TOGETHER IN THAT EVENT. As for "sometimes" lakes or marshes, HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT? Kindly give us the evidence that any lake or marsh since the Flood has produced a fossil. I don't say it's impossible, only that any of the billions of fossils in the strata were NOT produced by a lake or a marsh.

The most a flood could do is move a fossil.

This was not just "A FLOOD," this was THE Flood to end all floods. It did not MOVE fossils, it MADE fossils.

Ignoring the two problems above, what are the odds that the fossils could be ripped up from their original locations and sorted out by time and type in their new locations by chaotic flood waters?

The fossils weren't, but the question applies somewhat to the living things themselves that were buried by the Flood. The TIME element of course does not apply, that's just your usual presupposition that you can't seem to suspend even for a moment's consideration of another point of view, but the sorting by type is mostly a SEEMING sorting by type as I say above. However, the Flood wasn't as chaotic as you seem to think. Ocean water has layers and currents and streams in it and these carry things. We can only suppose that the living things were sorted by some physical factors as well as their original habitat and their having been found all together in one place at the time of the Flood.

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And now Nuggin following Coyote:

If a flood occurred, what would you expect to find? Billions of dead things, which we call fossils, laid down by water all over the world. And what do we find? Billions of dead things, which we call fossils, laid down by water all over the world.

When floods occur, they kill everything that can not get away. They sweep all the dead things downhill to form giant piles of dead things.

As is the case with most here, you are picturing an ordinary flood limited in space and time compared to THE Flood which covered the entire planet and lasted a year. It rained 40 days and 40 nights during which time mudslides would have occurred and living things would have sought higher ground, most likely flocking together in their own groups. When they are swept up in a mudslide they are all together with perhaps the odd misfit as well. They do not form just a bunch of giant piles because there is too much water. Some may stay buried but as the water rises it's going to continue to erode away the land including all the mud with the dead creatures in it and carry them in the water along with the sediments. We know water sorts sediments, and apparently there was enough of it in the Flood that it also sorted everything else and carried it along in its layers and currents and streams until whatever law of physics came into play at whatever was the right phase of the Flood and dropped them on the now-denuded land mass in interestingly separated layers of sediments with their peculiar creaturely contents.

Those dead things are not sorted.

Not in an ordinary little local flood. Think bigger, Nuggywuggy.

If you flood Upstate New York, you are going to get dead people, dogs, cats, horses, cows, deer, coyotes, raccoons, mice, rats, snakes etc. All the things in the environment.

When we look at fossil beds we do not see a vast collection of "everything". We see certain groups of things clustered together and then other groups of things clustered together in different strata.

If "The Flood" were to occur, we'd expect to find elephants AND mammoths AND mastadons AND rabbits AND T-Rex AND zebras all in one big piles
We never find that. Ever.

So, unless "The Flood" included magic sorting water, your claim just doesn't.... carry water.

. Yeah well you've got the usual commonsense notion based on no knowledge whatever or even a reasonable imagination of what a worldwide Flood would do that lasted an entire year, just the usual itty bitty flood you've seen with your own eyes on television. And it has its plausibility as an exercise of fallible human imagination but that's all it has.

Actually your objection to the way things are sorted is just as much an objection to the evolutionist explanation. OK you've got the strata sorted VERTICALLY into time periods so you can get away with explaining the sorting of the fossils in terms of time, but there's nothing in evo theory that accounts for the HORIZONTAL sorting that is also seen in the strata. There is some mixture, sure, but there are also whole beds of one family of creatures from trilobites to dinosaurs, sometimes so ridiculously packed together the idea that they died in anything other than an enormous catastrophe is just ludicrous. Why should that be? Do animals all go to the same place to die? Not in our world. They die willy nilly just as you picture those creatures from New York dying in your tiny little flood.

No, SOMETHING sorted all of it. Seems to me the Flood is the only reasonable explanation. Something to do with the characteristics of a huge body of water, not magic.

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.]

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*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.