Dr. A's Geology Course: Fossils

Today Dr. A has another blog post in his Geology course I can enjoy, which gets into a few of the odd theories about fossils that some used to hold.   

We take it for granted today that mold, cast and mineralized fossils are the relics of organic life. It may surprise the reader to learn that this was once a minority view, verging literally on heresy. Instead, it was widely believed that they were not: the most common view being that the fossils grew in the rocks as the result of a mysterious force known as vis plastica.  

This explanation fitted nicely with the religious views of the time. Many fossils, if interpreted as the relics of once-living organisms, would have to represent species that had gone extinct, since no-one could find their modern equivalents. Now theologians argued that God, being perfect, would not have made any species so badly that it would go extinct; dissenting scientists such as Robert Hooke were obliged to guard themselves carefully against accusations of impiety. . . .

Another view proposed at about the same time was that the fossils were created by God when he created the Earth. This is certainly conceivable (an omnipotent God can do what he wants) . . . .

What most interests me, as a Christian, is how such strange notions of what God must have done took hold in what was presumably a Christian culture, because it is quite obvious NOW that they are anything but BIBLICAL  The natural world SHOULD be understood from a biblical perspective to exclude the appearance of organic creatures in rocks, whether thought to grow there or to have been created there from the beginning.  But I suppose it's possible that some theological idea had taken hold at the time that led to these notions.  The history of all this would be very interesting.

Apparently they also didn't know how to reckon with the Fall as the explanation for the extinction of former "species" (which in most cases aren't Species in the sense of Kinds anyway but varieties of a Kind, not that it matters a lot, just a point of fact), and they also didn't figure the Flood as the cause of all those dead things.  Did NOBODY have that idea?  I'd really like to know why or why not.  Was it a lack of biblical knowledge?  Of course many creationists today don't take the Fall into account either but keep their theorizing confined to some notion of the perfections of God's original Creation -- big mistake -- and most also have really inadequate ideas of what a worldwide Flood would do, so I suppose there's no reason to expect that earlier creationists might have done any better.   Of course I have the benefit of Morris and Whitcomb's book The Genesis Flood.

How many theories were there at the time to explain these things?  Although these odd ideas were apparently strongly defended there must have been others out there being argued.

Such preconceptions no doubt often ruled in science.  Once you get an idea firmly fixed in your head, or a science gets it fixed in their collective head, all else has to bow to it.  We see this ALL the time in each other (hardly ever ourselves of course).  And it is of course what has happened in the case of evolution and the Old Earth -- EVERYTHING must be conformed to those ideas.  Although their proponents most piously quote the Creed about how Science is neutral, how it's all about discovering truth no matter what, that simply is NOT what they are actually doing, as they are determined to rationalize evolution and undermine the slightest claim against it by hook or by crook.  And they don't see that that's what they are doing.

I have often wanted to read a really good history of science but I don't know if one exists.  One thing I would like to see is all the theories about fossils laid out as they entered the scientific lore, who proposed the theory and when and so on, how the reasoning went, how widely it was accepted, how they agreed or disagreed with other theories and so on.

Maybe Dr. A would like to take on this project.  He's been doing a nice job with Geology, and it sounds like he might even be planning to get it published as a textbook.  I think he should, despite disliking his occasional slams against creationism.

Dr. A's Course in Geology: Actualism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speed of deposition of layers according to "science"

Just a typical little exchange at EvC in which the evolutionist puts down the creationist for drawing the natural inference from their idiotic millions-of-years-per-layer-of-rock theory.

[Creationist says:] Which is based on the theory that layers require millions of years to form or that each layer represents a long period of time.

[Evolutionist answers:] What theory's that? The one that you made up?

Geologists know perfectly well that some layers form rapidly. They are extremely adept at telling these layers from those that formed over much longer periods. Not all strata form at the same rate - obviously.

Now the creationist didn't ONLY say they "require millions of years to form" but gave the alternative wording that "each layer represents a long period of time" and that CANNOT be disputed Mr. Evolutionist. That's on all your idiotic Geological Time Table charts.

And of course it's not obvious at all that strata don't all form at the same rate, since we creationists know they were all laid down in the Flood, therefore they were all deposited rapidly. Yes, all of them. The geologists are fooling themselves because they believe in that ridiculous idea that a few feet of rock represent millions of years of time. That's just stupid to begin with, but then they want to say that some of them were laid down rapidly within those millions of years and others were laid down slowly also within millions of years and somehow they can tell the difference. Ha ha.

"Despicable Christian Bigotry"

Yes it's a lost cause though it takes time for that to sink in. That is, the Biblical creationist position out there in "the world" is a lost cause. Unless God decides to intervene.

One of the admins at EvC decided to give a Post of the Month nomination to a creationist there, which got the backing of one member but less than cheers from others.

Including Boss Admin Percy and at least five members who gave him a thumbs-up for the following:

This post has received a POTM nomination from Minnemooseus and a 2nd from NoNukes, but what I see is a message where almost every sentence contains something that is either wrong or misunderstood, much of it about things that Marc has been wrong about in the past and already been corrected multiple times, and the comments about Bryan Rehm are just the same despicable Christian bigotry Marc has been spouting since he joined. Perhaps Moose and NN, who haven't yet participated in this thread, can chime in here and help Marc defend that post.
--Percy

Standard Biblical belief is now "hate speech" all over Christendom, a development that's taken place only within the last few decades, unheard of before, thanks to what I'm coming to believe must be a tireless machinery of stealth and shrewdness operating behind the scenes to bring down the West. A version of "hate speech" is the expression in the post quoted above, "despicable Christian bigotry." This needs to be recognized as an accusation against the same standard Biblical belief that brought civilization to the western world, that was the foundation of the government of England and in some sense America too, despite the anti-Christian beliefs of the biggest names of the Constitutional generation, and many European nations that embraced the Protestant Reformation.

Anybody who SAYS he is a Christian these days MUST be regarded as a Christian, that's the Politically Correct position, and it's "bigotry" to question it, just as it's "hate speech" to apply Biblical principles to sins such as homosexuality.

PC dictates that we can't call people atheists unless they profess to be atheists, although according to our Biblical standards that's what they are if they deny the Biblical revelation, especially its gospel center but also Genesis 1 to 11. Jesus affirmed it, so must we. Or perhaps a better appellation than "atheists" would be "antichrists" -- becuase that is basically the denial that Jesus Christ is Jehovah God come in the flesh (and yes He does say He is, in many many ways apparently obscured to the view of the naysayers). Again, what used to be the pretty standard understanding. Now it's "bigotry."

I would agree that we should use more specific designations for the sake of communication these days even if "atheist" is correct enough within the Christian frame of reference, especially in the context of Biblical creationism. As a practical matter just about all belief systems other than Biblical Christianity either deny or compromise Genesis 1-11, but since there are different flavors of this denial that people take seriously we should recognize them. Reading through that thread you'll find that Marc calls everybody an atheist basically because they reject the Christian frame of reference so they're all up in arms about his failure to know those of whom he is speaking. They ARE atheists within his frame of reference though. For instance Percy makes a big deal out of Marc's notion that as a believer in God to any extent at all he should show an interest in Intelligent Design. Percy says he DOES show an interest, but his interest does turn out to amount to rejecting everything about it. Which is what Marc is calling atheism. Marc simply meant a believer should have a POSITIVE interest in ID, entertain it seriously. Just a communication problem in the end, or a semantic problem, but it apparently can't be solved in that context. (I don't agree with any of this by the way. I think ID is just inadequate creationism and inadequate science.)

Our "fruit" is attacked as unChristian because we say such truths, it's attacked as not in the spirit of Christ. Christ who called the Pharisees "blind guides" and "whited sepulchres" and held Hell up to them as their lot. John the Baptist who called them "vipers." But we, the Christians, are unChristian if we call an atheist an atheist, if we call sin sin, if we connect evolution to atheism (because there are "religious" evolutionists. "Religious," yes, false religion. The only true religion rejects evolution).

And they quote the false Christians and ignore the true ones, letting the false ones stand for "Christianity." (See Dr. A's choice of a racist "Christian" tract that suits his anti-Christian bigotry. Is he unaware of the Christian protests against slavery and racism from the very beginning or has he simply "overlooked" that reality?)

Again, this is all going down in the very Christendom that was built on Biblical revelation. "I was wounded in the house of My friends."

The truth has become "hate speech," the truth has become "bigotry" and "despicable" by the morally superior enemies of Christ. The world is well and truly upside down.

From here it can only go one of two directions. God could intervene with a great revival and turn the tide back, or He could let the God-rejecting world have its own way for a while before the end, its own beliefs, its own religion, its own rules, its world government, its false idea of peace and so on. Let's see how well human rule without God REALLY does.

At least I think that's something like what's most likely going to happen as the end comes near, but then the outpouring of God's wrath, if humanity running things isn't already enough of God's wrath.

Guaranteed to sink it all, never to rise again.

Or He could do both, at least a limited or temporary version of the revival and then abandon ship and let humanity sink it to bloody oblivion (of course we know He'll intervene before that final point. He says so).

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.

Dr. A's course in Geology arrives at Continental Drift

In the Geology Course Dr. A has been presenting at EvC for some months now, he's arrived at a history of the concept of Continental Drift, which will lead next to a discussion of Plate Tectonics as the means by which the continents do their drifting.

He does a very good job on the history of the thinking in the field that led up to and finally accepted the proposition that the continents are in fact moving apart. In my opinion this is maybe the best post he's done in this series, showing with much clarity how science works.

But of course there's always something a mainstream scientific treatise has to say that a creationist must disagree with, and as is often the case, it has to do with timing:

First there is the fact that the continents are moving right now, as can be measured by GPS (the Global Positioning System), by SLR (Satelite Laser Ranging), and by VLBI (Very Long Baseline Inferometry).

Moreover, the continents are moving at the right rate. That is, if we apply geological dating methods to see how long ago the Americas parted from the Old World, if we measure the distance across the Atlantic, and if we measure the rate of drift using GPS, SLR, and VLBI, we find the numbers to be consistent.

If this in itself is not conclusive evidence that the continents have been moving for millions of years, it is at least highly consistent with that proposition.

In this part of his discussion he hasn't actually said (a flaw in his presentation) that "the right rate" is a constant rate, but given that the rate is known to be extremely slow (he doesn't give the figure -- another flaw -- but 2-4 inches per year is I believe the recognized rate), and that the rate as he says is "consistent with" millions of years of continental drift, we can assume that this very very slow rate which is observed to be occurring now is what they have in mind for the rate of travel over all of those entire millions of years. A uniformitarian assumption.

I don't know, I haven't done the calculations and it could be that it isn't really all that consistent with their assumptions, but I'll accept that it is for the moment.

But I did in an earlier post on this subject make the calculations based on the worldwide Flood as the starting point for continental drift. The idea is that the continents split apart as a result of geological disruption of some sort connected with the Flood, some 4300 years ago, probably volcanic eruptions along the lines where the land mass split into separate continents, a disruption violent enough to set the continents adrift at a much greater rate than that at which they are still continuing to move apart. The starting rate I came up with was 1-1/2 miles per year, or 20 feet per day, which slows to the current 2-4 inches per year in the 4300 years since the Flood.

As part of the evidence for Continental Drift, Dr. A presents a diagram of the distribution of certain fossils that only makes sense if the continents were once joined as the diagram shows they most likely were at one time. Since the vast majority of the world's fossils are a record of life forms that lived before the Flood and died in that catastrophe the diagram probably gives at least a rough picture of how those life forms were distributed in the pre-Flood world --assuming the Flood didn't carry them far from their usual habitat anyway. Second thought -- based on the long narrow shape of the fossil distributions -- is that the distribution might say more about the movement of the Flood waters than the original habitat of the flora and fauna. But either situation does require the land mass to have been united in some such pattern as the diagrim illustrates for the distributions to be coherent.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics contradicts the Theory of Evolution

At EvC they are complaining about creationist arguments concerning the Second Law of Thermodynamics, in a thread titled Infuriating Arguments. This gets into solar energy beyond my abilities.

It seems to me, however, that I've seen creationist arguments about the "closed system" that aren't quite what is being presented here but since I haven't followed them I can't really say anything about them.

But discrediting a particular argument about the Second Law doesn't necessarily discredit the whole creationist claim.

It seems to me to be pretty obvious that the universe IS gradually running down or losing energy or however that should be put. You can always point to factors that demonstrate renewal and growth nevertheless because seeds do sprout and grow to maturity, babies do start from a seed and grow up, the sun does give energy to all life on earth and so on and so forth, and yet, overall, the sun is gradually gradually burning out, living things are subject to disease and death, even extinction of whole species, and that's where we can see the Second Law in operation. Things running down, things running out. Slowly, very slowly. The evidence of the Fall.

The argument of course is that the Theory of Evolution contradicts the Second Law: both can't be true. They solve the problem by tacitly assuming or hallucinating an ever-renewing input of life energy that does not exist.

Oh, and if with much abstruse mathematical conjuring you can "prove" that the Second Law does not describe what I'm describing, then we need another law, that's all, because what I'm talking about IS happening and creationists know it is happening, and anybody with half a brain ought to know it's happening and it doesn't matter one iota whether the Second Law says so to your satisfaction or not.

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Later (Message 17) Trixie says:

Last night someone who was arguing for a 6000 year old earth and a global flood supported their position by linking to information on ice ages dated to 11,000 and 14,700 years ago. Another genius tried to cast doubt on carbon-dating by pointing out problems specific to K/Ar dating then linking to a page which exposed the errors in the usual arguments against carbon-dating, so refuting himself.

I don't know what the argument concerning the ice age(s) was but apparently the creationist failed to make clear that he/she denies the dates assigned by old-earth science, which obviously Trixie accepts as gospel truth. We know there was ONE ice age, but there most likely weren't two, and the one can't be older than the Flood. According to something I read somewhere the ice age was most likely the result of heat released in the Flood period, on the same principle as refrigeration (don't ask, haven't researched this in some time), heat caused probably by tectonic movement.

As for the rest of it, it sounds like the creationist did get confused.

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And in message 46 by Son Goku:

Unfortunately the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a particularly difficult concept to set right to an audience of this kind. This is because a lot of presentations make it appear to be about order and disorder (where as this is only a common, but not universal, consequence of it). Unfortunately an "increase in disorder" fits with all sorts of notions such as the decline of the world after the "fall". I've seen many Creationists using it as scientific proof of their world view, i.e. "Look the world really is decaying!"

I don't think we need the Second Law to know the world "really is decaying," that takes just the minimal knowledge of the fact that the sun IS gradually burning out and life DOES die, and the Second Law seems to reflect this fact. If it doesn't it doesn't, nevertheless the world "really is decaying."