Summations Only

No you will not find Triassic and Jurassic dinosaurs in the same layer because they are different breeds or groups that were not with each other when the Flood hit and got buried separately.You imagine the "formation" of different rocks instead of the mere carrying of the separated sediments on separated currents of water in a Flood to their final deposition, which explains their appearance far better than all the scenario building nonsense of modern geology.The nautiloids are found just about entirely without any other form of life accompanying them in that layer that extends for thousands of square miles. ALL other forms of sea life that preceded them should have been represented in that layer along with them if the notion of successive periods makes any sense at all. The fact that layers often contain only one type of creature such as the nautiloids is evidence against the explanation of the fossil record in terms of evolution.LATER EDIT: Since no one has responded to this post I'll add some further information I was just checking on. There ARE many other kinds of creatures in that layer, but there is a great preponderance of nautiloids there, about one per square meter over an area of hundreds of square miles, or something like ten billion in the entire area. This is great evidence for a sudden catastrophic killing and burying of the creatures, and not good evidence at all for the evolution interpretation. This identification was made by Steve Austin over years of studying that layer in the Grand Canyon, which you can find out more about here:http://youngearth.com/grand-canyon-nautiloidsRSR: Remember the Nautiloids! | KGOV.comIf you watch the video of Steve Austin at the second link talking about the nautiloid layer in the Grand Canyon area, a layer of the redwall limestone, at about 29.00 on the counter he identifies that layer as Mississippian which is above the Cambrian. Somebody said the nautiloids are Precambrian-Cambrian. Nope, Mississipppian redwall limestone: http://dept.astro.lsa.umich.edu/~cowley/grand33.jpgEdited by Faith, : To add information about the nautiloidsEdited by Faith, : No reason given.

No, I believe the junk DNA itself is the evidence of that huge bottleneck, and ALSO that you wouldn't see the extreme genetic depletion we see today from a genetic bottleneck because the remainder of the genome at that time would have had much more genetic variability although a great deal less than before the Flood.
So because of your current preconceptions you wouldn't recognize the bottleneck.ABE: DIDN'T GET THIS SAID RIGHT. Correction.The junk DNA should not have been present to the great extent it is today in the people or the animals on the ark, but because of the bottleneck they were then undergoing as inbreeding went on generation after generation after the Flood the bottleneck would have shown up as the increasing death of genes because of the absence of so many that had been there before the Flood. The greater heterozygosity would have been in the formerly functioning DNA that became junk DNA as well as in the remainder of the genome, but it would be reduced over the generations after the Flood as well because of so many missing alleles for genes that remained on top of a total absense of some genes through no alleles whatever for them remaining in the gene pool. Believe it or not I do understand how this would have worked but it's hard to get it into words.Sorry you don't have DNA from people who lived 4300 years ago, you only think you do.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

So please explain how you arrived at that date.

This makes sense for true sciences where you can replicate experiments and that sort of thing but evolution belongs to the past and you can't replicate anything. Your theory in this case remains a theory in the sense I meant it for that reason. It is all pure conjecture, pure imagination. I've USED the fact that the genome changes over time in my own arguments. Change in gene frequency explains how breeds or varieites are developed. Change in gene frequency also demonstrates how you can't get evolution BEYOND breeds and varieties so that evolution comes to a halt eventually for lack of genetic possibilities. I've argued this many times before here and at my blogs. No, creationism includes an understanding of for instance how varieties and breeds (microevolution) are formed and continue to form, and how the strata were laid down by the Flood such that all the fossils therein are evidence not of evolution but of life before the Flood. It is not just about origins, it has become a whole explanatory system unto itself.

Just please confirm that you did actually subject this particular find to carbon dating, send it to a lab or whatever you do for that purpose, and that you got back absolutely unambiguous results.Also please indicate what weight you put on the various methods of dating. How important is artifact style compared to "depositional history" and so on. And wasn't "artifact style" originally dated by the other things on your list anyway?The "depositional history of the site in which it was found" would of course meet with nothing but eye rolls from me.I know there is every kind of weird creationist notion about when the Flood supposedly occurred, many of them based on a compromise with what they think science knows, and I'm probably the only one here, or maybe that ever was here, who believes the ENTIRE geological column was formed in the Flood in the time period traditionally understood to be identified in the Bible. So I understand if "creationism" comes across as just anybody's wild guess, which it pretty much is for some reason among those who post here. Including my own guesses of course. I can't see how any, some, many or most of the strata could have been formed by the Flood and the rest formed by some other means. They are all identical as to their basic horizontality, demarcation from layers above and below, etc etc etc. They show NO disturbances until recent time when tectonic forces distorted them, cut canyons into them or whatnot, they just lie there as a full stack. What is called "erosion" between the slabs such as in the GC, is a little roughing up, minuscule compared to what real erosion does on the surface of this earth, easily accounted for by runoff of water between the layers as the stack dried out after the Flood. Etc. etc. etc.Sorry, I DO respect you scientists a great deal -- when you stick to the work of science, not when you are conjuring up ages of time you can't possibly really know anything about and calling it fact and jeering us Biblical creationists for not accepting it because we have a better testimony to time.Seems to me that as long as certain kinds of science, such as archaeology and paleontology, work as oh, say, entomologists do, mostly by scrupulously identifying and cataloging pure phenomena/fact including location, conditions or whatever, rather than treating things like dating as fact that really depend on a bunch of accumulated speculations and NOT actual fact, then they are doing true science that I'm not going to dispute. Unless there is reason to suspect a hoax, and hoaxes are not unknown in science to say the least.Yes, I know the dating methods SEEM pretty open and shut to you. But even with RAZD's dendrochronology and his whole list of supposed proofs, which I've seen him post many times here, I reject it as science. Sorry. Because you cannot know the past as you think you can and I do happen to have a trustworthy source of historical knowledge that I'm not going to yield over to the mere cogitations of mere human beings, however nice, smart and honest you might be.

I think so, yes. First of course I think I have a better source of dating information, which is scientific information in itself. But also I've read the history of how the age of the earth just got older and older based entirely on speculative subjective musings, starting with Hutton and popularlized by Lyell, way before radiometric dating came along. I did my own debunking of Hutton's revolutionary "discovery" of huge ages of time in his ponderings of Siccar Point, on my blog (listed in my profile). So yes, I believe my rejection is scientific.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Not in THIS kind of Flood which was an expansion of the oceans to cover every bit of land. The oceans are crisscrossed with currents at different depths, and different temperatures, that do carry things along within them. Such a flood would have dissolved everything dissolvable and apparently sorted it somehow. Of course we don't kow how for sure, it's all speculation, just as your stuff is speculation. Wave action also could have deposited layers over a huge breadth of land.But the layering makes far LESS sense on the evolutionist interpretation. Why should eras of time be demarcated by any such geological phenomena? Why shouldn't there be a continuous piling up of mixed sediments over those supposed billions of years? In fact why should there be ANY piling up of sediments whatever? Such phenomena occur in the present for particular reasons in limited locations. The idea that the entire earth would be layered makes NO sense except on the basis of the Flood catastrophe which stirred up everything, dissolved everything and redeposited it in layers. Well, rivers sort and deposite sediments in layers too. This is the sort of thing that water does. The scale of the Flood was beyond anything we can imagine but we CAN say that WATER ACTS THAT WAY. There is no reason to think that the mere passage of time should create layers on the earth but the earth is covered with such layers. And again, when you LOOK at the layers in their most undisturbed condition in the Grand Canyon, SO undisturbed for billions of years according to old earth/evolution theory, and THEN subjected to some pretty violent disturbances such as tectonic lifting and twistings (elsewhere, not in the GC) and the cutting of the canyon, how can you even THINK long ages? No, they are merely in thrall to the accumulated "knowledge" of their discipline. The work they do is done under that umbrella. They take it for granted, they have no reason to question it as far as they know. That's normal science. It doesn't make anyone stupid, but it would be nice if creationists could get our act together well enough to make some of you have to rethink the foundations you are taking for granted. I'm not asking for "trust," just a consideration of the evidence as I see it which I hope I argue with some intelligence. Well, presumably AFTER they've been formed they could be MOVED and stacked in a layer, couldn't they? All in the form of loose sediments perhaps broken up by the Flood waters before being moved. The lithification would have occurred over a much longer period than the period of the Flood itself, which merely did the work of deposition into layers. The weight of the stack must have done quite a bit of the hardening, at least of the lower layers, and then after the Flood receded it must have taken a fair amount of time for it to dry out and harden. Years? A century? Sorry, I just figured the other creatures were sparsely represented and don't occur in the numbers needed to be evidence for the volutionist scenario, which I believe is borne out by the evidence, and I absolutized it, which I shouldn't have. But I did look up evidence and apparently I was writing my edit to that post while you were answering the earlier version.What I added was links to Steve Austin's work on the nautiloid layer in the GC and the correction that there ARE other creatures in the layer with the nautiloids, but that nevertheless the nautiloids are found there in prodigious numbers, one to a square meter, or he estimates something like 10 billion over the hundreds of square miles he sampled. Such a dense preponderance of one creature in one layer is good evidence for rapid catastrophic deposition and killing, and not good evidence for the long-ages evolutionist interpretation.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Hi Coyote, I lost most of an answer to your post through an automatic updating program that just threw it out of my computer last night with no warning that I'd managed to see. I don't think I ever got my thoughts back together well enough the second time around but anyway I am now finally posting an answer.First of all thank you very much for such a thorough and thoughtful post, I really appreciate it very much. I might even nominate it for a POTM if nobody else does. My first answer probably did more justice to all your work than my second does so I'm sorry about thatI did some thinking about the carbon dating part of your post and want to post on that part separately, after this part: The basic reason is usually that they think science has actually proved something about age so they try to fit the Bible into that. They abandon the first page of their Bible, actually the first few pages, which my signature says we must not do. Why so many different time guesses I don’t know. Even some of the creationist ministries don’t hold to a fixed traditional reading of Genesis but add in a few thousand years here or there without any justification that I can see. The traditional reading, which I know is held by many who don’t get into the debate, is that the Creation is about 6000 years old and the Flood occurred about 4300 years ago. I wish we could all agree on this much at least.As for the idea that you’ve examined the time periods suggested, let’s say 4300 years ago, and found no evidence for the Flood, this is an illusion because you are working from your own assumptions about time and you have a very limited idea of what sort of evidence you’re looking for. I think this is nave in the extreme. A worldwide flood would have had effects no ordinary local flood could have. The Flood would have effectively demolished the whole land surface of the planet, you wouldn’t just get a layer or deposit of a certain kind of evidence at some level of the strata or depth of an archaeological dig. Within days or weeks of constant rain and rising water it would have to have dissolved everything that could dissolve, all loose sediments and soils for sure, and probably pulverized some rock as well in the process as it tumbled from higher to lower positions in huge watery mudslides. Whatever could float would float and the ocean currents would carry huge quantities of both sediments and living creatures. Yes, it seems to have sorted things in some fashion, since the layers have pretty predictable contents. I’ve presented my view on this further up the thread though, and I still have to get back to the response I got to that. So no, you have NOT found no evidence of the Flood because you have a completely insufficient idea of what sort of evidence there should be. It's like you’re looking with a microscope for evidence when the real evidence is surrounding you everywhere you look if you would just stand up and look around. The entire geological column is the sort of evidence such a Flood would bring about. All of it bottom to top. And yes, I’ve dealt with a whole bunch of the objections to this idea but it would take too much space to get into all that here. Oh believe me I’ve read all that stuff already. I get my ideas from what scientists write. What I say here ought to be simple enough for anyone to judge, shouldn't need expert input. Just visualize the walls of the Grand Canyon. I see, I’m not allowed to appreciate the actual reality of DNA because I don’t believe in the interpretive scheme of evolution, I’m not allowed to appreciate basic laboratory chemistry of the sort I did in high school or advances in medicine because I don’t believe in the interpretive scheme of evolution, I’m not allowed to appreciate how gold or oil can be found through a knowledge of the mechanics of geology because I don’t believe the earth is billions of years old. I must not respect the scientific method because I don’t believe evolution has anything to do with the scientific method, that the scientific method cannot even be applied to evolution because it requires testability which evolution does not afford since it’s just an interpretive scheme about the past and the past cannot be replicated. I can’t understand how population genetics works, how different breeds are genetically developed, which is something I argue a lot at my blogs, because I don’t believe in evolution beyond the level of varieties and breeds. I see. Then you must be right, I don’t respect scientists at all.What creationists pick and choose is very specific. We pick and choose what is actual factual science, and throw out the purely speculative untestable and unprovable interpretive system of evolution. The fact that you can't tell the difference is our biggest problem. It's a very real diffierence. I know creationists get into some indefensible stuff, although I'm not sure exactly what you have in mind here so I can't judge it one way or the other. But there's a lot of true creationist work nevertheless. It couldn’t be that your own prejudice has blinded you to what and why creationists are doing what they are doing, could it? Not nonsense at all and not invented either. Hard to get across to someone who is totally immersed in the paradigm such that you can’t distinguish the actual scientific work from the interpretive work in which it is enmeshed, but no, not invented, quite real. Well, since I don’t want the sort of credibility that comes from abandoning what I know to be the truth I guess that’s just a handicap I’ll have to continue to labor under. What I try to do is argue from what I do understand, and I think there are plenty of such arguments that all by themselves undermine evolution, even, yes, absolutely discredit it to such an extent that all the OTHER arguments that seem to support evolution should have to yield to rethinking. Challenging the dating methods is one approach to the problem that can be taken by creationists but I think there are more effective approaches as I indicate above. My approach is to make other arguments that I think are a lot more defensible arguments, particularly about how you can’t get beyond breeds and varieties because of the nature of genetics, that is, because genetic variability decreases with each division of a population that results in a new gene pool in reproductive isolation. That’s a big argument I’ve made many times and I believe it shows that macroevolution simply cannot happen. (Yes, I know the argument from mutation. But my argument IS testable) This sort of evidence should force the dating arguments to be rethought, as I just said. What's hard to get across to you and people in your position is that we, I, genuinely believe that you do not have the evidence you think you have, that you are subsuming the work of true science under a false interpretive scheme and not noticing that the meld does not hold. Your massive evidence, where it is true fact, supports most of my creationist interpretations as well or better than it supports evolutionst interpretations. I sincerely believe that and argue it wherever I can to the best of my ability. I've been through RAZD's stuff. As I believe I've acknowledged. the dating arguments are the hardest for creactionists to answer. The best approach for us, therefore is to present other kinds of evidence so that eventually the dating stuff, which we believe has to be wrong even if we can't yet prove it, will have to be rethought as a result. As I say above. Yes, in fact this whole thread has become something of a Creationism Road Trip unto itself. But I think I’ve done a lot more here than just hand-wave, I’ve given answers of one sort or another to all your challenges. And again, I know my source of knowledge is reliable and trustworthy and therefore I’m not going to yield it up to mere fallible human thought processes.Surely you can appreciate the basic position I'm in: if you believed as I believe, which to me is a kind of knowing really, that the Bible IS the word of the God who created everything we see, everything that is studied by science, including ourselves, if you believe the Bible is His revelation of who He is and what He made, know it and trust it from experience and not just some sort of intellectual assent, you yourself would have to agree that science should be subordinated to that revelation and not the other way around. Just as a matter of reasonable principle. Yes, I’ve taken note of your signature. I agree with Heinlein that belief gets in the way of learning and is probably what accounts for the inability of scientists to think outside the box of evolution. As for the idea that religious belief has nothing to do with scientific evidence or knowledge, it's true that most religious belief doesn’t, but the Bible IS the word of God and although it provides only the scantiest of hints to work from it provides enough for a belief in a physical universe that obeys laws and can therefore be studied, and the knowledge that human reason is untrustworthy.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

OK here's my rsponse to the part of your post about carbon dating: I appreciate that there is careful attention to getting a reliable result here, but all the trials and errors involved raise doubts in my mind about how reliable even your end result could be. Certainly none of it comes near absolutely unambiguous results as I put it. The fact that you chose the most experienced lab means that there are other inexperienced ones and that it TAKES experience, which implies a subjective component to the test, or at least I have to wonder what kind of experience is needed. Where to look in the bone fragment for the best carbon 14 or are you looking for the decay products? Anyway extracting whatever you're looking for so you can measure it sounds like it must involve some trial and error, subjective judgment, etc. The neec for experience also implies that all the less experienced labs could be regularly producing unreliable results, which doesn’t inspire confidence in the method overall.Further showing the uncertainty involved is that you sent so many other samples. I’m sure you’re convinced that your final result is trustworthy and that the further tests are a guarantee of greater trustworthiness, but you should understand that from the point of view of a nonscientist it doesn’t look all that trustworthy if it takes so many trials and errors to get a result that makes sense to you. And the idea that you might not understand what was going on from earlier readings and have to have additional tests until you did understand doesn’t inspire confidence either. Of course I understand that 100% reliability in almost anything is a lot to ask but it sounds like there’s an awful lot of slippage in this department of science, a lot more than I expected for sure. All this doesn’t prove your results are wrong, it just raises doubts. Requiring that all the different dating methods must match sounds good, it’s certainly a sign that you take care to get good results, but it also makes me wonder if it could involve a mindset that leads everybody unconsciously toward validating a preconceived expectation. I’m sure you’ve considered that, but it seems to me like a real possibility since the methods are somewhat subjective or the results at least changeable or ambiguous given all the testing it takes to get a result you’ll accept. (And it DOES seem to come down to a result you’ll accept in the end, the one that best matches up with everything else you’ve judged to be the case about the site or the sample, but what you’ll accept, what fits best, etc. is to some extent a subjective measure. If all the scientists already share a common theory or expectation across all the areas of work, without an absolutely objective measure you’re all going to end up agreeing anyway just because you do share the same assumptions, and your assumptions are the only real standard in the end. That’s the way it seems to me. Even with the best of intentions, great care to do comparisons, scrupulous honesty, all that, your judgment can be skewed by your expectations because there’s nothing to clearly contradict them. OK so you finally accepted the older date, and that shows willingness to accept what the test shows even against your expectations, but did it make sense? Is there anything about that part of the site that explained it for you? Were there artifacts there that you’d dated in accord with the rest of the site, as more recent? If that sort of test doesn’t fit the carbon date what do you do with the discrepancy?I can’t help but have a lot of questions about this because my impression is that the radiometric dating methods really aren’t as reliable as they’re made out to be, and that they could even be made to conform to the expectations of the people doing the tests. But of course I can’t prove anything myself, I can barely comprehend how the dating process works.OK, let me say a word about that then. I understand that you have to test for carbon 14, the radioactive form of carbon, because that’s where you see the decay that gives you the time factor, and that while carbon occurs in abundance in organic things carbon 14 occurs only in trace amounts there and in the atmosphere. I’ve got some fuzzy idea that carbon 14 can be used to replace nonradioactive carbon in testing organic compounds but that’s a very fuzzy idea and I don’t know if that’s what’s done or not and besides it seems to me that would change the date of the origin of the carbon you are trying to date. I did consult Wikipedia but I end up just as fuzzy about these things.So anyway you’re testing for this form of carbon that is found in tiny amounts to begin with, or for the decay products therefrom, also tiny amounts of necessity, expecting to be able to tell how much it’s decayed by how much is left in the sample you’re testing. But an organic sample must be made up of a complexity of molecules. Bone isn’t grass isn’t skin isn’t tree bark Carbon-based molecules aren’t exactly pure carbon, and carbon 14 is so awfully rareIn other words I would like to be able to get some reasonable grasp of all this but it’s far too complex. Certainly the abstract principle is graspable, that is, the theory of the technique and the basic mathematical formula involved. The reliable decay rate of carbon 14 and how it measures time is easy enough to grasp, but the reality of testing for it in organic samples seems to be just rife with slippage. Meaning, it’s FAR from as simple as it’s sometimes made to sound, as if you have a clearcut sample of this carbon 14 or its decay product in the item being dated so that the amount of whichever you're measuring that you find in the sample is certain evidence of how old it is.No, this is not all that simple at all. Apparently the inventor of the process had amazing results with some organic items of known date but it sounds like that’s the exception rather than the rule and, well, it makes a person wonder. Seems to me the lab technicians could wonder how come their own results aren’t all that predictably perfect, since his were, his name was something Libby I think?So there seems to be slippage at many levels of this process, perhaps starting with extracting the carbon from the sample, or again the decay product, I'm never clear which you’re looking for. I guess either way you have to extract the stuff from the bone or other sample somehow and I suppose you have to get a representative quantity of it in relation to the material itself, and there must be other steps involved after that until you get to your output.And then there’s the human factor. Are the samples totally blind at the labs or do the technicians know things about them such as where they’re from and the history of work at that site or whatever? I can easily imagine a technician saying "OK we’re looking for a date somewhere in the range of" whatever that site has been finding. And it would be quite kosher to do that, no fraud involved, no conscious fraud anyway, just a help in doing the work, but it could skew things without anyone intending to.Perhaps the same date could keep turning up for a particular site just because the particular technician who happens to have been the one testing the samples from that site has a particular way of working peculiar to himself, a particular kind of experience and whatnot, and without having the slightest intention to do so just keeps turning up a certain kind of result due to his/her style of working, extracting, or whatever is involved And so on and so forth. There’s just a LOT of room for slippageIn the end you are asking me to take on faith something that involves so many ifs and buts even the best scientists must have trouble sorting it all out. I can get some grasp on DNA and of other things in science, but how this process could work with all the variables involved leaves me mystified and frustrated. And always your dates are older than the Bible’s, if even only by a thousand years or so, but you want me to abandon the Bible for such an unreliable way of measuring time as yours. Probably all enmeshed with all the other assumptions and so on, but maybe we aren’t even talking about the same thing so I’ll leave it for now.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Right again, foreveryoung. I thought I might get back to that myself and I'd have said the same thing you said. Only you meant "and NOT as the government wishes."Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

One, you seem to think you know things you couldn't possibly know about where people use their money, you decide it entirely according to some raw bias of your own, some fantasy about Christians, some prejudice woven from who knows what.Two, assuming your prejudice did conform to reality, which I happen to know it doesn't, you feel you have the right to judge how they use their money and, obviously, if it comes to that, to force your judgment on them by law if they stubbornly continue to prefer their own God-given judgment to yours. They have their place, but it's not the place you have in mind for them, which just about swallows up every area of life so that nobody is left with a thought of his own, even a shred of self-determination. YOUR definition of healthcare, welfare, and all the rest MUST be imposed by law on those who disagree with you, doesn't it, because so clearly ONLY your judgment is righteous and true.You can nod in agreement now.No wonder the American founders were so concerned to give us freedom, they knew that it's so easy for government to take it all away under the pretense of knowing better. Edited by Faith, : typo

I see and you disapprove of Romney's choices as if he shouldn't be allowed the right to make his own decisions but needs you to take him by the hand and guide him. Maybe the state should grant you Power of Attorney over him so you can take over his life for him. Really, why don't you make lobotomy mandatory by law for all conservatives while you're at it, especially the ones who managed to acquire more money in their lives than you judge to be right and fair?Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

If no one picks up the shovel -- which is a big fat lie, speaking of reductio ad absurdum, since freedom begets all kinds of creative activity to improve our lives, which is why the west succeeded as it did, especially America with all our inventiveness -- then better the shovel remain untouched than that government be given the infernal power you want it to have. Oh you lovers of Big Brother and Brave New World tyranny. What a bunch of lying propaganda you've swallowed.You are determined to destroy exactly what made us great, produced the wealth and prosperity that made even the poor among us wealthier than the majority of the rest of the world. Your moral perspective is corrupt. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Yeah but the picture they created is what you want whether you know it or not. Where everything is run for us, we haven't the right to think for ourselves. Oh yes it's appalling but you don't seem to recognize it since everything you want tends in that direction.And the absurdity I reduced your attitude to Romney to is a fair reduction. You talk like the man has no right to make his own decisions, you should make them for him, or government should which is the same thing since they'd make the decisions YOU want made.You'd probably approve a tax return that showed millions spent on pornography or something like that along with a big gift to Planned Parenthood and the Gay Liberation Front or something like that? That's how Romney fails by the Left's moral standards.There is something hideously wrong with how the Left thinks.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I'm not going to deal with you tonight, maybe tomorrow, but there are layers ALL over the earth even if technically they don't cover every square inch of the earth. The layers are in Asia, they are in the Americas, they are in the Alps, they're everywhere. You see them buckled in all the high mountains. The Flood didn't HAVE to lay down layers but it did "all over the earth" even if in some places they washed away leaving no trace and in other places they didn't form for whatever reason,