Posted on 02/02/2005 6:19:41 PM PST by curiosity
b_sharp, if you are after a good laugh then you might like to look at this hilarious nonsense. Note the lack of angular unconformities in the Grand Canyon. My cross-sectional maps of the area must be innaccurate...
Hey, Mt. St. Helens has been dated to millions of years. Are you a YEC? Just kidding. I quit.
Yes, using a dating method that is known to not work with rocks that are recently formed, for reasons that are well understood. Attempting to discredit radiometric dating with that kind of data is a typical piece of ICR fraud. I guess that you should quit while you are behind...
Evolutionists say that the SUN came before the EARTH.
Hmm. What do grammarians say? Uppercase earth, uppercase sun, or, . . . the heck with it, make it all uppercase.
Okay, I can see why a flood would bury small animals deepest, but why would burial depth be a function of complexity?
At any rate, with regard to size, your hypothesis is resoundingly falsified. Many species of dinosaurs are orders of magnitude larger than the largest extinct land mammals, and yet we see dinosaurs buried deeper than mammoths, sabre tooth tigers, and the like.
First of all, there are transitional forms.
Second of all, the existince of transitional forms (or evolution, for that matter) has nothing to do with the question of whether the species buried lower in the strata are older than the species buried higher. To maintain that their not older, you have to assume both modern geology and physics are bunk. Occums razor indeed.
All I can say about that site is 'WOW', fiction sure can be very entertaining.
Don't you know all uplifts, folds, intrusions, disconformities and other unconformities occurred during and after the flood? This map was made before any of that could happen. You obviously have one of them there 'evolutionist' cross-section maps. You really need to get an approved map.
The more complex organisms were more full of hot air than the simpler so they floated longer.
There are two wonderful sentences on that page:
If you are looking to worship something, steer clear of knowledge.
Yep, sums up the YEC (false) dichotomy between belief and science in a nutshell, and...
The Bible is authentic and can be taken literally, except when clearly designated otherwise.
I must have missed the passages in the Bible preceded by the words, "The following passage is not to be taken literally. Or perhaps bondserv has some different definition of "...except clearly designated otherwise" than I have, like "...except when it is so obviously false that even I accept its words as poetic metaphor"
I am not the only one positing this idea.
I never claimed that you had thought of it yourself. I always assumed that you had got it from one of several creationist websites that touts it to the geologically uninformed. Now all you have to do is explain meanders, huge sheer drops, how tribes who weren't there at the time (according to the Biblical account they'd all been drowned) remember the formation....etc etc etc.
What you appear to have difficulty grasping is that whatever its religious status (and I suspect that it is bad religion) flood geology is utterly bogus science; it has no more substance than clairvoyance and ley lines. No successful predictions. Numerous falsifications. Laden with logical and observational fallacy. Completely useless. Lets recap on Glenn Morton's Story....I have emboldened the killer passages which illustrate that professional YEC geologists found nothing in the real geological data that supports the YEC viewpoint, and ample falsification.
For years I struggled to understand how the geologic data I worked with everyday could be fit into a Biblical perspective. Being a physics major in college I had no geology courses. Thus, as a young Christian, when I was presented with the view that Christians must believe in a young-earth and global flood, I went along willingly. I knew there were problems but I thought I was going to solve them. When I graduated from college with a physics degree, physicists were unemployable since NASA had just laid a bunch of them off. I did graduate work in philosophy and then decided to leave school to support my growing family. Even after a year, physicists were still unemployable. After six months of looking, I finally found work as a geophysicist working for a seismic company. Within a year, I was processing seismic data for Atlantic Richfield.
This was where I first became exposed to the problems geology presented to the idea of a global flood. I would see extremely thick (30,000 feet) sedimentary layers. One could follow these beds from the surface down to those depths where they were covered by vast thicknesses of sediment. I would see buried mountains which had experienced thousands of feet of erosion, which required time. Yet the sediments in those mountains had to have been deposited by the flood, if it was true. I would see faults that were active early but not late and faults that were active late but not early. I would see karsts and sinkholes (limestone erosion) which occurred during the middle of the sedimentary column (supposedly during the middle of the flood) yet the flood waters would have been saturated in limestone and incapable of dissolving lime. It became clear that more time was needed than the global flood would allow.(See http://www.seg.org/publications/geoarchive/1996/sep-oct/geo6105r1336.pdf for an article showing an example of a deeply buried karst. For a better but bigger (3.4 meg) version of that paper see http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/proceedings/97/97ng/ng97_pdf/NG4-1.PDF
One also finds erosional canyons buried in the earth. These canyons would require time to excavate, just like the time it takes to erode the Grand Canyon. This picture was downloaded from a site which is now gone from the web. It was http://ic.ucsc.edu/~casey/eart168/3DInterpretation/Deltain3d1.gif
I worked hard over the next few years to solve these problems. I published 20+ items in the Creation Research Society Quarterly. I would listen to ICR, have discussions with people like Slusher, Gish, Austin, Barnes and also discuss things with some of their graduates that I had hired.
In order to get closer to the data and know it better, with the hope of finding a solution, I changed subdivisions of my work in 1980. I left seismic processing and went into seismic interpretation where I would have to deal with more geologic data. My horror at what I was seeing only increased. There was a major problem; the data I was seeing at work, was not agreeing with what I had been taught as a Christian. Doubts about what I was writing and teaching began to grow. Unfortunately, my fellow young earth creationists were not willing to listen to the problems. No one could give me a model which allowed me to unite into one cloth what I believed on Sunday and what I was forced to believe by the data Monday through Friday. I was living the life of a double-minded man--believing two things.
By 1986, the growing doubts about the ability of the widely accepted creationist viewpoints to explain the geologic data led to a nearly 10 year withdrawal from publication. My last young-earth paper was entitled Geologic Challenges to a Young-earth, which I presented as the first paper in the First International Conference on Creationism. It was not well received. Young-earth creationists don't like being told they are wrong. The reaction to the pictures, seismic data, the logic disgusted me. They were more interested in what I sounded like than in the data!
John Morris came to the stage to challenge me. He claimed to have been in the oil industry. I asked him what oil company he had worked for. I am going to let an account of this published in the Skeptical Inquirer in late 86 or early 87. It was written by Robert Schadewald. He writes,
"John Morris went to the microphone and identified himself as a petroleum geologist. He questioned Morton's claim that pollen grains are found in salt formations, and accused Morton of sounding like an anticreationist, raising more problems than his critics could respond to in the time available. Morris said that the ICR staff is working on these problems all the time. He told Morton to quit raising problems and start solving them. "Morton chopped him off at the ankles. Two questions, said Morton: 'What oil company did you work for?' Well, uh, actually Morris never worked for an oil company, but he once taught petroleum engineering at the University of Oklahoma. Second, How old is the Earth?' 'If the earth is more than 10,000 years old then Scripture has no meaning.' Morton then said that he had hired several graduates of Christian Heritage College, and that all of them suffered severe crises of faith. The were utterly unprepared to face the geologic facts every petroleum geologist deals with on a daily basis. Morton neglected to add that ICR is much better known for ignoring or denying problems than dealing with them."
It appeared that the more I questions I raised, the more they questioned my theological purity. When telling one friend of my difficulties with young-earth creationism and geology, he told me that I had obviously been brain-washed by my geology professors. When I told him that I had never taken a geology course, he then said I must be saying this in order to hold my job. Never would he consider that I might really believe the data. Since then this type of treatment has become expected from young-earthers. I have been called nearly everything under the sun but they don't deal with the data I present to them. Here is a list of what young-earthers have called me in response to my data: 'an apostate,'(Humphreys) 'a heretic'(Jim Bell although he later apologised like the gentleman he is) 'a compromiser'(Henry Morris) "absurd", "naive", "compromising", "abysmally ignorant", "sloppy", "reckless disregard", "extremely inaccurate", "misleading", "tomfoolery" and "intentionally deceitful"(John Woodmorappe) 'like your father, Satan' (Carl R. Froede--I am proud to have this one because Jesus was once said to have been of satan also.) 'your loyality and commitment to Jesus Christ is shaky or just not truly genuine' (John Baumgardner 12-24-99 [Merry Christmas]) "[I] have secretly entertained suspicions of a Trojan horse roaming behind the lines..." Royal Truman 12-28-99
Above I say that I with drew from publishing for 10 years. I need to make one item clear. It is true that I published a couple of items in the late 80s. The truth is that these were an edited letter exchange I had with George Howe. When George approached me about the Mountain Building symposium, I told him I didn't want to write it. He said that was ok he would write it, give it to me for ok and then publish it. Since it was merely splicing a bunch of letters together, it was my words, but George's editorship that made that article. To all intents and purposes I was through with young-earth creationist (not ism yet) because I knew that they didn't care about the data.
But eventually, by 1994 I was through with young-earth creationISM. Nothing that young-earth creationists had taught me about geology turned out to be true. I took a poll of my ICR graduate friends who have worked in the oil industry. I asked them one question.
"From your oil industry experience, did any fact that you were taught at ICR, which challenged current geological thinking, turn out in the long run to be true? ,"
That is a very simple question. One man, Steve Robertson, who worked for Shell grew real silent on the phone, sighed and softly said 'No!' A very close friend that I had hired at Arco, after hearing the question, exclaimed, "Wait a minute. There has to be one!" But he could not name one. I can not name one. No one else could either. One man I could not reach, to ask that question, had a crisis of faith about two years after coming into the oil industry. I do not know what his spiritual state is now but he was in bad shape the last time I talked to him.
And being through with creationism, I very nearly became through with Christianity. I was on the very verge of becoming an atheist. During that time, I re-read a book I had reviewed prior to its publication. It was Alan Hayward's Creation/Evolution. Even though I had reviewed it 1984 prior to its publication in 1985, I hadn't been ready for the views he expressed. He presented a wonderful Days of Proclamation view which pulled me back from the edge of atheism. Although I believe Alan applied it to the earth in an unworkable fashion, his view had the power to unite the data with the Scripture, if it was applied differently. That is what I have done with my views. Without that I would now be an atheist. There is much in Alan's book I agree with and much I disagree with but his book was very important in keeping me in the faith. While his book may not have changed the debate totally yet, it did change my life.
Oh, I forgot, you haven't explained angular unconformities themselves yet, either.
These scientists are more aware of Morton's findings than you. They disagree with his assessment and so do I.
But eventually, by 1994 I was through with young-earth creationISM. Nothing that young-earth creationists had taught me about geology turned out to be true. I took a poll of my ICR graduate friends who have worked in the oil industry. I asked them one question.
"From your oil industry experience, did any fact that you were taught at ICR, which challenged current geological thinking, turn out in the long run to be true? ,"
That is a very simple question. One man, Steve Robertson, who worked for Shell grew real silent on the phone, sighed and softly said 'No!' A very close friend that I had hired at Arco, after hearing the question, exclaimed, "Wait a minute. There has to be one!" But he could not name one. I can not name one. No one else could either. One man I could not reach, to ask that question, had a crisis of faith about two years after coming into the oil industry. I do not know what his spiritual state is now but he was in bad shape the last time I talked to him.
We can theorize how billions of tons of swirling water would cause the earths crust to crack up and ooze like a meringue pie. How layers of sediment could be compressed by the weight over them, causing them to bend over on themselves, while magma is squeezed up into the pockets that are created by the immense forces that we have never seen since.
99% of the modern geologists have not even considered the implications, therefore a majority of the articles do not consider the possibilities. Most professional geologists are more concerned with how the drainiage on a new golf course they are working on, will hold up under a heavy rain.
The difference is that the mainstream geology is useful. It makes successful predictions. Mineral companies use it to make finds. Flood geology OTOH is useless. As Glenn Morton discovered flood geology's "theories" (the word is not being used here in the scientific meaning, but the lay meaning of "wild conjectures") fall apart when confronted with the real data.
If you want to take the opinions of three possible experts(one anonymous), and compare them to the multitude of accredited geologists from my post, feel free. The folks from my post have staked their reputations on the line publicly, and if you attend their presentations are not afraid to take any questions you might have. They aren't hiding behind academia like most of your friends. BIG DIFFERENCE!
The folks at ICR don't have any reputation to lose. The articles that you posted, not published in peer-reviewed journals but on a creationist website, come from a total of two people who already have no credibility left, Snelling and Austin.
Glenn Morton is talking about ICR graduates who actually work with the data in industry not academics (of course virtually all the academics who don't work for ICR also reject ICR's conjectures). Unless you consider Glenn Morton to be a liar, not a single one of those he managed to contact had found ICR's non-mainstream teaching to be true. He explicitly refers to 4, himself and one other by name, and implies that there are others. Morton used to write papers for ICR himself many of which are still cited on their website, so if he was some kind of 5th columnist he worked hard at being one for many years. I can well imagine that ICR graduates who have "seen the light" would mostly not want to raise their heads above the parapet, given the villification that Morton has attracted. Can you cite a single ICR graduate working in the oil industry for more than a couple of years with the geological data who has retained their YEC faith? Morton claims that he couldn't find one. ICR should find that an easy claim to counter.
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