Did the Flood really happen?

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Strata do sag under certain conditions and that's what clearly happened in Nepal.

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Really? On what do you base that conclusion?(ABE I will add that even if the lower strata sagged, it doesn’t look as if that applies to anything above the black lignite layer. The strata immediately above it - which is a lake deposit of sticky black clay occasionally interspersed with coarse sand - does not seem to have sagged with them)

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Also in the Michigan basin and the Gulf of Mexico and other places where there is a salt layer, usually at the bottom. Since I'm unable to read the legends on your illustration I have to guess that there's salt there. Yes?

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I don’t know why you can’t read the legend, but no, there is no salt layer. The bottom layer is gravel and clay. Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

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If it's not a salt layer then I don't know why it's sagging.

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I don’t think even think that it is relevant. If there is a lake filling a basin, it doesn’t matter how the basin formed.

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I don't see any indication of the time periods involved by the way

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These are quite young sediments. According to this the lowest layer shown (which is a river deposit) is late Pliocene to early Pleistocene in age and the oldest part of the lake deposits are 2.5 million years old, which is early Pleistocene, while the youngest are a mere 29,000 years old which is still in the Pleistocene.

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The Nepal example looks like strata that sagged after being laid down.

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Even if, for the sake of argument I accept that the lignite layer and the rock beneath it sagged,i see absolutely no evidence that the lake sediments above the lignite sagged. The surface is nowhere parallel to the supposed sagging.

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This diagram is intended to show how sediments accumulate on a lake bottom by sliding down the sides and ending up with the finest at the bottom and coarser up along the sides. Doesn't resemble the Geo Column in the slightest,

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That is a strange claim. Why would some local strata look like the geological column ? Also, your diagram is taken from this page
Curiosity Peels Back Layers on Ancient Martian LakeSo this is specifically looking at the case where the water is stratified.

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The actual evidence of the Geo Golumn shows strata that are straight and thick and flat and typically extend for thousands of square miles.

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The actual geological column includes more localised strata, valleys, buried river systems, monadnocks and so on. Another case of your deliberate avoidance of the whole picture.

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Flood evidence.

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So you misrepresent the geology and claim it as Flood evidence even though you have no idea of how the Flood could do it. If the Flood can’t even sensibly account for your false version of the geological record, how can it possibly be considered anything other than a ridiculous falsehood?Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

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Well, can't find any more diagrams of lake beds.

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Apparently you can’t find any evidence that the lake sediments sagged either.

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Yes it has to be the Flood because water does that and it would have done it on a huge scale.

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Water does that under conditions that wouldn’t apply, and the scale is way too big. Gradual accumulation over long periods of time makes much more sense.

Here’s a look at the geology around the Green River Formation. USGS (pdf)Note especially figure 3. Compare that to Faith’s idea of the geological column.Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

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This is the sort of thing establishment Geology says that is just nonsense.

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But it isn’t nonsense. You only say that because it contradicts your opinions. You haven’t considered the evidence at all.

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Geology likes multiple events for some reason.

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No, it is just that the evidence shows multiple events, where you assume only one.

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ltiple transgressions and regressions for instance where I see one gigantic Flood. Multiple ice ages for instance where I see one that started with the Flood and is now finally near its en

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But you do not see these things, you just assume them. If you saw multiple instances of the sequence indicating a transgression below the sequence indicating a regression - at a single location - why should it not be interpreted as multiple transgressions and regressions? If you see glacial erosion and glacial deposits within the strata why should it not be interpreted as evidence of a glacier?

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However, there is nothing at all about salt flats confined within the borders of the Bonneville ex-lake that could ever have contributed to the Geological Column.

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And just more assumption. Why not? There are salt deposits in the geological column. Why could they not have formed in the same way.

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You know I think standard timing of ancient events is a crock. On the Flood model the lake would have been water left in a confined area after the main Flood water had drained away. Some time later whatever had dammed it up released it, most likely caused by the continuing tectonic activity that had begun at the end of the Flood.

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And yet RAZD listed evidence of age, which you did not answer. And no, the lake did not simply drain. It dried up, that’s how the salt gets deposited.

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The giant lakes are one of the things that are easy to explain as post-Flood phenomena, as I already said.

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If the evidence was so easy to address why did you refuse to address it?

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It is truly amazing how far people can get elaborating such an untruth

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You have demonstrated that with your amazing ad hoc inventions about the Flood. Geology, on the other hand, is science and must stick to the evidence (including the evidence you want suppressed).

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I haven't read through your links but I may do it after I finish this. We probably COULD learn a lot about the climate if it were recognized that all these phenomena point to a worldwide Flood about 4300 years ago. But if you have a false idea of the past you're going to get it all wrong.

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That is obviously self-contradictory. The evidence does not point to a worldwide flood a mere 4300 years ago. That is why you have to ignore so much of it, that is why we know that it is a false idea of the past.

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And you are certainly wrong that such bodies of water have anything to do with the Geological Column. Really, RAZD, you are very knowledgeable about all this supposed scientific history but apparently you don't have a single reasonable doubt about its veracity? If it's totally false you'll never know it

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You aren’t asking for reasonable doubt, you are asking for unreasonable doubt. Your history on this forum reveals a long trail of errors, some completely inexcusable. You ignore much of the evidence to put forward your pre-determined conclusions. Why should any reasonable person prefer your opinions over solid scientific conclusions? And there is no blind faith on our side, we consider the evidence where you largely ignore it.

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A salt flat is no indication of any relation whatever to the Geological Column, let alone its confining borders and no doubt sloping shoulders which don't exist in any of the strata of the Geo Column.

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More assumption.

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Here are the two posts I made that show the great extent of the strata of the Geological Column, layers that extend much farther than your lakes, the first one from a geological textbook and the other pointing out that the cores taken in the Midwest show continuous deposition of the same layers over thousands of square miles. You've got a hidebound distaste for the idea of the Flood and that's all that keeps you from recognizing that it's the only explanation for the actual evidence, even though your own explanation requires weird forms of denial..

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It is not a case of distaste for the Flood it’s just a fact that the evidence disproves it. As you know.But let’s deal with your posts.First I will point out that the statements you quote were made to refute Flood geology. Price doubtless had more of a model of Flood geology than you have, so it is far from clear that his ideas of what the Flood would produce are less reasonable than yours. Even lake deposits could be found over hundreds of miles - the Great Lakes cover more than 94,000 square miles. The quote is lacking in detail - it does not deny that some deposits are more localised. Nor does it contain any information that would let us conclude that these rocks are problematic for mainstream geology. It may be a starting point for an argument but you need to go further, much further.And this is evidence against the Flood The Flood cannot explain they order in the fossil record. You know that.

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The other post contains diagrams showing the extent of the rocks of different "time periods."

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Which is why it is useless to you. The time periods are not strata. That rocks from a particular time period are found in two places tells you very little. They could have been deposited millions of years apart in completely different conditions.Edited by PaulK, : Fixed tag and 1 typo

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The Flood explains pretty much everything..

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If that was true you wouldn’t be ignoring so much evidence.

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... where Geology is klutzy and incompetent,

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Well, no. Geologists aren’t trying to cover up the truth and pretend that you are right. They are trying to understand the evidence - something you don’t do.

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... and the fossil order is some kind of odd illusion especially since no creature could have evolved from the others.

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The order of the fossil record is objective fact. Your opinion about evolution is irrelevant to that.

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Again, there is absolutely no way the strata as they exist as the Geological Column, spreading across thousands of square miles, could ever have come about if they represent time periods.

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The rocks only represent time periods in that they were deposited at particular times and therefore provide evidence about the environment at that time. There is nothing silly about that.

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It is a physical impossibility but that is something you deny.

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You’ve never presented any valid reason to think that there is a physical impossibility there. Indeed you seem to be horribly confused about the whole relationship between the time periods and the rocks.

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The WAY the Geological Column is different in different places is just that IN SOME CASES it has different sediments, but otherwise it is continuous with all the other strata...

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Of course there are quite a lot of discontinuities, both vertically and horizontally. Indeed, differing sediments will often indicate a discontinuity.

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... and certainly the fossil contents are the same, which is of course a major tenet of the ToE I'm sure you don't want to deny.

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The fossil contents vary by the environment of the time, of course.

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Otherwise it's all the same layers as shown in the two posts I refer to.

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One of them doesn’t even show layers. And the other only says that the microfossils are the same worldwide - not the rocks.

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There is no continuation of the Geological Column going on now, and your example of Lake Bonneville has NO resemblance to it

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The first claim is false. As for the second, I see no reason why pluvial lakes should not be a source of evaporites.

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And that's the honesty I'm asking for which of course is never going to happen.

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Perhaps you would like to explain your definition of honesty since it requires us to say things that we believe to be false - and have good reasons to believe false.

And I’ll bring my reply over

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My point is that the geological phenomena that are PREHISTORIC, meaning without any sort of witness evidence, and ONE-TIME events, meaning unrepeatable, are not testable science, and although by comparison with other similar phenomena we may know SOME things about them...

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In fact we may learn a lot of things about them. We can identify lakes, deserts, rivers. We can identify ancient tectonic events. We can work out a whole lot from the type of sediment and how it lies and how it relates to other nearby rocks. Your objection is not an honest objection, it is just an excuse for discarding conclusions you don’t like.

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... the accepted theory about the strata and the fossils is a wild interpretation that has no testability

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Neither of these are true and you have not given any valid reason to think otherwise. But then you think that the idea that the sediment was deposited over a particular period of time is absurd. You think that the order of the fossil record is an illusion - despite the fact that it is based on (and is the product of) repeatable and repeated observation.

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... and I believe yields to the interpretation of the Flood as the far better explanation.

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I don’t think that your preferences have anything to do with which is the better explanation. Since the mainstream view accounts for the evidence very well, while you discount large amounts of evidence (because the Flood can’t explain it!) and don’t even have a good explanation for the remainder.In the face of those facts any honest person would have to admit that the mainstream stream view was by far the better explanation.

Here is one example (an old one, but I’m using a search engine) Message 94
Very recently you stated: Message 1373
It is pretty clear that we do not have an account from Noah or anyone who talked to Noah.
(And, of course, Gilgamesh was not a witness to the mythical Flood)

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But it's only devoted evolutionists that think this

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Really? You think that someone who claims to be able to explain the evidence but ignores most of it and doesn’t have a good explanation for the rest should be believed?

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You only study one side of the coin.

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And how would you know that?

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With historical cases you have an induction of evidence that, "fits", you build it up, sort of like in a court case. There is however an induction of evidence that, "fits" with the flood and creation very well, it's just that it would seem probable you either aren't aware of it or through denial, will simply never accept the evidence fits well. Most evolutionists online are very dogmatic and will make statements such as, "ALL the evidence favours mainstream and NONE creation"

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Faith hasn’t been able to find any. And do remember that we are talking about Faith’s views not creationism in general (which is bad but not as bad as Faith’s nonsense).

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That's part of the problem, laypeople like you are making claims about honest people like you just did here, that basically the mainstream scientists wouldn't make. A lot of you are die-hard atheists, and that is your real motive, so there is usually a disparity between what scientists say we must accept and what atheists INSIST we must accept.

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I guess you must share Faith’s redefinition of honesty. I am not aware that anyone tells obvious falsehoods - falsehoods that should be obvious even to them - is usually considered honest.Let us also note that you have a habit of making fallacious and misleading arguments,

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The, "any honest person" would agree with your side, as the mainstream view being the best explanation, is basically a clumsy non-sequitur. I am an honest person, but this honest person does not believe you have ever studied the arguments of GAPS, paraconformities, inselburgs, flume experiments PROVING you can get laminated strata by progradation, very quickly, both laterally and superposed, standing arches, water gaps, planation, polystrate fossils, the best ways to bury large loads and save them from rotting, (bloat and float disarticulation experiments), intertonguing rock, fossils breaking many varves, and the problems with the phylogenetic tree which are a mismatch of the record, meaning the tree would predict diversity then disparity, but what we see is the opposite.

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That deposition can happen rapidly in some cases is not in dispute. That all of it happened rapidly is very much lacking in evidence. Also, flumes are not a natural condition.The rest is a collection of assertions. Some of them extremely dubious. But the evidence still stands - you don’t for instance have any answer to the order of the fossil record.

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The, "any honest" person is just a way of creating a false dichotomy where all the righteous, honest people are evolutionists and all the evil, dishonest mikes are basically liars.

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You have, in fact given good cause to question your honesty. For instance when you falsely accused me of presenting Faith as a representative of creationism - instead of the fringe loon she is. And here you are doing just that - for real

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Do you refer to Faith? If you note I only quoted the parts that it seemed to me were generally aimed at creationists.

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None of it was generally aimed at creationists.

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You're not stupid" Paul. You have knowledge, so don't think I am picking on you. But there are SIGNS when a person is being dogmatic about things or saying certain things, that they are portraying a matter more simplistically than it really exists as. You aren't as objective as you think. Again I am not attacking you personally and I am not saying I am perfect either, but with the issue of historical case, let's face it our own dependence on data focuses very much on what we do know rather than what we don't know.

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You mean signs like noting that Faith discounts most of the evidence we’ve been discussing ?And no, I have quite often read creationist articles.

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With historical cases, I myself would never say, "creation wins, there is nothing for eons". That would be biased HORSE*HIT. I would only be saying that because I am creationist. My own studies have shown me there is no silver bullet when it comes to historical cases, either way, it's simply a situation where we rely on an inductive tally of consistent evidence and we have to either explain away the conflicting evidence or ignore it. That happens on both sides. It is a complex issue, I just don't think it's as simply as, "any honest person". I am honestly evaluating the facts using critical thinking, again the point of my boast is only to confirm I am able to do that evaluation, and if it is just down to data, and argumentation, it isn't a case of a clear win for either side because it is a very, very complex area the dating thing.

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But scientists are well aware of that. The mere fact that Flood geology is only believed by Young Earth Creationists - all of whom seem to be YECs before encountering it - is itself a red flag.

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For example as an objective statement I MUST to remain, "honest", admit that light speed leads to a best explanation the universe is very old. Now I am not an old earther but what I am saying is YES, I can admit when an argument is strong for the evolutionist side. But that intellectual honesty isn't easy to achieve, you have to know a LOT about the rules of logic and critical evaluation.

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I can say, without doubt that I understand those rules far better than you. You have a lot of learning to do,

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"Bad" is just an epithet, of course you will say that, you're biased. In my book I tried to be more objective, for example I think Darwin's idea of evolution AS AN IDEA, is very clever, and in terms of explanative power, a common ancestor answering for say, a homological feature in say a horse's bats and humans limb, would be a very elegant way and has explanative power. I could just say, "it's bad", but the truth is, it isn't bad, it was a very clever offering. Do I think it ultimately wrong? Yes, but as an attempt it had intellectual merit.

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That doesn’t change the fact that creationist arguments often are very bad. Especially Young a Earth argument. The information argument, for instance, which relies on omitting any clear measure of information such that we cannot tell if a mutation increases information or not. Or I remember an especially awful probability argument from Lee Spetner who should have known better.

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No Paul I don't because when it comes to logical reasoning and critical thinking, as you can see I am still the top scorer, so if you have superior abilities please show them by beating that score. I also have a LOT of tests of say 90% average.

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And that there is a fallacious argument right there. Scoring highly in a test doesn’t make your posts any better.

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I have an answer for the order of the fossil record. There was always going to be one. Darwin invented his tree predicated on the order that exists but the order existed to begin with meaning to say, "break evolution by breaking the order" would be to make a logical error, because the order was always factual, meaning if the order is nothing to do with evolution then the order will still exist.

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You’re not even addressing the problem. All I am asking for is an explanation of how the observed order could be produced by the Flood. Evolution doesn’t enter into that,And you are wrong to say that there has to be an order. If the Earth was old and species were fixed there would be no special order to the fossil record at all.

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Let us pretend Darwin found not the Cambrian common marine critters but rather mammals in the bottom most layers. Do you seriously believe he would then still have argued that mammals evolved from reptiles? So then inherently when you match a process like evolution, over time, to a record, then describe that record as what evolution occurred, the matter becomes something called, "tautologous", which means it will always be true that evolution will match the record because Darwin was always going to say it happened in whatever pattern he found

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And here you also make an error. The relationship between mammals and reptiles has as much to do with taxonomy as th3 order of the fossil record. An extreme disagreement between the two would have been a serious problem for Darwin.

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So unless there is some science which can disprove the notion that there could be some other cause of the sorting, why must I dismiss the flood based on what biased laypeople evolutionists say?

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You could look at the order and ask how the Flood could do it. We have and nobody has been able to find an explanation, nor - to the best of my knowledge has any creationist. That is the problem. Too bad your answer ignores it -but since your answer is fallacious anyway it’s no great loss.

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As for "flumes are not a natural condition", neither is an experiment that replicates the water cycle, with it's beaker and bunsen burner, and other instruments. Come on Paul, we both know that if you caused abiogenesis in the lab I could not respond thus; "but that wasn't a natural condition".

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I think that you would if it were claimed that the experiment proved that abiogenesis happened in nature - rather than merely demonstrating the possibility of it occurring. Which would be the relevant parallel.

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As for Faith, I can only give my opinion but don't want to disparage her as a poster. I would say 60% of what she says I disagree with as being the best argument for creation. That has no baring on her personally because that would likely be the same for any lay person creationist, so I wasn't trying to get into defending Faith, I was mostly concerned with the, "any honest person" claim, and the claim everything on creationist side is, "bad"..

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The point, of course, is that any honest person would recognise that Faith had come nowhere near showing that the Flood was even a viable explanation, let alone a better explanation than that offered by science. Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

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Seems to me such a sandwich would show the fossil order idea to be a crock.

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Obviously it wouldn’t. The order in the fossil record is not an order of environments.

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Either it progresses from marine to land or it doesn't progress at all.

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That’s silly. The fact that some life moved on to land doesn’t mean that all marine life vanished. Marine life went on living and dying and being fossilised.

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The Flood has no problem with any motley collection of sediments and fossils, it's you guys who insist there is an order that we have to explain. But we don't.

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You do if you wish to claim that you have a viable explanation of the evidence. The order is a known empirical fact, first observed in the very early days of geology.

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Really there isn't any such thing anyway as marine or land sediments, maybe fossils but not sediments.

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And that is empirically false, too. We can observe the sediments deposited on land and those deposited by the sea.

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Or if they originated in one or the other location why would it matter since the water would carry them willynilly wherever it willed anyway.

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Except for the ones which weren’t deposited by water at all. Desert sand and loess come to mind.

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Either this is wrong or you're saying something subtle that I'm not getting.

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No, I am saying that the geological record is not ordered by the depositional environments. You won’t find a fixed order of marine to terrestrial sediments or types of sediment.

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What I thought Faith was saying was that a stratigraphic sequence of marine/terrestrial/marine disproves sea transgression/regressions.

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Oh, no. That isn’t what she said. Every time we talk about the observed order in the fossil record she starts assuming we’re talking about an evolutionary order and with her ideas about progress thrown into it.So, if we get marine sediments followed by terrestrial sediments followed by marine sediments Faith assumes we’d see fossils of marine organisms followed by fossils of terrestrial organisms followed by fossils of marine organisms. And that goes against her idea of the order of the fossil record. Which is just silly, and she ought to know better.It’s just another example of her refusal to understand with the usual consequence. All she’s doing is making herself look worse - but that’s her problem.