Hi Flyer,
I know your post has already received three replies, but one point you made deserves more detailed treatment:
Flyer75 writes:
For a second I'll digress; haven't many scientists begin to take a position (s) that yes indeed, catastrophic events did take place, more so then what was originally thought years ago, and that is what can explain many geological structures/strata that we see today.
You're talking about uniformitarianism, and it doesn't mean what you think it does. The concept was introduced by Charles Lyell in the first half of the 19th century, and it means that the same forces and processes at work in the world today were also at work throughout the entire history of the Earth. In addition to slow processes like deposition and erosion, Lyell's famous book,
Principles of Geology (Darwin took it with him on the Beagle), included earthquakes, volcanoes and floods. Today we also include processes of which Lyell was unaware, such as glaciers and asteroid and comet impacts.
The term uniformitarianism fell into disuse within geology long ago, probably because it is so easy to misinterpret as excluding the possibility of sudden change. But that's not what it means. Uniformitarianism refers to the array of forces at work, not the rate of change.
So no, scientists are not changing their views about the forces that might have been at work changing our planet in the past. They still think that erosion, deposition, earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, glaciers and impacts are what shapes our planet. And...
Whether one believes a Genesis Noah flood is not the issue in this, just the fact that something big did occur??
Things that actually happened leave evidence behind, and looking back four or five thousand years, there is no evidence of "something big" happening.
--Percy
Edited by Percy, : Grammar.