The Great Creationist Fossil Failure

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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.

This is so patently true that I am at a loss to know why you would mention it. The order is both objective and obvious.Your argument, insofar as it is coherent, seems to be that there are other orders that would also be consistent with evolution. That is true: but in the first place the one we have is consistent with evolution, in the second place, there are many more things we could conceivably find in the fossil record that would not be consistent with evolution; and in the third place, and most germane to this thread, it is completely inconsistent with Flood Geology. Which is why the thread is called The Great Creationist Fossil Failure.

Last I checked this "positive evidence" was:(1) Many of the sediments in sedimentary rocks were laid down with original horizontality, just like we can see real processes doing today without a magical impossible Flood.(2) The geological record shows that in the past some parts of the planet were covered with water, just as is the case today without a magical impossible Flood.I think I can see my way to explaining those things without invoking a magical impossible Flood, but if you have any other points you'd like to adduce which you think would give me more difficulty, please feel free to start a thread. On this one, perhaps you could try to explain the order in the fossil record.

Sorry Faith, that doesn't work. Organisms develop in particular orders because they have to, but the particular order is not the only relevant point here.If you imagine that cats, dogs and pigs arrived in the world one million years apart - they didn't, it's just a way of thinking about it - you'd expect them to always be found in the fossil record in that order. We say they are.But if there was a global flood you'd expect to find all those animals jumbled up together.That's not what we find so you have to explain how a flood sorted cats, dogs and pigs into seperate layers and never got a single one in the wrong layer. Not one.If you prefer make the animals marbles. We find three diferent coloured marbles in rocks that we say are of different ages. Red, blue and yellow. We never find a red marble in the same rock as a blue and so on. This is easily explained by the marbles existing at different times and laid down independantly.You need to explain how a flood organised all the marbles in their individual levels when they would have all been swirling around together.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

There are more pressing problems with the Old Earth scenario:

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.

Wildly inaccurate cartoons produced by halfwits are not a problem with the Old Earth scenario, since there is nothing in the Old Earth scenario that predicts that halfwits will not be able to draw cartoons.

What you don't get is that all those scenes you ascribe to various Time Periods are purely imaginary. The actual evidence is the surface of slabs of rock that are all stacked up. They are associated with Time Periods, whose supposed character is constructed out of some characteristics of the rock plus the flotsam within the rock, but the actual evidence is merely the rock and its superficial characteristics.If you like you may draw some dinosaur footprints wherever indicated on the surface of a particular rock, some other fossilized impressions perhaps, or some ripple marks, burrow holes, raindrops etc. But the point is that the surface of these rocks is ALL you have to represent the actual surface of the Earth in the indicated Time Period. You have no mountains, rivers, trees, canyons, etc. except as imaginary constructs you impose on these clues.All you have is the relatively flat surface of sedimentary rocks. I'm going through this book about the Grand Canyon that led off the thread on AIG's view of the canyon, and of course it's full of drawings of the strata, all identified with the Time Period assigned to each. The surfaces of these strata cover enormous swaths of geography; they are the ONLY physical representation of the actual surface of the earth in the assigned time period, obviously a flattish rock surface with some markings on it, and NOTHING ELSE.There is something very very wrong with this picture but you don't see it, do you? What you "see" is what you IMAGINE was there, not the strata themselves which is ALL that was there.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

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.

You mean like dinosaurs are "imaginary constructs" that I "impose" on the dinosaur bones and footprints?(Or perhaps like the mountains, rivers, trees, canyons, etc. that I think exist today are imaginary constructs I impose on my sense-data?) Really? Usually you claim that there was some sort of flood.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Well, explain it to me. What's very wrong?You mention rivers. I can in fact see some rivers that were present in the Jurassic which are still here doing their thing. However, other ancient rivers have dried up, and when that is the case I would not expect to see the actual river, would I? What I would expect to see is the sediment it deposited, which will stay there after the water is gone. And I do in fact see geological formations that look just like that.Since there are old rivers, there are also old canyons: but again, if the forces that erode a canyon have been absent for millions of years, I would expect to see the canyon filled in with sediment. And I do in fact see geological formations that look just like that.If a tree grew a million years ago then I don't expect to see it still growing: but under the right conditions I might see it fossilized. And I do in fact see fossils that look just like fossils of trees.Mountains usually last for millions of years, so I can in fact see mountains that were there in the Jurassic Period. The Appalachians, for example, have been there ever since the Ordovician, and though of course they're smaller now, they're still there, Faith; and even you would have some difficulty in describing the Appalachian Mountains as "a flattish rock surface with some markings on it, and NOTHING ELSE".Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Remember how these "slabs of rock" don't cover the ENTIRE surface of the earth? You have left those parts out of your illustration.Remember the monadocks that jutted up through the Tapeats? You have left those out of your illustration.Remember the buried canyons that were detected by seismic imagery? You left those out of your illustration.Remember the channels that flowed at the surface of the Mauv limestone and were later filled in with Temple Butte formations (end of Cambrian)? You left those out of your illustration.Remember that the layers in the GC are not uniform in thickness and some go from very thick to non-existent - even within the canyon? You left that out of your illustration.Remember the flat lands of the central plains states? You left those out of your "surface of the earth today" drawing.In short, you are comparing a mountainous section of the surface of the earth today with a flat section of the earth in the past. If you were actually trying to make a drawing that represented the way the surfaces ACTUALLY looked at those times, they would be very different and would include the ACTUAL features present at those times. You are just cherry picking.BTW: nice illustration, even if it is not very realistic.HBD

Faith, although there is a definite order, the topic is not about that order of fossils per se, or whether they are more/less complex with time.The question is 'why is there an order at all?'

Actually, no. You can ignore all of those 'superficial' data if you want. But every one of them tells you something about the source, transport and deposition of that rock or stratum.For instance, the very fact that you have sandstone indicates that erosion is going on someplace and sand is being transported to the site.So, the extensive sandstone deposits of the Jurassic on the Colorado Plateau had to come from someplace and mineralogical/geochemical studies show them to have been eroded from the Appalachians to the east. The Appalachians were being eroded in the Jurassic, just as Precambrian rocks were being eroded to form the Tapeats Sandstone.I have shown you evidence for this in the past.And we don't 'draw some dinosaur footprints' in a rock just so that we can call them Mesozoic. You are either being flippant or completely ignorant on this. Dinosaurs were land animals the lived during your global flood, in fact, they lived toward the end of your flood.How did that happen?We have an answer: evolution.Maybe you could say that the carcasses of dinosaurs were simply deposited late somehow, but what about footprints? How did dead dinosaurs make footprints in Jurassic and Cretaceous rocks?Sorting by time (evolution) explains it.That 'superficial flotsam' (including fossils), provides the clue.

All imaginary, of course.Just 'flotsam'.Superficial.Oh, and remember, YECs use the same data, just a different interpretation. Edited by edge, : No reason given.