Summations Only

If you're following the Bible where it leads then you're doing religion.If you're following the evidence where it leads then you're doing science.Obviously you're doing religion and shouldn't be participating in this thread.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

Most strata, especially since the pre-Cambrian, contains signs of life. The Kaibab contains fossils of sea floor life. When what is now the Kaibab was on the sea floor, what is it about slow sedimentation gradually burying the layer to great depths that you have a problem with. So you keep saying, and this is still a bald declaration. What is it about supporting your positions with evidence that is so difficult for you to understand? If there is some reason based upon fact that it seems impossible to you then you're going to have to describe what that is, otherwise we'll just have to assume you're objecting for religious reasons.--Percy

Actually, as you've been shown, pretty flat is flatter than many strata in the geologic column. You are again making the mistake of extrapolating a diagram to the entire world. Edge just showed you a stratigraphic diagram containing many non-flat strata. Oh, wait, that's right, you couldn't look at it, it was too white. Was the color version I provided too white also? I hope you mean hundreds of thousands of square miles.Your view of how strata form is fatally flawed. You've failed to take into account obvious consequences. You never answered my question from Message 2351, so let me ask again. I'm looking for two pieces of information:

• How far inland does each wave go?
• How deep a load of sediment does each wave deposit?

Then I can consider a region like that around Brian Head, which has a couple miles of sediment lying beneath it, and get a feel for how it might have happened in your scenario. For example, let's say you tell me that each wave went a mile, and that the depth of sediment deposited was 10 feet (If you don't like the mile of travel and 10 feet of sediment for each wave then just plug in your own numbers). I can then consider the scenario where the rising waters of the ocean are within a mile of where Brian Head is today, but haven't gotten there yet. This raises the question, "How will that next mile be deposited?"Will it be like this:

• First the first 10 feet of the Tapeats Sandstone will be deposited. Let's say the total thickness of the Tapeats will eventually be 200 feet, so it will take 20 waves. The first wave sweeps a mile across the landscape and deposits 10 feet of sand, then recedes. At the edge of that mile the sand is now 10 feet higher than the land beyond it.
• Now the next wave of Tapeats sand rolls a mile across the landscape and deposits another 10 feet of sand, then recedes. At the edge of that mile the sand will now be 20 feet higher than the land beyond.
• Successive waves roll inland a mile and each deposits 10 feet of Tapeats sand and then recedes. When the Tapeats is completely deposited the sand will be 200 feet higher than the land beyond.
• Now the first wave of mud/silt for the Bright Angel Shale layer rolls a mile across the landscape, deposits 10 feet of mud and silt, then recedes. This happens 30 more times for a total depth of Bright Angel Shale sediments of 300 feet. The total height of sediments at the edge of that mile is now 500 feet higher than the land beyond.
• Now the waves calcareous sediments for the Muav Limestone begin rolling across that mile of landscape, depositing their sediments to a depth of 10 feet, then receding. When all is done the thickness of the Muav Limestone sediments is 400 feet, and the total height of sediments at the edge of that mile is now 900 feet higher than the land beyond.
• Then the waves for the Temple Butte Limestone and the Redwall Limestone and the Supai Group and the Hermit Shale and all the rest up to the Claron roll across that mile of landscape, deposit their sediments, and recede. The total height of sediments at the edge of that mile of landscape is a couple miles higher than the land beyond. We have reached Brian Head and the ocean is lapping at its door.
• Now the next mile beyond Brian Head will be deposited, again beginning with the first 10 feet of the Tapeats. A wave containing a load of Tapeats Sand is just beginning to roll past Brian Head. But there's a problem. The land beyond Brian Head is now a couple miles lower than Brian Head. Instead of rolling across the landscape beyond Brian Head the wave instead pours over the edge of the 2 mile height of sediments like a giant waterfall.

Well, that can't be right. Even if you plug in much bigger numbers, like a hundred miles of travel across the landscape for each wave and 100 feet of sediment delivered, because at the end of that hundred miles after all the strata are deposited you'll still have a 2 mile waterfall. And such huge waves don't give your animals any chance to leave footprints and dig burrows on the mudflats.So how does this work?--Percy

What is your reasoning - or is this just your religion talking again? Well, I see Capt Stormfield beat me to the obvious retort, so I'll just say that the lack of content and the lapse into "bald declaration" mode in almost all your messages over the past few days indicates that your mind has already checked out of this discussion.--Percy

Faith was responding to what I said about crushing. I told her that a mile of sediments would exert a force of over 6000 pounds/in², crushing flat whatever was beneath it. Any surface irregularities would be flattened.I'm not sure what you're saying, so I'll just describe what I believe to be true. The contact between strata could be conformable or non-conformable. A conformable contact indicates a change in depositional environment. A non-conformable contact indicates a missing time period during which sedimentation was for some reason suspended, or material was eroded away, then sedimentation in a different depositional environment resumed.--Percy

Maybe you meant to talk about that, but you didn't. So please explain how lithified strata are evidence they were never at the surface with life in, on and above them? Isn't your own scenario in essence the same, with lithified strata that were at one time at the surface with life in, on and above them? How can eventual lithification of a landscape that hosted life be impossible in geology but possible in your flood scenario? But what you know doesn't go very far, and as I just pointed out, on the key point regarding a living landscape becoming lithified your scenario is basically the same as standard geology. Contradictory much? I think you rush through your posts creating brief salvos of declarative vague unclarity. I didn't get your evidence, and no one else did either, because there's no evidence to get. You haven't said anything of substance or engaged in meaningful discussion for days now. Mostly you've been doing the dodge determinative discussion dance.--Percy

But this is not a truthful characterization of what you've been doing. You haven't answered this question at all. Let me make sure of that and quickly review your posts over the past few days summarizing your answers to this and any similar questions. I'll go back through the 27th of April. Here's what you've said on the topic:

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The rock itself is the evidence against the idea.
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As far as I know there is no rock that is purported to represent such a supposed landscape.
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Simply crushing a lumpy field with things growing on it is not going to produce anything like the rock surfaces found in the geo column.
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"Pretty flat" is not flat as any rock in the geo column which was obviously formed originally as a flat wet expanse of sediment that in many cases covered so many hundreds of thousands of miles any comparison with lumpy bumpy fields with things growing on them that cover only a hundredth or thousandth of that area is ludicrous.
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I'm talking about a bald flat rock with no signs of ever having been anything but a bald flat rock in the making, in other words a huge flat expanse of wet bald sediment. All these attempts to make these huge flat rocks into former landscapes are wild fantasies.
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The whole idea of landscapes in ancient time periods is impossible.
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But Percy (and others too), describes an ordinary land surface with animals on it, the kind we all see every day, and then acts like that lumpy variegated surface, to some depth of course, could just turn into a flat sedimentary rock if only enough dirt got piled on it. This hits me as utterly impossible, and I don't see how your chart addresses this.
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Anything on the surface inhabited by life would have been lumpy and irregular and composed of all kinds of mixed sediments and gravel of all sizes and organic matter, and if buried would never turn into a flat slab of sedimentary rock and find itself neatly stacked among other such slabs of rock.
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There cannot have been any kind of landscape where there is now a layer of sedimentary rock, all there could have been is the wet sediment that eventually lithified.
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Not "on the spot" NOW, but still made up out of nothing because there is no justification at all for the "landscape" or time period interpretation of the rocks. They don't know when the rock was formed, it's all made up.
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It's ad hoc whether you say it or the article says it. All made up to fit the ridiculous "landscape" interpretation of what is only now a flat sandstone rock in most places, and a water-swirled sandstone formation elsewhere.
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There could never have been any kind of landscape where any layered rock formation now exists. Any identification of rock with time is ludicrous, including any identification with pre-rock "sand dunes" or anything else pre-rock. I hope eventually this ridiculous imposition on the human mind is absolutely and totally debunked.
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Sorry but the only way to answer this kind of thing is through incredulity. The idea that this represents an actual riverbed is some kind of joke. A cartoon riverbed at best. It's a trough or a channel cut in pure limestone and filled with pure limestone, both flush with the level of the contact with the Redwall limestone above. This could only have formed during the deposition of the sediments in the Flood, and since it is flush with the Redwall, meaning the Temple limestone doesn't spill over the top of the Muav, that's evidence that the Redwall was already laid down, which is what leads me to interpret the channel as a form of karst cut in the Muav after deposition of Muav and Redwall both. The "landscape" explanation is ludicrous.

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I've read through the above a couple times now, and I see no evidence or explanation or answers of any kind. I just see bald assertions. At one point you say you hope the lithified landscape idea is "eventually...absolutely and totally debunked," which makes clear you know you haven't done that yet. At another point you say the only way to deal with it is incredulity, which makes clear you know you're not offering any evidence or reasoned argument.Your writings do make very clear that you still do not understand how Walther's Law works, and you still don't realize that no one believes there was ever a Tapeats beach a thousand miles long and wide. That's because the Tapeats (and the Bright Angel and the Muav above it) formed through Walther's Law. Let me attempt another explanation.Imagine you want to paint your basement floor with a roller just as wide as your basement. The floor is gray and you're going to paint it light brown, the color of sand. You load the roller with paint, position it at one end of the basement, then begin rolling it toward the other end of the basement.The roller moving across the floor is like a transgressing sea. Where the roller contacts the floor is analogous to where the land meets the sea, and it is there that sand forms and a beach is created (a beach includes the sand extending from land on down into the water). You move the roller across the floor and it paints (deposits sand and creates a beach) as it goes. The gray floor in front of the roller corresponds to land, and the now-painted floor behind the roller corresponds to submerged sand deposits. And to repeat once more, where the roller contacts and paints the floor corresponds to the land/sea boundary where sand is deposited.But just one roller isn't really analogous to Walther's Law. Imagine that we have another basement-wide roller loaded with purple paint (to correspond to silt/mud/clay) to roll along a few inches behind the first roller. Both rollers move from one end of the basement to the other in tandem, the first painting the floor light brown (depositing sand), and the second painting the floor purple (depositing silt/mud/clay on top of the sand).To be even more complete we need another basement-wide roller loaded with white paint (to correspond to calcareous ooze) to follow along about a foot behind the purple roller. Now we have three rollers moving in tandem across the basement floor from one end to the other. The first roller paints the floor light brown (deposits sand), the second paints the floor purple (deposits silt/mud/clay on top of the sand), and the third paints the floor white (deposits calcareous ooze on top of the silt/mud/clay).Notice that at no time was the light brown roller in contact with more than just a very short stretch of floor. That very short stretch of floor, call it a half inch, represents a beach where there is a stretch of sand that extends from dry land down into the water. In front of the roller the floor is gray, which represents dry land. Behind the roller the floor is light brown, which represents submerged sand deposits. Since only the point of contact between the roller and floor represents a beach, and since that point of contact is very narrow, at no time is the entire basement floor a beach.If you followed this explanation you now understand why there was never a Tapeats beach that was a thousand miles long and wide. You also now understand why your version of the Flood is not an example of Walther's Law in action.I'll now try to answer the rest of your post. We're all the beneficiaries of many images of the walls of the Grand Canyon (and other canyons and mountain sides and road cuts and so on), so no, I'm quite sure none of us have any problem picturing what strata in a stratigraphic column look like. We've all seen images of the Tapeats Sandstone and the Bright Angel Shale and the Muav, so no, there's no problem picturing those either. Nope, no problem picturing this either. Nope, no problem picturing this either. Your oft-repeated descriptions of your flood scenario are not difficult to envision. The problem isn't that we don't understand what you're saying. The problem is that what you describe is not supported by any evidence, it's contradicted by a great deal of evidence, it doesn't take into account what we know of how geologic processes work, it follows processes that make no sense, and some of it violates known physical laws.These aren't just bald declarations. The details have been explained to you many times in many threads, including this one, but your response has been to dimiss, to deny, or most often, to simply ignore. If a flat prairie became buried beneath a mile of sediments and was subjected to a force of 5000 pounds/inch², how could it fail to lithify? Strata, including the familiar ones in the walls of the Grand Canyon, are rarely made up of a single sediment type. Go to the USGS site and read the summaries of each layer. This is the description of the Tapeats Sandstone:

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Tapeats Sandstone (Middle and Lower Cambrian)Brown and red-brown, cliff-forming sandstone and conglomerate. Includes an upper slope-forming transition zone of nearly equal distribution of brown sandstone of Tapeats Sandstone lithology and green siltstone and shale of Bright Angel Shale lithology, and a lower unit of cliff-forming sandstone and conglomeratic sandstone. Lower cliff unit consists mainly of medium- to coarse-grained, thin-bedded, low-angle planar and trough cross-bedded sandstone and conglomeratic sandstone; sandstone beds 6—24 in. (15—60 cm) thick. Unconformable contact with underlying Middle and Late Proterozoic surface that forms the Great Unconformity. The Tapeats fills in lowland areas and thins across or pinches out against young Proterozoic highlands. Variable thickness 0—400 ft (0—122 m)

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Did you read that? It's typical in describing different parts of a stratum as having different compositions. And this is just the Tapeats at the Grand Canyon. Along its lateral extent the Tapeats will also vary a great deal as to sediment composition. This means that you've been operating under a misimpression that a stratum consists of a single homogenous sediment.But there's another important point you're missing. The example of the flat prairie lithifying when deeply buried carried with it no implication of being similar to any particular strata such as those at the Grand Canyon or anywhere else. It was simply a point about net sedimentation having the ability over time to gradually and deeply bury a landscape.I'll mention another related point that has been oft-repeated but I fear seldom if ever heard by you. Most land is undergoing net erosion. Even if we consider blocked mountain valleys that are today experiencing net deposition, that's only a temporary situation. Eventually deposition will fill the valley and sediments will begin flowing out, and for a while the valley will be in deposition/erosion equilibrium. But eventually even the mountains surrounding the valley will erode away, and finally only a flat landscape will be left behind.So most likely the prairie in that image is going to erode away and disappear. As long as it's a prairie it is very unlikely to ever be preserved in the geological record. Only when it becomes a coastal region because of subsidence or sea-level rise or a combination does that prairie have a chance of becoming a layer of strata, but by that time it will be a beach or a lagoon or a swamp. Evidence would be nice, yes. It is how science works. We can already see what is there. This again? Do you never tire of non sequiturs. This is just a bald declaration. Can you place the fossils in an explanatory framework that turns them into evidence for the flood, particularly their distribution in the geologic column, and in a manner that has substance and that addresses rather than ignores or denies the evidence? This is a good example of a substanceless argument that ignores all the presented evidence. Your arguments are very familiar to us, as are your failures to address the evidence and arguments of others.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar, delete a phrase of extraneous text accidentally left behind during original composition.

No sweat, Faith, I think everyone knew your request for calculations would end with incomprehension and rejection. How does increased heat cause an ice age? You're neither under nor overestimating. You're making things up. I think people here will accept or at least consider pretty much anything that is strongly supported by evidence.--Percy

That's possibly true. You called joules meaningless, and joules are the units of heat and energy. If you're going to be hostile to knowledge then indeed the cause is hopeless. When you asked for calculations about the heat of accelerated continental drift did you imagine the answer would be in degrees per second or something?There's nothing particularly difficult about basic heat calculations. It's not like derivatives, calculus, differential equations and so forth. If you tell me your level of math education I'll figure out how to explain it. Okay, sure. To boil a gallon of water from room temperature takes a million joules (approximately - I'm only going to use ballpark figures), so to boil 10,000 gallons would take 10 billion joules. A candle gives off about a hundred watts, so it would take about 3 years (10 billion joules divided by 100 watts) to boil the water in the 10,000 gallon pot. To do it in one year, the year of the flood, would take 3 candles. Naturally the pot would never boil because a year is a long time and the candle heat transferred to the water in the pot would just radiate into the air.Now let's imagine that the heat of 3 candles for 175 million years were delivered to the 10,000 gallon pot, which would be equivalent to 525 million candles. Naturally the water would heat up much faster. In fact it would heat up so fast that the 10,000 gallons would take only .2 seconds to boil. Get the idea?--Percy

Really? In that case you are -100e^πi% correct. --Percy

Inconclusive evidence could leave you with multiple possibly valid hypotheses, but the evidence of geology concerning an ancient Earth and of evolution concerning the diversity of life on the planet are fairly conclusive. Those who demur typically have philosophical rather evidential reasons, such as blind adherence to a holy book that they believe eclipses reality. "Abundance" is a highly qualitative term and questionable anyway - the quantity of fossils varies greatly across strata. The distribution of fossils is impossible for a flood. "Huge" is another qualitative term, and as I said before, the quantity of fossils varies greatly across strata. Wouldn't most buried "dead things", since they were suddenly and completely buried, still have a great deal of biological tissue left after just 4500 years? Shouldn't a great many fossils still be bones?And rendering all that moot, wouldn't most dead things just float? Vague and questionable qualitative claims ought to make the point? Why do you think so? Do you actually believe your own propaganda? Why is it that all you can do is make vague unsupported claims, castigate people, and ignore evidence, information, explanations, diagrams, you name it. You don't have a model. You have a religion where adherence to a holy book trumps real world evidence. You've said as much right in this thread.--Percy

I think we're all still trying to understand what Moose meant when he said you had a less wrong view of Walther's Law than I did, and that your flood model followed Walther's Law. He posted a reply later, but it didn't seem to address these issues and I still don't know what to think. Yeah, I feel bad about that - I apologize and hope Moose forgives me. I don't follow your reasoning, but Moose's post was the strongest expression of support for your views that I think I've ever seen here, and on an extremely technical point, too. But in saying that your flood model was consistent with Walther's Law it seemed to me that he was weakening on that position. Not in that post he wasn't. Well, it certainly raised some questions that haven't been answered yet. I've posted quite a bit of information about Walther's Law to you. I hope you get a chance to look it over. I don't think it costs anyone here to honestly express and defend their views. I certainly haven't seen any hostility or resentment expressed toward Moose.--Percy

Are you saying that fossils should be at the bottom of the geological column because they tend to be dense and heavy? If so, I was thinking that because Faith says that fossils are from life killed by the flood that it wouldn't be fossils being swept around by the flood but corpses (in the general sense, not just people). Corpses will tend to float if air remains in the lungs, making it impossible for the corpse to sink. But if the lungs fill with water then the corpse will sink. After a few days corpses fill with gases, increasing the volume and decreasing the density, so they will all float. After a variable amount of time the gasses leave the corpses (either gradually or suddenly in the case of a rupture) and they sink again.I don't think Faith has taken any of this into account. I think it means there would be a great deal of randomness about which sedimentary layers corpses eventually become buried in.--Percy

PaulK and NoNukes have already responded, and I will also in a moment, but first I'd like to point out that you long ago lost the right to accuse anyone of dismissing your arguments. In this thread alone of my last 80 posts to you you've only responded to 15, and 5 were brief two or three line messages, so you only really responded substantively to 10, or 12.5%. Someone who dismisses or ignores so many messages has lost their right to complain.You also posted explicitly dismissive messages on two occasions, saying, "I think so much of what you say really isn't worth thinking about," and "Your attitude makes me even less interested in trying to deal with anything you post."So stop playing the hypocrite. When you begin replying to all the arguments people make then you'll have earned the right to register a protest when someone ignores an argument of yours.But now to address the specifics of your complaint: What gaping fracture in your thinking leads you to believe your own assessments of your ideas are the ones with genuine value. I'm sure we're all brilliant in our own minds, but a true finding of brilliance is conferred by others, not by oneself. That you actually believe your own opinion of your ideas is what counts explains a lot of your delusional stubbornness and determined ignorance. I did not dismiss your argument. Your argument was nonsense but I was polite enough not to say so, providing only enough rebuttal to allow any intelligent person to recognize its flagrant flaw.And unlike you I am willing to explain as many times as necessary to achieve understanding, though with you the number appears to be exceedingly large, made larger by the huge number of posts you completely ignore. But nonetheless, whenever you'd like me to explain again you need only ask. Nothing of trilobite genetics is known. As I pointed out, by your argument humans and chimpanzees are the same species. Foxes and wolves are the same species. Elk and deer are the same species. Alligators and crocodiles are the same species. All lizards are the same species. All salamanders are the same species. All fish are the same species.This should be enough for you to recognize that your argument is absurd, but what you will do, indeed what after reading ahead a little bit I see you have already done, is take this absurd argument, blindly reject all evidence and reason, and just dig in. This is because what you believe is not driven by evidence or rational thinking but by what you said back in Message 2439: "The one thing I know is true is that the Biblical worldwide Flood did occur about 4500 years ago. Everything else has to be subordinated to that."I did scan the Wikipedia entry on trilobites before posting my previous reply, and that mentioned something about trilobite eyes that made me curious. Looking it up just now I found The Trilobite Eye webpage over at the Trilobite Info website. Did you know that some trilobites had regular eyes, most had compound eyes, and some had no eyes at all? Do you really believe creatures with such different eyes could all be the same species?--Percy

The recent emphasis has been on Walther's Law, which is about a land/water boundary moving inland or outland. I'll try to fill in a few blanks regarding terrestrial strata - please tell me where any of this is wrong or incomplete. I've haven't had much luck finding a webpage that explicitly describes how it happens.When a sea slowly transgresses inland it is in effect mincing the land into sediments that then get separated by particle size according to the energy of the water, sand and anything larger/heavier depositing near shore, slit/mud/clay further from shore, pelagic even further shore. Slowly transgressing seas (for a ballpark figure, something like a million years to move a hundred miles) are like giant monsters chomping up the land. Whatever was on the land before is gone.Coastlines of only slight elevation above sea level will leave little or no evidence of what was once present on the land - it will be destroyed by wave action. But if a sea transgresses into a mountain range then cliff faces will form, rocks will break off, gravel will be created, and all that will be preserved telling us that there was once a mountain range there.But how do terrestrial landscapes become preserved as strata? I can only guess. I think transgression would have to be more rapid, either because of rapid sea level rise or rapid subsidence. For example, a subsidence of the land by 10 feet would cause coastal areas to be inundated, killing and preserving dinosaurs and their nests. A sudden land subsidence of 10 feet is nothing unusual - the Alaska earthquake of 1964 caused subsidence of as much as 7 feet and uplift of as much as 30 feet (not in the same locations of course). Well, here it is again, maybe she'll respond to it this time. The point, I think, was that strata vary a great deal and can be flat or lumpy. The Grand Canyon is a) not how all strata around the world look; and b) not as flat as Faith thinks anyway: --Percy