Can you speculate what the creationist rebuttal would be to the evolutionist paragraph above?
Sure I can speculate, I can even theorize (based on previous discussions), but I don't think I can accurately
predict the response.
Or they are satisfied with the evolutionist answer and don't need to look further. Remember, I'm thinking of nonscience people and not necessarily fundamentalists.
True, so the question becomes "how do you interest the non-science types in the question of (how do marine fossils get on mountaintops) tectonics?" And, to the unbiased non-science people, both answers may seem reasonable at this point.
Tectonics can easily be looked up and is generally easy to understand, IMO. Getting into the species, sorting, sediment, etc. takes more explanation and could be more confusing than not, ...
The problem here is that you are then only addressing half of the Creationist "answer" -- why the fossils are on top of the mountain. What is left out is that the marine fossils just show that the sediment environment was marine when the {soon to become fossils} were deposited, that only certain environments produce such fossils, but that there were many such environments at all times in the earths past. What significantly distinguishes one such deposit from another are (1) age of the deposit and (2) species in the fossils.
There is not "a" layer of marine fossils, but many disconnected (in time and space) plates of fossils in many places -- plates that are still topologically discernable as layers (though many have been warped or sliced by tectonics, they have not been {disturbed\jumbled\mixed} across layers) within their geological columns.
The concept that all such fossils were made at the same time is
not a "parsimonious answer" (as it requires a massive amount of coincidence of action), and it is at odds with the evidence: you can have two marine deposits in the same relatively close (geological) area, one from over 65 million years ago and one from less than 65 million years ago. They were not made (under water) at the same time. Not only are they composed of different species, but they are also separated by the iridium layer (meteor, ended age of dinosaurs) as a time marker.
Another aspect of this argument is that the fossils in question (marine fossils recognizable to the average layman) are mostly coastal environment marine fossils: sea shells and corals and such only grow in thick abundance in relatively shallow coastal areas and are mostly absent from the deep ocean bottom (except around deep sea mounts). This is a fairly narrow band around all the continents.
A sudden shift of position from deep ocean bottom to mountaintop would not produce those "recognizable to the average layman" marine fossils, but just another (boring) layer of sedimentary rock.
To get those fossils into a layer they must have grown (over several lifetimes) in a relatively shallow coastal environment. In those coastal bands.
To get those coastal band deposits to cover an area wider than the band there needs to be a mechanism that shifts the band under the growing population, one that acts slow enough that the growing process continues unabated, with enough life cycles to deposit recognizable layers.
Consider a document printer at work: the print head is the coastal environment, the letters (etc) printed are the coastal marine fossils and the paper is the tectonic plate, moving up (in this case) over time (in small discrete increments). Sometimes there are bigger shifts (paragraphs, page ends, earthquakes) that leave blank areas, but the only way to get letters on the document is to stay long enough in the coastal environment to print the letters: below the print head there are no printed letters.
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When the printer exit jams and the paper crumples up in the tray you get fossils on mountaintops -- shallow coastal marine species fossils.
Thus species and their ages are as critical to the Evolutionist "answer" as plate tectonics, and they show that the Creationist "answer" just doesn’t provide the time and the space for such fossils to form.
The Evolutionist "answer" not only solves the problem of the shells, it invalidates the Creationist "answer" -- a critical element.
Having evidence
for a {position\concept\belief} is not the sole criteria for it's relative validity (there is plenty of "evidence" that the sun revolves around a flat earth), but the absence or existence of contra-indicative evidence.
While the absence of contra-indicative evidence does not
prove a {theory\hypothesis\concept}, it's existence does invalidate the {theory\hypothesis\concept} in question.
Enjoy.
This message has been edited by RAZD, 03*12*2006 11:30 AM
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