Summations Only

Look, it's like you've got this one graveyard as it were that represents all the living things you assign to a particular time period of millions of years. It's all compressed down into this straight flat layer of usually a single sediment, this one graveyard. I don't know how you all manage to avoid the absurd implications of this, manage to think the strata don't really have anything to do with the time periods although there they are, labeled everywhere you look with a name that designates the time span and some indication of the fossils of the life forms that supposedly lived in that time span, and if there hadn't been such layers with fossils in them nobody would ever have come up with the idea of time periods anyway, that's how connected they are, but you all deny there is any connection when it's pointed out. And you'll go on denying it now just as you deny all the other realities creationists can see but you can't.

Oh right, pick on the ways an analogy doesn't work. Typical.

In what way does your alleged analogy work ?To expand, it is hardly my fault that the absurdity is in the bits that don’t work. That’s your fault for relying on a bad analogy. Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

quote:

---

Look, it's like you've got this one graveyard as it were that represents all the living things you assign to a particular time period of millions of years.

---

More accurately we have material deposited at a particular time, which includes the remains of creatures that died about that time.

quote:

---

It's all compressed down into this straight flat layer of usually a single sediment, this one graveyard.

---

You’re rejecting the idea that sedimentary rock is lithified sediment ?

quote:

---

I don't know how you all manage to avoid the absurd implications of this, manage to think the strata don't really have anything to do with the time periods although there they are, labeled everywhere you look with a name that designates the time span and some indication of the fossils of the life forms that supposedly lived in that time span, and if there hadn't been such layers with fossils in them nobody would ever have come up with the idea of time periods anyway, that's how connected they are

---

There aren’t any absurd implications.Geologists worked out the order of the strata, extending that order based on geometric relationships. Geologists discovered that there were distinctive assemblages of fossils in particular groups of strata and attached the labels to them, calling them systems. The time periods are simply the times in which the systems were deposited.This really all makes sense. You just reject it because it contradicts your religious dogma.

Or, because the dating contradicts everything else you "know," perhaps you should examine what you "know" for errors.Works both ways!

And of course that "everything else {you} know" is the dogmatic beliefs that you hold in spite of the evidence. You keep accusing everybody else of being blinded by an old-earth view and that our scientific findings are fabrications of "the OE/ToE paradigm".The reality is that you are projecting your own failings in that you are yourself being deceived by your own religious dogma which is the only reason you have for rejecting the evidence. Furthermore, that is also what drives you to keep yourself ignorant of the evidence and of the scientific methods which uses that evidence. You claim that all those methods are hopelessly flawed, yet you have absolutely no clue what could possibly be wrong with them, only that you believe that your extreme dogmatism requires them to be wrong. That is exactly what you just told us.So what answers did that geologist give you when you asked him questions about what geology students are taught and how the layers are laid down? You did complain that you have never seen it explained how the layers are laid down, so I told you to ask a geologist, since a geologist would be able to explain it to you. Have you spoken with a geologist? No, of course not! Talking with a geologist would cure you of that portion of your ignorance, which you cannot dare to allow to happen. You depend completely on that ignorance and must maintain it at all costs. The first question, about what they are taught at university, was already answered by edge who had been through those same courses are Steve Austin, but you rejected what he told you and ignored the truth. That proves to us that even if you were to ever talk with a geologist, you would reject everything he would tell you for no other reason than that you believe that it would conflict with your dogma.
 Faith, try to answer an honest question: What would be the consequences of the earth being billions of years old after all?In order to cut you to the quick, I'll answer the counter-question about the consequences of the earth turning out to be no more than 10,000 years old. It would literally change all of science, because we would have to then figure out why everything we had discovered and tested and retested could have possibly been so incredibly wrong. That is because science is not in the least like theology, in which you can cherry-pick and redefine and obfuscate in order to "prove" anything while disallowing any attempts to test your assertions. Instead, in science everything depends on everything else. You cannot ignore any actual evidence, you cannot avoid having your ideas challenged and tested. All the evidence shows that the earth is ancient, so if the earth turns out to instead be so incredibly young, than that would mean that everything we thought we knew was completely wrong. Which would be extremely incredible, since everything else based on our scientific understanding works so incredibly well.OK, your turn: What would be the consequences of the earth being billions of years old after all?

You still making that absolutely ludicrous false claim? Even somebody with only a quarter of a functioning brain could see how false that is and how utterly stupid it is.When a layer of sediment is laid down, it is laid down over a particular period of time starting at one specific point in time and ending at a later specific point in time. Duh?Layers of sediment are laid down over the layers below it and before the layers that will end up above them. Therefore, a given layer is younger than the layers beneath it, which were laid down in a previous period of time. Similarly, a given layer is older than the layers above it, which were laid down in a later period of time. Duh?Therefore every layer does indeed represent the period in time at which it was laid down. Duh?Everything deposited in a particular layer, both organic and inorganic, were present during the period in time that the layer was deposited. Duh?Those simple facts that you deny hold true regardless of the lengths of those time periods and at exactly what in time each time period started and ended. Whether the earth is young or old, those simple facts do still hold true and are obvious. Duh?Clearly, your false claim that strata do not represent time periods is complete and absolute blithering nonsense. What is wrong with you that you continue to spout something so utterly stupid?Has your theology really inflicted such a high degree on brain damage on you?

How very strange, dw, that you would allow yourself to make such a deceitful argument, Surely you know that by "time periods" I mean THE time periods such as Cambrian, Devonian, Mississippian, Permian, Triassic and so on. It's a piece of deceitful sophistry to use the term to refer to any period of time from a minute to an hour to a day to millions or billions of years.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Only the historical sciences, not the true sciences. It would be very hard on the scientists who have believed the lies, that's for sure. But if you really care about truth, you'd just pull yourself together and face the truth. You've been so wrong because you've accepted at every turn an unevidenced lie. What is actually true will remain, many facts you've discovered, but they will be seen in a different context. A very hard time indeed but it could be the start of a new grip on the truth. If it's really the truth you care about. Well, that is completely false. Christian theology requires that all parts of the Bible be understood in relation to all its other parts. All of it is truth, and all of it must be understood as working together, no part of it contradicting any other part. You cannot prove anything you like, all of it has to support all of it. As I just said, that is also true of Biblical theology.As for science, if you've accepted a false model or paradigm then you will always be working within that false model, to confirm that false model, so of course if the model is shown to be false all of it will have to go, all of the interpretive or explanatory system, the paradigm. But all the true facts will remain. They will just have to be understood within the true paradigm. You may have to if you don't know how to explain it. That is always the case in the early stages of developing any theory anyway, there will be plenty that's not yet understood within the model. It's not ignoring, it's just admitting it isn't yet understood. But what happens here is that creationist ideas are often not tested in themselves, other problems not yet understood are often thrown at us instead, and even when tested they are not tested so much by facts as by the false ToE paradigm anyway. Over and over creationist ideas are misunderstood because they are being criticized from a false paradigm. No ALL THE EVIDENCE does not show that. Only radiometric dating shows that. At every turn you read the Old Earth paradigm into the facts, but the facts do not in themselves support the paradigm. Yes, you'd have to face that what you thought you knew you did not in fact know, that you had been misinterpreting facts by reading them through the lens of a false model. The hard sciences are the true sciences and they do work incredibly well. They are subject to testing because their evidence can be replicated. That is not true of the historical sciences which are based on one-time events that cannot be replicated but can only be interpreted. Much of the above would also describe the position Bible believers would be in. The Bible would be false and there would be no true God, just all the false religions that make slaves of human beings.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

By cousins you mean that all trilobites are the same species? If so, what is your evidence that all trilobites are the same species? By "kind" do you mean species? If not, what is the definition of "kind", what does horizontal evolution within a kind mean, and what is the evidence for genomic built-in variation? What evidence are you looking at that says they aren't eras? Radiometric dating, sedimentation rates, evolutionary pace, all say they are eras of time. Yes, of course. Evolutionary change (beyond drift) is driven by environmental pressures. Species experiencing the least environmental pressures will experience the least change, if any at all, while species experiencing the greatest environmental pressures will experience the greatest change, if they don't go extinct. I was referring to adjacent eras, not adjacent strata, and I said that adjacent eras represent modest differences, at last as compared to those across long timespans. Adjacent eras are not the same thing as adjacent strata which can have unconformities between them that represent millions and millions of years. And how did a flood insure that no rabbit ever got buried with a trilobite, no pterodactyl with a bat? Are you sure they were flocking? Maybe they were traipsing. And tell us how you learned of these unknown factors about water behavior. Sure you are. You're denying radiometric dating, evolutionary change over time, the chaotic nature of floods, the way sediments form and are transported, and the way sediments settle out of water, just to mention a few. What you're actually denying is the reality paradigm. Your Flood paradigm is the illusion. Gee, I guess we disagree. How shall we settle this? Maybe with evidence? Got any?--Percy

Yet more utterly dishonest misrepresentation from you Faith.You constantly show you do not believe what the Bible says but rather what your Cult claims it actually should have said.Traditional Christianity is based on honesty rather than the fantasy that is the major characteristic of the Christianity you market. Traditional Christianity believes the Bible actually says what it says, that it is NOT inerrant, that Young Earth, Creationism and Biblical Inerrancy are simply perversions of Christianity and pretty much a joke.Traditional Christianity has had no problem with the Earth being billions of years old, with the Biblical Flood being plot devices in stories, with humans being the product of evolution rather than Special Creation and that there has never been a Fall. Traditional Christianity places what the Bible actually says over the fantasies of your Cult.Creationism is only a modern lunatic fringe branch of Christianity. The idea of Inerrancy is also another example of the lunatic fringe trying to pretend there is any legitimacy to long discarded dogma by traditional Christianity. Young Earth is simply stupid.

It should be based on the basic structure of the creature. As you pointed out you can't tell a tiger from a lion by its skeleton, they are both of the cat Species. So with the trilobites you can tell by their structure that they are of the trilobite Species no matter how much their incidental characteristics may vary.That would be the basic rule I'd have in mind. But there was an interesting segment of the film "Is Genesis History" where three sea creatures were said to be the same Species although they look entirely different: the starfish, the sea cucumber and a little round creature I forget the name of. The scientist had to pick them up to demonstrate what made them the same Species, which was their many little poison tentacles and the location of their mouth in the center bottom of their form, and the fact that they are all segmented although not in the same way. Yet they are three entirely different shapes, one spherical, one like a cucumber and one shaped like a star. So I guess you wouldn't be able to tell from their fossils that they were the same Species but there are always exceptions to any rule.But trilobites all have the same basic structure of three lobes, a central lobe and two side lobes, and the same basic shape."Kind" means species in the sense I'm using the term above. The words are synonymous, one the English, the other Latin, and "species" gets used for all levels of differentiation ("Species of cat" etc, while "Kind" includes all cats) so that it's hard to be clear when you use "species." They are rocks; rocks are not eras. Sedimentation rates today cannot possibly be the model for the geologic column. They are small in area by comparison and they cannot possibly be as straight and flat from end to end as are the geo column strata, and they occur all over the place. The strata occur on the continents, not under the sea, where the abyssal plains are not straight and flat anyway.{Paradigm Clash Alert} Evolutionary pace is a weird one. It only takes a few hundred years to establish a pure breed of anything you like, and you yourself produced the evidence of the formation of different "species" of Jutland cattle by the simple accidental isolation of a portion of the herd for a few generations. The lizards isolated on Pod Mcaru evolved a whole new head and jaw and digestive system in less than thirty years. Millions of years is ridiculous overkill. {Paradigm Clash Alert}there is absolutely no need for environmental pressures. Simple sexual recombination automatically produces changes in every generation. Environmental pressures may contribute to the final result in some cases but it is not at all necessary. {Paradigm Clash} Oh not so at all. You can get great changes by simple sexual recombination in reproductive isolation. Jutland cattle, Pod Mrcaru lizards, any creature that has been reproductively isolated for many generations. Whole new breeds of cattle or dogs or whatever. Even human beings: that's how we got all the different human races. And environmental pressure could very well bring about extinction because it could eliminate too much variability from the genome all at once by selecting an extremely narrow set of characteristics.Later.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

continued According to the geo column/timescale charts, they are identical. The trilobites show minimal changes over "hundreds of millions of years" which really means six or seven layers of rock. I don't want to get into a detailed comparison but eras are dependent on strata and you can get any amount of "change"
imaginable from one level to the next because it isn't change, it's just different groups of creatures in their own separate grave sites.. Unknown factors, hydraulic mechanisms. Process of elimination. I believe I've answered all that sufficiently, most of it is interpretation, not facts. And you are not the one to pontificate about physical facts since you get it wrong so often.Cheers.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Faith, please use the word "species " correctly.
Sea stars, sea cucumbers, and sea daisies, (which are probably the little round one you refer to), are in the same PHYLUM, Echinodermata, but different orders.
There are about 1300 species of sea cucumbers, 1600 of sea stars, and a small number of sea daisies. They would not be able to breed with one another, and it is exceedingly unlikely that the considerably different trilobites would be able to interbreed.This is a reply to 1812, not 1813Edited by Pollux, : Message replied to

Are you saying that a stratum equals an era (according to science)?No wonder you are so confused.I really recommend a general geology course at your local community college. Just sit in and listen ...These are things that you cannot teach yourself.