The Great Creationist Fossil Failure

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Nobody has seen a worldwide Flood so all we can do is imagine and guess. Just as that's really all your theory is based on too.

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Well,no. It is possible to apply scientific principles to work out limits on what the Flood could or could not do, and to consider other possible causes that might fit the evidence better. Or it is possible to ignore all that, simply assume the Flood and try to make up half-baked excuses. The first approach has obvious value in finding the truth, the second has none.

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The best evidence for the Flood is the simple facts of the strata which are known to be laid down by water, an awful lot of it one would suppose from the great depth of much of the strata, certainly no river deposits those; and the enormous number of fossils.

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And yet we do find river deposits - and desert deposits - within the strata. Not all are laid down by water. And there are numerous other problems with this simplistic assumption. This is more an attempt to hide evidence against the Flood than to present evidence for it.

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No matter how many objections you can dream up against the Flood, and how much you prefer your own interpretations to ours, you really ought to concede that billions of dead things buried in layers of sediment under conditions ideal for fossilization really is great evidence for a worldwide Flood.

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To say this in a thread dedicated to showing how the fossils contradict the Flood is just breathtakingly dishonest. Indeed, previous discussion has shown that it is doubtful that the Flood can even account for the number of fossils. So, again, more of an attempt to cover up evidence. The dishonest and superficial presentation certainly disqualifies this from being considered "great evidence" of the Flood.

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You don't have to concede the whole shebang, but fairness really does require this much of you.

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Fairness does not require any such thing. Fairness would require you to deal with the evidence honestly - which you obviously refuse to do.

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My guess would be that circumstances did a lot of the sorting too: It's pretty clear that the land animals were caught up in the Flood later, as the water kept rising on the land, while mostly marine creatures were deposited in the earlier stages. But of course there's no way to know any of this.

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It is certainly possible to know that this "explanation" is grossly inadequate. It is certainly possible to know that the mainstream scientific view explains the evidence much better. Yet you won't even admit that. Funny how your "fairness" requires us to acknowledge imaginary "strengths" of your position but does not require you to acknowledge the real strengths of ours. How unfair.

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It's all a matter of which interpretation seems most plausible to you.

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On any remotely fair assessment that would be the mainstream scientific view over yours.

The order itself is not subjective, so that is one obvious lie. Really, Faith you need to actually find an honest way of dealing with truths you don't like.Second the fact of the order is enough to kill the Flood, so speculating about how we would handle different orders is pretty much irrelevant. Obviously different orders would have an explanation that differed in some ways.

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Because although amphibians would seem to follow fishes and precede reptiles, it's because that IS the order that leads to that conclusion, but there's nothing really obvious about that, you could just say something like, "amphibians are obviously more complex than reptiles."

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It's not based on complexity, it's based on comparative anatomy. This is the second time in this thread that you've let your misconceptions about evolution drive your arguments into irrelevance. All you are doing is displaying your ignorance, and we all know how you hate that (although you will doubtless try to blame others, as usual)

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Comparative anatomy is also an exercise in subjectivity. I'd say the same thing about that.

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A massive exaggeration (I'll point out that even creationists praise Linnaeus). And even so our explanations of the order are distinct from the order itself. And that order is an objective fact.

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As for killing the Flood, hardly. Not being able to explain the fossil record is nothing compared to all the positive evidence we can muster to show that only the Flood could account for the facts while the OE stuff is just silly.

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Let me make an analogy to your favourite argument:"Gentlemen of the jury forensic examiners have retrieved fingerprints, DNA and fibres from clothing from the scene of the crime. Experts assure us that the defendant has DNA, and as you can see he has fingers and is wearing clothes. Surely this is undeniable evidence of his guilt"Presumably you would say that the pointing out that neither the fingerprints nor the DNA match, and the fibres cannot be traced to any clothing in the defendant's possession are "just silly", worthless compared to the "terrific evidence" that the prosecutor presented.And you would be wrong - just as you are wrong now, and for much the same reasons.

So real problems for your position "don't matter" but "problems" that you've invented for the Old Earth position do ?I think that pretty much everyone will disagree with that.

You're making off-topic assertions that have already been shown to be false in this thread. And doing so in an attempt to dismiss the very strong evidence against your beliefs that is the topic.Yes I'd say that there is something very wrong with that.

Did you not read the quote ? The actual surface was there (of course). What do you think the rivers flowed through ? What do you think the desert was ?And - of course - this is just an attempt to bury the real topic.

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That's because I'm making a point about the time periods which are marked by the strata.

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is this another of your weird semantic games where you make up your own definition as an excuse to discount all the evidence against you ? Because it's the strata that Tell us that your point is a falsehood.

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But you'd also have to make a case that the fossils found in those rocks actually lived in the OTHER parts of the earth that supposedly weren't covered by the slabs of rock. Because they certainly couldn't live on the surface of the slabs of rock

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Nobody says that they lived directly on "slabs of rock". For instance the animals living in the desert lived on the desert sands, just like modern animals living in deserts. The desert wasn't a "slab of rock" then.You even admit that the desert was an "actual feature" at the end of the post, without seeing how that refutes your whole silly argument.Now how about dealing with the topic instead of spouting nonsense ?

You do realise that "when the strata were laid down" refers to the deposition of the sediment ?

You can call your lies "reasonable observations" or even "facts". But they are still lies.

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The time periods are represented only by flat rocks, they are not landscapes and never were. And couldn't have been because they stack on top of one another fairly neatly and flatly.

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Faith, the reason people do not agree with your point is that it is NOT TRUE. Numerous examples have been produced in this thread. You can see some in the post you are replying to. And yet you say that it is irrelevant and that your point is being misunderstood.So, if there is a misunderstanding on our part it is this. We do not understand why the actual facts should be discounted in favour of your assertions. Perhaps you should try explaining that instead of just trotting out the "you don't understand" line.

I'll leave edge to refute the other silliness but this is just so obvious:

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Since when would a fossilized tree stump be part of a livable landscape?

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It should be obvious that the real question should be "Since when would a tree be part of a livable landscape?" I really don't think that any more need be said.

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Please don't keep garbling the point.

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But I am not.

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The only tree in the strata is a dead tree.

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And obviously that would be the case, no matter who was right.The point, however, is how did the tree stump get there to be fossilised. If it has roots in place (and there are examples of such) then the evidence indicates that the tree grew there, died and the stump was buried and eventually fossilised. This would be evidence of a livable landscape. Discounting it on the grounds that it is fossilised now IS silly.

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What you have to explain, since you believe there was an actual normal landscape for each time period, is where that landscape could have occurred given that the only actual evidence of the time period is a slab of rock. Did the landscape form on top of the lower rock, did it then get eroded down to nothing for the next sediment to deposit on top of it? What exactly do you think happened?

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Since the tree stumps are in the coal, I would tentatively suggest that the landscape - a peat bog - is right there, compressed and lithified. The coal bed where the stumps are found follows the dip of a stream bed, clearly indicating that that stream was part of the landscape at that time.

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There is nothing silly or false about what I'm saying. The problem is that Geology believes something that IS silly and false and can't admit it.

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It is silly and false to accuse me of "garbling the point" when in fact I am illustrating the silliness of the point.It is silly and false to say that all we have is a flat slab of rock when the bed in question is dips into a channel.It is silly and false to think that making excuses to explain away contrary evidence causes that evidence to cease to exist. The existence of features in the strata prove that the strata are not featureless, no matter what "explanations" you dream up.

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I inferred it from the drawing itself that shows a straight contact line above each filled channel

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That is not a valid inference, also it isn't true of all the channels. Look at the small channel on the bottom right. Also the coal seam with the fossil tree stumps dips into the bed of a channel instead of going on top of it.

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Anyway even if I give a better interpretation later, I don't think it's important to this topic whether water ran in these channels at the surface or not since the surface was still just flat sediment and not a landscape.

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Obviously it was not flat if it had channels running through it. Also if any of the channels were on the surface it would contradict your idea that all the sediments were deposited at the same time. So it does seem to matter.

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Even if the sediments are stream sediments there is still the problem that sedimentary rock covers all the territory where supposedly there was a landscape with all the necessities to sustain the life of the dinosaur before it got buried in the stream sediments which became the slab of rock that covers all that territory. You still have to explain how this could be the case. Was the landscape there at one time but it all became sedimentary rock?

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This is a very odd question, if a bone is found in lithified sediment then surely the sediment beneath it would also be lithified. How could it be any other way ? So, as far as the locations where the fossils are found, the answer is yes. In other places the landscape would have been eroded away, just as erosion happens today. There is absolutely nothing odd about any of this.

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And if so how did that happen? And no dinosaurs survived? But wasn't that due to the meteor? And what about all the other living things? Where did they go when their environment got squashed under all that sediment?

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This is just more bizarre assumptions on your part. Why assume that massive amounts of sediment suddenly got dumped on the environment rather than it slowly accumulating over time ? The way sediment accumulates in modern environments.Really the whole argument is just a ridiculous strawman. At least try to find out what the mainstream view actually claims rather than making things up,

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...but that requires imagining a very complex scenario in which such a landscape ends up as a sedimentary rock, EVERY landscape of EVERY time period ends up as a sedimentary rock.

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Why can't we accept that some landscapes would have been lost to erosion ? Only landscapes in areas of net deposition are going to be preserved. So the idea that EVERY landscape has to be preserved is not only something we do not have to imagine, it is something that we should reject.

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For every sedimentary deposit that contains terrestrial fossils we have to conjure this supposed environment and then suppose it was eventually all reduced to a flat sedimentary rock. The rocks as observed in the strata, where they haven't been tectonically deformed, are pretty flat, often with pretty tight contacts between them, and yet we are to imagine that there was once a whole landscape on their surface somewhat like the landscape on the surface now? And that makes sense to you? That makes sense to Geologists?

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Since we do find fossil landscapes - river channels, sand dunes, soils - then to the extent your claim is true (the existence of river channels itself is a deviation from flatness - and we have seen other examples) - it does make sense, add in the requirement for net deposition and it makes more sense. The flood plain of a river - for instance - is flat.The other question is does it really make sense to you to expect us deny this evidence in favour of your assumptions ? Surely it does not.

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Oy. Interpretive madness it seems to me. You're talking about ROCKS here, that you are calling the "geological record" in which you supposedly can see all those events with water and silt and debris? Oy.

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I don't see any madness in it. We can examine rocks and understand the nature of the particles that make them up - their size, shape and chemistry. If we find rock including particles like silt - in size shape and chemistry - on a flat surface adjacent to a fossil river channel it seems perfectly reasonable to suppose that the material the rock includes material that was silt spread by the river flooding. How could that be considered "mad" ?
Surely it would be madness to reject it out of hand.I'll consider the Grand Staircase later after I have done the research.