The Great Creationist Fossil Failure

I remember a few sessions with Barry Setterfield, too. It didn't take long for him to bow out. We exchanged a few emails where he admitted that he was out of touch on geological matters after I criticized his website.ETA: I have to say that he was more civil than most YECs.Edited by edge, : No reason given.

Well, then you've got a problem. The thing about all of that information out there is that you have to want to access it and understand it. Casually dismissing it is not the way to gain an understanding.It is the nature of an advanced science to have generated huge amounts of information. It cannot all be presented to the general public, but textbooks, science publications and universities are glad to help. Well, we can't do that here, even though we have tried to some degree to help. Right. I'm sure you would know how to create a curriculum of geological courses. No kidding ... Yep, it's all us. Nothing to do with your presentation. Nothing to do with your admitted and willful ignorance.And it's our problem...Sorry, Faith, but a little humility would do you a world of good.

Sorry, but the strata vary laterally and vertically with varying depositional environments through time and space, and the same with fossils. Just because you choose to look at one area at a time, it does not create th record that you think. While you have coal swamps in one place you will have coral reefs elsewhere, along with continental shelves, deep seas and mountain building. The geologic record is clear on this, just as we see it today.

Very good points. I don't see how such resolution of time periods would be possible if it was all just all coincidence or imaginary as YECs seem to think.It may be a little beyond the scope of a discussion board, but here is an example of such time divisions as taken from Wiki.

Pollux's purpose was to show the fine degree of fossil sorting in the record. It is hard to imagine any YEC flood scenario to result in such detail.I mentioned the Norian because it is based on the first occurrence of various ammonite species, alike enough that it isn't possible to visualize a sorting mechanism so precise.Secondarily, I wanted to show that people have thought about these things for a very long time and it is not just some ad hoc situation designed to show evolution occurring. And, as Pollux noted, this division has proven useful for almost 150 years now. But that is exactly what the article explains. I'm not sure how to make it any clearer. Why should it be progressive? There is a steady evolution of ammonites through the upper Triassic section based on first appearances. In this case, it is based on first appearances, in a sequence of layers, of a number of ammonite fossil species.And the order holds throughout the world where these species are present. In other words, the fossil ammonite that identifies the Norian is always found below the one that identifies the Raetian and above the first occurrence fossil ammonite of the Camian.

So you don't see different species of ammonite coming into the record at different times? At successively higher levels in the stratigraphy?That's odd, because most people do.If all of the ammonite species (or trilobite species, etc.) existed at the same time, why would they not just all be mixed together? I mean, it's not like we are talking about sharks and rabbits being in different layers. So, you don't see a sequence?You don't believe that one layer on top of another is of a younger age?Have you overturned Steno's laws while we weren't looking? They are certainly temporally later, or do you not agree?The question is why are they sorted according to time. We are not just talking about trilobites and humans here. We are talking about various species of essentially the same animal living in the same environment at the same location.So, why are they not all mixed together?The only real explanation is an evolution of species within a relatively short period of time: trilobite to trilobite in this case and amphibian to reptile on a more grand scale. I'm not sure how you can come up with a conclusion diametrically opposite to people who have actually studied the fossils for entire careers.We have shown you that there is fossil sorting on all scales of observation and you simply deny it.Okay, so you can say that human and fish fossils lived in different environments so the fossils are not found together. (This isn't exactly true because we can find them in the same aged rocks in different places.) However, in this case as shown by Pollux, why are trilobite or ammonites not mixed in with certain other trilobites or ammonites?That would be because they are 'sorted'.

Faith is confused (I think) because fossils are sorted according to several different factors, time being just one. Others would be the ecological environment such as pelagic versus shelf. I would imagine that climate might affect the distribution of fossils such as corals or reptiles, etc. Well, it's been a long time since some stages were designated. Now we have added a lot of information such as absolute ages and correlations between different biological environments. There is a lot of careful work involved and it is ongoing (evolution of the knowledge base, if you will).

The question was not whether the organisms evolved, but how did they become sorted in the stratigraphy as they are. But as you said, you have no mechanism for this.The creatures are surely buried at different times, otherwise they would be mixed together. Do you have another explanation? Other than the fact that we have an explanation, whereas you do not. Neither can you 'prove' that there is no invisible dragon hiding in my garage. On the other hand, we can prove that floods do deposit certain types of sediments in distinctive patterns and that fossils would logically by included in any layer they happened to be be situated at the time. When you (all) come up with a mechanism for this sorting then you will have some basis for your conclusions. At this time, you have no basis, whereas we see the principle of superposition as providing a framework for the passage of time. Well, then make your argument for sorting of fossils by a global flood. So, you must presuppose a global flood as described in the Bible. That's been done and we have an explanation. Please document this occurrence. What you are saying now is that the fossils should be mixed up. So, why aren't they? Simply stated, changing environmental conditions. The point is that you don't see them earlier or later in similar rock types. Evolution is not the conclusion here. It is the explanation. And, evidently there is no other explanation than 'must have been' or 'could have been'. That is the whole point. They are the same type but different species. So why are they sorted? Time is the variable. They are still sorted, even though they are the same type of fossil, but they have changed with time.

Do you mean that reference to 'flood currents' or something like that?If so, just remember that not only do the fossils occur in a sequence, but it is a non-repeating sequence. And why were there no currents depositing dinosaurs in the Cambrian time?

If there truly were a global flood of the dimensions necessary to create the geological record, there would be no tsunamis. At least, there would be no record.Now, if the flood were not global nor deep, there would be all kinds of evidence for tsunamis.

Well, the distribution of the flood would have all kinds of impacts on the fossil record, so I would say that we are not toooo far off-topic.But yes, this is all true, though I'm not sure that the continents would necessarily subside.One of the simplest evidences for this is the sea level rise during the Cretaceous (giving us one of the great epeiric seas in the record and the Cretaceous Seaway in North America) contemporaneous with the excessive amount of sea floor basalt as show on sea-floor age maps. This, of course, also caused extensive continental volcanism too, due to increased subduction rates.However, there is plenty of evidence to show that this transgression was not complete and there were always land masses throughout the episode.

No they are primary textures in the rocks derived from known processes and duplicated in the lab.

What?What could you possibly mean by this statement?

Ah, but then we would be talking about erosion of a fossil 747; and, as you know, erosion is a figment of the geological imagination.But, good point. I never thought of it that way.

I had not responded to this post earlier as we got off on the stratigraphy topic for a while, but maybe to revive the conversation I might comment. But there are clearly marine creatures in late 'flood' sediments. Why are they different from the earlier representatives? Why did pelecypods occur later than trilobites? Well, there is such a thing as evidence. One piece of evidence is the lack of flowering plants in the lower part of the record and yet some other plants were common in the early part of the Paleozoic Era. Well, we can't 'prove' it to you, of course, but most reasonable people would go with what the evidence shows. Here is some data. If you have anything to add, like mammals in the Cambrian rocks, please feel free to present your data. Edited by edge, : No reason given.