Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham

Hi Faith,I was focusing on the contradiction. You claimed you had never said rocks form from evaporation, that you had instead stated they form by drying. You seem unaware that evaporation and drying are the same thing.But rocks, the kind we were talking about in the Grand Canyon, don't form by drying.--Percy

I understand that. But the experts can still tell the difference between species from 10,000 years ago and today.Besides, I'm specifically referring to animals and humans that lived 4300 years ago. Those will certainly stick out like a sore thumb at the base of all these thousands of feet of stratigraphic section since most Creos place the flood at the top of the Precambrian.

It seemed simple enough.You and Ham suppose that there was quite a lot of evolution packed in to the few thousand years after the flood, as in this picture from AiG: Unless you and Ham are extreme saltationists, who think that one day a lion gave birth to a tiger, etc, then there must have been intermediate forms.Since sedimentary rocks were formed at the Flood, they were formed before this burst of evolution. Consequently, if the Floodists are right, we would expect to see intermediate forms, but not in the rocks; rather, we would expect to find them in the sediments laid down post-Flood by non-magical processes.Correct?

other than percy's input, i wasn't aware you had made such an argument. you're aware fluvial erosion on particulates and fluvial erosion on rock are, in fact, different, right? a few of the strata in the region actually show signs of fluvial deposition and erosion within the layer during deposition, and fluvial erosion on the layer itself as part of the river channel. think of it like "perimortem" and "postmortem" when you're watching bones or CSI or whatever.

and camels and lamas should leave a lot of transitionals in between.or bears and wolves ...

uh, percy, expulsion of connate fluids is generally a phase in lithification. water need not evaporate to be expelled from sedimentary rock as it "dries". this, in fact, still happens in deep marine deposition.

neither of those positions is accurate. the trilobite family tree looks something like this: with higher in the fossil record on the left, and lower on the right. it's true that most varieties lived concurrently in the cambrian. it's also true that some varieties went extinct, as best as we can tell, before the end of the cambrian, and others in the devonian, and the last by the end of the permian.there was wild diversification in the cambrian, but you still can use trilobites like a "cheat sheet" to take a stab at which rock layer you're looking at. at least until the specific examples are shown to exist higher than previously though. it's not an absolute dating method by anyways.

and i'm saying that it's the "humans" and "human civilizations" angle that you should work, because i can find plenty of animals that existed in practically identical forms both 4300 years ago, and 43 million years ago.we need to find, say, the city that cain's descendants built at the bottom of the precambrian rock. _{but i'm not going to hold my breath on that one.}

But there was no contradiction as I tried to explain.As I said, I did NOT say ROCKS formed by drying. Or evaporation. I was trying to avoid the word "ROCKS" (in the sense of LITHIFIED ROCKS, which I had come to accept is a technical term requiring chemical cementation}. Evaporation or drying is of course the same thing. I said only "mud dries, clay dries," and I many times said I was talking about sufficient hardness to maintain stability, which is brought about by drying /evaporation /compaction /compression etc etc etc., and was specifically trying to avoid the concept of ROCKS or LITHIFICATION.You seem to be trying to hold me to a very specific meaning I did not intend. And there was no contradiction. You just seem to be intent on finding something to find fault with which requires you to make up things I did not say.

There were no post-Flood STRATA.

Sorry, you've lost me. I don't know what you are saying and I don't know what point you think you are making.

Yes, expulsion of water is what I would expect from the compression of the strata by the weight. But it would have the effect of drying them nevertheless, they'd have less water in them.I don't know why what was really a very simple concept is becoming such a big deal. The context was whether the walls of the canyon would slump, I figure they wouldn't because water would have been pressed out of them. They would therefore not have been sloppy wet which is when one would expect them to slump. I used examples from making mud pies as a child and from working with clay. Both slump when too wet, but both hold their shape when damp but not completely dried out, in fact at that degree of dampness both can be cut or carved quite neatly without any distortion.ABE: The concept of lithification by cementation is not what I was talking about but people started making a big deal out of it. Then it turned out that really often doesn't take a lot of time anyway, and I postulated that the chemicals necessary to lithification were probably readily available in the recently Flood-deposited stack of sediments.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

the effects a river has on loose sediment and the effects a river has on rock are not the same.

Dr. A. is talking about non lithified strata. you know, the stuff we dig the cities of the bible out of.

Seems obvious enough, but what's your point and why are you talking about a river?