Well, that's very interesting since most of the layers consist of the kind of fine-grained sediments that cannot result from a flood.
I'm now referring to how the diagram proves that the Old Earth doesn't explain the structures in that region, not arguing the Flood.
Yes, that's correct, the layers above the Kaibab at the Grand Canyon were eroded away. I won't quote the rest of what you say, just let me ask why you think you need anything more than uplift and erosion? Is it because you need the erosion to be very rapid, so you imagine that volcanoes and tectonic forces somehow caused the overlying strata to become "cracked and broken up" so that they could be eroded and carried away quickly? Don't you think all this cracking and breaking up would have left evidence behind?
Don't you think that several thousand cubic miles of sediment eroded away within the last couple thousand years would have ended up somewhere where we'd notice so that you could point to it and say, "See, there's all the material from the sedimentary layers that used to lie above the Kaibab!"
I don't think what I think because I feel I NEED it, I looked at the diagrams of the canyon and observed the relationship between various elements and came to the conclusion I came to. Volcano as cause of uplift both there and at the north end of the Grand Staircase, obvious breaking of chunks of strata in GS area, etc. etc./
I'd look for the evidence in the rubble that piled up at the southwest end of the canyon, all over southern California and into the Gulf of California, but by the time it got there it wojuld probably have been completely dissolved in the rushing water anyway and not even be found as chunks, just jumbled sediments. I've looked up gthe geology of that area and only have the impression that it doesn't have clearcut features like exposed strata which suggests maybe it IS composed of a jumble of sediments that just became the surface of the land.
But if you want evidence for cracking and breaking in the GC area look at the Grand Staircase itself which was formed by the same cracking and breaking in the same time frame. I'd expect the remains of that to be somewhere to the west of the Grand Staircase as well, anothre area where jumbled up sediments can be found.
Again, why do you think "horizontality and flatness" indicate flood? The majority of layers are marine, and huge expanses of marine basins are flat.
And why do you think "lack of disturbance to the individual layers" is contrary to slow deposition over millions of years? Why do you even think the layers are undisturbed, since they contain evidence of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods, folding, intrusions and faults?
I've already answered this of course but hey why not again and again and again. Lack of disturbance is an argument against the idea of EXPOSURE AT THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH FOR HUGE LONG PERIODS, which would erode and otherwise disturb the horizontality to the point it could be seen from great distances, but no such disturbances in the individual layers ARE seen at all in the strata from a distance, it's all regular and parallel EXCEPT where it's been disturbed AFTERWARD, and then the disturbance affects the ENTIRE STACK, noty the individual layers individually. All the disturbances occur AFTER the stack was in place. That throws HUGE doubt on your OE theory.
Why do you think a stack of sedimentary layers being distorted together is contrary to slow deposition when the layers originally formed millions of years before?
The idea is that it's odd that such distortions and disturbances didn't occur to the layers DURING those millions of years when they were forming. SOME of them are assumed to have been at the surface for very long periods which SHOULD have disturbed gthem greatly if that were true, to the poinmt of the disturbance being quite visible from a long distance as I keep saying, and since that didn't happen over all those millions of years during which they were supposedly at the surface for long periods, that calls the OE theory seriously into question.
I've assumed the malleability which is shown in the distortion of strata in groups reflects the expectable condition of dampness right after the Flood, but it isn't crucial to my argument.
That's good, because it's wrong. Soaking a rock doesn't make it malleable.
I dcan't believe you said that. You can't be serious. I'm talking about SEDIMENTS that were laid down, not ROCKl. They BECAME rock subsequently. Right after they were laid down, even highly compressed from the stack above, they would still be WET THROUGH for some time.
But some of my argument have been formed in response to arguments at EvC and others here HAVE argued that hardened rock is NOT pliable. Clearly the rock WAS pliable in order to conform to the slopes as indicated in the diagrams, and toward the end of the AFlood or right after it would still have been wet too. But I must say, recognizing how cracks form in the ground with earthquakes and any kind of upheaval, and I'm just talking about hard ground, not actual rock, the idea that the strata could have conformed to the slopes after it had turned to rock is highly unlikely.
Besides, if the Kaibab was deeply buried long enough after the flood for you to believe it became rock, then that was so long after the flood that your special kind of rock that is malleable when wet would have dried out and would no longer be malleable. So you can just forget your "wet rock is malleable" argument. The facts are that rock is pliable on a scale of miles, and when heated it is pliable on a scale of feet. You don't need any special malleable rock to cause a stack of sedimentary layers to bend without fracturing.
I'm quite sure you are wrong about that. Shale is not going to bend without breaking over miles of distance, nor is limestone or sandstone. However, have it your way for now. There is no heat involved here, so if rock bends over miles and the strata were already rock, fine, they all bent over the slopes, it really doesn't matter, but others DO contradict you about that.
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HOWEVER, I didn't say the Kaibab was already rock when it was scoured off, just that it was hardened enough to remain in place, which would have been due to the weight of the stack that had compressed it from above before it all eroded away, and squeezed out a lot of its water content. It would have dried slowly after that and then been quite hard. Even if not true rock for quite some time, if ever.
The rest of your argument seems to be that over the course of millions of years each newly forming sedimentary layer would experience its own unique set of bendings and distortions, and that they therefore couldn't form a neat stack of layers. This goes back to my question about the snow at the beginning of this message. If the top layer became bent and distorted into a series of ups and downs, why wouldn't the next layer deposited atop it conform to it just like snow?
It would, but the ups and downs filled in by the snow would be visible at a great distance. That is, the neat parallel horizontality that we in fact see in so many places in the GC would have been destroyed.
Now comes that picture others here have been discussing:
Faith writes:
you would see individually distorted contact lines between layers, and you would see irregular thicknesses over short lengths as deposition of new sediments would have had to fill in the irregularities of the lower disturbed layer.
I don't know why you asked me the question about snow since right here that's what I described, the filling in of irregularities in a lower distorted layer. Clearly there is some big misunderstanding going on here and I don't know how to correct the problem. But you answer:
We *do* find these things in layers. Here's a picture of the interbedding at the Grand Canyon taken from a Bible website:
That is NOT a picture of what I've been saying would occur to any g8iven layer if it was at the surface for any great period of time. This is a picture of something that happened to a block of layers AFTER they were all in place, not to an individual layer.
Interbedding occurs where you have a disturbance that affects the contact between the layers, abrades them, erodes them etc., where the layers were as usual, as I keep saying, disturbed as a stack and not individually. And that's what this picture demonstrates. There appears to be a lot of faulting, displacement of the layers by tectonic action. That would mingle the sediments. It's exactly what I was describing about the "band of erosion" between the Great Unconformity and the horizontal layer above it, whose name I keep forgetting -- the Muav as in the picture perhaps. Anyway, the sediments of BOTH layers are mingled together. That is interbedding, right, and that's what has happened here too. Some kind of disturbance caused abrasion between the Muav and the Redwall which caused the interbedded area mingling the sediments of both, ahd further disturbance faulted the area and shifted the layers vertically in relation to each other.
So the picture actually supports what I've been saying. First notice the horizontality in all the layers, most noticeable in the interbedded area and higher in the Redwall, that would be the original form of the deposits. Then notice that all the disturbances occurred to all the layers as a block, not to them individually. This is the pattern all over the canyon and it demonstrates that the layers could not have been millions of years old IF they are assumed ever to have been exposed at the surface for any great length of time which would have distorted them individually. The fact that the whole stack was tectonically affected at once after all the strata were in place argues against OE theory.
Perhaps you're expecting such things to be conspicuously common, but large regions of sea floors are far from plate boundaries (where the most significant disturbances occur) and simply collect sediments for millennium after millennium, and most of the layers of the Grand Canyon formed on quiet sea floors.
First, again, that picture is NOT what I was describing would have to be the case if individual layers had been exposed at the surface for huge spans of time.
Also the sea-floor theory of its formation was obviously concocted to explain it in OE terms, nothing that could possibly have been derived from reasoned observation. The main problem I have with the sea floor explanation is the Rube Goldbergish complicated-contraption- type explanation of risings and fallings of either the land or the water to explain different conditions of different strata as you think necessary. Not only is that physically impossible but if anything like it had ever occurred you wouldn't have ANY sections of the strata that survived intact. The only thing that makes sense is that the whole thing WAS laid down in water. The FLood.
I need to do this post in two segments.
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