The Flood, fossils, & the geologic evidence

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Hi solja247, and welcome to the fray, Open minded skepticism is the best way to treat any new information, especially when it may seem to contradict current beliefs. If you want to discuss ages, there is a good thread to look at what the evidence shows for the minimum age of the earth by various methods and the correlations between them: Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1.When it comes to evidence of a flood, we have to ask what kind of evidence is there? To which the geologist says "So?" as the evidence shows this as well. And the Grand Canyon is the wrong kind of erosion for some flood outlet flow. Some of the channels flow in the opposite direction of the main channel, for one. The evidence shows that the Grand Canyon was formed by slow erosion as the rock in the area rose, and the erosion pattern is consistent with this.A better example of the kind of erosion you should see is the Channeled Scablands in Washington State, where massive flooding after the last glaciers were released in a series of catastrophic outflows. These floods were minute compared to a world wide flood, and yet they carved channels that are over a kilometer wide and with square sides, a characteristic of flood outflow erosion. You are free to believe what you want to believe, however you must also realize that whatever you believe has no effect on reality. The evidence shows that Mt Everest is still rising due to plate tectonics, and that the current rate of rise is adequate to explain the current height in the time that this geological formation has been underway.You may also be interested to know that there are sea shells in the rocks at many elevations, including near the top. Sea shells that formed and grew to ages of 20 or 30 years in a placid environment similar to what we see on the sea floor today: some of the shells, such as for brachiopods, are attached by stalks to the bottom and the growth of plants and other animas around the shells are also preserved.You may be interested to know that such layers occur one on top of the other to substantial depth of sequential sedimentary deposits, one overlaying the other in such a way that only thousands of years of formation explains all the evidence -- there is no evidence of catastrophic overturning, breaking and mixing up of the shells and other life forms.Modern geology explains how former sea floor can rise to become mountains. A world wide flood cannot explain this evidence at all. As occurred in the Channeled Scablands. There are also isloated instances of catastrophic events, however they are not linked into any single world wide pattern.There is also a lot of evidence that many parts of the continents were underwater at some time, including the top of Mt Everest and many other mountains, but there is no evidence that the inundations were catastrophic, nor that they occurred at the same time.And it is not logical to believe that catastrophies can cause multiple layers of placid normal growth of complete mature developed ecosystems, and thus it cannot explain the actual evidence. Nope. Which is what has happened, over millions of years, tectonic activity that is still going on and still causing the Himalayas to rise more every year.If such activity were compressed into a few thousand years (and you would need to compress it into days) the friction would heat up the rock to the point where it would melt, and this changes the type of rock -- the sedimentary layers with the shells would no longer exist.If you are going to believe in a world wide flood, then you need to believe in some magical transformation of the world, at which point you can just believe that the water was made to flow uphill and cover all the land, however we still do not have any evidence that (a) this occurred (no universal silt layer for instance), and (b) that the geological explanation is wrong in any way. In essence you have to believe that all the evidence we can see is wrong. That is not logical.Enjoy.

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Hi again solja247, Why not learn about it, and improve your understanding, before making statements like this?See Radiometric Dating

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Radiometric Dating - A Christian Perspective,
by Dr. Roger C. Wiens

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The cosmogenic dating clocks work somewhat differently than the others. Carbon-14 in particular is used to date material such as bones, wood, cloth, paper, and other dead tissue from either plants or animals. To a rough approximation, the ratio of carbon-14 to the stable isotopes, carbon-12 and carbon-13, is relatively constant in the atmosphere and living organisms, and has been well calibrated. Once a living thing dies, it no longer takes in carbon from food or air, and the amount of carbon-14 starts to drop with time. How far the carbon-14/carbon-12 ratio has dropped indicates how old the sample is. Since the half-life of carbon-14 is less than 6,000 years, it can only be used for dating material less than about 45,000 years old. Dinosaur bones do not have carbon-14 (unless contaminated), as the dinosaurs became extinct over 60 million years ago. But some other animals that are now extinct, such as North American mammoths, can be dated by carbon-14. Also, some materials from prehistoric times, as well as Biblical events, can be dated by carbon-14.

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Dr Wiens explains many of the various forms of radiometric (means any dating based on radioactive decay) methods commonly used for dating objects. You're right that it makes no sense, however that is because you are wrong (or someone has misled you) that 14C is used to date fossils. For one thing fossils no longer contain the organic matter that could be dated. Instead other radiometric methods were used to date such older fossils. Commonly several different methods are used to confirm dates. Precisely so, and the method of replenishment is well known and documented, and - curiously - without such replenishment the dating system would not work.A good site that explains this is How Carbon-14 Dating Works | HowStuffWorks Once again, what you believe is irrelevant, as your opinion is unable to alter reality in any way.If you want to discuss the innacuracies, then see Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1 (second notice) and how they compare to layer counting methods.Your opening post suggested you were open-minded, yet now all you are doing is spouting old creationist PRATTs (points refuted a thousand times).This thread is about The Flood, fossils, & the geologic evidence and not about 14C or other radiometric dating methods, so if you want to discuss dating methods you need to go to one of the dating threads: Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1 has already been recommended, however you can go to Dates and Dating and pick one. There are several old ones about 14C dating. fossils and carbon dating and Radioactive carbon dating are threads started by other creationists that had very little understanding of 14C dating methodology.Enjoy.

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Hi again, solja247, getting a lot of traffic? Then you know that there is a lot of scientific evidence for an old earth as well, from a multitude of sources.While it is possible to have evidence of younger testing samples of rock, etc in an old earth (recent volcanic rock for instance), it is not possible to have older rock in a young earth. In other words, the evidence was changed to fool us, rather than lead us to truth? Once you have started down this path, then every bit of evidence that contradicts your beliefs is due to such lokian behavior of your god/s to hide the real evidence. Ultimately all evidence becomes faked to make the world appear different from what you need it to be. That's called delusion, not rational logical thinking. If one were going on a strict biblical interpretation, then the only thing you could posit would be what is in the bible. This would tend to rule out mountain forming as part of the flood process, if my recollections are correct (I am no biblical scholar, so I leave that to others).If you need to invent additional catastrophic events to explain the geological formations, then the issue of a flood becomes rather inconsequential doesn't it? Yet we can compare floods to floods, to see what kinds of forces are involved, and we can look at the ocean floor to see the stresses imposed by very deep water on the sediments and rocks and organisms that live at those depths. We do not see hill formation as a result in either process, to say nothing of mountains.We can compare flood outflows to annual rain erosion patterns and we see that flood outflows consistently match the erosion patterns seen in the Channeled Scablands, and that the annual rain erosion patterns consistently match the Grand Canyon erosion patterns. It is not change but the rate of change that is the problem for you. Consider an analogy: I fill a quart pot with water and let it sit at normal room temperature and document the evaporation of water from the pot. From the observed rate of evaporation I can calculate how long it would take for the pot to be dry. Then I can add energy to the system to make the water evaporate at a faster rate, and I can observe the amount of energy it takes to double the evaporation rate. Then I can figure how much is needed to make the water evaporate in 1/1millionth of the time, and see that this much energy not only vaporizes the water, but it melts the pot. The Himalyas took millions of years to form according to the geological evidence, and compressing that into a few days means you have a lot of frictional waste energy to dissipate, yet somehow keep from affecting any of the evidence. We are back to a lokian god faking evidence to fool you. Except that the evidence in different parts of the world is from different ages, does not correlate in any way with other areas, and is evidence of underwater life for thousands of years. This is not evidence of a biblical flood that lasted barely a year, iirc, in total span of time. Most of the marine life in such deposits would not have sufficient time to have developed even the beginning of rudimentary evidence of life, to say nothing of the contiguous generations upon generations of life forms that take multiple years to develop, so it cannot explain the evidence that exists. Or we are back to a lokian god faking evidence to fool you. Which is not what science claims happened. See a more up-to-date article at:Origin of water on Earth - WikipediaIt appears that water was already a part of the composition of earth, during its formation. Not very tall. The problem is one of energy and heat as a waste product, especially as rock is not a good conductor of heat.

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Hi again solja247, Have fun, and remember that the purpose of going to school is to learn.If you have any questions, feel free to start a thread and ask - there are a lot of people here who will be happy to help.Enjoy.

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Hi again Chuck77 What I find fascinating is that creationists seems to be fixated on a link between mountain formation and a supposedly large flood -- there is no record anywhere of flooding causing the ground to rise. Floods cause sedimentary deposits in low spots, floods (or the water causing the floods) cause erosion away from high spots to deposit in the low spots.Plate tectonics, on the other hand, is observed to cause mountains to rise (Mt Everest is still rising). Here I would repeat ZenMonkey's suggestion (Message 270): That thread addresses the issue of dating correlations that should NOT occur if there had been a flood.The earth is old, the universe is older. Do any of them deal with the evidence of (a) marine deposits of different ages in many layers on mountains (why not one homogeneous layer) and (b) the marine deposits know to science all show mature growth of a complete marine ecosystem extending for decades or centuries in each place? See Trilobites, Mountains and Marine Deposits - Evidence of a flood? for more.Enjoy

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