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If all the slope/wall surfaces in the Grand Canyon were retreating at say a quarter inch in a hundred years, a pretty conservative guess wouldn't you think? that would be an inch in four hundred years which would be about 42,500 inches in seventeen million years or roughly 3500 feet of retreat of all the walls in the canyon. If all the slopes retreat by 3500 feet, at least for all the formations within the canyon, wouldn't you have at most just piles of debris left after 17 million years?

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Slope retreat would explain the width of the Canyon. The average width is 10 miles. More than 50,000 feet.So no, your argument obviously doesn’t make sense.

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Slope retreat would demolish all the island type formations within the canyon where it is widest,

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I don’t see why it should. If the island was sufficiently large or resistant, why couldn’t it survive ?

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...as well as pushing back the outer walls, and lowering the height of the walls too.

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I don’t think it should lower the walls directly - other erosive forces might do that, or if the land gets lower further away from the centre of the Canyon. Slope retreat is essentially widening the Canyon.And you are on record as saying that it is too wide to be accounted for by the conventional explanation, so I think you need to actually get some real figures rather than making contradictory guesses.

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At that rate it would certainly be long gone in seventeen million years.

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That really doesn’t make sense. The rate calculated based on the current size and 17 million years will show the Canyon as it is now after 17 million years. Obviously it has to.

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But of course I think the canyon was cut by the retreating Flood waters and sometimes I get the paradigms mixed up, so I just added the 3500 feet feet to what exists now. Oh well.

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That is a pretty obvious mistake. Maybe if you tried critical thinking you might manage to avoid a repeat.

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All the slopes are eroding. That's clear from the talus at the bottom of all of them. We don't have a broad plain between the walls of the canyon, we have layered formations with talus at their feet.

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Which is why the Canyon is so wide.

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Yes it's too wide to have been cut by the river. But slope retreat is an ongoing process since it was formed.

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I guess we have another falsification if the Young Earth. Since the Canyon was clearly cut by the river rather than retreating flood waters (as has already been shown) we need a considerable amount of slope retreat to explain the width.

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There is none besides your radiometric dating.

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What about the evidence of massive erosion between formations ?

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All the evidence of the way the strata were formed, their flatness and lack of erosion between formations

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Ah, you pretend it doesn’t exist. Point to Coyote.

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Gosh, you're right. The seventeen million years are up. Whatever exists now HAS to have eroded within that time.

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That is not what I said. It doesn’t matter to my point if the assumptions behind the calculation are correct or not. As a simple matter of logic the result of the calculation cannot contradict the assumptions used to produce it. (Unless you get the maths wrong).Thus your point was completely daft.

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There is no massive erosion between formations. Here and there we see some erosion, but otherwise there is nothing but straight flat tight strata and the erosion seen is easily explained by runoff between layers or disturbance of the layers after they were all in place..

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That’s what you say. It isn’t what geologists have found. I’ll stick with the reports of people who have actually investigated the strata, instead of believing your inventions.

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Of course you will, even though their reports are conditioned by their paradigm and not by the evidence

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By which you mean that they report what is actually there rather than things you’ve made up. And that is a very good reason for believing them.

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Sorry, you lost me.

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I guess calculations of rate are too difficult for you to understand.But it really is simple.The calculation was based on the assumption that it took 17 million years to get to the present state. Therefore if that was the rate, after 17 million years we should have the present state. Anything greatly different than that and you have made a major mathematical blunder.Or to put it another way, multiplication is the opposite of division.If you assume that 5 miles of erosion occurred in 10 million years and use that to calculate the rate, then the rate should produce 5 miles of erosion in 10 million years.If you can do division and multiplication you can even prove it.

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They report what is there as interpreted by their paradigm.

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Which means reporting what is there.

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So do creationists report what is there, only they interpret it by a different paradigm.

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YOU don’t because you don’t even know what is there which is the point.As for other creationists, they are quite capable of holding things back if they are inconvenient.

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The evidence is the same, the interpretation is what is different.

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That is a standard Creationist lie. The simplest example I know is the existence of transitional fossils. It would be one thing if creationists accepted the existence of anatomical intermediates, and accepted that they were evidence for evolution, even if they denied that the fossils really represented evolutionary transitions (to be fair Kurt Wise HAS admitted that much) - that would be reporting what was there. However the usual Creationist line is to claim that transitional fossils don’t exist and even use that assertion as evidence against evolution.

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No, I simply took a guess at a rate and figured it for seventeen million years. That length of time doesn't dictate the conclusion, the rate dictates the conclusion. Of course I wanted to show that in seventeen million years even a very conservative rate would reduce the canyon to rubbish.

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And both Caffeine and I pointed out that you were wrong, and your rate didn’t even account for the Canyon as we see it.

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Caffeine pointed out that the greatest width is ten miles which should presumably prove me wrong, at least it would prove the rate I guessed at wrong;

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Wrong. I pointed out that the AVERAGE width is 10 miles. The greatest width is wider still.And your response was: Yes, you actually claimed that a rate that would produce the Canyon in 17 million years would actually destroy it. Which would obviously require a much greater rate.

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but if my supposition is right that all the center formations would have been reduced to rubbish and the surfaces of the walls too, then I think what's being proved here is that the current width of the canyon was not formed by seventeen million years of slope retreat.

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Since such a supposition was not mentioned by you, nor caffeine, even by implication, and is rather obviously in need of support it can’t be reasonably read into your post.

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I don't think there's any deception. The way things look from the YEC point of view there are just two basic models, although to you it's possible to make many fine distinctions. It's not a false dichotomy, it's the way YECs actually truly see the reality.

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So, as a YEC you genuinely believe that there are no Old Earth Creationists ? Neither Hugh Ross, nor the OECs in the Intelligent Design movement ?

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And instead of wanting to "hide" anything, I believe the intention was simply to try to be clearer. Although YEC begins in the Bible, it provides the foundational assumptions, the arguments concerning the Flood and all the other physical issues are scientific issues. If a huge effort isn't made to try to keep the distinctions clear, all we ever hear is that everything we say is nothing but "religion." Well, it's not, it is a real attempt to think through the issues in the physical world from a different paradigm or model than the accepted one.

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Perhaps you can show us where the proposed curriculum admitted that it was based on the YEC interpretation of the Bible rather than scientific evidence. Because not mentioning something is hardly a good way to be clear about it. And don’t forget that is the fact that lost them the case. Do you really think that they didn’t know that would happen if it came out ?

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And yes, YEC does regard anything other than its own view of the age of the earth to be unbiblical, not accepting anything but what you call a strict YEC interpretation. It may be going too far to say others who consider themselves Christians with different ideas of the Bible aren't really Christians, but since YEC is considered to be the only accurate understanding of the Bible, they are within their rights to make that judgment, and they may be right. I personally allow for some deviation from the Bible where people maintain a Christian lifestyle, but I'm not entirely sure where God draws the line on these things, and I certainly believe YEC is the right biblical understanding and any deviation is wrong though perhaps God will forgive it. You may certainly disagree, but it's not right to accuse YECs of misrepresentation or whatever else it is you want to hang on them/us for that.

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Aside from the fact that it is hardly clear that the YEC view of the Bible is correct - and you don’t even try to argue that it is - I hardly think that God has any cause to condemn anyone who sees things differently. Besides can you point to any place where salvation is said to depend on believing YEC rather than things like Baptism or repentance of sins ?

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Perhaps it is technically wrong to define evolution as atheistic since there are people who profess various forms of religious and Christian belief who also endorse evolution, but again, since YEC regards evolution as completely antithetical to the Bible they are within their rights to make that judgment call. Atheism is often described in Christian theology as applying to people who live like atheists although they profess Christian belief. You just aren't familiar with this way of thinking.

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It is not just technically wrong, it is absolutely wrong. Perhaps you can explain why YECs have the right to pretend that the various forms of theistic evolution don’t exist or why it should be a judgement call.

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The list of seven scientific principles you object to as too strictly YEC and I guess not really even scientific, are honestly scientific, and they are claiming to be able to present them as scientific although they are using the Bible as foundational. Of COURSE "the full YEC theology" is the basis of the principles. I understand that if there is a biblical foundation, or YEC foundation, from your point of view that disqualifies it as science. All they are trying to do is say that is not so and I agree with them.

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They obviously aren’t scientific. They are obviously the product of religious doctrine without any sound evidential support. Just because you deluded yourself into thinking you have evidence doesn’t mean that the leaders o& the YEC movement don’t know better.

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I don't know anything about the Dover case except what has been said at EvC. My impression of what I read here, however, is that the judge was wrong.

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Since you can’t even remember that the case being discussed was the earlier Edwards v Aguillard your opinion isn’t worth much. I’m convinced that the judges were correct in both cases.

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There hardly seems any need to argue that YEC represents the most biblically faithful understanding of the Creation

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Oh, there is plenty of need. The claim that God authored the Bible is unBiblical in itself. The idea that clearly mythical accounts are even intended to be taken literally is certainly not an obvious truth.

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The Bible clearly describes an earth of a few thousand years old. It takes all sorts of mental gyrations to make it mean anything else,

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.It takes plenty of mental gyrations to overcome the issues with a literal reading. The tensions between the two creation accounts or the fact that the whole Eden story looks rather more like a pagan myth than even the more sophisticated view found in Genesis 1. Not to mention the fact that self-styled Bible-believing Christians find it very hard to accept the fact that, in the story, the serpent spoke the truth.

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and Old Earth creationism is clearly an accommodation to the theory of evolution, which is warned against in the New Testament

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No, it obviously isn’t. Old Earth Creationists are Creationists. They don’t believe in evolution any more than you do.

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It's just prejudice that makes a difference between "religion" and science when we're talking about the Bible, since it offers facts about the real world by God Himself.

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It would be much more true to say that your assertion is based on prejudice. Even if you could demonstrate that the Bible was reliable - and you can’t because it obviously isn’t - it would still not be science. Science rests on empirical investigation, not on authority.

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I'll go with the majority traditional reading of the Bible over two thousand years which is basically the YEC reading, rather than your weird revisionist version which you share with jar.

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So where can I find the traditional Bible? All the ones I’ve seen - including the KJV - are weird revisionist versions.