Six Views on the Creation/Evolution Debate

John and I don’t seem to have the same numbers for the posts..this is causing confusion.

I see post 336 as my post which begins:

John,

I appreciate you comments about apparent tone.

Do other see this as post 335? or 336?

Thanks.

I see it as 335.

Post 336 is from Steve Bartholomew

Dave Z,

Most interesting. I’ve cleared my browser cache and reloaded and I still see 335 from Truth Unites, 336 from me, 337 and 338 as a two parter from Steve…

Richard and Dave Z

I show post #’s 336 & 337 as being from me

Steve

John,

please comment on posts 254-255 about the discarding of the “6 billion year old diamonds”, and also the statements to the Lucas Heights Scientific Society

Given the results of radiometrically dating a rock, John admits he would not know the age of the rock. He called it a nonsense question, and rightly indicated that he’d need to know more about the rock.

Here’s why: http://creation.com/radio-dating-in-rubble
(main points follow)
In 1993, rocks know to have formed in the lava dome at Mt. St. Helens were dated. The dating method Dr Austin used was the potassium-argon method, which is widely used in geological circles. It is based on the fact that potassium-40 (an isotope or ‘variety’ of the element potassium) spontaneously ‘decays’ into argon-40 (an isotope of the element argon). This process proceeds very slowly at a known rate, having a half-life for potassium-40 of 1.3 billion years. In other words, 1.0 g of potassium-40 would, in 1.3 billion years, theoretically decay to the point that only 0.5 g was left.

Contrary to what is generally believed, it is not just a matter of measuring the amount of potassium-40 and argon-40 in a volcanic rock sample of unknown age, and calculating a date. Unfortunately, before that can be done, we need to know the history of the rock. For example, we need to know how much ‘daughter’ was present in the rock when it formed. In most situations we don’t know since we didn’t measure it, so we need to make an assumption—a guess. It is routinely assumed that there was no argon initially. We also need to know whether potassium-40 or argon-40 have leaked into, or out of, the rock since it formed. Again, we do not know, so we need to make an assumption. It is routinely assumed that no leakage occurred. It is only after we have made these assumptions that we can calculate an ‘age’ for the rock. And when this is done, the ‘age’ of most rocks calculated in this way is usually very great, often millions of years. The Mount St Helens lava dome gives us the opportunity to check these assumptions, because we know it formed just a handful of years ago, between 1980 and 1986. The calculated age was between 340,000 and 2.8 million years old.

OEs claimed this is invalid because “you can’t date young rocks with K-Ar dating”. Here’s an article explaining why this is incorrect. http://creation.com/radio-dating-in-rubble-article-ignores-data

Since it’s assumed that the Ar results from decay of the K and that occurs slowly, a young rock should not have enough Ar to measure. However, this assumption was shown to be false. There was indeed measurable Ar. So due to a faulty initial assumption K-Ar yields a vastly older age than is correct.

This is NOT an isolated event. See http://creation.com/excess-argon-within-mineral-concentrates-from-the-new-dacite-lava-dome-at-mount-st-helens-volcano for additional instances, including work done by Dalrymple himself, in which he claimed “excess argon” to explain the wrong age.

Conclusion: a technique that fails for rocks of known age is not reliable for rocks of unknown age

This has been…

Richard,

Re: #326

Thus decidedly supernatural events such as creation and the flood are completely beyond the reach of ’science’.

Richard, this hasn’t stopped you or any YEC organization from trying to provide scientific evidence for a young earth and global flood. An inconsistency like that isn’t good for your argument.

The creation and flood would leave behind evidence, just as a resurrected person would leave behind footprints and other signs that can be assessed.

The global flood would have been a real flood, regardless of where the water came from and its supernatural cause. It would have left its mark on the face of the earth in a manner consistent with such phenomena. We don’t see what we would expect to see if a global flood really happened.

The beginning of the universe, regardless of what caused it, is off limits to science simply because it precedes the existence of matter. This isn’t news to the scientific community. The theologian and philosopher must take over at this point.

But the moment matter is created and begins to interact with itself, science has a foothold to begin working from. Miracles are untestable but they don’t occur in a vacuum. They leave evidence behind that can be used to evaluate them.

Yet you appear to ignore this limitation on ’science’ and instead accept its conclusions, then you must conclude that the scriptural account does not mean what it appears to say, so the whole ANE cultural argument is used.

Did you know you use science to inform your view of scripture? You interpret any verse on the placement and movement of the sun and earth phenomenologically. Not because you understand scripture better than Luther, Calvin, and the Catholic Church. No, you understand the science of astronomy. Because of that, you know the verses cannot be understood literally, unlike the church prior to Copernicus and Galileo. Why did the church change? Why do we know all those great interpreters of scripture were wrong?

Science. And you accept it.

Be careful what you accuse me of doing. You may be guilty of it too.

John, regarding the flood account you said:

“and we must take into account that the Biblical text appears as if it were written from the perspective of a person on the ground in the area where the things describe were happening”

How so? The author of Genesis was not there when God flooded the earth….he didn’t yet exist on the earth…..nor was he there at creation….nor were the prophets who prophesied about future events present when those events occurred. God gave the writers of many events the information He wanted them to record.

“The water’s completely inundated the earth so that even ALL THE HIGH MOUNTAINS under the sky were COVERED. The waters rose more than twenty feet above the mountains” and of course, God’s stated objective was to “wipe mankind, whom I’ve created from the face of the earth–everthing from humankind to animals…..for I regret that I have made them”

How could a person ” on the ground near where these things happened” have written this account? Pure illogic.

I’m sure you’ve read this, and I realize that Richard has enumerated these details in a previous post. Frankly, it seems incredibly defiant and arrogant before God to contend that these things didn’t actually happen as they are so clearly stated….with very specific timing included at many points in the narrative. Even if this event doesn’t explain all of the fossils, how can you deny a world-wide flood when the mountains were covered and all people and land animals outside of those on the ark were killed?…..and then of course, there was God’s promise never to flood the entire earth again. A promise which He has kept. Why can you believe that Jesus rose from the dead, but not believe that God produced a world-wide flood? I don’t get it.

Richard,

Re: Post #331

While we certainly don’t know everything (far from it!) no one need fear that the “waters above” somehow destroy the possibility that scripture is actually correct.

Or we could just look at the ANE cosmology and notice that a lot of people thought there really was water above the firmament. Considering that at least the Old Testament was written in the Ancient Neat East by Ancient Near Eastern people, I don’t see why this discussion is going on any further.

I’ve said it before, but any hermeneutic that tries to find modern science in ancient scripture, especially when better alternatives are available, is doing eisegesis with the text. That’s unacceptable.

Steve,

Re: Post #338

Proponents of YEC include hundreds, undoubtedly thousands, of individuals with credentials similar to those of John Baumgartner and Dr. Carson. For you to claim that such worthy people “practice junk science and completely lack credibility” is breathtakingly arrogant … and coming from someone who professes to be a Christian, virtually incomprehensible.

Someone may be an expert in one field and a novice or layman in another. Take Richard Dawkins for example: a great zoologist but a horrible philosopher.

The fact that this great individual is a YEC doesn’t mean much. He’s also a Seventh Day Adventist Christian, so are we really surprised by this? John pointed out that a precommitment like this can cloud how someone looks at the evidence.

Can you show me a YEC that isn’t a Christian and is also an expert with a terminal degree in biology, cosmology, or geology?

Greg wrote:

We don’t see what we would expect to see if a global flood really happened.

Oh really…fossils and sea shells on the top of all the mountains…thousand of meters of sedimentary deposits….billions of creatures buried in fossil graveyards showing clear signs of transportation and deposition in water

200+ cultures with flood “legends”.

No, there’s no evidence at all.

Not to mention a account inspired by the Holy Spirit and clearly written to communicate what happened.

We see what we choose to see.

Susan,

Re: Post #358

I don’t know how long you’ve been following this discussion, and I can’t speak for John, but if you would like to hear my take on the flood, a few of my posts throughout this discussion touch on it.

Richard,

Re: Post #360

Oh really…fossils and sea shells on the top of all the mountains…thousand of meters of sedimentary deposits….billions of creatures buried in fossil graveyards showing clear signs of transportation and deposition in water.

Shells on mountains are easily explained by uplift of the land. Although this process is slow, it is observed happening today, and it accounts not only for the seashells on mountains but also for the other geological and paleontological features of those mountains. The sea once did cover the areas where the fossils are found, but they were not mountains at the time; they were shallow seas.

A global flood cannot explain the presence of marine shells on mountains for the following reasons:
-Floods erode mountains and deposit their sediments in valleys.
-In many cases, the fossils are in the same positions as they grow in life, not scattered as if they were redeposited by a flood. This was noted as early as the sixteenth century by Leonardo da Vinci.
-Other evidence, such as fossilized tracks and burrows of marine organisms, show that the region was once under the sea. Seashells are not found in sediments that were not formerly covered by sea.

200+ cultures with flood “legends”.

Flood myths are widespread, but they are not all the same myth. They differ in many important aspects, including:

-Reasons for the flood. (Most do not give a reason.)
-Who survived. (Almost none have only a family of eight surviving.)
-What they took with them. (Very few saved samples of all life.)
-How they survived. (In about half the myths, people escaped to high ground; some flood myths have no survivors.)
-What they did afterwards. (Few feature any kind of sacrifice after the flood.)

If the world’s flood myths arose from a common source, then we would expect evidence of common descent. An analysis of their similarities and differences should show either a branching tree such as the evolutionary tree of life, or, if the original biblical myth was preserved unchanged, the differences should be greater the further one gets from Babylon. Neither pattern matches the evidence. Flood myths are best explained by repeated independent origins with some local spread and some spread by missionaries. The biblical flood myth in particular has close parallels only to other myths from the same region, with which it probably shares a common source, and to versions spread to other cultures by missionaries.

Flood myths are likely common because floods are common; the commonness of the myth in no way implies a global flood.

I liked this argument when I was a YEC…until I read the accounts. Have you looked at them? Or do you just cite a large number and hope details aren’t asked for?

…clearly written to communicate what happened…

*Sigh*

P.S. – There was more to post #357 than just this.

And it seems my post #322, which has a list of resources in it and other stuff, has just been approved by the moderator!

Good night!

Greg wrote:

the Old Testament was written in the Ancient Neat East by Ancient Near Eastern people

This ignores the fact of inspiration. You’ve completely failed to make the case that God could not communicate historically accurate information to the audience of Genesis. Nor is it logically possible to make such a case. To someone who believes what scripture says, God created man in his image, and God communicates meaningful with man…

“Come now, let us reason together,” says the LORD.

The ANE argument is used only because it is believed that science has *proven* the plain reading of the bible can’t be true, so we must find a way to explain away that plain reading. I’ve posted several quotes from bible scholars that admit that scripture teaches a 6 day creation and global flood, even though those scholars choose to not believe it. Pattle Pun was honest…he referenced the “hermeneutical considerations suggested by science”. It could hardly be clearer.

Greg wrote:

A global flood cannot explain the presence of marine shells on mountains for the following reasons:
-Floods erode mountains and deposit their sediments in valleys.
-In many cases, the fossils are in the same positions as they grow in life, not scattered as if they were redeposited by a flood. This was noted as early as the sixteenth century by Leonardo da Vinci.
-Other evidence, such as fossilized tracks and burrows of marine organisms, show that the region was once under the sea. Seashells are not found in sediments that were not formerly covered by sea.

You really need to read some of the work being done on the details of the flood. The tectonic activity was enormous, including the raising up of mountains through flood sediments. Try looking into the catastrophic plate tectonics model by Baumgartner for example.

Your understanding of what the flood might do is simplistic and incorrect. Again, our understanding is incomplete, but each objection you’ve listed is addressed.

Local flood adherents. In post 247, I listed several of the statements of scripture that show the flood was global.

Please explain how an ANE worldview precluded proper understanding of each one of these concepts.

Is an ANE also incapable of understand days, months, and cubits?

Or did the local flood last as long as stated and to the depths stated? — if so, then explain how the laws of physics were changed to accomodate this.

To those interested in info about the flood, there are many articles available here;
http://creation.com/noahs-flood-questions-and-answers

re post 365: God did communicate accurately to the ANE Hebrews. He just didn’t communicate what you think He did.

What you call the “plain” or “straightforward” reading of scripture is more accurately described as the “naive” reading of scripture. A reading of scripture that ignores one’s own cultural context, ignores the language and cultural context of the people who did the writing, and ignores what God was doing when he did communicate.

BTW, I did not say that I wouldn’t know the date of the rock. However, Richard is purposely posing a trick question because he knows that the date he is quoting comes from a sample that also produced a different date. There is an explanation for the dates, but we’ve been over that.

Regards,
#John

Greg wrote:

Can you show me a YEC that isn’t a Christian and is also an expert with a terminal degree in biology, cosmology, or geology?

Notice two things here.

1. This very question implies that there would be more credibility to the beliefs of a YEC scientist if they were NOT A CHRISTIAN.

2. Imagine someone who realized that the physical evidence is compatible with a young earth who then did not realize what this implies about the truth of scripture…

3. Peter prophesied that skeptics would deliberately forget the facts of creation and the flood, so why should we expect a non-believer to recognize these facts? (2 Pet 3, post 167)

John wrote:

What you call the “plain” or “straightforward” reading of scripture is more accurately described as the “naive” reading of scripture. A reading of scripture that ignores one’s own cultural context, ignores the language and cultural context of the people who did the writing, and ignores what God was doing when he did communicate.

We’ve been over this. You’ve not proven that God couldn’t communicate historically accurate information to His audience. As documented, the desire for the “naive” reading of scripture to be inaccurate is because of the “naive” belief in truths proven by science.

Greg wrote

Richard, this hasn’t stopped you or any YEC organization from trying to provide scientific evidence for a young earth and global flood. An inconsistency like that isn’t good for your argument.

I state this one last time. YECs do NOT claim that science proves a YEC understanding, simply that the facts of science are consistent with it. There is no inconsistency at all in investigating what science IS capable of showing us.

As an example of what can happen when an intelligent person does adhere to naturalism:

“I will not accept that philosophically, because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore, I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation arising to evolution.” (George Wald [Nobel Prize winner], “Biochemical Science: An Inquiry Into Life”)

Now to the light time travel problem. (post 1 of 5) The statement of the problem is that light from distant galaxies could not reach the earth in only 6000 years, yet we can see these galaxies.

First you need to know that there is an equivalent problem for the big bang. The extreme uniformity of the Cosmic Microwave Background can only be explained if all regions of the had a chance to exchange radiation and settle to the same temperature. There are various proposed solutions, with “inflation” being the most popular, but not all agree. Inflation proposes that the early universe allowed time for the required exchange of radiation, then underwent an “inflation” period of extremely rapid expansion (greater than the speed of light), then this rapid expansion stops (inflation ends). There are multiple inflation models, and no known mechanism to either start or stop it.

Details here:http://creation.com/light-travel-time-a-problem-for-the-big-bang

So the dominant OE cosmology (Big Bang) and YEC cosmologies both have light time travel problems, thus the existence of such a problem can’t be used to choose one model over the other. [I’m unaware of any physical cosmologies promoted by Christians that do not have this type of problem. Someone please educate me if they know of one.] Further, there are multiple big bang models, and none is final and proven. In fact, there is a growing set of secular scientists that consider the big bang to have many difficult problems. An open letter to the scientific community (with many scientists are researches as signatories) was published in New Scientist in 2004 (http://www.cosmologystatement.org/) which begins

The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed– inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory.

The reason for mentioning all of this is to level the playing field. Nobody has a fully working model for physical cosmology (despite what Hugh Ross would have you believe). So the lack of one is certainly not the “death knell for YEC” trumpeted by John. It’s not even a discriminator when comparing YEC to the big bang.

(cont.)

[continued] light time travel problem 2 of 5

Now to potential solutions. As usual John asserts (I added the numbers):

The failed response of the YECs to the phenomena of light include:
1-the speed of light has changed since the start of the universe
2-time flows at different rates in different parts of the universe, or from different points of view, or is affected by gravity
3-local time is different from universal time
4-red shift effect

[Actually there are some he missed, such as alternate geometries that effect the “path” of light, let’s number that item 5.]

If by ‘failed response’ John means unproven, then the big bang is in exactly the same boat as YEC. If by ‘failed response’ John means disproved, then he’s simply wrong.

Ironically the article referenced above (http://creation.com/light-travel-time-a-problem-for-the-big-bang) documents that big bangers have considered items 1, 2, and 5 along with several other ideas in attempting to address their light time travel problem! Yet, I’ve seen YEC treated as morons for even some of these possibilities.

It’s important to know that time is not absolute. Relativity predicts that gravity (and velocity) will modify the rate of time, and these effects has been experimentally verified. Of interest to this discussion is that time runs more slowly in a higher gravity field. The big bang and YEC cosmologies are built on top of general relativity.

You can see many articles discussing this issue by searching ‘light time travel’ at
http://creation.com/search

I’ll provide some more details next.
(cont.)

[continued] light time travel problem (3 of 5)

References:
This article by Dr. Hartnett (more about him later) describes several YEC models, including one of his own, along with critiques.
http://creation.com/a-new-cosmology-solution-to-the-starlight-travel-time-problem

No YEC claims any of these models is final and proven. As an example, probably the most well known YEC model is Russ Humphrey’s “White Hole” cosmology. Since it was first published in 1994 (D.R. Humphreys, “Progress Toward a Young-earth Relativistic Cosmology,” Proceedings 3rd ICC, Pittsburgh, 1994, pp. 267-286.) and the popular level book “Starlight and Time: Solving the Puzzle of Distant Starlight in a Young Universe”, there have been several years of criticisms and responses occurred and in some cases the model was refined. It was certainly not refuted. Much of this interchange is available here:
http://www.trueorigin.org/ca_rh_03.asp

Because YEC scientists have been so denigrated in this blog, I’ll list part of Dr. Humphreys bio. Full bio at http://creation.com/d-russell-humphreys-cv

Dr Humphreys was born on 2 February 1942 in Wyandotte, Michigan, U.S.A., and was raised in a scientifically aware but non–Christian household. Not surprisingly, Russell himself always had a love for science, and in 1959, he was one of the 40 winners of the Westinghouse National Science Talent Search.

He received a B.S. degree in physics at Duke University, 1959–1963. After this, he moved to Louisiana State University (LSU) to study postgraduate physics. In 1969, while doing his dissertation research for LSU in the mountains of Colorado, he committed his life to Christ. In 1972, he was awarded a Ph.D. in physics, on cosmic rays and ultrahigh energy nucleon–nucleon interactions, by which time he was a fully convinced creationist due to both the biblical and scientific evidence. For the next 6 years he worked in the High Voltage Laboratory of General Electric Company, designing and inventing equipment and researching high–voltage phenomena. While there, he received a U.S. patent and one of Industrial Research Magazine’s IR–100 awards.

(cont.)

Re post 259. I do believe that what is described in Genesis occurred the way it is described. I just don’t believe that what it is describing and what YECs are describing are the same thing. In fact, I think that what the YECs are describing is substantially different. Other than the fact that YEC flood geology cannot account for sedimentary rock, or metamorphic rock, the extent of the flood is not my bag of hammers in this thread. As I noted by my citation of the site http://www.kjvbible.org/, it is possible to believe in an ancient earth (as I do) and also a global Noahic flood. One can believe in such a flood without believing that it created all the sedimentary rock that we observe (which I believe was created in the millions of years prior to the Noahic flood).

Because of the YECs commitment to a particular view, which is based on an unnecessarily restrictive and exclusive intepretation of scripture, I do not expect by my replies to convince them (I’ve made this point in previous posts as well).

However, I do believe that St. Augustine was correct in what he wrote 1600 years ago regarding the harmful effects of their beliefs. So I write for the benefit of those who are unbelievers and read this thread, for the OEs who have not deeply considered why they are OEs, to encourage other OEs in their beliefs, and to assist those YECs who are now examining what they were taught.

The YEC interpretation of Genesis is not the only valid and viable interpretation held by, and open to, evangelical bible believing inerrantists. Indeed, it is more likely that the Bible does not teach a specific age of the earth–but I can leave a young earth interpretive option on the table (as an interpretive option).

Science, however, is another matter. I believe that God gave us powers and faculties of observation and perception, and of reasoning. If we apply those faculties to the aspects of the physical universe that relate to its age, in the same way that we apply them to other aspects of the physical universe, we arrive at an ancient earth.

re the recent post on light and “there is an equivalent problem for the big bang”. The problem is not equivalent, but I’ll get to that (if others are interested) after I respond to polystrate trees.

Regards,
#John

to try and keep my posts on the light time travel problem in order, I’ll have to wait until post 3 is moderated…

Greg Re: #360

Your adamant opposition to YEC has corrupted your reason, Greg.
In #360 you make the following 2 statements:

“Someone may be an expert in one field and a novice or layman in another.”
“The fact that this great individual is a YEC doesn’t mean much.”

You are referring here to the individual that I referenced in a previous post, Dr. Benjamin Carson. The implication of your statements is that the fact that Dr. Carson is a YEC doesn’t mean much because his field of expertise doesn’t qualify him to make judgments on the subject of creation and evolution.

As the article I posted indicates, Dr. Carson is one of the world’s foremost pediatric neurosurgeons, and is professor and chief of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University Medical School. Furthermore, his achievements have so far earned him 51 honorary doctorates, including from Yale and Columbia Universities.

Two of the most important fields of study for the medical profession are biology and chemistry. These disciplines are also of primary importance in the creation/evolution debate. Thus, in direct opposition to your implication, Dr. Carson’s background and profession UNIQUELY qualify him to make judments about creation and evolution.

Therefore, for you to state that “The fact that this great individual is a YEC doesn’t mean much” is completely illogical.

Take off your blinders, Greg.

John wrote (again)

Other than the fact that YEC flood geology cannot account for sedimentary rock, or metamorphic rock, …

John, being a lawyer, you should know how difficult it is to prove a negative absolute, but you keep asserting them:-)

For John to justify his above statement, he would have to know all possible mechanisms involved in the flood and have proven that they are incapable of producing sedimentary rock. The fact is that geologists have shown how layered sedimentary rock can form from sediment deposited by *moving* water for a long time.

Furthermore, the Derek Ager quote (posts 266 and 335?) shows that non-YEC geologists have had to admit that sedimentary rocks can be deposited very rapidly. They’ve also admitted that they will conclude that long periods of no deposition occurred, *despite* the uniform appearance of the deposit itself.

Many fossil bearing sedimentary rocks are understood by all geologists as having been rapidly deposited in moving water. Given all of this, to state that the flood could not form sedimentary rocks is ludicrous.

Metamorphic rocks are well accounted for within flood geology. Don’t forget that flood geology was the common view prior to the introduction of uniformitarianism, and that many geologists (neo-catastrophists, such as Ager) now interpret many deposits which previously had been believed to occur slowly, as having been rapidly deposited. They simply believe that all of these “episodic events” must have occurred separated by large amount of time.

If flood really happened as described, then all peoples on the earth today are descended from Noah’s family. Given that scenario, we’d expect that the knowledge of what happened would be passed down through generations. Further we’d expect that some elements of the history would become corrupted during transmission, but that many important elements would remain visible within these accounts. Further, we’d expect to find these accounts in virtually all cultures. This is precisely what is found.

http://www.conservapedia.com/Great_flood

Critics of the global flood suggest that the flood accounts are unrelated accounts of local floods, or stories influenced by the arrival of missionaries.

However, Nozomi Osanai responds that “…the detailed nature of the widely spread statements has common elements to the Bible. In fact, even people who live far from the sea or in mountainous areas have flood traditions which are similar to the Genesis account.” http://creation.com/gilgamesh-epic-v-genesis-thesis-by-nozomi-oaanai-chapter-7-a-comparison-from-secular-historical-records

And Murray Adamthwaite responds regarding the missionary influence, “…that explanation fails since in many cases secular anthropologists gathered the stories before missionaries reached these tribes with the Gospel. In other cases missionaries have related how they indeed told the story of Noah, only to find that the tribal folk already had a similar tale in their own legends.”
http://creation.com/church-leader-aghast-at-belief-in-a-worldwide-flood

“Polystrate fossils” and Derek Ager and sedimentation during floods

Polystrate does not appear to be a term used by geologists and fossil hunters, but is a creationist neologism created from “poly” as a root morpheme meaning “many” combined with “strata” meaning “layers”. YECs use it to refer to a single fossil that projects vertically through several layers of sedimentary rock. Trees are an easy example because they are linear and one can find a vertically positioned tree, with the root bed also visible, that extends through several layers of stone until buried by yet more layers.

Such fossil trees provide a great example of the junk science that YECs practice.

YECs start with their answer—God said the world is 6,000 years old—and then work backwards. 6,000 years is too little time for sedimentary rock to be formed by the natural processes that we do observe, so it must have been formed quickly. To form thousands of feet of rock quickly, a massive dumping of sediment is needed. The only available event is the Noahic flood. So that must have been it. We see trees sticking up through rock that postdates the tree. Aha. The tree must have been growing there and then a massive amount of sediment was deposited around and over it, and then that sediment lithified and turned to rock.

Except that, well, the flood cannot form the rock they need (more below), bu the YECs have to believe anyway. Their starting point, search, and conclusion are all ideologically driven and use faulty methodology: the definition of junk science.

Geologists, on the other hand, have investigated sediment deposition and lithification both in the lab and in the field. Using the kind of observation making that is used in all the other sciences, they can do experiments using water and solids in the lab. In the field they take regular measurements of sediment deposition at lakes and river deltas, etc. The Nile has records of flooding dating back thousands of years and they can be matched up against core samples in the delta. Geologists have gone to flood sites around the world, and to sites of volcanic eruptions. U.S. volcanoes are particularly well studied.

So geologists have a thorough knowledge of how a variety of sediments are deposited under a variety of conditions. The same goes for the study of lithification of sediments. And they publish their work, which is peer reviewed. Their work is ideology independent because they are dealing with the hard sciences and because of the peer review process. Don’t like they way did their sampling or their experiment or their methodology? Redo the work yourself and publish a challenge. Are you a Moslem, a Buddhist, a scientologist, a YEC, an atheist, a believer in alien abduction? Doesn’t matter, collect the rocks, do your analysis publish your results. The ideology gets exposed and stripped away. It’s about who has the best explanation of the phenomena, not whether one believes in which…

[cont. from post 378]

It’s about who has the best explanation of the phenomena, not whether one believes in which god (or doesn’t).

Alternations of slow and quick depositions are regularly observed in river floodplain environments where the fossilized trees are found. Biologists and other scientists can and do observe that trees remain upright during multiple river floods over lengthy periods of time. Some trees are tolerant of immersion in water and don’t die (bald cypress, mangrove) and others are rot resistent (cedar). Forests flooded by dams or earthquakes survive underwater, with many or most of the trees remaining upright. These are observable facts, facts which Derek Ager knows, and facts that are explainable, which is why he continues to be an old earther.

The problem for YEC flood geology is that a single flood event produces only a single sedimentary deposit one that is recognizably connected to that flood event. A flood, even of the size and kind proposed by YECs, would not deposit hundreds of distinguishable and unrelated layers of sediment that is then turned into rock in that same year, or in the 4.5 thousand years since then.

What actually happens during floods? It’s actually a matter studied by geologists and oceanologists, as exemplified by the abstract quoted below (note that the three floods produced only three distinct sedimentary deposits:

Abstract
Flooding by northern California’s Eel River in January 1995, March 1995 and January 1997 produced sedimentologically and geochemically distinct deposits on the adjacent continental shelf. X-radiographs collected during an extensive suite of box coring cruises revealed that these layers extended along-shelf for up to 50 km, were in water depths of 50–110 m and were up to 8 cm thick. The areal distribution of the three flood layers was remarkably similar, with <8 km separating their respective centers of mass. Hourly measurements of river discharge made by the US Geological Survey were coupled with an empirically determined rating curve to predict the mass of fine-grained (<63 μm) suspended sediment that entered the ocean during each flood. Comparison of these estimates to independent estimates of flood layer mass suggests that <25% of the fine-grained sediment delivered to the ocean resides in the flood layers. The remaining flood sediment is temporarily sequestered within sand deposits of the inner shelf or transported along- and off-shelf by buoyant plumes and density-driven fluid-mud flows. The Eel River dispersal system therefore has two seemingly contradictory attributes: widespread dispersal of flood sediment (most likely off shelf), but a consistent locus of deposition of flood layers on the shelf. Explanations for this paradox involve the small size of the drainage basin and the extreme suspended-sediment concentrations during floods. The former results

[cont.]

re post 377: “to state that the flood could not form sedimentary rocks is ludicrous.” Actually, it’s true. But first I’ll finish the quote of the abstract, which I produced in full so that I would not look like I was quote mining.

[cont. of abstract]

The former results in a rapid throughput of sediment in the basin, whereby sediment is delivered to the ocean during storms, when energy levels are high (leading to widespread dispersal), but repeatable (leading to a consistent locus of deposition). In addition, high suspended-sediment concentrations result in fluid muds that may be a necessary condition for the formation of the flood deposits. Other West Coast river systems (e.g., Columbia, Russian) either have longer sediment throughput times or lower riverine suspended-sediment concentrations, thereby resulting in a greater fraction of sediment deposited on the shelf, but not as thick, recognizable layers (i.e. flood deposits).

R. A. Wheatcroft, and J. C. Borgeldb, “Oceanic flood deposits on the northern California shelf: large-scale distribution and small-scale physical properties”, Continental Shelf Research, Volume 20, Issue 16, 1 December 2000, Pages 2163-2190. Wheatcroft is at the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, and Borgeldb is at the Department of Oceanography, Humboldt State University, Arcata.

We see then that Ager is not being ideologically driven to his conclusions. Ager is basing his reasoning on actual observations of sedimentation. From the science of sedimentation, as investigated not only by geologists but also oceanologists, etc., he understands how sediments are deposited. It is for that reason that he dismisses theories based soley on mathematics (depth of coal divided by a constant rate of deposition (in units of length per units of time) to give a time. He also knows from field observations and papers of other researchers that localized flood events and droughts cause significant variation in the rate of deposition of sediments. Therefore he rejects any mere mathematical exercise that posits a single consistent rate of deposition. That is all he is doing.

So, in relation to flood geology, a flood does not and could not (because of the known behaviour of fluids and solids in suspension and the deposition of those solids, not just from the article I cited) produce hundreds of unrelated layers of sediment. Sediment does not rapidly turn into / lithify into sedimentary rock—-certainly not in one year during which the sediments lithify and then are alleged crumpled into mountains and then weathered, as YECs believe.

Furthermore, the fossilized trees are found on top of sedimentary rocks and also have fossilized roots. So, let’s see: layers of sedimentary rock. Layer of sedimentary rock with fossilized roots. Tree projecting through layers of sedimentary rock. Layers of sedimentary rock on top of tree. Evidence of folding and weathering . . .

Regards,
#John

John wrote two entire posts supposedly answering the simple issue that I raised in quoting Derek Ager, and yet he never even mentioned the issue. Let me repeat from my post 266, and then I’ll say no more. Any observers of this discussion can make up their own minds.

Ager says “we cannot escape the conclusion that sedimentation was at times very rapid indeed and at other times there were long breaks in sedimentation, though it looks both uniform and continuous” The formation looks like it was uniformly and continuously deposited, but where the polystrate trees are it MUST have been “very rapid indeed”. A YEC geologist would go with the observation and say since it looks uniform and continuous, it really is and the entire deposit occurred rapidly.

So Ager does not believe what his eyes tell him….he believes that DESPITE THE EVIDENCE the deposition was neither uniform, nor continuous. This is required by his OE views.

The YEC has no problem accepting the physical evidence as rapid, uniform, continuous deposition.

Let me explain a big reason why OEs believe flood deposits “can’t” be from the flood. They believe that mud and clay can only accumulate in still water, and only very slowly. E.g., Alan Haywood:

‘Shale is made of compacted clay. As most readers will have noticed, clay consists of exceedingly fine particles which take a long time to settle in water. Turbulence keeps them in suspension and consequently clay will only settle in calm water.’

Given these statements (and many similar ones) one can understand where John and other OEs are coming from. However, my constant theme in this blog is “What has science *really proven*”. Is it a *fact* that these deposits must have formed slowly?

Recent work published in Science proves otherwise. http://www.physorg.com/news116777974.html

Geologists have long thought muds will only settle when waters are quiet, but new research by Indiana University Bloomington and Massachusetts Institute of Technology geologists shows muds will accumulate even when currents move swiftly. Their findings appear in this week’s Science.

Note how extensive mudstone are, and that they believe current reconstructions are wrong:

“Mudstones make up two-thirds of the sedimentary geological record,” said IU Bloomington geologist Juergen Schieber, who led the study. “One thing we are very certain of is that our findings will influence how geologists and paleontologists reconstruct Earth’s past.”

Notice how bias effects thinking:

Previously geologists had thought that constant, rapid water flow prevented mud’s constituents — silts and clays — from coalescing and gathering at the bottoms of rivers, lakes and oceans. This has led to a bias, Schieber explains, that wherever mudstones are encountered in the sedimentary rock record, they are generally interpreted as quiet water deposits.

Now here’s what always amazes me. The truth of this *new* understanding has always been obvious:

“But we suspected this did not have to be the case,” Schieber said. “All you have to do is look around. After the creek on our university’s campus floods, you can see ripples on the sidewalks once the waters have subsided. Closely examined, these ripples consist of mud. Sedimentary geologists have assumed up until now that only sand can form ripples and that mud particles are too small and settle too slowly to do the same thing. We just needed to demonstrate it that it can actually happen under controlled conditions.”

Note that what was firmly believed to be true and used to discredit YECs (mudstones can only form very slowly) was completely false. I’ve seen this happen repeated over my 33 years of following these issues, so you might understand my reluctance to just accept the current consensus theory and insist it MUST BE TRUE.

This is not a surprise for YEC geologists: http://creation.com/mud-experiments-overturn-long-held-geological-beliefs

Richard: “Ignoring the limitations of ’science’ is dangerously close to scientism. Be very cautious….”

Let me explain why I so heartily agree with Richard’s exhortation for caution, particularly for those “theistic evolutionists”.

There has been conclusive linkage to how the logical conclusions and the presuppositions of Darwinian evolution science influenced Adolf Hitler. (And not just Hitler; after all, look at all the other anti-Christians who cite neo-Darwinian evolution as their paradigm, even claiming that it’s a fact.)

From here:

“Hitler’s hostility to Christianity reached new heights, or depths, during the war. It was a frequent theme of his mealtime monologues. After the war was over and victory assured, he said in 1942, the Concordat he had signed with the Catholic Church in 1933 would be formally abrogated and the Church would be dealt with like any other non-Nazi voluntary association. The Third Reich ‘would not tolerate the intervention of any foreign influence’ such as the Pope, and the Papal Nuncio would eventually have to go back to Rome. Priests, he said, were ‘black bugs’, ‘abortions in cassocks’. Hitler emphasized again and again his belief that Nazism was a secular ideology founded on modern science. Science, he declared, would easily destroy the last remaining vestiges of superstition. ‘Put a small telescope in a village, and you destroy a world of superstitions.’ ‘The best thing,’ he declared on 14 October 1941, ‘is to let Christianity die a natural death. A slow death has something comforting about it. The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science.’ He was particularly critical of what he saw as its violation of the law of natural selection and the survival of the fittest. ‘Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of human failure.’ It was indelibly Jewish in origin and character. ‘Christianity is a prototype of Bolshevism: the mobilization by the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society.’ Christianity was a drug, a kind of sickness: ‘Let’s be the only people who are immunized against the disease.’ ‘In the long run,’ he concluded, ‘National Socialism and religion will no longer be able to exist together.’ He would not persecute the Churches: they would simply wither away. ‘But in that case we must not replace the Church by something equivalent. That would be terrifying!’ The future was Nazi, and the future would be secular.”

Re post 331: The obvious point is that when you just look at a vertical slice or exposure of rock and see sedimentary rock layers, you cannot how they were laid down (one can by further investigation, but I’m just referring to the initial appearance). One can look at those layers and posit either a slow uniformitarian deposition, a rapid deposition, or a mixture of the same. Ager’s point was that a solely uniformitarian explanation is not sufficient. Ager’s point was that one cannot make assumptions about the rate of deposition apart from further investigation of the rocks themselves, as the simple fact of layers alone does not provide sufficient information. Ager is noting that if one carries uniformitarian assumptions and simply looks at the layers, then one would conclude that the layers were thusly laid down. But Ager does not have uniformitarian assumptions, so he does not make that simplistic mistake. Ager requires further investigation and that is one of the points of his work. So, the YEC quote mining out of context and in the face of Ager’s actual work becomes an example of what the Council of State Governments stated constitutes “junk science” (see my post 346 for their statement).

Re post 377: “how difficult it is to prove a negative absolute, but you keep asserting them”

? I’m not asking you to prove a negative absolute.

I’m saying that YECs do not have any valid theory (i.e., not a speculation but something related to either lab tests or field observations) for the formation of multiple (hundreds) of distinct unrelated layers of sediment, their lithification, their bending and faulting, and exposure and weathering during an alleged catastrophic Noahic flood. Given how water behaves, solids suspended in water behave, how lithification occurs, the YEC so-called “explanation” is an impossibility.

Similar to the problem (for them) of the polystrate trees, YEC flood geology also cannot explain fossilized dinosaur nests or fossilized animal tracks. Both of the latter phenomena occur in a layer of sedimentary rock that is both on top of and beneath other layers of sedimentary rock. So a dinosaur waited until the Noahic flood deposited layers of sediment and lithified them, and then swam down and made a nest and laid its eggs, which then gestated to significant stage of development, and then the nest was covered by more layers of sediment, which all lithified? Same goes for the tracks, which after the animals swam down to make them by walking along the bottom of flood waters that reached the mountains, were not washed away by the catastrophically violent flood.

What we are dealing with here is another the creation of Ptolemaic epi-cycles to bolster an unworkable speculation, except that the Ptolemaic epicycles actually worked reasonably well. [cont.]

Regards
#John

John wrote:

Re post 377: “how difficult it is to prove a negative absolute, but you keep asserting them”

? I’m not asking you to prove a negative absolute.

Huh?? I wrote:

John, being a lawyer, you should know how difficult it is to prove a negative absolute, but you keep asserting them:-)

I said you are asserting a negative absolute, and was simply reminding you how difficult those are to defend (let alone prove).

re post 382 and the continuation of my post 384:

. . . speculation, except that the Ptolemaic (named after the ancient Greek philosopher Ptolemy) epicycles actually worked reasonably well. Athough some Greek astronomers / philosophers had argued that the earth revolves around the sun, they were not able to convince everyone else and the dominant paradigm was that the sun and every other planet circled around the earth in perfectly circular orbits. However, this theory could not accurately describe the current, and predict the future, positions of the planets. So epicycles or smaller additional circles where added to each circular orbit around the sun.

More and more epicycles were added to try to account for the observed positions of the planets. The predictions were OK, but even at the time Keppler, the predicted path of Mars was still 8 arc minutes off from the observed path. The Ptolemaic system was collapsing under the weight of more and more epicycles that could not account for what was observed. Using observatories and more advanced math, it was determined that, yes, the earth did circle the sun and that the orbit was elliptical not circular. But—and this is important in relation to this debate—examine what happened in the lives of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) and Johann Keppler (1571-1630).

Brahe was a very diligent observer and tireless worker and accumulated a massive data collection on stellar and planetary positions and movements. He hoped both to reconcile astronomy with Scriptural teaching as commonly understood (geo (earth) centric) and to remove the necessity of placing the stars far beyond the outermost planet as was required by the heliocentric scheme. His careful observations revealed significant problems with the geocentric theory and the theory of the closeness of the stars, but he died without changing his beliefs in the standard Church teaching (there was some acceptance of heliocentricism in some parts of the church, and openness to it in other parts, but it was decidedly the minority view).

Upon Brahe’s death, Kepler obtained data and in 1597 published a book (“The Cosmographic Mystery”) defending heliocentrism and in 1609 published “New Astronomy” in which he rejecting traditional circles and epicycles in favour of their replacement with elliptical orbits. He was attacked by many church leaders. This is how he responded (and still relevant today):

Astronomy discloses the causes of natural phenomena and takes within its purview the investigation of optical illusions. Much loftier subjects are treated by Holy Writ, which employs popular speech in order to be understood . . . Not even astronomers cultivate astronomy with the intention of altering popular speeds. Yet while it remains unchanged, we seek to open the doors of truth his is all the more reason not to require divinely inspired Scripture to abandons the popular style of speech, weigh its words no the precision balance of natural science,…

[cont. my post 386] Johann Keppler, renaissance astronomer:

Astronomy discloses the causes of natural phenomena and takes within its purview the investigation of optical illusions. Much loftier subjects are treated by Holy Writ, which employs popular speech in order to be understood . . . Not even astronomers cultivate astronomy with the intention of altering popular speeds. Yet while it remains unchanged, we seek to open the doors of truth [T]his is all the more reason not to require divinely inspired Scripture to abandon the popular style of speech, weigh its words no the precision balance of natural science, confuse Gods simple people with unfamiliar and inappropriate utterances about matters which are beyond the comprehension of those will) are to he instructed, and thereby block their access to the far more elevated authentic goal of Scripture.

In our days all the most outstanding philosophers and astronomers agree with Copernicus . . . Yet the authorities are cast aside by most educated people, whose knowledge is on a level not much higher than the uneducated. Acting by themselves and blinded by ignorance, first they condemn a discordant and unfamilar doctrine as false. After deciding that it must be completely rejected and destroyed, they look around for authorities, with whom they protect and arm themselves. On the other hand they would make an exception of these same authorities, sacred and secular alike … if they found them aligned on the side if the unconventional doctrine. They show this attitude in connection with, the book of Job, chapter 38, when anybody proves by means of it that the earth is flat, stretched to the tautness of a line, and resting on certain foundations, according to the literal meaning. (Epitome of Copernican Astronomy, 1618).

And:

Who would deny that God’s word is attuned to its subject matter and for that reason to the popular speech of mankind? Hence, every deeply religious man will most carefully refrain from twisting God’s word in the most obvious matters so that it denies God’s handiwork in nature. When he has understood the most delicately harmonious coordination of the celestial motions , let him ask himself whether sufficiently correct and sufficiently productive reasons have been discovered for the agreement between the word of God and the hand of God, or whether there is any advantage in rejecting this agreement and by means of censorship destroying this glorification of the boundless beauty of the divine handiwork. The ignorant refuse to have respect for authority; they rush recklessly into a fight, relying on their numbers and the protection of tradition, which is impervious to the weapons of truth. But after the edge of the ax has been struck against iron, it does not cut wood any longer either. Let this be understood by anyone who is interested. (Cosmographic Mystery, 1621)

Regards
#John

John just wrote:

Given how water behaves, solids suspended in water behave, how lithification occurs, the YEC so-called “explanation” is an impossibility.

Read my very recent post on the formation of mudstones. Your understanding of how sedimentation can occur is faulty. You are not to blame as this has been a wide spread misunderstanding.

Geologists have long been taught that “Stokes Law” describes how this sedimentation occurs. Here’s an example of a lab exercise for the application of Stoke’s Law to rocks and minerals.
http://serc.carleton.edu/quantskills/activities/stokes_law.html

YEC PhD geologist Steve Austin described what was done in his graduate sedimentology class in 1970 to verify Stoke’s Law for deposition. The mud particles were:
1. washed in distilled water, and sometimes detergent
2. soaked in bleach
3. dispersed in Calgon
Then Stoke’s Law worked!

Why was this done…because “everybody knows how mud particles must have settled to form shales”. This is just an example of the “bias” mentioned in the science article about rapid mudstone formation from moving water.

More from the article about mudstones:

As you read this notice the effect of “organic matter” and think about the implications for the flood, in which billions of tons of organic matter where ripped from the face of the ground and redeposited. Also, consider for a minute what tides would be like with the entire planet submerged so there where no continents to stop the tides rushing around the planet.

Further, notice in the third paragraph quoted below, that the erosion features were known, and “at odds” with the standard interpretation (ie slow deposition in still water), but had been ignored.

“If anything, when organic matter is present in addition to mud, it enhances mud deposition from fast moving currents,” he said.

The finding feels like something of a vindication, Schieber says. He and his colleagues have (genially) argued about whether muds could deposit from rapidly flowing water. Schieber had posited the possibility after noting an apparent oddity in the sedimentary rock record.

“In many ancient mudstones, you see not only deposition, but also erosion and rapid re-deposition of mud — all in the same place,” Schieber said. “The erosive features are at odds with the notion that the waters must have been still all or most of the time. We needed a better explanation.”

The usual type of response from OEs to specific info such as I just posted on mudstones is to state something like:

“That doesn’t prove that mudstones always form quickly.”

Just to (hopefully) preempt this I repeat myself. I’M NOT CLAIMING TO PROVE HOW IT HAPPENED.

However, John needs to accept that his repeated statements that it is “impossible” for a flood to form sedimentary rocks are simply false statements. Again, I understand where he’s coming from, as I’ve read many of the books and articles that make these very statements.

Thus the conclusion is what I’ve been saying all along. There is nothing in science *facts* that precludes the straight-forward understanding of scripture (I believe that was recently called the “naive” view).

What a FANTASTIC post! I didn’t realize that there were any Christians who felt this way. You are completely right, IMO.

Your poll on the topic “If evolution were true” could have another choice for answer. To the extent that evolutionary theories have achieved any persuasive ability, they have *strengthened* my faith.

I’ve spent more than a decade reading extensively on evolution, epistemology, linguistics, consciousness and so on — and everything I discover reinforces the wonder of the book of Genesis. It convinces me that Genesis alone should be enough to persuade someone that the God of Abraham is the Lord of Creation.

There is a ton of crap being churned out by the materialist reductionists, and many of the arguments are used to advance atheism (Dawkins being a prime example). But one can see through this. Dawkins (for example) triumphantly concludes “MAN WAS FORMED FROM DUST!” (true), but the continues “therefore, there is no God” (doesn’t follow from the conclusion, has no scientific basis, and is just mentally retarded).

Hi Richard,

Would you e-mail me at [email protected]? I’d like to ask you a question.

Much thanks,

Truth Unites… and Divides

Before I address some more recent posts, I wish to indicate that I have found this thread to be a useful exercise in bringing me up to speed on more recent YEC thought, and in further developing my understanding of the age of the universe and earth. There is much good material in this thread so I hope it remains up for a long time. However, I know that I will not persuade Richard so long as he holds to his belief in what God has said to him. The interaction may nevertheless be a useful tool for others to learn from. So I am happy to continue posting if others are interested in reading. But if it’s only Richard and me, I think I’ll stop.

I do note, though, that the responses to and reading of this thread appear to have contributed to a significant increase in the internet traffic to this website, according to Alexa.com and Statsaholic.com

So, should this thread continue?

Regards,
#John

re post 384, and the reference to the work by geologist Juergen Schieber, one of the world’s leading experts on shales.

We’ve been around this bend before, when discussing D. Ager and also polystrate tree fossils. OEs, like geologists, believe that sedimentary deposition happens both quickly and slowly. So the fact that a quick flowing stream can deposit sediment in the stream bed does not disprove the fact that other mud deposition occurred slowly, which Richard acknowledges in his post 392. However, his posts still imply that Schieber’s observations somehow overturn the geologic understanding of the age of shales.

There are numerous worldwide examples of the slow deposition of muddy sediment: existing freshwater lakes, ancient lakes, Nile delta, Mississippi delta, etc. Ancient fossilized river beds have also been found, with of course layers of sediment lithified into rock. One can examine shales to determine the nature of their deposition (lake bed, stream, slow, fast, ripples, no ripples, worm tracks, etc.). On the OE view, there are areas of slow deposition took millions of years to deposit. Schieber agrees with this, and his research supports this.

However, the YEC illogic is this: There are massive amounts of shale (a sedimentary rock lithified from muddy sediments) around the globe; YEC flood geology requires the rapid formation of this massive amount of rock in a short period of time; some mud deposition occurs quickly; therefore all (or nearly all) the mud deposition and shale formation we observe occurred quickly.

Once again we have a YEC overstating the importance of a particular phenomena, and ignoring its proper context and other significant phenomena. The phenomena Richard points to only explains a portion of the shale. Major portions of the shale exhibit the features of slow deposition and still require millions of years of formation. This interaction of quick and slow deposition, and weathering, is illustrated in Scheiber’s description of the Chattannoga Shale, which he estimates to have been formed over a period of 14 million years.

“Developing a Sequence Stratigraphic Framework for the Late Devonian Chattanooga Shale of the southeastern US

The Late Devonian Chattanooga Shale of Tennessee and Kentucky is in most areas a thin black shale deposit of less than 10 meters thickness. It is a distal equivalent to the almost 3000m thick Catskill sequence, and encompasses most of the Frasnian and Fammenian, approximately 14 million years of earth history.

Although originally thought of as a continuously, though slowly, deposited deep water shale unit, the Chattanooga Shale shows internal erosion surfaces at various scales as well as storm deposits. These features suggest comparatively shallow water deposition (tens of meters water depth), and a stratigraphic record with numerous interruptions of various duration. A number of erosion surfaces are laterally extensive and can be traced [cont.]

[cont. from my post 396] . . . A number of erosion surfaces are laterally extensive and can be traced from exposure to exposure through the entire outcrop area (over distances of as much as 300km). Erosion surfaces of this type are considered sequence boundaries sensu Vail, and tracing them has made it possible to subdivide the Chattanooga Shale into as many as 14 sequences.”

[from the web pages of Jürgen Schieber, UTA Department of Geology, home page at http://www.uta.edu/paleomap/homepage/Schieberweb/schieber.htm ]

re post 392:

Note that I am not disputing that a flood could deposit a layer of muddy sediment that could be lithified into shale. I am making two other, and different points: (1) a flood, even a global and catastrophic one, will not deposit hundreds of clearly demarcated and unrelated layers of sediment and lithify them (YEC flood geology defies the laws of our physical universe), and (2) at least some (geologists would say most, but I only need some) shales show evidence of a history of having been deposited over several million years (which history, being millions of years long includes floods and droughts and different levels above the sea, and different climates, and different events, etc.).

re post 391:

OK, before polystrate trees, which are fossilized with undisturbed intact root systems, were proof of YEC global flood “geology”, but now YECs have all the vegetation ripped up by a catastrophic flood. I think we are finally getting somewhere.

Regards,
#John

Let me throw out this grenade into the discussion.

Dinosaurs.

How do the YEC’s account for dinosaurs? How do the OEC’s account for dinosaurs? What’s the same and what’s different in the YEC and OEC explanations of dinosaurs?

Regarding the Science article about mudstones, John tries to imply that the rapid deposition of mudstones is not even surprising.

OEs, like geologists, believe that sedimentary deposition happens both quickly and slowly.

The very first line that I quoted contradicts this. Note the word only:
“Geologists have long thought muds will only settle when waters are quiet…”

He claims that I’m overstating the implications. While no one expects Schieber (or John) to reach the conclusion that the biblical flood really occurred, note the Schieber (not I) said:

“One thing we are very certain of is that our findings will influence how geologists and paleontologists reconstruct Earth’s past.”

This does not sound like a “ho-hum, we already knew this” type of finding. John just can’t accept that it’s possible for the current consensus geological view to be wrong. No matter how many specific beliefs within that view are discovered and admitted to be wrong.

Here are two of John’s own statements:

two days ago:

Richard states, ” Exactly what rock formations are impossible to explain in a YEC model? Give a specific example or two.” Point to any sedimentart rock. YEC’s so-called “flood geology” does not explain any of the sedimentary rocks that we see.

today:

Note that I am not disputing that a flood could deposit a layer of muddy sediment that could be lithified into shale.

I don’t know if any comment from me is even necessary….