Did the Flood really happen?

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Gosh, I see a whole lot of short pieces of strata all tilted toward the left, arranged (sorry you hate the more literary "marching") from left to right across the whole island. Perhaps this is a little clearer on Smith's own diagram but I think it's clear enough on the other too.

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The better diagram shows that a large majority continue East (Right) beneath the island For instance the dotted layer just to the left of the Carboniferous (the black coal) continued until it is under the Cretaceous- hardly short.

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I don't think I said anything about "horizontal movement." Anyway I gather you still don't get what I'm trying to describe.

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You talk about the strata having moved but you don’t give any idea of how you think they moved. If you won’t specify I have to deal with all the possibilities.

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Yes the principle of superposition is violated in their current position one after the other from left to right. Superposition would describe the usual situation of one on top of the other, which is not what we see here but was surely their original position when they were laid down.

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Since none of them are truly vertical - and most are closer to horizontal - superposition still applies.

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I'm not talking about the tilt, I'm talking about how a geological column is never laid down on its side, it is stacked vertically, but this one is on it's side, marching, as it were, from left to right ACROSS the island when it would originally have been stacked UP vertically.

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That is the tilt.

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Didn't I say the short tilted strata ON TOOP OF THE ISLAND?

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Indeed you did, that’s the problem because there aren’t many that are short.

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I KNOW they continue beneath the island...

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Which is why they aren’t short. Sorry, but I don’t see how you can call a continuous stratum going from the Carboniferous label to the Cretaceous label short

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...they ALL do, but I was trying to talk about the SHORT TILTED ONES ON THE ISLAND.

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Which you know aren’t actually short or at least that is what you just said. This is not in the least helpful.

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Vertical is vertical, horizontal is horizontal, scale makes no difference to these orientations.

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But it makes a big difference to the angles. The differing scales will make the angles seem closer to vertical. This is High School mathematics. Try drawing two right angled triangles, one twice as tall as the other. Take a look at what that does to the angles.

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The strata ON THE ISLAND PROPER, meaning resting on the straight horizontal sea level line, are all side by side from left to right, and the scale will make no difference to that fact

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This is where you are using very confusing terminology. Many strata are in part above sea level, but those portions are not separate strata, nor do they rest on the line - which corresponds to nothing physical that they could rest on.Further, Not only are they are not vertical, they are much closer to horizontal than they appear in the diagram because of the differing horizontal and vertical scales.

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They would not have been originally deposited in that position, they would have been stacked one upon another, Cambrian on the bottom, Holocene on the top, instead of as we now see them, Cambrian on the left, Holocene on the far right.

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They have been tilted, obviously. Their extent has likely been reduced by erosion. But it is not at all clear that they all covered the entire island. In fact that seems quite unlikely.

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If they were returned to their original position, the strata beneath the sea level line would be pulled up to extend across the island from left to right, the Cambrian or bottom layer resting ON the sea level line.

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I’m not at all sure of that. The sea level has nothing to do with their original position, and I am sure that there is more folding than collapsing here. (So the presumed Cambrian layer at the bottom of Snowdon - which is not bounded by sea level - has likely been raised from it’s original position).

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That is how they would originally have been deposited.

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It’s more complicated than that because there are multiple tectonic events going on. A single pivot at Snowdon will not undo the bending of the strata, so it will not make all the strata parallel.And what do you make of the Silurian deposits directly underlying early Cretaceous - or perhaps late Jurassic - strata at the Eastern end (beneath the Cretaceous label, and identified as Silurian)?Edited by PaulK, : Correct minor typo

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Seems to me it's the Old Earth system in which everything should be all jumbled up, not the Flood

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That is pretty obviously wrong. Fossils aren’t just going to jump out of the rock containing them to mix with later things. The Flood on the other hand supposedly happened in a single year while everything was alive - until the Flood killed it.

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The surface of the earth NOW is all jumbled up isn't it? Animals die willy-nilly on the surface, they don't get nicely buried in nice neat specific sediments, whether above or below the sea, let alone in conditions that would fossilze them.

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Neither the fossils or the sediments are as neat as you think. And how do you know nothing ends up in conditions that would allow fossilisation ? That would be very strange.

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Why should any previous time period, let alone, what, dozens? hundreds? of "time periods" be marked by such nice neat sedimentary strata with specific collections of fossils buried in them?

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They aren’t as neat as you say, and that is the way sedimentation works. The specific collections simply reflect the way life has changed over time. And you have no viable explanation for it at all.

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makes no sense at all that such periods of time should be marked out by flat neat sedimentary rocks of different kinds of sediment for every few million years,

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Environments change over time. Transgression and regression is a great example. And we can see environments changing in history, and even now as the sea levels rise and the glaciers melt.

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...and the effort to rationalize it has to involve extreme mental contortionism. Or just denial.

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Or just pointing out obvious facts, as I did.

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It's the sediments above all that would have been jumbled. There's no reason for neat flat sedimentary rocks to exist in each time period at all, not even one time period let alone dozens .

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Again you’re just making assumptions. Sediment is being deposited today, and some of it will end up as rock. And why should it be jumbled ? We’re not assuming a massively violent global flood.

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As for the fossils, there really should be a lot more fossils from early time periods mixed into each subsquent period than there are anyway, but certainly if things just die willynilly on the bottom of the sea or on the surface of the land, mostly there will be a LOT fewer that get fossilized but also there should be some jumbling, and there is none.

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Given the timescales, no there shouldn’t be much jumbling. Fossils don’t just jump out of the rocks, and that is what it would take. Some fossils are eroded out and found in later rock - and they can be identified.

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Transgressions and regressions are just a way of accounting for what the Flood actually did, and they require you to have living creatures roaming around where you postulate water covering the land anyway.

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No, they are ways of accounting for specific sequences of rock that we wouldn’t expect your Flood to produce. And marine creatures generally do live in the sea.

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I don't say NOTHING gets fossilzed, what I say is that there's way too much regularity about how things got buried and fossilized in the OE and ToE scenarios, and way too many neat sedimentary rocks and way too many fossilized creatures.

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And that is all assumption without any solid basis at all.

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Water produces layered sediments, why would you expect there to be any of the necessary conditions just happening to show up every few million years to lay down a new sediment on top of sediment laid down millions of years previously, all containing fossils just as the previous did, and the next and the next and the next.

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The necessary conditions are often absent, and it’s not like there is any regular timetable. So what is the problem ?

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See THAT makes a LOT less sense than the Flood as the explanation for the geological column no matter how many objections you can think up against the Flood.

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No it doesn’t because the Flood makes no sense at all as an explanation of the geological column. It’s just a desperate mental contortion. That’s why you have to ignore most of the evidence.

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No regular timetable. Hm. Funny how the strata just happen to show up regularly enough to form the geological column

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Local columns vary. Very few places have strata from all the periods - and the periods are long stretches of time. Even the basins that have strata from all the periods don’t have continuous deposition from what I remember. So no, there is nothing funny there. It took a lot of work to correlate all the strata even in Europe, and more to relate them to the other continents.

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Containing a specific bunch of fossils.

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Which is hardly surprising if life changes over time. The problem is trying to explain it with a Flood. Especially when you include the trace fossils. Have you managed to sort out the contradiction yet ?

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As it rises it pushes up the column of strata and they break as it rises, right over the mountain top, one side of it falling to the west / left, and disappearing into the sea, the other side tilting to the east or right. The east/right side falls down until its broken upper edge forms the short pieces of strata we now see arranged on the sea level line from left/west to right/east, with the rest of the layers now beneath the sea level line where they bend to the right/east and show signs of various disturbances and distortions.

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This does not make a lot of sense. Especially as you have admitted that the short pieces of strata are not short pieces of strata at all - just the upper and Western ends of strata extending down to the East Message 662. I don’t know why you insist on this intentional falsehood.Nor do I know why you think that the sea level line is anything more than an illustrative line on the diagram.

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I think it's pretty clear those short pieces of strata on the island had to be broken off because they would originally have had very long extensions which wouldn't just erode away.

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Your idea that they would have had long extensions is just your opinion. And if they did have long extensions which somehow broke off and could not have been removed by erosion, where are they ?It seems pretty clear to me that your idea can’t be true.Edited by PaulK, : Added link to post

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If time periods were marked by sedimentary layers we should see one forming today exactly over the geologial columns wherever they are. We don't.

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So, you deny that sediment is being deposited today.

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...That's clearly what we see in the Grand Canyon/Grand Staircase area, and it's clearly what we see in the UK diagram we've been discussing. ALL the strata are in place, all laid down one after another, AFTER which something disturbed them, cut canyons into them, caused them to collapse from original vertically stacked horizontal layers down to pieces of strata arranged no longer vertically but horizontally across the island. All this supports the Flood explanation.

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We do not clearly see it at all. What we clearly see is evidence of tectonic events and massive erosion during the creation of the column. And you go into desperate contortions to deny the evidence. This is evidence AGAINST the Flood explanation.

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Neat sedimentary rocks every few millions of years all neatly stacked one upon another despite the intervening millions of years, just does not fit reality as we know it.

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Indeed we often find that sedimentary rocks are not neatly stacked on each other and we can have gaps much greater than a few million years.

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Animals die on the surface, including the surface of the sea bottom, where predators gobble them up and they have zerio chance of being buried let alone fossilized.

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Generally predators do not eat the hard parts - and it is the hard parts that form the vast majority of fossils. Some animals die where predators cannot reach them - like being buried by a landslide or a sandstorm - or falling to an anoxic lake bottom.

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The surface of the earth is a jumble of sediments, not neatly sorted sediments except in special places that aren't even part of the geological column, and the sea floor is also a jumble of stuff that died and landed on it. Yes a jumble. Everyday nature creates a jumble of stuff on our earth, it has to be a special event that would create the geological column.

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I guess you are pulling your old dodge of not counting present day sediments because they aren’t rock. So we don’t get pure sediments that aren’t sediments. Big deal. As it is we do get quite pure sediments in conditions that did produce rock.As for your jumbling of fossils, fossils are often jumbled in the same way as modern organisms. The order of the fossil record doesn’t deny that.And of course we are still waiting for you to offer any remotely viable explanation of the order of the fossil record.

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Well, no, I can't think of them as being part of the geological column not because they aren't rock but because they aren't in the right place to be part of the geological column, they don't have the same geographical extent, and if there's anything about their being unconsolidated that applies it's that they could never become a rock shaped like those in the geological column anyway.

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I can’t imagine what you think the right place might be. But there is absolutely no reason to believe that the sediments that settle and stay do so anywhere but in the surface - which is the right p,ave, wherever it might be.The extent is also a dubious objection since we already have the example of the Sahara, we already know that many strata are more local in extent and we already know that the extent of many strata is greater than the area they were being deposited at any particular point in time.Your finAl objection just denies that sediment can become rock. Which I guess rules out the Flood explanation.

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Well, there is no island on the left/west now...

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I think that the Irish might disagree with that.

You're a compromiser who lets science judge the Bible.Obviously the sky is blue because the Earth is surrounded by water, held back by a transparent barrier (Genesis 1:6-8)

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But the next picture should be the whole stack of strata breaking at that point. The broken ends on the right will become the pieces of strata we see spread across the sea level line on the diagram being discussed earlier.

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But we don’t see any broken pieces of strata spread across the sea level line.