Summations Only

Please repeat the information. I don't remember what Leonardo thought,.

This is an interesting topic chiefly because of the wide variations of beliefs and world views between believers and unbelievers. Which brings up another argument: What has to be believed in order to qualify as a "believer"? I consider myself to be a believer in a Creator of all seen and unseen and I also believe that this Creator sent Jesus to communicate with us. I believe that Jesus is eternal life and that He lives today. That being said, I have no problem if the Grand Canyon was "created" by flood, erosion, nor how many years it took---be it ten or ten million.Now as for all of you.... It is my understanding and belief that satan was and is allowed to exist by the Creator of all seen and unseen. It is also my understanding that satan is not able to deceive someone who has accepted the eternal life of our Lord Jesus. Does that make me one of these so called "Elect" or am I still in trouble for not believing in a global flood? You surely dont want the students of our future to be forced to only study certain books and historical arguments while being "protected" from other data, do you? Thats an interesting bit of information! I respect your perspective. I personally am a cosmological ceationist in that I think God exists and is the source for everything, but not necessarily the Creator of all things directly. Natural processes seem logical. After all, take our individual thoughts. Does God "create" the thoughts of everyone? Perhaps only the Elect? Or...more likely...God allows us to think and reason and learn. The final answer is not simply some code in the Bible that only the elect can decipher. That being said, I am not in favor of eliminating the Bible as a source of learning. The question is what the book is supposed to teach us. Think about it. (Hint: Jesus Christ) Evidence is useful when concrete things (such as dirt and rocks and water) are being discussed. It is not useful when discussing abstract things (such as God, eternal life, and human destiny) although perhaps conversations between believers and non believers can be useful regarding human destiny! Actually, Tangle...I would be more likely to ascribe the belief that religion is done by satan. Science is all about thinking. You have several assertions here that need addressing.
1) Are Design and Intelligence given to only certain people? (These Elect that are always being discussed)
2) Are the secular educated being deceived? If so by whom? And who is to say that the modern church is not also being deceived?3) What is the most important single idea that ALL humans should believe? One sentence,please. Unless Loki is actually in charge!

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

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Leonardo knew well the rocks and fossils (mostly Cenozoic mollusks) found in his native north Italy. No doubt he had ample opportunity to observe them during his service as an engineer and artist at the court of Lodovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, from 1482 to 1499: Vasari wrote that "Leonardo was frequently occupied in the preparation of plans to remove mountains or to pierce them with tunnels from plain to plain." He made many observations on mountains and rivers, and he grasped the principle that rocks can be formed by deposition of sediments by water, while at the same time the rivers erode rocks and carry their sediments to the sea, in a continuous grand cycle. He wrote: "The stratified stones of the mountains are all layers of clay, deposited one above the other by the various floods of the rivers. . . In every concavity at the summit of the mountains we shall always find the divisions of strata in the rocks." Leonardo appear to have grasped the law of superposition, which would later be articulated fully by the Danish scientist Nicolaus Steno in 1669: in any sequence of sedimentary rocks, the oldest rocks are those at the base. He also appears to have noticed that distinct layers of rocks and fossils could be traced over long distances, and that these layers were formed at different times: ". . . the shells in Lombardy are at four levels, and thus it is everywhere, having been made at various times." Nearly three hundred years later, the rediscovery and elaboration of these principles would make possible modern stratigraphy and geological mapping.

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In Leonardo's day there were several hypotheses of how it was that shells and other living creatures were found in rocks on the tops of mountans. Some believed the shells to have been carried there by the Biblical Flood; others thought that these shells had grown in the rocks. Leonardo had no patience with either hypothesis, and refuted both using his careful observations. Concerning the second hypothesis, he wrote that "such an opinion cannot exist in a brain of much reason; because here are the years of their growth, numbered on their shells, and there are large and small ones to be seen which could not have grown without food, and could not have fed without motion -- and here they could not move." There was every sign that these shells had once been living organisms. What about the Great Flood mentioned in the Bible? Leonardo doubted the existence of a single worldwide flood, noting that there would have been no place for the water to go when it receded. He also noted that "if the shells had been carried by the muddy deluge they would have been mixed up, and separated from each other amidst the mud, and not in regular steps and layers -- as we see them now in our time." He noted that rain falling on mountains rushed downhill, not uphill, and suggested that any Great Flood would have carried fossils away from the land, not towards it. He described sessile fossils such as oysters and corals, and considered it impossible that one flood could have carried them 300 miles inland, or that they could have crawled 300 miles in the forty days and nights of the Biblical flood.

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Modern geologists have made similar observations over the whole world. Once again it is the spacial-temporal matrix that provides the detailed evidence for the natural history of the earth.Enjoy

Basically he realized that the fossils on mountaintops lived and grew where they were found (wherever that might have been at the time) and were far too complete to be deposited by moving water.

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Since things are much more ancient than letters, it is no marvel if, in our day, no records exist of these seas having covered so many countries. . . But sufficient for us is the testimony of things created in the salt waters, and found again in high mountains far from the seas.

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http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/vinci.html

Thanks for the information, but I was just reading what RAZD posted from the Leonardo site and you seem to be in disagreement with that where you say: At first glance this seems to contradict what RAZD just posted about Leonardo's refuting the idea that the fossils in mountains had grown there: But he isn't saying they grew in the rocks, merely " lived and grew where they were found (wherever that might have been at the time" since he goes on to suppose that the land had been covered by seas at some point: " it is no marvel if, in our day, no records exist of these seas having covered so many countries. . . But sufficient for us is the testimony of things created in the salt waters, and found again in high mountains far from the seas. "But that's a statement I would take as a near miss to grasping that they were deposited by the Flood, so near and yet so far.If local floods could have deposited them and not broken them to bits, why couldn't the worldwide Flood? Why is there such certainty about what the Flood would have done as long as it contradicts what the Bible says? It's not all that hard to set your mind to reconciling the facts with the Bible, it's a mental set, the explanations that debunk the Bible aren't particularly realistic, they're just the usual off-the-cuff suppositions. If the shells are not broken we then assume the Flood wasn't as violent as is often thought.But the general idea that they lived and grew wherever the mountains originally were is certainly in turn with the idea of the Flood, especially since he also says strata are found in the high parts of the mountains, which to my mind are a sure evidence of the Flood. So the Flood laid down all the sediments along with the shells and other fossils, and after the Flood the mountains were raised: that's the tectonic activity that occurred with the splitting of the continents. See? It all works out just fine.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

But the dating doesn't work.That's way too much mountain building etc. to pack into 4350 years. Or actually more like under 2000 years, as by about 500 BC the Greeks were making a lot of observations and records and the tectonic activity that would be associated with such rapid mountain building (and plate movement) would surely have been noticed.(The Egyptians were making records much earlier, and they made no reference to a worldwide flood.)

Interesting, thanks.He was very interested in the strata, but called them "all layers of clay," rather than different sediments, noting that "at the summit of the mountains we shall always find the divisions of strata in the rocks," but attributed them to flooding of rivers.Obviously it wouldn't be easy to interpret such phenomena in any age, but it seems to me that believing the Bible ought to give a person the definite idea that the strata are evidence for the Flood. Lots of odd ideas are possible for all these phenomena; standard current Geology's ideas are probably the strangest though, the idea of separate eras of time in which the fossils lived. The idea that layers represent time periods is in his thinking already, it seems. Maybe it wasn't all that easy to see layers as simultaneously produced, which is what various recent experiments have shown. But mostly I fault Leonardo for not trying to reconcile the facts with the Bible. On the other hand the Catholic church was discouraging people from reading the Bible in those days.....The idea that fossils "grew there" he rightly denounces. But then JonF quotes something else from that article that suggests he accepted that they "lived and grew there" if that refers to an original location in the sea. Too bad, Leonardo didn't put much trust in the Bible, but then as I said above, Catholics in those days didn't. Those who do trust the Bible expect to find an explanation for where the water went, they don't just give up and call God a liar, which is what Leonardo's position amounts to from the point of view of a Bible believer. The current theory about where the water went has something to do with the dropping of the sea floor I think. He lacked the perspective that explains the steps and layers as formed by water in one event. But this is easily answered. There were no fossils on mountaintops when the Flood began, they were deposited in the layers during the Flood which where then raised into mountains afterward. He seems to have an awfully small flood in mind, as so many do, not envisioning that a worldwide Flood would have so totally covered the land that its tides and waves would have carried all kinds of flotsam and jetsam many hundreds of miles over the land.All this demonstrates that explaining the prehistoric past is a difficult thing. But biblical creationists have the Bible to give us a lead that others don't have.

Yes, your dating doesn't work. And since there weren't yet enough people around to be disturbed by the jostling of mountain building as the tectonic plates moved apart, that's the best theory that fits with the biblical account.

Another point: If Leonardo realized that the shells in the high mountains had to have originated in the sea, which led him to postulate that the land had been covered by the sea at one point, he should have noticed that to get shells into the high mountains by that means implies that the water had to be as deep as the worldwide Flood anyway.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Going back to Adam Sedgwick, Talkorigins has a nice description on one of their pages:"The answer is simple: empirical evidence. Because the 'diluvial' strata which had been cited as evidence for a global flood were composed of gravel and other unconsolidated sediments, they were harder to investigate than the older, consolidated sedimentary rock. However, after a great deal of study, some geologists had been able to map portions of the 'diluvium' and demonstrate conclusively that they were the result of different events, clearly separated in time. Once this was firmly established, it became clear to Sedgwick and others that if the deposits were clearly the result of a series of distinct events, they could not have been the result of a single global flood. Therefore, as a conscientious scientist, Sedgwick rejected his previous hypothesis."
The Talk.Origins Archive Post of the Month: April 2002

A recent global flood and a young Earth were disproven well before Darwin ever wrote about evolution, or before he had even contemplated evolution.

I also respect your point of view, even if I don't agree with it.The problem I see is that you approach the problem backwards. You don't start out accepting something is true without any evidence, and then try to find reasons not to think it is true. Instead, you look at all claims skeptically and only accept them on the weight of evidence.Therefore, it isn't about eliminating the Bible from consideration. Instead, it is about producing evidence that it is true before accepting it. That is where theism falls short.

You don't fit theories to stories in books. You fit theories to empirical evidence.

This doesn't make sense to me. I don't know what it is referring to. What at that time was considered to be "diluvial" strata? How is the sedimentary rock determined to be "older?" Since I have no idea what is meant by the "diluvium" nor what "mapping" portions of it describes, I can't get any; idea of what is meant by "demonstrate[ing] conclusively that they were the result of different events, clearly separated in time." How could that be determined in any case? Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

If the book is known to be the word of the Creator God who made it all, what it says is the primary evidence, THE empirical evidence we must put above all other evidence. This does not mean rejecting something in the world that is clearly a fact, but a lot of what is pitted against the Bible is noting but interpretations and not facts at all.