This is a reply to
Message 324 from Faith.
Faith writes:
Yes, Percy, I understand your thinking, but I think like a floodist and it seems to me that the facts support my thinking as well as evo thinking. I'm not so sure that the deeper fossils are all that much more different from modern types than the wooly mammoth, the sabre-toothed tiger or eohippus are different from modern types.
Your above statement includes a contradiction. First you say,"The facts support my thinking as well," then you say you doubt one of the central facts of geology.
If I could briefly touch on the original topic of the old thread, one of the primary reasons for the low esteem in which Creationism is held is it's habit of dismissing inconvenient facts. That increasing depth in geological layers means increasing differences from modern forms is a fact based upon simple observation of the fossils derived from the layers. The evidence is so directly visual that it really can't be challenged. It would be like saying "What chocolate cookie?" with your hand in the cookie jar.
If you doubt the facts of the geologic column when you hear it from me then there are Creationists here who will tell you I am not misrepresenting this, such as wmscott and TrueCreation.
The creationist explanation for the finding of different kinds of creatures in the same layer (are they ever found together or usually in separate digs?) is that they simply occupied the same piece of geography.
Right, and the question being asked of you is how creatures occupying the same geography (I've been calling it region, we could also call it area or location) come to reside in different layers. It would be helpful if you could carefully describe this for us because we haven't had much success trying to fill in the blanks ourselves, such attempts drawing quick criticisms for not getting your meaning. In other words, apparently no one so far has been able to understand your scenario for how this could happen.
To make the problems more clear, let's look at just the layers cut through by the Colorado at the Grand Canyon. I'll start at one of the lowest layers and selectively work my way upwards through the layers, and I'll try to find ways in which each layer is consistent with a flood.
- Tapeats Sandstone: Coastal sand dunes. Turbulent coastal waters. Among the types of layers at the Grand Canyon, this type most resembles the results of a flood, but closer examination makes a single flood unlikely to be the cause. The Tapeats Standstone layer is a couple hundred feet thick, and its frozen sand dunes appear one upon the other. How a single flood in less than a year could repeatedly inundate the coast at intervals long enough for large sand dunes to form again and again is difficult to imagine, but in this discussion let us assume that this layer was laid down as the flood waters encroached onto the land.
- Bright Angel Shale: deposited in quieter waters further from shore. Rich in fossil remains. This, too, at an undetailed level, is consistent with a flood. The flood overtook the land and the level of the waters continued to rise, and what was once shoreline came to be some distance from the new shoreline. But how did so much life manage to live, die and accumulate on the sea floor in so short a period of time?
- Muav Limestone: shallow sea further from shore. The evidence of storms ripping up the sea bottom is present. Again, this is consistent with a flood. As the water continued to rise, this area came to be even further from shore and generally very quiet. But the sea was sufficiently shallow that storms were able to affect the sea bottom. But again we ask the same question, how did so much limestone accumulate in so short a period of time? In modern seas about a yard of limestone is deposited every 7500 years, and the Muav Limestone is more than 200 yards thick in places, which is more than a million years of limestone. How could that much limestone be deposited in less than a year. In particular, how could a sea only 10 or 20 yards deep accumulate deposits hundreds of yards deep?
- Supai Group: siltstone and sandstone from low lying swampy area. Includes mud-cracks and land plants. How did this happen in a flood? Well, presumably this layer records the flood receding. The only problem is that there are still a thousand feet of layers above this layer.
- Coconino Sandstone: desert. Reptile tracks but no reptiles. This can be interpreted as the flood having completely retreated.
- Toroweap Fromation: sandstone and limestone interspersed with gypsum beds. Encroachment of the sea. Is this the same flood? Another flood?
- Kaibab Limestone: shallow sea. Many fossils. The layer is about 100 yards thick, nearly a million years of limestone. This is the top layer. Higher layers recording the recession of the sea have been eroded away.
Summarizing, the oldest layers of the Grand Canyon if considered in a very undetailed way can be interpreted as the incursion of a flood onto land, but higher layers record the recession of the sea followed by a period of dry land, and then incursion of the sea again. This is not the pattern of a single flood, and most importantly for a flood scenario, the topmost layer is of a shallow sea, not of land from which a flood is retreating.
What's more, there are the obvious timescale problems presented by such thick layers of fine-grained sediment, as well as the shear volumes of organic material that take thousands and thousands of years to produce, especially the limestone.
I suggested a different scenario: that they were likely soon overcome by the torrential rain, which would severely limit their ability to survive as they couldn't fly far in that.
Would it be okay to request a little less violent oscillation in viewpoint? First flight is an advantage, now it's a disadvantage.
Presumably flightless birds like ostriches and high stepping birds like flamingos would have an advantage over the sparrows and wrens, since the rain is too intense for flight. If fossil ordering is a function of differential ability to escape the flood, why aren't ostriches and flamingos found primarily in layers above most other birds?
Your scenario also has serious probabilistic problems. It requires that not one single modern bird ever suffered some misfortune that caused it to be buried with the dinosaurs or with the reptiles of the lower Permian layers. No modern bird was ever struck by airborne debris. Not one ever suffered a heart attack. None ever grew weary because it was too old or too young.
And as far as water dwelling creatures go, as I also proposed, their survival potentials would in fact be the lowest because of the huge quantities of sediments that would have been sent into the water continuously from the beginning of the flood, both stirred up from the bottom of the oceans ("fountains of the deep") and eroded off the land everywhere on earth.
This scenario introduces a dilemma. As described earlier, many of the layers are rich in organic materials. Creationists who claim these layers were laid down by the flood must also claim that there was accelerated life during the flood so that millions of years of organic material was created and deposited in less than a year. Your proposal starkly contradicts this traditional Creationist position by claiming that the huge amount of sediment suspended in the flood waters would have greatly diminished sea life. Since I can't see how either proposal is tenable, I merely note the contradiction.
[regarding ducks...] Locale, habitat, heavy heavy rain for forty days straight, all their usual food dead.
Unless you have evidence of a heavy rain for forty days straight, this argument derives from the Bible and must be left aside from a scientific discussion.
As to the specifics of your proposal, your claim has been that animals' differing habits and characteristics relative to mobility in a flood would have caused their differential appearance in the layers, yet every time a differing characteristic is pointed out that should have caused such sorting you claim it isn't really a differing characteristic. Had I instead fed you misinformation and told you that ducks were predominantly found in the upper layers, you would have said that their ability to float in a flood made this possible.
But I still have to ask, in how many places do you find these Eocene, Jurassic, Permian layers with their corresponding fossils? There is always this problem for someone trying to trace the evidence that what is presented is the CONCLUSIONS from the evidence, not the evidence itself. We are TOLD that such and such a creature is ONLY found in the "Eocene," we are NOT told where these layers exist around the world, how many fossil specimens are found where, etc. How many fossils are we talking about? Are any of them actually grouped together or are they placed in the same "era" by extrapolation from the Geo Timeline? Are their layers of the same kind of sediment or different kinds of sediments in different parts of the world? If you find a "gap" between such a layer /time period and others above or below, what REAL evidence is there to justify assuming it ever existed in that locale?
These are questions that would be very difficult to answer. Am I being truthful when I tell you that Hyracotherium (the dawn horse formerly known as eohippus) lived only in the Eocene? Or if you went to a textbook would you discover that I was lying and that paleontologists actually say that Hyracotherium was found in layers both above and below the Eocene. This is pretty easy to verify. If you trust the web when many webpages say basically the same thing, then you can easily discover that paleontologists believe Hyracotherium lived only in the early Eocene.
But there are a couple other possibilities. Perhaps Hyracotherium lived in many other layers, we just haven't found any yet in other layers. This is not only a realistic possibility, it is something that has actually happened, not with Hyracotherium, but very famously with the Coelacanth, an ancient lobe-finned fish. Thought extinct for 80 million years, but only because the youngest Coelacanth fossils ever found are 80 million years old, the paleontological world was stunned when Coelacanths were discovered off the coast of Madagascar in 1938. Such could be the case with any fossils, not so much for fossils of land-based creatures (there's not much, if anything, left unexplored on land), but much more so with sea creatures. It has often been said that we know more about distant galaxies than we do about our own ocean. We shouldn't be surprised by surprises from the ocean.
Another possibility is that paleontologists are lying. It could be that though Hyracotherium is found in many layers, the paleontologists through mutual agreement at secret meetings pledge to always write that Hyracotherium is only found in early Eocene layers. This puts us into the realm of conspiracy theories, a realm I'd rather avoid.
Touching on the initial question about in how many places we find Eocene, Jurassic and Permian layers with fossils, the answer is, "I don't know." Edge seems to believe it is many, but I don't know myself. But what does it matter? Many layers are revealed by the cutaway at the Grand Canyon, and many layers is what you would find if you could perform similar cutaways in most regions of the world. Many of these layers contain fossils. Independent of my specific example of the Eocene, Jurassic and Permian, you'll have the problem of multiple fossil-bearing layers one atop the other (not necessarily with no intervening layers) in a single location that present the exact same problem as my specific example. How does your flood scenario account for a flood overtaking an area and entombing the inhabitants, then returning a couple layers later to entomb a completely different set of inhabitants, then returning yet again to entomb yet still another completely different set of inhabitants. How does a flood do this?
I didn't think your scenario worked, and I don't think your scenario this time works either. I HAD proposed a scenario of my own or at least was in the process of developing one. You are wrong to say I haven't provided one, and I've repeated some of it here.
First, a correction. It wasn't my scenario. It was my attempt to fill in the missing pieces of your scenario. I know you think you've provided a complete and consistent scenario, but pretty much everyone discussing with can't figure out what it is, so either we're all dunderheads and you're wasting your time with such idiots and should move on, or perhaps you need to make another attempt at clarifying your scenario.
I proposed the tides to explain a layer of marine life high in the column, not for anything else. Land animals would have died on the land and while I assume they too were pushed around by the tidal action I supposed they were probably buried in roughly the same vicinity as their natural habitat. I've also proposed that as the flood receded at least some of the tides could have been huge, not normal, flooding the drying land for huge distances inland, partly because of the undersea volcanoes and earthquake activity that was triggered by the release of the "fountains of the deep."
Much of your argument has been that fossil ordering is due to different capabilities of the creatures. How are floods and tides pushing around dead land animals combined with receding flood waters, volcanos and earthquakes going to maintain any sorting that might have occurred?
But nobody knows, ALL of it is speculation.
I don't know how to respond to this. What am I required to do to rebut this, Faith, list everything I know about geology? Or is this just a bit of hyperbole that I'm supposed to ignore? Or is it a bit of misdirection intended to provoke others into responding in kind so you can complain some more about the horrible treatment you receive here?
Could I respectfully suggest that these kinds of comments are not helpful to the discussion?
The evidence to my mind definitely suggests that the fossils in the layers couldn't just have died in the normal course of life over millions of years but were encased in mud, all of them, bazillions of them.
Can you describe what it is about the evidence that causes you to reach these conclusions? Certainly many of the layers of the Grand Canyon could not be interpreted as ever having been mud. The fine-grained limestone, sandstone and shale layers all have clear evidence of having been layed down over thousands and thousands and thousands of years. What is it about these layers that suggests to you sudden encasement in mud?
What evos have a BIG problem with that is NEVER acknowledged is how millions or years would have produced many horizontal layers of anything at all over so much of the earth, rather than heaps and valleys, and layers that contain fossil life in such apparently quickly-covering wet-sediment type "environments" too.
The ultimate fate of the Rocky Mountains is Kansas. All mountain systems are eventually worn down into plains. It takes about 20-30 million years once the forces causing uplift relent. Weathering and gravity do the trick. This is what we observe happening today. Perhaps you saw the movie "The Man Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain". At the end they relate how the townspeople recently had to build the mountain up again because erosion and settling had turned it once more into a hill.
Your intuition that geological forces operating over long periods would produce "heaps and valleys" isn't something I at all understand, and so I can't really argue against it. If you can describe what geological actions you think would occur to cause these "heaps and valleys" I'll try to respond to that.
I really need a picture of the distribution of fossils within their layers over great distances.
Well, if you think you need one, then I encourage you to seek one out or find the raw data and create one yourself. But it might be easier if you asked yourself why you feel the need for such data. If it's just that you're the type of person who likes to study raw data, then by all means, go for it. But if it's because you believe that fossil ordering and the geologic column is a myth and that geologists are just making it up or misinterpreting the data, then it would just be wasted effort.
There's a very good reason why you can't just go to a Creationist website and get the story of how the flood created all the geologic layers and the fossil ordering, and why you're forced to come up with all your own answers. It's because there is not only little agreement within Creationist circles of how these things happened, many Creationists purposefully try to address these issues in as unspecific a fashion as possible. The reason other Creationists can only act as cheerleader for you instead of arguing for the same things you do is because they don't see things the same way you do. The reason Creationists have such varied views and proposals is because their views are not based upon evidence. Each Creationist looks at the geologic layers and explains the flood causing them in a different way. Creationists must start incorporating facts into their scenarios, such as at least agreeing that fine-grained sediments take immensely long times to settle out of quiet waters and will never settle out of violent waters. This isn't speculation or imagination, it's a fact, and the unwillingness of Creationists to acknowledge facts is why there's no agreement among them and why still after more than a half century they're just as far as ever from concensus about how the flood could have caused the geologic column. Such a determined lack of concensus after all this time should set off alarm bells for you.
The geologic column and fossil ordering are based upon evidence gathered by geologists over a period of more than 200 years. Literally generations of geologists have gone to college and grad school and participated in innumerable field studies collecting and anlyzing samples and writing papers that are read and reviewed by other geologists so as to build a concensus of opinion on topics for which there is sufficient evidence. It's the reason so many here are arguing the same viewpoint, and it's the failure to acknowledge evidence that causes the lack of concensus among Creationists, leaving you alone in this debate.
I am happy with the idea that marine animals would have died first and been buried first, precipitated out of the flood onto the land first. The principle of their sorting among each other I don't know though.
But the topmost layer of the Grand Canyon is a marine layer.
Faith writes:
Erosion, tidal currents, run off and mudslides would cause randomization, not sorting, of dead creatures.
The sorting would have occurred before the moving. But your point is taken.
I thought your argument was that different animal habits and capabilities enabled them to reach different heights before being overtaken by the flood. Now a mudslide tumbles down across the dead creatures that have carefully sorted themselves. How does a mudslide not destroy the sorting?
They [early geologists] may have considered themselves Christians too, but they weren't taking the Bible as written or they wouodn't have so readily accepted an idea of long periods of time between the layers.
There's the Bible again. Let's stick to the scientific evidence, shall we? If the flood really happened then it happened for everyone, Christian and Jew, Hindu and Moslem, agnostic and atheist. And if it happened then there's evidence for it. Follow the evidence.
Seems to me the original geologists wouldn't have immediately thought of those layers as having been formed under water or they couldn't have dismissed them as evidence for the Flood.
You've picked up a misimpression somehow. One of the first things early geologists learned to recognize was which layers were laid down under water. One of the earliest tools in the geologist's toolbox was the ability to recognize limestone layers as being laid down in shallow seas, and sandstone layers as being laid down near or at coastal areas.
But evidence FOR the flood is in the strata themselves so visible in many mountains, and the mountains had to have been formed as a result of the flood or certainly afterward and didn't exist before, according to the small depth the Bible says was required to cover all the mountains on earth at the time.
How does a flood build a mountain? And you're again referring to the Bible.
But the timetable based on it, and the fossil ordering may yet prove to be a false mental construct nevertheless.
All theories, including Einstein's, are tentative and will change in light of new evidence or improved insight. All you have to do is show how more than 200 years of geological thinking is totally and utterly wrong. How Creationists will do this when they can't even acknowledge how fine-grained layers are deposited (very slowly, in case I haven't drilled this in sufficiently yet) is the biggest mystery in all this.
--Percy
Corrected section on Bright Angel Shale. --Percy
This message has been edited by Percy, 03-27-2005 07:32 AM
Fixed grammar in a couple places. --Percy
This message has been edited by Percy, 03-27-2005 09:21 PM
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