The Great Creationist Fossil Failure

Most YEC, in fact most people, would not realise that each of the major periods - Jurassic, Triassic etc - is further broken up into stages numbering about 100 from the Cambrian to the present. The limits of these stages are defined by the first or last appearance of various fossils, often microscopic organisms. Then these stages are typically divided into 5 or 6 further stages, some more and some less, similarly defined.
Then there are pollen stages which may overlap these stages.
The ability of the Flood to sort the fossils in this way would be mind-boggling.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church set up the Geoscience Research Institute in 1959 to find evidence for YEC and the Flood. GRI reported to the church's 5 yearly General Conference in 2010 that after 50 years they still could not produce a model of YEC and Flood that explained the evidence.
Their website FAQ section lists unsolved questions after discussing various topics. I think they make interesting reading. A selection follows."Fossils : How did the fossils become arranged in the particular sequence in which we find them? Why do some organisms .... appear throughout the fossil record while others disappear?""Age of Earth : The most difficult question is probably the apparent sequence of radiometric dates, giving older dates for lower layers ..... and younger dates for the upper layers. ....why different dating methods often give similar ages; an explanation for the cooling of the magma composing the ocean floor""Plate tectonics : When and how rapidly have the plates moved? What happened to the pre-Flood continents? ""Ice ages : What processes account for the appearance of large numbers of layers in ice cores and cyclical oscillation in climate proxies from marine and terrestrial records?""Noah's Ark : How did the terrestrial animals get from the Ark to their present distribution?"One would wonder how someone could read - or write - these questions without having a light-bulb moment. "Hey, there's a good answer to all these questions - the Earth is old!"

The Norian was introduced as a stage in 1869, and most of the 100 stages were characterised 1840 - 1880. So they have been known for a LONG time.

Radiolarians and diatoms are similarly sized microscopic critters that occur in similar sea environments, though diatoms often live deeper. there are abundant species of both in the fossil record, but while radiolarians are found from the Cambrian up, diatoms are only first found in the Triassic.Their sorting in the record is such that they can be used to date rocks, with in some cases the diatoms can refine the date to within 50,000 years. One would expect a Flood to mix up these critters, not have them sorted into the layers in which they are found.Diatoms can produce immense deposits, and when part of sediment flows undersea can entomb other fossils.One could also ask how the Flood spread the Iridium layer around the Earth so that it is found at the end of the Cretaceous, including in the midst of the Deccan traps lava flows which occurred above waterMost regulars know the following, but for newbies and lurkers, an excellent book available on the internet is Daniel Wonderley's " Neglect of Geologic Data by Creationists" It has a wealth of information showing how a young Earth and Flood does not fit with what is observed. His web site also has a good account on corals. He was a Christian, and was prepared to go where the evidence led.

As Dr A's geology points out, the various rocks on the Earth show features indicating they were placed under different conditions : e.g. deep ocean, shallow ocean, shoreline, deltas, river flats, deserts, landslides, volcanoes. The Flood has to mimic all these different environments as well as sorting the fossils, and as the Geoscience Research Institute admitted, sort the radiometric ages as well.
This is not a small problem!Any YEC/Flood model also has to account for volcanism, with literally tens of millions of cubic kilometres of flood basalts deposited above water and about as many under water, plus thousands of volcanoes of all apparent ages -some just residual magma plugs with the cones eroded away - and their ash falls etc.As an aside on volcanoes, in one of her books, Ellen White attributed volcanoes to subterranean fires, from coal deposited by the Flood, melting the rocks.
Incredibly, the GRI at one time had this prominently on their web site.

Over at AIG John Baumgardner has an article on the deposition of sediment during the Flood.
I admit I only skimmed it because I did not think my stomach would stand reading it in detail.
In essence, he postulates rapid plate tectonics of 2 metre per second causing massive tsunamis which wash over the continents and erode them. There are fast ocean currents to carry the sediment load required, which gradually slow as the plate speed drops off, and the sediment is deposited.This of course would do nothing toward the sorting of fossils we have been talking about, but shows that, often in YECism, trying to explain one aspect of reality in YEC terms raises other difficulties.
Also he does nothing toward explaining volcanism.

He accepts the evidence the plates have moved. The only time they could move in a YEC paradigm is during the Flood, ergo they have to move pretty smartly. He commented on the small movements that produce tsunamis now, so seemed to hypothesise stronger plates so they can undergo further pressure before they give.
Why they should start to move and then slow down is not clear.Of course while the plates are steaming along you have to have hot spots furiously building volcanoes such as the Hawaiian -Emperor chain. Poor Noah is in for a rough ride!It is just a desperate effort to explain the facts in a YEC framework.The churning up of sediment he visualises would not even allow the ecological zonation sorting of fossils some YEC suggest.

The article is titled "Numerical modelling of the large-scale erosion, sediment transport, and deposition processes of the Genesis flood"Go to AIG, click on Answers, scroll to Science then Geology then Sedimentation.Remember AIG do not look at data and see what they show, but to see how they can be mangled into a dogmatic mind-set.

There are a myriad "real" problems for the Flood,and so far you have adduced no mechanism for solving them.How about explaining the distribution of radiolarians and diatoms? Forget the way individual species are ordered, just tell us for starters why radiolarians are from the Cambrian up, but diatoms do not start till the Triassic. Remember these critters are of similar sizes, and should be randomly mixed by a raging Flood.

Hi Faith,
Let me have a try.
I am not a geologist, so I welcome correction from those who know more than me, but here goes.You seem to not understand how a slab of rock is the environment, well in most cases the rocks we see are not THE environment, but show EVIDENCE of it.
Most sedimentary rocks are laid down in water - such as lakes, deltas, seas, river flats.Consider a lake. On its bed it will have remains of critters and vegetation growing in it, but also animals - or more usually bits thereof - living on the nearby land and washed in by streams or local floods. Along with that there will also be pollens and pieces of vegetation from the land. As streams wash in mud and silt the bits on the lake bed get covered.Eventually with changes in the area like uplift or sea transgression the lake bed will become stone. Millions of years later geologists examine the rocks and see evidence of what the land was like alongside the lake, and infer a landscape with plants and animals in it.
The rocks are not the landscape, but they show what it was like.In addition to exposed rock layers in streams and rivers, there must be millions of bores that have been drilled into land, lakes, rivers, and seas in the last 200 years which also show the ordering of the fossils talked about here, and you are no nearer explaining that than GRI is. Remember their unsolved questions? There is one easy answer for them.