Have any Biblical literalists been to the American Southwest?

I'm staying away from EvC as much as possible so I don't want to get into a lengthy discussion about this. No, I haven't been to the Southwest though I really want to see it, so you can disqualify my answer on that basis. It is, however, pictures of the formations of the Southwest that convince me the most of the Flood apart from the Bible. The stacked strata, so obviously rapidly formed by water, the fact that all the formations are shapes of stacked strata exposed by what looks like massive water erosion, and of course the incredibly copious fossil contents.

There's no reason the Flood would have left ONLY this kind of effect, it's just one large area where it looks obvious because the strata have been exposed in so many dramatic ways. But there *are* places in the rest of the world that show similar deep stratifications and the sculpting or exposure of them after they were formed, places in Africa for instance, IIRC. These are just places were the strata were exposed so they're visible to the naked eye, but deep drilling just about anywhere on earth encounters the same stratifications. You see stratifications in high mountains too. Seems obvious to me, though I know people here hate that expression, that deep stacks of strata were laid down BEFORE they were exposed --by erosion in the Southwest, or by the tectonic forces that pushed up the mountains, or by road cuts wherever, etc. Despite all the emphasis on how individual strata show erosion and other disruptive effects, nothing like the water erosion and tectonic upheavals that exposed the entire stack after its complete formation has been shown, which in itself is evidence for a rapid laying down of the strata.

I wouldn't put it that way, but yes I think the worldwide strata themselves are evidence for the Flood. Yes. I believe the actual facts are consistent with what water that saturated the earth would have done, and not consistent with the OE explanation. The erosion has to do with their composition and the way they were formed, not their age. I haven't mentioned my religion in these observations.Thank you for the conversation. That's all for today.This message has been edited by Faith, 09-07-2005 01:31 PM

Erosion of relatively soft sediments doesn't take millions of years. The Rockies were thrust up at steep angles, their highly compressed strata remaining parallel and intact. The Appalachians were buckled and folded, which exposed more surfaces to erosion.The explanations of creationists about how water would have created the strata make lots of sense, whereas hundreds of millions of years to form horizontal strata makes no sense. The extravagant abundance of fossils is consistent with rapid formation also.Again, I have not relied on my religion for any thing I've said. I believe the physical facts elegantly support a worldwide flood and that the OE explanation requires a jury-rigged mass of explanations for every little observation.I guess I'm going to have to avoid reading EvC too, to avoid having to answer straw man misrepresentations for the rest of the day.Good luck getting some literalists to discuss this with as so many have been banned from EvC.This message has been edited by Faith, 09-07-2005 01:48 PM

The defensiveness is in your imagination, but your insistently claiming this is a misrepresentation of my posts on the subject and therefore a violation of Forum rules. All the Bible says concerning our topic is that there was a worldwide Flood; it doesn't describe strata or anything else as a result of it. Your obligation is to address what I've actually said, not irrelevancies.

The creationists explain these things far better than evolutionists do with their slow buildup notions. The enormous quantity of water of the Flood, the stirring up of enormous quantities of sediments and marine life in the sea plus the dissolving of all the land areas the water covered, all suspended in various currents of the water and moved and sorted and deposited from waves and currents are parts of creationist theory I have read about. "A water column" misrepresents their ideas. They talk in terms of currents and waves depositing separately sorted kinds of sediments and fossil contents {meaning living creatures that were buried with the sediments}, theoretically sorted by point of origin, by weight and other factors. And of course we're talking about loose sediments, not stone. They hardened after they settled out.However, this thread asked for subjective impressions of the formations of the Southwest by visitors there. I haven't been there, I've seen them only in films and photos. I look at those pictures and they convince me of the Flood just looking at them -- more, actually, they convince me of the nonsense of millions of years of slow build-up.Are you demanding of schrafinator that she produce scientific evidence for her subjective impressions upon visiting there?This message has been edited by Faith, 09-07-2005 08:53 PM

From reading I have a pretty good idea of the material in the Grand Canyon and Grand Staircase area to the north of it. I find it all quite fascinating. But the horizontal layers of disparate contents, which do exist all over the world although they are exposed only here and there, is what is the most convincing evidence of a Flood, along with the incredible abundance of fossils, especially marine fossils in mountains and deserts. I've been here a lot longer than you have, Nuggin, and obviously you haven't checked into previous threads on this subject. You simply share the establishment point of view so you don't have to face being challenged as a YEC does, and when you are challenged you don't have to bother to really think about it either, just ride along on the EvC wagon, just shout along with the crowd. No, I had read the creationists, and they opened my eyes. But my point was that I haven't used the Bible in my arguments and generally avoid doing that so your references to religion are out of order. It is the physical situation itself I'm talking about. You have an awfully autocratic attitude for somebody who just showed up here last month. The establishment really ought to call you on such impertinence.

Local particulars don't address the overall fact of the stratification of the worldwide geological column and its enormous fossil contents. Also, not everything is the result of the Flood.

I've done a fair amount of reading about the composition of the layers of the Grand Canyon / Grand Staircase area. Meanwhile the overall fact of the worldwide stratification itself is evidence for a great flood. All that is erosion over the last 4500 or so years since the Flood. Material falling off the cliffs naturally falls into slopes, and leaves spires behind. From what I have read about the Southwest, most of the dramatic formations have been caused by normal weathering, and in fact some of the most precarious formations have a habit of disappearing in a very short period of years because of that. The same weathering processes that create the amazing shapes also eventually destroy them. They've even discussed trying to find a way to preserve the most striking ones from these natural processes. The cold winters are a major element in the process: ice forms in cracks and breaks off pieces of the spire. The pieces tumble down to the sloping base. Eventually there will be no more spire at all. See above. I would think it had once been a lot more substantial than it now is, a few thousand years ago, its spire-ness being the result of the aforementioned thousands of years of the effects of weathering. The receding flood with its no doubt thousands of temporary rivers and lakes would have started the sculpting, but not down to the dramatic spindly formations we see today. Anything that the receding flood waters had carved down to such extreme spindliness WOULD have been washed away. Amazing place, isn't it? I would really love to hang out there for a while myself, dig some fossils. I've enjoyed reading up on the Southwest over the last few months.

I know, deerbreh, I know the history. Sorry I'm not always precise.

Seems to me that slow buildup theory would have just as much of a problem with this as flood theory. Myself, I picture tides and waves building up at least some of the strata, perhaps tidal waves that reach over huge swaths of land depositing a certain kind of content at a time, and receding for very long periods (days? weeks?) while another layer is formed by rocks tumbling down from higher places, before another wave washes over the land carrying another cargo of sediment and living things. Whatever was the case, the flood was something unique not only in scope but also behavior, and not to be compared with local floods. It involved massive tectonic and volcanic activity according to most creationists, that could have caused enormous waves and certainly stirred up sediments and killed enormous quantities of living things in the deep ocean areas, and washed them over the higher land areas. Not if layers were established one at a time with some period for settling before the next washed in.

I've read Hutton. So he was wrong. It happens. Funny how people take him so seriously now although basically his thinking was extremely primitive.And once again, if I don't use the Bible in my argument it is totally out of bounds to answer my argument as if I had.

You'd sound a lot less foolish if you would address the actual arguments that are used instead of making up such ridiculous straw men.

You did not discuss the Appalachians, but gave another example as if it applied and never showed that it did. You have said nothing about what condition the Appalachians were in when they were folded, and your examples of stressed rocks were not from the Appalachians. You yourself admitted that had the rocks actually been soft, the stress indicators would not have been so dramatic as they are on hardened rocks, but microscopic. Someone posted a site a long time ago showing the folded strata of the Alleghenies that exposed them to erosion. You never addressed that, then or now.Nuggin has not yet addressed anything I've written. If he's talking about granite he doesn't bother to say where.

Since I do my best to follow the geological reasoning and leave out religious considerations, your job is to deal with the geological reasoning and to leave out the religious considerations. Pulling rank is not fair argument.