Should intellectually honest fundamentalists live like the Amish?

Faith's entire argument rests on her refusal to acknowledge buried paleo landscapes. As long as she can deny their existence, she can discount 'OE-ism,' because an undeniable occurrence of thousands of buried landscapes in the geologic record makes YECism impossible.You can show her all the buried fluvial systems, buried paleosols/paloelaterites, buried valleys, buried impact craters, buried submarine volcanic systems, buried shorelines, buried wave-cut terrances, and buried lava flows in the world, and she will still, without blinking an eye, tell you you're full of shit.Her mind is made up.She doesn't know a thing about geology, but that's inconsequential to Faith - she's a fucking genius, dontcha know?! The sheer magnitude of her scientific psychosis is staggering.

Your arguments are baseless, illogical, and don't make a lick of sense.YOU are the one with the problem. Not the people who have spent a considerable amount of time and energy trying to conquer that gutless idiocy you presume to call reason. Of course you deny the existence of paleolandscapes, Faith, you acknowledge 'configurations,' NOT LANDSCAPES. Big difference.You mean 'interesting random patterns in the subsurface.' I mean 'landscapes,' as in the ancient surface of the Earth... as in deserts, oceans, braided stream environments.We're talking GEOLOGY here, Faith, not Faith-ology. Your wacky definitions or deliberate mis-translations have NO place in this discussion. This is why you are so damn annoying. I have a very fixed definition of what a landscape is and what I am discussing, and it does not include the term 'configuration.'Stop de-railing the discussion before it even gets started. You can "acknowledge the physical reality of these landscapes" all you want, but it's entirely obvious you haven't a clue what defines them or what they represent.To you, these configurations are nothing but rocks, in their most generic sense. For all I know, your understanding of rocks might be limited to categorizing them as skipping rocks, bludgeoning rocks, and rocks too big to pick up.To call the Navajo Sandstone or a volcanogenic massive sulfide deposit a 'configuration' is simply idiotic and laughable. Every formation is characterized by very specific rocks, textures, mineral compositions, internal structures, fossils, alterations, and morphologies; which in turn are the result of various depositional environments, all subjected to various amounts and degrees of diagenesis and/or metamorphism and deformation.These configurations are not interesting, random assortments of rocks and minerals. Instead, they exhibit cross-bedding, grading, sorting, fossils, vegetation, lenses, changes in composition, etc., which are all repeated elsewhere in hundreds of other rocks and formations. These characteristics indicate that depositional PROCESSES are responsible for their existence.What are your suggestions for modes of deposition/formation in your random-assortment-of-rocks model? What process is responsible for creating cross-beds, channels, or grading in the subsurface? Can't answer that? Refuse to?Well guess what? There are mountains of literature available to anyone who cares to understand WHY geologists think the Alamo breccia and the Sudbury Basin are ancient impacts, or why tillites are interpreted to be glacial. YOU, on the other hand, have offered nothing other than ill-conceived child-like incredulity to support your position. You are not only denying that paleolanscapes represent millions of years of deposition, but also that they exist at all.Even if we determined tomorrow that each one of the thousands of formations in the geologic record took no more than a hundred years to be deposited, you still would not, COULD not, acknowledge paleolandscapes exist. If you did, you're disingenuity would reveal itself.Deep age is a fact based on the presence of hundreds upon hundreds of buried landscapes in the geologic record, as well as the recognition that what we see, ain't all that was there.Fact is, the geologic record is more gaps than rock. The geologic record is a woefully INCOMPLETE record of ancient landscapes. It's akin to taking ten steps forward (i.e., deposition) and 9 steps back (erosion).THAT is why we are pretty damn confident in our determination that the earth is billions of years old. It has nothing with how long ONE measly little braided stream environment took to form and deposit its sediment. It has to do with the QUANTITY of braided stream environments in the rock record and the fact that they are interspersed and stacked one atop the other with hundreds of other marine- and continent-deposited rocks.Deep age was/is a logical and valid conclusion. If you don't agree, then give reasons why we are wrong. Reasons that don't include "could've." No, not difficult to convey. Your points are just so damn stupid we have a hard time coming to grips with how any sane and intelligent person can adhere to such idiotic positions. NO ONE can follow your insane ramblings because they're moronic and you don't know what the hell you're talking about. It's not because your brain is so much more advanced than everyone else's.Your incessant whining about the lack of generic terminology available to you is hilarious. We use the term paleolandscape because that's what we mean - and we can show you why we've determined that. When we're on the side of a mountain and say, "look at that reef complex," that's what we mean - it's a freaking REEF with fossils of corals, sponges, brachiopods, etc.The science, methodology, and success of geology is borne out of the our recognition of deep age. You cannot accept modern geologic science and its methods and then turn around and discard what those methods reveal about our geologic history. Or at least no sane and reasonable person could.Edited for clarity. And then again for grammer, spelling, punctuation.This message has been edited by roxrkool, 08-11-2005 02:17 PMThis message has been edited by roxrkool, 08-12-2005 05:19 PM

You are absolutely correct, geologists do not NEED deep age. We NEED deep age about as much as we NEED ArcGIS to make maps.Our 'assumptions' of deep age are the result of years and years of geologic research, logical inferences, and inductive reasoning. It's the best explanation for the data based on the data. And today, deep age is a tool.YEC assumptions are based on the Bible.If YECs or you have a better explanation for the data, present it.