"The Flood" deposits as a sea transgressive/regressive sequence ("Walther's Law")

I have one question for both of you though. Can we agree that Creation Science starts with a conclusion whereas Science as taught traditionally starts with a Premise? Is this one of the basic differences?

That is way too simplistic. Darwin himself didn't even originate the idea of evolution, his grandfather had already thought of it. So you could say that Darwin worked from the Conclusion of evolution to come up with his theory of natural selection as the mechanism for how it could have come about.

That's really all creationists are doing. For instance we know there was a worldwide Flood some 4500 years ago so we think about the particulars of how it could have come about.

And now all thinking on the evolution side begins with the Conclusions of Evolution and many of the tenets that support it. Or geology begins with the conclusions of the Old Earth and related tenets. All thinking is done within these established frameworks and if anyone thinks otherwise they are seriously misled. Once you are convinced that you know how something happened everything you do is done within that framework. There is nothing at all different about how creationists think. We start with what we know as provided by a trustworthy source: God's word.

Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

... Besides, my arguments are all refutations to begin with and show the logical impossibility of the ancient earth, the time periods and the Geological Time Scale. ...

Except, shockingly, all the evidence of an ancient earth in Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1 ... where your single post to address the very beginning of the evidence (the Bristlecone Pines) was:

Message 278: No, RAZD, I can't explain it to support the Flood, it's good evidence for your side, so I leave it at that for now.

That is the sum total of your reply to my Message 277:

There are three trees that are documented to be over 4800 years old, the oldest is 5014 years old this year. There is no change in the formation of the tree rings during those years. Can you explain this without magic and fantasy? We can discuss how this evidence is tested and validated, if you are interested, and we can discuss how the scientific method can be used to extend this chronology to 8000 years with bristlecone pines, and then to 12000 years with Irish and German oak chronologies. Note that this evidence invalidates any evidence you think demonstrates a young earth.

You couldn't refute this and made no attempt ... in over 13 years of this thread being posted ... to address any of the other issues.

The scenario I present hangs together and accounts for what we see.

Except that it does not (and cannot) account for the sorting of trilobite body shapes (let's forget whether or not they were all one species for now, and concentrate on the factual evidence of different body shapes) in layers with radioactive isotopes that are also curiously sorted to have different "decay aged" isotopes always in the same layers with specific trilobite body shapes even though these isotopes are immune to chemical sorting or physical sorting by any known scientific process.

Evidence that IS explained by old age and the lapse of time since the layers were deposited for the radioactive isotopes to decay to their present states.

And evidence that is supported by the evidence of Uranium Halos and the Oklo natural reactors that shows no change in the way radioactive material decays ... for hundreds of millions of years ....

What is logically impossible is a young earth when there is soooo much evidence of an old earth, evidence that should not exist in a young earth.

You have no idea how much evidence is out there that totally refutes any young earth scenario ... except magic.

Enjoy

As I said I've been ignoring posts that attack me personally, sorry if that interferes with what you think of as "evidence" but that's the way it goes. Looking over this post of yours I see that as is often the case with you, your rebuttal is beyond idiotic. I may or may not decide to answer you some time in the future.

Faith writes: That's really all creationists are doing. For instance we know there was a worldwide Flood some 4500 years ago so we think about the particulars of how it could have come about.

You can postulate a flood hypothesis and you can gather evidence for it. That's all fine. It's what the scientists did in the 19th century.

What you can't do if you're going to be a scientist rather than a creationist is reject mountains of evidence that disproves the hypothesis and overemphasise the weak to non-existant evidence in its favour. That's simply bias.

The flood hypothesis was rejected over 100 years ago and the case for it has worsened ever since. There is no scientific support for it whatsoever.

Yes you keep bringing up OTHER evidence and ignoring my evidence. I doubt you even have a clue to what I've been arguing all these years. I've acknowledged some of yours as belonging on the plus side for evolution and the old earth, yes "good evidence for your side" and I leave it at that, because my evidence is very good for MY side, conclusive in my opinion. Meaning yours is going to have to be adjusted.

The rejection of the Flood hypothesis was wrong, based on a failure to imagine the sheer magnitude of such an event.

The rejection of the Flood hypothesis was wrong, based on a failure to imagine the sheer magnitude of such an event.

Regardless of the magnitude, we know beyond a reasonable doubt that because of the clear lack of a genetic bottleneck in humans, that the entire planet has not been covered in water since humans have been here. QED.

I don't see how Walther's Law could apply to a flood deposit, not even in a "superficial and simplified way." Walther's Law states that vertical successions of strata result from lateral changes in environment, such as a coastline that is moving inland or outland. Floods don't cause lateral changes in environment. The water level change is temporary, so any flood deposits are not part of Walther's law.

Strictly speaking, yes.

It's been a long time since I learned Walther's Law, but I remember it having something to do with the observation that adjacent depositional environments will also be above or below each other.

Here is a definitions from encyclopedia.com:

Walther's law (law of correlation of facies) An important statement relating to the manner in which a vertical sedimentary sequence of facies develops. Walther's law of facies implies that a vertical sequence of facies will be the product of a series of depositional environments which lay laterally adjacent to each other. This law is applicable only to situations where there is no break in the sedimentary sequence.

So, you could have the superposition of different facies in a flood, but they would not be adjacent nor would it be a continuous sedimentary sequence.

Add to that the fact that flood facies look nothing like normal transgressional sequences and you are up against a hard rock and the sea. Literally.

Faith's argument is so muddled that I can hardly comment. It just makes no sense.

The rejection of the Flood hypothesis was wrong, based on a failure to imagine the sheer magnitude of such an event.

The rejection of old ages is wrong, based on a failure to imagine the sheer magnitude of time.

So, now we're talking real evidence, eh?

The water carries them over the land and deposits them in those neat layers, such as we see occuring with rising sea water according to Walther's Law, but perhaps also by precipitation when the water has risen to its height. There is all this heavily sediment-laden water over the land, rising over the land, standing over the land, both, and the sediments get deposited from that water. How are we having such difficulty communicating about something so simple? So, how do you keep all of that sediment suspended in the water as it's carried all the way across the continent?

How do sediments get progressively deposited as the water rises according to Walther's Law? I would guess they are depositing with each rising of the water.

The kind of turbulence necessary to do that would not facilitate nice, even, tabular, sorted deposits of the kind that we see. Basically, you are talking about a mudflow. Have you ever seen a mudflow deposit? How many thick limestone layers are there?

Yes, all there is for the ancient unwitnessed and untestable past is such conjectures, lots of conjectures. See, I know the Flood occurred so I'm trying to explain it. You think it didn't occur so you are trying to debunk it. That's all that's going on here. You don't know what degree of turbulence was involved but it makes you happy to think there was more of it than would facilitate the depositing of the strata. Perhaps if you put your geologically educated mind to the task of explaining instead how it could have happened you'd come up with something really interesting.

This is all silly nonsense. There is no reason for this quantity of sediments to suddenly be ripped off the ocean floor and cast onto the continents. ....

Why not? Fountains of the deep, turbulent water, huge quantities of sediments from the land all rising up over the land.

There is a reason that sediments accumulate where they do ... it's because they have reached a low energy environment and the eroded sediments can settle out in the ocean basins. So, why would they move back up-gradient to travel across the continent?

This basin idea is nonsensical. The strata show no signs of being deposited in basins, they are huge flat horizontal expanses, they aren't shaped within rims of basins. Again, Walther's Law shows that sediments do move "up-gradient" as sea level rises.

In fact, the kind of turbulence that you would need would also leave behind some kind of diagnostic evidence.

My guess is that you are overlooking the necessary evidence because you don't expect to find any.

What is that evidence? Why did it suddenly stop to settle out in neat fashion? How far would boulders and gravel be carried across the continent in what is essentialy an uphill direction?

I thought boulders and gravel were carried by glaciers.

Your jacking the data into an impossible scenario.

Well, there is plenty of evidence for that scenario that I've shown many times already. The famous cross section I like so much is good evidence for rapid deposition of the strata for instance, for no disturbance of the strata until all were in place and so on and so forth.

I guess you missed the discussions of the genetic bottleneck that prove you wrong.

I guess you missed the discussions of the genetic bottleneck that prove you wrong.

Impossible, there is no genetic bottleneck in humans.

And genetic bottlenecks in other species are irrelevant.

They cannot be from The Flood since we know that the entire planet has not been covered in water since humans have been here.

A genetic bottleneck in another species must have come about by a different means than The Flood.

How do sediments get progressively deposited as the water rises according to Walther's Law? I would guess they are depositing with each rising of the water.

That wasn't the point. How do you keep the sediments suspended as they flow across the continent?

Yes, all there is for the ancient unwitnessed and untestable past is such conjectures, lots of conjectures. See, I know the Flood occurred so I'm trying to explain it. You think it didn't occur so you are trying to debunk it. That's all that's going on here. You don't know what degree of turbulence was involved but it makes you happy to think there was more of it than would facilitate the depositing of the strata. Perhaps if you put your geologically educated mind to the task of explaining instead how it could have happened you'd come up with something really interesting.

I've been trying for years to understand the YEC scenario, but I've also never heard a YEC explain it. For thousands of miles a flow has to maintain its load flowing across the landscape, not leaving a trace and then suddenly stopping and dumping a continental-scale set of layers.

All I get from YECs is "that was the flood, so there!"

Faith--don't forget to address post 34, which deals with the dating issue.

You can't just keep on ignoring dating as it won't go away, and your whole model depends on it.

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That is way too simplistic. Darwin himself didn't even originate the idea of evolution, his grandfather had already thought of it. So you could say that Darwin worked from the Conclusion of evolution to come up with his theory of natural selection as the mechanism for how it could have come about.

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Erasmus came up with a version of evolution, but it wasn't the same. Also you conveniently ignore the fact that Wallace independently came up with much the same ideas and that Charles Darwin mustered sufficient evidence to convince the scientific community.

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That's really all creationists are doing. For instance we know there was a worldwide Flood some 4500 years ago so we think about the particulars of how it could have come about.

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In other words you are claiming that Charles Darwin was fanatically devoted to the idea of evolution on the sole ground that his grandfather came up with a version of it. I think we can see that your argument is somewhat lacking.

And, of course, you do not truly know that there was a Flood at that time. It is simply a dogmatic belief held in spite of the evidence. The difference is very, very clear.

And that is before we get into the creationist habits of falsehood and misrepresentation.

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And now all thinking on the evolution side begins with the Conclusions of Evolution and many of the tenets that support it. Or geology begins with the conclusions of the Old Earth and related tenets. All thinking is done within these established frameworks and if anyone thinks otherwise they are seriously misled

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Both are established on the basis of the evidence. You have not even come close to matching that evidence, as proven in discussions here. The fact that you run away from so many challenges to your assertions is clear evidence of that.

Is it not true that you call the order of the fossil record an"illusion" simply because it is a major problem to your arguments ? Certainly you have come up with no better reason even when asked - and you have been, many times.

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There is nothing at all different about how creationists think.

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And yet we see that there is. Your own argument about Darwin is so shoddy that I certainly would not make it, or anything similar.

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We start with what we know as provided by a trustworthy source: God's word

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What you call God's word, even though it makes no such claim for itself. And, as we know, you won't argue the theology that is the supposed basis for your position. If you can't even come up with arguments that you think good - given the obvious stinkers you have called good - for that position then it really must be indefensible.