Growing the Geologic Column

Would it be fair to say that no evidence, no matter what it is, will convince you that the Earth is ancient? The same for a lack of a recent global flood?Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

The difference, an enormous one, is that the paleontologist has never seen the creature that made the footprint whereas the forensic criminologist has seen millions and has a huge database just in his own experience to work from in solving the crime, not to mention the collective experience of all other forensic criminologists, and in fact the whole human race, who are also direct witnesses to the footprints of other human beings. Well, the light from the supernova is arriving in the present and can be measured in many ways and compared to other celestial sources of light, which is a very different matter from interpreting events on earth supposed millions of years ago. You guys seem not to get how you have no REFERENTS from events in the distant past, and no witnesses, and all your data is completely mute and inert. You try to infer things from supposed similarities in the present, and I'm not going to say you get it all wrong but the point is you have no way to verify any conclusion you come to so all you can do is try to persuade others of your conclusion and if it's accepted that becomes your scientific fact. Can't you see how different this process is from laboratory science or criminal forensics in the present? You have actual observers, you have witnesses, you have people who can do the same experiments you do and see the same things you do, it isn't a matter of persuasion but of testing and testing and testing.You can know lots of things about the rocks and the fossils too, but you can't really know anything about the past in which they were formed just by studying them. You can guess, you can hypothesize, but you can't KNOW the way you can know who committed the murder last night if you have enough facts to work with, or how far the light from the supernova traveled, or the structure of the DNA molecule. The point is all you have is interpretation, it's not that all the interpretations are necessarily wrong, just that you can't test them to find out for sure. And in the case of this debate you have creationists who believe the Bible which is contradicted by your interpretations, and you really can't prove you are right, all you can do is assemble your plausibilities and declare that you are right. It's not that you can't understand various facts about the rocks and the fossils, it's that you can't know anything about their age or the conditions of the earth based on your assumptions about the strata as time periods, and all you have is the rocks themselves, you don't have any other referents for judging the rocks. If you get off on a wrong theory you have nothing to correct you. Bible creationists have another source of information we take seriously, which leads to a completely different theory about the rocks. We can't prove ours either, but that's the situation on both sides as I keep saying. It's a war of plausibilities. Nothing happens to the evidence, what happens is that we are too far removed from it to judge it clearly. And as for trying to explain why, I wish I were better able to do that. Really, this idea that rocks tilting underground is absurd is what's absurd. You should look at all the cross sections I've been looking at. Tectonic forces move the rocks in relation to each other UNDERGROUND in an amazing variety of ways, even very long distances, as attested by the blizzard of fault lines you find on some cross sections. They are tilted against each other in all sorts of directions, to such an extent in fact that the idea that an angular unconformity is something special really gets called into question. Seems to me it's easily enough explained as just one of the many ways rocks get moved around in relation to each other. And this question about where all the erosion would have gone has to be asked about a lot of those faults where it looks like a great deal of rock had to have been abraded away to get into the positions they are found in. They may not be quite as sharply tilted as an angular unconformity is but they are certainly tilted with respect to one another and whole chunks of strata have to be missing due to the movement alone. Very cute but I don't think so. I really don't think your interpretations suffice as the explanations you claim for them, they are open to other interpretations because they ARE interpretations. Unlike the testable claims of the hard sciences.

According to the Bible, it was a miracle at the hand of God. I explained that with scripture in Message 264. If and when you want to get around to finishing that discussion...

You wish, but to believe this is just my faulty theology you have to deny the plain testimony of the Bible. It's very clear on these things, you have to twist it and stretch it and read between the lines to make it support Old Earthism or evolution. Nope, absolutely false. As I said, the Bible is very clear on these things, all you have to do is read it simply and straightforwardly and believe what it says. I have no strange theology about the Flood and related scientific issues, it's all based on a straightforward reading of Genesis. I don't have a theology apart from the Bible, it has shown itself to be clearly God's word, and I'm solidly within the tradition of Bible believers down the centuries and particularly since the Reformation, which is as Bible-focused as you can get. Where on earth have I said anything about my theology or anything else being "infallible?" There are always questions that have to be resolved, the Bible is very easy to understand on the important points but that isn't to say there aren't difficult passages in it. Nevertheless what it says about the scientific issues concerning the Flood and evolution is very simple and straightforward. You should be able to come to the same conclusions from reading it yourself, there's really nothing mysterious or difficult about it. If that's all that's possible you might as well give up and never leave your house because with that degree of distrust of human understanding you couldn't survive for half a day.The Bible was given to us BECAUSE we are fallible, to give us understanding of things we couldn't otherwise understand. "Thy word is a light unto my path and a lamp unto my feet." A simply honest reading of it IS possible, not that human fallibility can't still get things wrong, but you almost have to go out of your way to get the Bible wrong on the main issues. And there's certainly no denying that people do distort the reading, but "there is wisdom in many counselors" and there are many ways for an honest reader to correct a misreading.So again a very simple reading of the Bible on the important issues is quite possible, and there is such a thing as a theology that is simply based on the Bible. Theologies can contain errors that the Bible can't, but that's why one reads different commentators to get the best understanding. That is really one of the silliest ideas you all have here. The rocks are mute. Tribal peoples see faces and animals and totems in them. What makes your reading of them any better than that? That is delusional. The evidence is often in your fallible head and you impose it on the rocks. That couldn't be more twisted, more upsidedown and backwards. The written word can be misunderstood but the mute natural world is in itself undecipherable. Why did it take so long for the human race to arrive at any decent scientific understanding of anything in the natural world? Yet here you are comparing it to a written testimony for lucidity? You've got things so twisted you're lost in the labyrinth of your own mind. How sad anyone can get things so wrong. You are probably adept at writing backwards too since you think backwards so well.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I don't believe that your theology is on topic here. Although it's very sad that you don't realise how much of your theology is not Biblical at all.

Absolute nonsense, Percy. For one thing everybody has assumptions and putting them aside isn't even possible in most cases. For another thing it would be idiotic to approach any study by denying something crucial to the study you happen to know to be the truth, and only an idiot would do such a thing. But I don't think it's missing, I think the evidence is glaringly obvious wherever you look around this planet. I think science thinks it's missing because science is operating under a delusional theory that colors everything so they can't see the truth about the rocks they are looking at. It makes no sense to look at rocks that were clearly formed in a worldwide catastrophic event involving water and mindlessly state that they are ancient and formed millions of years ago and that all the dead creatures inside them lived at different times even though that means some of them that even still live today were apparently absent during some of those eras and similar anomalies of the theory that you all conveniently ignore.

You guys are good at assertions about such things, with a TOTAL absence of the evidence you think you are so enamored of. My theology is solidly biblical. And I keep trying to avoid such subjects on threads like these but that would mean ignoring the zillion challenges that people throw at me about them.

Your theology is not on topic in this thread. I'm not gunning for another suspension. Start a new thread if you want to discuss it.

Please provide documentation. What cross-section shows this? Why is that?Because, in some contortionist logic, it fits the Faith model. If it is easily explained, please do so. This is bizarre. In on instance, you claim we don't have a source for all of the sediments found in the geological reocrd, and in practically the next post, you claim that we don't have a place to deposit all of that sediment. And erosion explains that.

Your say-so is not evidence. All you need is evidence. Right now, you've got nothing.

But we do provide evidence such as radiometric dating ifnormation. On the other hand, all we have from you is personal credence. "It just looks that way"...

It only shows itself to be God's word in your eyes because you throw out any evidence that contradicts it. You have already said as much.So if it wasn't God's word, you wouldn't know it. In message 480 you wrote:"Perhaps you could say I'm trying to make science fit the Bible, but certainly not the other way around. The Bible is God's production, but Old Earth science is humanly created."You are treating the Bible as infallible, throwing out science that doesn't fit the Bible.When you say that such-and-such geologic feature is consistent with a recent global flood, what are you really saying? Aren't you really saying that no matter what that geologic formation looks like, you will consider it to be consistent with a recent global flood?Surely you can see why your claims don't hold water, or aren't that convincing.

Which fails to explain the faults at the left that do not go up through the upper layers, just as we would expect to happen if those upper layers had been laid down after the faulting on the left occurred.Ash deposits buried by later sediments also show that volcanic activity occurred before all the sedimentary layers were made ... like the ones in Laetoli that have hominid footprints in them.Laetoli - Wikipedia

quote:

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Laetoli is a site in Tanzania, dated to the Plio-Pleistocene and famous for its hominin footprints, preserved in volcanic ash (Site G). The site of the Laetoli footprints is located 45 km south of Olduvai gorge. The location was excavated by archaeologist Mary Leakey in 1978. The Laetoli Footprints received significant recognition by the public, providing convincing evidence of bipedalism in Pliocene hominids based on analysis of the impressions.

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Hominid footprints in volcanic ash, covered by later sedimentary deposits.Everywhere you look, from shell deposits on Mt Everest to the oldest living trees and tree ring chronologies covering 12,000 years, to the varve layers in Lake Suigetsu and the Ice layers in Greenland and Antarctica to uranium halos, there is a total lack of evidence for a global flood and massive evidence of an old earth.The explanation of ALL the evidence is simple: the world is very very very old and there .. was .. no .. global .. flood.Enjoy

But as has been pointed out to you many, many times, you DO deny the plain testimony of the Bible and constantly misrepresent what the Bible stories actually say.Biblical Christianity is based on willful dismissal of what the Bible actually says as well as willful ignorance of all the evidence and reality.Your whole posting history is based on lying about reality and what the Bible actually says.

You guys make me laugh. And cry. I could read the Bible to you where it is so plain and simple and says how the Flood happened and you'd twist it into something else. I could quote a dozen high profile Bible believer teachers who teach what I believe and you'd just prefer some guy who interprets the Bible by making it mean whatever he wants it to mean and accuse me of being the one doing the twisting. I guess there is no cure for this.And then there is the constant refrain that I provide no evidence for my assertions. But my assertions are just a way of saying "Look!" Just "look for yourself," the evidence is right there, on the cross sections etc. I point something out, but instead of looking you point something else out.I have allowed myself to hope that maybe somebody here, just one person, one of the posters or a lurker, doesn't matter, would just recognize the truth in what I'm saying, just "get it" but that isn't going to happen is it? Good thing I can laugh at it at least some of the time. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.