Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham

I would have thought I'd made it quite clear that there are some things one CAN know from the prehistoric past, such as the former existence of some creatures no longer living today, because all that requires is finding a good skeleton from which to recreate their body. That doesn't require confirmatory tests of any sort. Of course I have said this many times by now and you still prefer to pretend I haven't.That the earth is older than 6000 years, however, is one of those hypotheses that does need the kind of confirmatory test that is not available from the prehistoric past. It's just a speculation, a wild guess, and so are all the dating methods inconclusive, nothing that can be known for sure, as the existence of many now-extinct animals can be.

As I said, some things can be known, if that is known for sure, fine, no contest.

Plants are given as food and not considered to be living in the sense "flesh" is living, yet of course many survived and probably many on the ark too, perhaps many as seeds.Marine creatures could not survive on the ark so obviously some would have been preserved in the Flood waters though others would have died. The ark protected land animals, creatures with "the breath of life" in them, that could not survive at all without protection. Sure seems obvious to me.

The strata are evidence for the Flood; the billions of fossils all over the earth are evidence for the Flood. You have to be willfully blind not to recognize this.

I went to three different high schools, the first, Freshman year in my small town, the second a year in the LA area, big city school, in fact the three year high school had 3000 students, half again the population of the whole small town; and last two years in a medium sized city school, four hundred in my graduating class. It was the Sputnik era and science was king. I got a lot of indoctrination in the value of science, and my best friend from LA went on to get graduate degrees in biological science. I was interested in writing, not science.But I was somewhat interested in the philosophy of science and read Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Karl Popper, forget his titles, it was a long time ago. The idea that science is empirical and has ways of testing and knowing, the ultimate test being that rockets do fly where you want them to fly and medicines can cure diseases and the like, I always considered to be its hallmark. Evolution and the Old Earth, however, cannot be subjected to that sort of testing and yet you all defend it as if it could.I never even heard of creationism or creation science until after I became a Christian in my mid forties (in the late 80s).Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

You are blinded by a bunch of irrelevant stuff you think is Fact but is not and it prevents you from seeing the obvious. The strata just as strata, because of their horizontality, their being separated sediments stacked neatly one on top of another usually with very tight contact lines between them, and their widespread occurrence, are great evidence for the Flood. The billions of fossils are too, because the Flood would have killed billions upon billions of living things, and provided the ideal conditions for their burial and fossilization. ABE: These simple observable facts are excellent evidence for the Flood for anyone who can see things clearly, without the brain cramp caused by theory bias.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Yes, but I would think it intuitively obvious as well. I didn't hear him say anything that implies that. There is no mixture. We believe there was a Flood because the Bible says so, but beyond that creationists think about the physical world exclusively in the effort to prove the Flood scientifically. What an odd question. I think not only creationists but most of the human race do not consider plants alive in any such sense as you are implying. Plants are predominantly food, and not just in the view of creationists. It wouldn't even enter a creationist's mind to include them in the idea of death. The Biblical idea of death clearly relates only to creatures "in whom is the breath of life." which doesn't include plants, which were given as food.

I reject your whole dating obsession so am not interested in your challenge. You need to clear your head of that obsession, which is just blinding you to the simple observable facts of the strata and the fossils as terrific evidence just as they are for the Flood. Obviously.ABE: Your dating obsession allows you to accept unbelievable absurdities about the strata and the fossils.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

They should in any case, simply on the face of it, if only because the alternative scenarios are ridiculous, plus the fact that billions of dead things got buried which protected them from predators (which were dying en masse too) and even managed to get fossilized, which does require special conditions the Flood would have produced in abundance, which otherwise can only occur rarely. You can of course come up with all your objections, but the general fact remains that he observable situation DOES support the Flood extremely well. But of course they do. You can't know where they SHOULD have occurred. This is one of those things that can't be proved, exactly the sort of speculation, imagination. hypothesis that cannot be tested, so you are left with it in that form as merely an hypothesis.We know the land animals ended up at the top, for whatever reason.As for the creatures differing from their living counterparts that simply implies changes by microevolution since the Flood, which is exactly what should be expected. Why the stranger ones are deeper is a puzzle, I agree, but again there's no way to KNOW why that is so, it just is. And again they are bizarre because they are so different from life forms today, but again their living counterparts would simply have microevolved from any of those types that happened to have been preserved either on the ark or otherwise. The animals on the ark most likely didn't look a whole lot like those we are familiar with today.

I keep trying to say that some things CAN be known, they are just obvious as is. Mike the Wiz was saying they are actually in the present anyway and what you want explained about them doesn't require any leap into theorizing about events in that prehistoric past, which is what WOULD be untestable. What you cannot KNOW about the fossils for instance is when and how they died, all you can do is hypothesize, but you CAN know that a particular fossil represents a life form that is no longer living on this planet. So IF there is no doubt that the rock formation on Mars was caused by water, no competing ideas about that, fine, but if you come up with a theory about how and when it occurred, that is going to be untestable.

Go read the thread Why the Flood Never Happened. We've done the Grand Canyon to death on that thread and I'm not going to repeat it here just for you just because you missed it.Your guess about what a worldwide Flood would have done is just as useless as all the others here. If the Flood created ANY of the strata it should have created ALL of the strata.

Your methods are just as untestable and unprovable and unreliable as what they are supposedly testing. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

The strata suggest what the Flood would have done: lay down layers of sediments by precipitation or by waves the way the oceans lay down sand on beaches, only to a huge depth because the Flood was that huge. What's ridiculous is the usual idea that the strata were laid down over millions of years per rock and that each rock represents a whole time period on the earth. The idea that a time period is characterized by a particular kind of rock is actually funny, but conventional geology doesn't even blink. Why should it be? Water does deposit layers of sediments, and there would have been a LOT of sediments to deposit in a worldwide Flood. Great, that's more than anybody else here will grant. The only layer that is a problem is the cross bedded sandstone because the angle of repose supposedly means it had to have been aerially deposited. I suspect there is an answer to that too but I don't know what it is yet. Meanwhile there's no problem with the idea that all the sediments were carried in the water and then deposited wherever they were deposited. The idea that each layer represents a kind of environment is based on the contents of the rock on the ASSUMPTION that it was laid down over millions of years, but if it was all simply transported from one place to another in one gigantic Flood event the contents of the rock are irrelevant, they are just whatever was carried from one place to another. You've bought the standard scenario and haven't followed any of the Flood arguments. The Grand Canyon scenario you present is just the usual silliness. You've got the sea level rising and falling to accommodate the rock contents. Everybody complains that there's no source of water for the Flood or any place for it to go, while they easily accept water coming and going to huge depths to accommodate this ridiculous Rube-Goldbergish idea of how the strata formed over a couple billion years.

Of course anybody who denies that the Bible is God's own revelation to us is going to have a problem with starting from the Flood, but since it IS God's own revelation to us it would be foolish for science NOT to start there, because in that case the Biblical revelation IS evidence, the primary evidence, and all the rest of the evidence has to conform to it. Comparing THE worldwide Flood with any other flood is absurd. What you "would expect to see" based on such observations as you give is likely very far from what actually happened because you don't have the scale of the thing in mind.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Which we have to assume was sorting the Flood did, for whatever reason. Since the conventional time scale is pure fantasy there is no reason to expect human remains at any particular point. For whatever reason, land creatures ended up in the upper strata. And since most of the uppermost strata washed away as the Flood water receded we can assume that most of the land animals and human remains went with it. The loss of these strata is quite apparent in the Grand Canyon area where it is clear they were originally laid down from the current rim of the Kaibab at least to the uppermost layer over the Grand Staircase to the north. Exactly. Even over a few thousand years you should expect quite a bit of change. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.