Summations Only

Faith, these are not the posts of someone who understands something pretty well. ---But then you go on to write: Yes, Faith, where's the difficulty? You have finally managed to say something clear, straightforward, and sensible, and it is a summary of the view that you wish to attack as ridiculous. But perhaps the bit you think is ridiculous is the bit you still don't understand, the bit you have all these questions about, the questions that you are still unable to understand the answers to.

Small amounts of sediment deposited on soil become soil, because organic material is available to mix with the sediment. How can that not be clear to you, if you are making any effort whatsoever to understand what people are actually saying.You've also denied that soil can become rock under soil. It is quite clear that you are simply denying what folks are saying. I cannot tell whether your errors are willful or if you are simply incapable of understanding. But from start to finish your position in this thread has been completely untenable.

It is tempting, and pretty close to correct, to say that you have never been right about anything pertaining to science.

After seeing the complaint Faith registered yesterday at Message 503 I read this thread forward from Message 547 to the end. I think the sense people have is correct, that despite many varied explanations Faith still doesn't understand geology's view of how a living landscape becomes part of the geological column. Dr Adequate's list of Faith excerpts in Message 601 makes clear how poorly it is understood how a landscape (such as the one I'm looking at now from my porch of trees and underbrush and dead leaves and birds and squirrels and chipmunks) becomes a minute part of a possibly miles thick layer of rock.There's another point I've seen alluded to several times over the past 150 messages that I also think is important, that the fate of most terrestrial landscapes is obliteration through slow erosion, explaining why most layers in the geological column are marine. The soil in much of my state is just passing through on its way from the mountains to the sea. As long as the mountains exist then the net of incoming and outgoing soil is in balance and our landscape changes little across the centuries. But when the mountains are gone millions of years from now this chunky hilly landscape will disappear, worn down to a plain and possibly even disappearing beneath the waves.i'm still in a busy period, so my moderation efforts will be slight. I see Adminnemooseus has been looking in and keeping discussion on-topic.Please, no replies to this message.

Sigh. All I'm aware of denying is anything that isn't found in the geological column, which is mostly composed of discrete sediments, not soil. This isn't to deny that soil can become rock, just that all I am talking about is what ended up in the geo column as we find it today / strata/ stacks of rocks wherever they are found that are the scaffolding for the geo timescale. Soil may be part of some layers, but most oif the layers don't have much organic mix in them, being mostly composed of a particular sediment such as sand, clay, calcium carbonates, and so on; but do correct me if I'm wrong.So I'm picturing the situation of the sediments as first laid down before they became the rock in the geo column, that would not be a livable landscape for living things. I'm using the term landscape to describe an environment that can support living things, but a bare sedimentary expanse as not a livable landscape, whether before it became a livable landscape or after it was buried and becoming rock, or was the burying sediments that buried the landscape. Any time in the processes where the landscape was not the surface but only bare sediments. And snce we have rocks in the geo column that stretch across a lot of geography I'm talking about any point before or after they were rock but not a livable landscape, making a surface for animal life that was not livable (including sea life though inadvertently I may not always include them). Much of the discussion has been about how it could have been livable anyway despite having buried the livable landscape. As the discussion has proceeded it's seemed to me that there has always been a point where there must have been an absence of livable landscape and nothing but an unlivable bare surface of sediment. This I'm judging simply from the fact of the rock in the strata today and considering what events must have occurred to get from a landscape to a rock. That's ALL I'm trying to do here. In trying to juggle the events in this hostile atmosphere I'm most likely getting things out of order at times.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

But you don't want to prove it by commenting on what I said in that particular post for some reason.

Most of those statements got resolved in the course of the discussion, being responses to things others said. What do you think I still don't understand? Even the idea that a landscape forms on top of a layer wasn't wrong, it has to do that, though it is the layer that represents the previous time period and not the rock that the landscape became. In a stack of strata the next time period would start out as sediment on top of the previous sediment/rock of the previous time period. However, since that was confusing I started talking about the landscape in relation to the rock it became rather than what it built on. Both are correct but I was trying to find the clearest way of saying it.There may still be things I don't completely get. So what? What point are you trying to make? Do you have any idea what point(s) *I've* been trying to make?At least you seem to be saying the post where I laid out the processes as I understand them was "clear, straightforward and sensible" but I keep thinking I must be misreading you. If not, at least thanks for that much acknowledgment. But I still am not sure what you think I'm still not understanding and what it has to do with this discussion.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

And, as been pointed out to you many, many, many, many, many, many, many times even in just this thread that is simply incorrect, utter nonsense and absolutely false.As pointed out to you back in Message 8 all the evidence shows the layers of what is now rock also contain absolute positive conclusive evidence that at one time the layer was at the surface and under conditions similar to those seen today.The process was explained to you in Message 19 and is repeated yet again here.

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But of course that is utter nonsense. Some areas were barren and some areas were fertile. Also, one period did not end and then another begin but just as today change was continuous.

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Weathering and erosion are going on constantly just as the process of building up goes on constantly, just like today.

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The reality is that if we look at the surface of the earth today we see very old rocks exposed in some places and brand new rocks being created in others. Today's great mountain chains like the US West Coastal range are being raised up today while old mountain ranges like the US East Coastal range are being worn down.

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But as humans we examine and catalog what we find and what is found is evidence of billions of years of change; and, since we are humans we also tried to make sense of what we saw.

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For a really brief moment, a few thousand years out of the hundreds of thousand years modern humans have existed on Earth the Biblical Flood was accepted as the explanation. So that explanation lasted until more detailed examination of reality showed it was simply impossible as a valid explanation.

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While that was going on humans noticed certain uniform and universal traits that allowed the list of what exists to be grouped into smaller segments; that in this catalog we can group these things together.

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One method was to use the first appearance of a particular anatomical feature; the first signs of life, the first appearance of back bones, the first appearance of reptiles, the first appearance of conifers, the first appearance of flowering plants, the first appearance of mammals, the last appearance of dinosaurs, the first appearance of grasses.

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There were other groupings, cycles of hot and cold; repeated great die-offs where a large percentage of lifeforms suddenly (in geological terms) disappeared.

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There was specific evidence of landmasses being created and broken up. And of new material surging up from within the planet and old material being pushed back down into the planet.

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But only in a very very few cases was the whole planet relatively barren.

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Just as today, the landscape changed. Usually the change was slow as mountains got pushed up, inches higher each year and other areas worn down becoming sediment that when worked by living things and mixed with the waste products of living things became soil.

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Today, much of the US and Europe and Asia are rising up. Most folk don't notice but it's still happening. It is the surface of the earth that was scraped bare by the Glaciers that covered it until about 10,000 years ago. That glaciation happened several times, each incursion wiping the soil away leaving only a barren surface of bare rock, rock carved and scored by the glacier. With the weight of those thousands of feet of ice removed the land has been rising slowly back up. And in most places that had been just barren rock soil has formed and some of the most fertile land around.

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Change is continuous Faith. It is not one landscape being created and then worn down before another landscape gets started; it is both processes going on continuously and simultaneously; The Rockies and Cascades going up while the Appalachians and Blue Ridge and Adirondack and Catskill chains are worn down to just stubs, the roots of what they once were. The San Joaquin Valley in California has subsided nearly 50 feet just since the 1920 while much of the Northern Hemisphere is seeing land rising in the post-glacial rebound that began 10,000 years ago and will likely continue for another 10,000 years.

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But as I pointed out in Message 8 when we examine the content of the rocks from earliest to most recent what we do find is conclusive evidence of the life and lifeforms that lived on the landscape during every period for several billion years.

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The reality was also pointed out in Message 352 and that is:

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If we look at the geology what we find is unordered layers of similar materials. We find sedimentary layers and igneous layers and organic layers and marine layers and aeolian layers all stacked vertically with different ordering depending on the location examined.

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But when we look at the fossil evidence we find an entirely different pattern.

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Biological samples are ordered and in a non-repeating pattern whether we are discussing animals or plants. What we see is a clear evolution of lifeforms that is similar across the whole record. We never find latter forms mixed with earlier forms. The ordering of the biological samples, the record of landscapes, is laid out like a storyboard, like a series of time lapse pictures. The oldest samples show no critters with skeletons. Next we find exoskeletons, then backbones. The first plants are all asexual, then we find sexual reproduction by spores then seeds then pollen.

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The ordering in biological samples always is evolutionary, changing over time; the types of materials seen in the geological samples are pretty constant over all time. Sedimentary rocks are made the same way they always were. Shale, limestone, lava, ash... the processes simply repeat.

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The fossils are absolute evidence of a succession of landscapes over vast periods of time where the geological processes continued and repeated but the biological processes themselves changed producing new and unique specimens.

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and yet again in Message 433

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Think.

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What buries a landscape is another landscape Faith.

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We seldom find living critters (we do but only a limited spectrum of living critters) inside buried landscapes.

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The process (and this was the enlightenment, the light bulb moment that showed the Biblical accounts and young earth we simply wrong and they died) is that the processes go on continuously, that critters evolve continuously and that there is no other possible way to explain what is seen unless all this happened over long, long periods of time.

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The fossils we find were at the time just critters that lived on the surface where they are found while it was just like the surface today.

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They died.

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They were not fossils when they died but rather just leaves and insects and dead dinosaurs.

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They got buried in soil, in sediment, in ash, in mud, in a bog, in forest litter, in a sand storm, in a stream, in a watering hole ... but buried.

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Time passes.

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Other stuff piled on top of the still soil with the sample buried in it.

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Eventually enough material is above the sample and its surrounding sediment to turn both the sample and the sediment from soil & dirt to rock.

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More time passes.

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The now lithified rock gets pushed up and as it gets pushed up the not yet lithified material that had gathered over it is weathered and eroded away.

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Eventually it is once again on the surface but now as lithified rock.

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Weathering and erosion now go more slowly than before the material was lithified.

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One day a boy living on the farm near the outcrop of rock sees what looks like bones and so runs and tells his dad.

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They call the police who come and look at the site and decide its not a murder in their jurisdiction and so call the museum three towns over.

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The museum sends some one out who declares "That's a fossil!"

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But for the whole time involved in this scenario there is still a landscape at the surface, still critters living and evolving at the surface.

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The real issue is that on the side of science is all the evidence, every study, every branch of science, every discovery and on your side nothing but stories written by man that contain multiple contradictory descriptions, factual errors and impossibilities.Edited by jar, : appalin spallin in sub-title fixed

I no longer pay attention to long insulting lectures that start out with how I've been told this or that many times. I couldn't care less what I've been told if it doesn't seem to address what I've been trying to get across and I assure you that most of what I get told here doesn't. Your long long post probably impresses those who share your convictions but I'm not reading it.

And you're flat out wrong.At the moment I'm at my parents place overlooking a wide estuary. 20 years ago the sea came in against a man-made Victorian promenade. In the 1800s there was a pier and ferry terminal to the other side of the bay. When the tide was out there is a wide expanse of sand and it's possible to walk the several miles across if you know what you're doing.Today though there's a quarter of a mile expanse of various grasses in place of the sea and sand. One terrestrial environment is replacing another in real time. I've watched it grow outward over the years. It's now so terrestrial that it's grazed by sheep.In a few thousand years, if you dig down you'll find the boundary between a sea bottom landscape and the terrestrial landscape. Both sustained a huge amount of life. What's the problem?

What's YOUR problem?Stating the uniformitarian party line using examples from the present does absolutely nothing to clarify the issues I've been trying to talk about, which are based on the facts as I find them in the strata and encountered in the discussion. Most of the posts here are irrelevant in exactly this sense.

That would be your call.

But in fact where we find terrestrial sediment we tend to find evidence of terrestrial plants and animals (at least from the Silurian onwards, i.e. after they evolved.) Even if you could find an "unlivable bare surface of sediment" somewhere after the Silurian, there'd be no reason to think that everywhere was like that at the same time.

Jesus Christ Faith. The party line is the fucking evidence. You're not impressed by 200 years of scientific endeavor by hundreds of thousands of real scientists so I'm trying to give you some real life, verifiable, observable, evidence for how landscapes develop and change to back up what we see in the rocks that are finally formed by them.

It dfoesn't deal with the situation as I've been trying to describe it. Sorry.YOUR PARENTS' LANDSCAPE ISN'T GOING TO BECOME AN ENORMOUS FLAT ROCK ON THE SURFACE AS HAS TO BE THE CASE IN THE GEO SCENARIO OF THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE ROCK STRATA FROM LANDSCAPES. THE STRATA SITUATION IS UNIQUE; YOU CAN'T ANSWER IT WITH STANDARD EXPLANATIONS.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.