Summations Only

No, I don't think the rise in level is theoretcial. If you throw in a very large boulder that nearly blocks the stream then the level behind the bolder will most certainly rise and the water will pour past the boulder on either side in torrents. Now consider this thought experiment again with a smaller boulder. The rise behind the boulder will also be smaller. Now consider the thought experiment yet again with an even smaller boulder. The rise behind the boulder be smaller yet.As you continue to repeat the thought experiment with ever smaller boulders until they become the size of sand grains there never becomes a time when the level behind the boulder come sand grain does not rise. As a practical matter there may be a size below which the rise in level isn't measurable, but the rise in level isn't theoretical. It is very real, just very small.--Percy

"I'm not, you are," is the best you could come up with? You sure have a lot of opinions. If you'd like a private conversation, use PM.I'm afraid I just couldn't resist pointing out the contradiction inherent in insisting there's nothing supernatural about a supernatural flood while simultaneously casting aspersions at others (one of your favorite pastimes) for not accepting enough supernatural.--Percy

Each individual rock on the bottom makes its contribution to obstructing the flow of water. Even a flat pebble lying perfectly flat on the bottom makes a contribution, since its absence would increase the volume of water at that cross section of the river. We're only considering the contribution of this single factor, by the way. There's a lot of other factors that have a say in the level of the river. You have to trust your equation and your knowledge of physics. The river can't flow faster without an increase in force, and that force comes from gravity. Water flowing from a greater height turns more potential energy into kinetic energy. If the increase in height of the water weren't real then the increased energy and increased velocity of the water could not be real either.My previous message suggested a thought experiment where a boulder thrown into the stream is considered to be smaller and smaller. This time I'd like to suggest the opposite thought experiment. Imagine you throw a tiny pebble, say a half inch in diameter, into the middle of the stream. You see no effect. Now you throw another and again see no effect. You continue throwing one pebble at a time into the stream and seeing no effect, but eventually you have thrown so many pebbles into the stream that you do begin to see an effect. If the contribution of each pebble were actually zero then you would never see any effect, so the contribution of each pebble cannot be zero.--Percy

Hi Faith,Any book or document (including the Bible) that is an accurate account would be supported by the evidence. The Genesis account of the flood cannot be considered an accurate account because it is not supported by any evidence and is contradicted by much evidence.This is a science thread, so you should be seeking scientific evidence of your position instead of issuing unsupported declarations based upon your interpretation of the Bible. You've presented no scientific data to support this position. As has been explained in great detail, none of the evidence presented and discussed in this thread points to a global flood 4300 years ago. Your determined insistence on impossible and unnatural processes makes even more starkly clear how impossible such a flood is. If you're not going to say something true then you might at least *try* to be original. You're the only one who has given no indication of understanding the nature of scientific evidence, and you certainly have no ability to interpret it.AbE: I see that you edited your post six times since I began replying to it. There's a preview button that allows you to see *exactly* what your message will look like when you post it. You don't have to go through repeated Edit/Submit cycles.--PercyEdited by Percy, : AbE.

Yes, Faith, we know you believe this, but this entire thread is a very detailed record of your complete failure to support any of it. Just declaring your beliefs over and over again accomplishes nothing but to convince people of your blind intransigence in the face of overwhelming evidence. Not a good idea. Editing messages after they're posted is a privilege, not a right. Acceptance of the privilege assumes one will use it to make minor fixes, not to add entire paragraphs unnoted by any indication like "AbE". Abuse the privilege and you can lose it.--Percy

This statement is as much at odds with the evidence as most everything else you've said. Well yes, that's your whole problem in a nutshell, that you're concocting scenarios from your imagination instead of from evidence. You can't possibly know anything about a worldwide flood because there is no evidence of one. You're left making up unsupported claims about what a worldwide flood would do based upon no evidence at all, and that magically does whatever you need it to do. Boy, everything needs to be redescribed in detail for you I guess. I guess it isn't a safe assumption that you'll be able to recognize briefly listed items that we've already discussed.I didn't say it transported layers whole. That item was just a reference to your claim that the current layers of the geological column were once antediluvian layers that the flood eroded away, then transported and redeposited them into their current locations. Floods cannot do this. Material from distinctly different layers caught up in a flood are going to be pretty thoroughly all mixed up, not kept separate. Bertault showed that energetic flows when carefully channelled in a particular way under laboratory conditions can rapidly deposit multiple layers of sediment in a short time, adding to layers horizontally rather than vertically. Bertault didn't show anything about this occurring in a flood nor even anywhere in nature. What you've usually done is ignored radiometric dating. The fact remains that no kind of sorting could organize radiometric materials into layers of decreasing age. Rebuttals like this are why everyone is certain that you have no evidence. You can call things names like "nuts" and so forth, but you never have any evidence. So you keep saying, but with all your blustering you still have no evidence of a global flood, and no evidence or examples of how it would behave. All you have is what you're making up, and this is clearly obvious to everyone. But if oil and gas can be created in short time periods, as you have claimed, then much oil and gas should have been created in the antediluvian layers. If they were randomly mixed up in the flood then traces of them should be present in all layers. If they were redeposited into their original layers then you need a way for the flood to transport them while keeping them with their original layer. As has been pointed out numerous times, the meanders go from top to bottom. The meanders were the original shape of the canyon. In your scenario where the course of the river was created by cracks created by tectonic forces, the cracks would have had to meander. What do mean meadering cracks have never been mentioned? That was the whole point of the discussion about meanders. The posts discussing it with you are there for anyone to see. No rational persion would deny that these discussions took place. Let me get this straight. Tectonic forces made the cliffs of places like the Grand Canyon. Were these cracks or something else?And at the same time that tectonic forces were creating places like Grand Canyon it was still buried under over a mile of layers. Did you really mean to say that?And these layers overlying the Grand Canyon became cracked by the same tectonic forces that created the Grand Canyon. Did these cracks descend down as far as the Grand Canyon that had been created? Well, yes, Faith, of course erosion cuts gullies, and I've said as much. I guess there must be more of my posts that you haven't read than I thought. The point is that erosion levels landscapes. It reduces mountains to plains. Layers will erode at rates dependent on hardness, and the harder layers will last the longest, but eventually even the hardest layers will erode away and leave a level plain. Yes, of course, but if you see a contradiction somewhere you're going to have to describe it. Just staying with the context of slope retreats, landscapes don't go on forever. They eventually meet another canyon or the ocean or something. Eventually slope retreats run out of room to retreat, and when all is said and done the sides of the Grand Canyon will have retreated great distances and the Colorado River will flow across a flat and lonely plain. This has been answered, Faith. Mud and clay do not dry to rock. When you add water they turn back to mud and clay. Rock does not form by drying. It forms from compaction and cementation. The only rocks that harden by drying are the ones of your imagination.--Percy

Hi Faith,The style of approach taken by that article (Geological reasoning: Geology as an interpretive and historical science) is the one that goes, "I have such good answers for these objections that I shall raise them myself." You're quoting from the part that characterizes the objections, not from the article's answers or conclusions.Also, you seem to have misinterpreted the first quote. The author doesn't use the word "derivative" in the sense of "not genuine". The article is about geological reasoning, and as he explains, he uses the term "derivative" in the sense that the reasoning used in geology derives from physics. He goes on to argue that in addition to those of physics geology has its own set of reasoning operations.The article doesn't at all support your claim that "you can't verify anything from the prehistoric past." There's a whole section on geology as a historical science beginning on page 964.--Percy

You are totally delusional.All you've convinced anyone of is your ignorance, inability to reason, lack of visualization skills, lack of math skills, lack of interest in evidence disproving your ideas, lack of introspection, emphasis on Biblical interpretations at the expense of reality, and reliance on primitive rhetorical techniques (name calling, declarations of victory, ignoring arguments, etc.) in place of arguments from evidence.--Percy

True, but as Heathen noted, very relevant. For my own part I'm fascinated by attempts to find the actual age of the canyon at various points. Finding the age of the layers is easy compared to figuring out when the river and erosion removed yawning chasms of those layers. Here's a neat diagram (note from the key that the shading doesn't represent elevation): In general, the longer a canyon has been around the longer its slopes have been retreating and the wider the canyon should be. If the Grand Canyon is oldest (50-70 million years) near the Hurricane fault (curvey vertical line near the center) then the canyon should be widest at that point, but it's about the same width as the younger (15-25 million years) Eastern Grand Canyon.What we can't forget is the miles of layers that once lay above the Grand Canyon region. The current prairie floor was once much higher. At the same time that the Grand Canyon walls are experiencing slope retreat and making the canyon wider the surrounding prairie is eroding ever lower and making the canyon narrower (because it has sloping walls). My bet is that the prairie is eroding downward much faster than the canyon walls are eroding back, and that would mean that the Grand Canyon today is much narrower today than it was, say, a couple million years ago.But whether I'm right or wrong about how the canyon width has changed over time, it is worth keeping in mind that the canyon was there even before the now missing layers eroded away, and that there is a great deal of canyon wall that simply no longer exists. A quarter mile of vertical wall? A half mile? A full mile? I don't know.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Improve description of location of Hurricane Fault in the image.Edited by Percy, : Minor clarity improvement in first paragraph.

That's right, or at least that's the way I interpret it. It's not topological. In the Eastern Grand Canyon the Kaibab Plateau runs right up to the canyon rim, so in that part of the diagram the Kaibab Plateau outlines the canyon. In the Western Grand Canyon it must be some other layer that runs up to the canyon rim, so the Kaibab Plateau layer no longer provides an outline of the canyon. The canyon is still roughly the same width in that area. I've been looking at photos people have taken of the area using Google Maps. RAZD was pursuing the same point for post after post, Faith just ignored it all. Given that fault lines are caused by stresses in the upper crust you would expect them to run roughly parallel. The fault lines we already know about run roughly north/south, so an orthogonal east/west fault line of any significant length (like the entire canyon) would be very unexpected and unusual, plus there's no evidence of one anyway, like almost all Faith's ideas.--Percy

Hi Faith,Yes, I'm sure all your problems are everyone else's fault, like here where you claim you never said the cracks ran the length of the canyon: And yet here you are back in Message 1212 saying it was the length of the canyon: Or here where you claim you never described antediluvian layers being transported by the flood: Where did I get such an idea? I got it from you, Faith, because you wrote it back in Message 1192: You also have reading comprehension problems: I described what would have happened in your scenario that you hadn't seemed to have figured out. I didn't attribute it to you.It's high time you stopped blaming everyone else for your problems and began focusing all that arrogance and chutzpah inward to find the real source. You came here armed only with ignorance and you're well on your way to leaving here having learned nothing while at the same time convincing many of the dangers of religious zealotry.People have posted many messages full of information to you throughout this thread, but you've ignored or disregarded or ridiculed or misunderstood or failed to comprehend most of it. It's time to turn over a new leaf and begin honestly addressing the facts, which come from studying the real world and not from the echo chamber inside your head.--Percy

Found a better reply to this:

I'm winning!

Stop with the absurd posturing and begin discussing in good Faith.--Percy

You're not exercising scientific imagination. You're ignoring scientific facts and just making things up. Your "scientific" ideas are like historical novels, based only tangentially on real places and events. For example: You obviously didn't research this. Water *can* flow underground, but as Wikipedia tells us in the article on acquifers: The canyon in that image is obviously the product of a river system on the surface, not underground acquifers or caves. Morton is only stating the obvious when he says it would take a considerable time to excavate and erode the canyon through hard rock, including the evident slope retreat: The canyon is not filled with material collapsed from the layers above. It's filled with sedimentary material, which would have taken an additional very long period of time.But you have far more fundamental problems. First and foremost, the layers of the Grand Canyon were obviously not laid down in a short period of time by a flood, because the material is not sorted top to bottom by size and density, with the heaviest and densest material on the bottom and the lightest and least dense on the top. The deeper the layer, the younger it is radiometrically, and the more different are fossils from modern forms. Nothing about any of the evidence hints of floods.--Percy

So it turns out you didn't believe the buried canyon was filled in with material collapsed from above layers, and you didn't believe it was filled with sediment from the layer above (which since you apparently think that is different from "material collapsed from the layers above" you must think was deposited by sediments somehow flowing in). So what is it that you did believe? Don't tell me you thought the it was open space way down there.Anyway, the sediment didn't flow in. This canyon area was carved when at a higher elevation and then either through subsidence or sea encroachment or a combination became submerged and became an area of net deposition, just like almost all areas under the sea.Water moving about underground does not carve canyons. Underground bodies of water or underground rivers are extremely rare. Most underground water exists in acquifers that are layers of rock saturated with water in the interstices and pores. River systems like this that carve canyons are a surface feature. Underground structures that come closest to what you're imagining are caves carved out of limestone layers, but caves and caverns like Luray in Virginia and Carlsbad in New Mexico are millions of years old.--Percy

Henry Morris wrote The Genesis Flood over 50 years ago. In that time mass-produced semiconductors were developed and the microelectronics and computer industries grew from scratch, we reached the moon, and we decoded human DNA. How many years do you need to do a bit of geology? Surely that can't be true if the Bible is your guide. God said he would "send rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights," so since God caused the flood it must have been a miracle. Later God "made a wind blow over the earth and the waters subsided," so that must have been a miracle, too. If you leave miracles out of your scenario then you're not following the Bible. It seems more like you're just making up explanations that happen to appeal to you in opposition to both God and science. You're probably the only person in this thread who appears irrational to people from both sides of the debate.--Percy