Re: Creationism is a falsified scientific theory

George Evans wrote:
in article dpednRebPc-S7nfZnZ2dnUVZ_76dnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxx, Noelie S. Alito at
noelie@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 8/21/06 8:00 PM:

George Evans wrote:
in article pan.2006.08.21.18.09.38.296036@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Mark Isaak at
eciton_NOSPAM@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 8/21/06 11:12 AM:

On Sun, 20 Aug 2006 12:34:05 -0700, George Evans wrote:

"Mark Isaak" <eciton_NOSPAM@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:pan.2006.08.19.20.38.02.653418@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Biblical creationism made at least two definite predictions -- that the
earth is less than 7000 years old...

This is a common misconception. Biblical creationism only predicts that
*life* is less than 7000 years old, not the earth. The bible is silent on
how old the earth is.

There are, of course, many different varieties of creationism. But the most
common form of YEC follows a straightforward interpretation of Genesis 1,
according to which dry land was created the same day as the first life.

...and that there was a global flood after humans came on the scene. Both
are now spectacularly falsified...

The hypothesis of a global flood is no where near falsified. In fact many
geological feature are better explained this way.
Have you ever been on a geology field trip?
Where, geologically speaking, do you live?

I live in southern California and have taken many geological trips to all
the southwestern states.

What have you looked at, besides sandstone and shale beds?

Only if by "many" you mean absolutely none. There are features which are
best explained by large local floods (ironically, creationists rarely refer
to these), but none that are better explained by a global flood.

One of the "none" is very widespread formations, covering several states, of
uniform thickness. Now what present geological process produces sheets of
sediment a thousand miles across on a continent. They used to try and feed us
the line that these were deposited in vast shallow inland seas, hoping, I
suppose, that none of us would realize that it is very difficult to corral
water on a continent, especially for millions of years. That we fell for that
so easily should be humiliating. Normally, even large geological feature are
only a fraction of the size of these vast formations.

There's nothing magic about continental crust that says it has to be dry land.
When sea level is high, the middle of what we call the North American
continent is covered by water. Not only are large parts of the Midwest
covered by distinctive sea deposits, but the fringe of this sea includes
*coral* *reef* *formations*. The Guadalupe Mountains in west Texas are reef
structures kilometers high! The summer session Geology Field Camps of the
University of Texas go there to study principles of reef formation--very
useful in the oil industry--and they save a lot of money on scuba gear. ;-)

http://www.geo.utexas.edu/courses/660/photo_gallery/06photos/photos_06_index.h
tm
http://geoinfo.nmt.edu/staff/scholle/guadalupe.html
http://geoinfo.nmt.edu/staff/scholle/graphics/permdiagr/PermPhysiog.html
http://www.scotese.com/3Dmodels.htm

Conversely, during low sea stands, much of the "continental shelf off the
Eastern Seaboard was above water, and to this day includes dry-land
("subaerial") geological formations. Oil company researches have spent a lot
of time and hundreds of millions of dollars evaluating soundings and cores of
submarine geology. (I know because I have sat through hours of presentations
by grad students going into hairy details of seafloor formations they
collected data and cores for.)

Even at the undergraduate level, we had to be able to understand and identify
geological formations associated with prograding and retrograding sea levels:

http://strata.geol.sc.edu/anim_gifs.html
http://www.searchanddiscovery.net/documents/2003/saller/images/05.htm

These patterns are essentially the same along the shores of the Permian and
Cretaceous mid-continent seas as along the actively prograding shore of the
Gulf of Mexico.

You make it sound so simple.

"Simple" is steady-state deposition in the middle of the sea, something
the undergraduates have no trouble understanding. Understanding the
shoreline depositional environments (backshore dunes which produce
"trademark" cross-bedding, recognizable patterns of ecology/fossils of intertidal zones and subtidal zones) takes a bit more study, involving
the understanding of both wind and wave energy, and the distinctive
ecosystems that develop in each zone.

Reef structure and ecology is a whole other field of study that
undergraduates had to master. My undergraduate class was taught
by the late Dr. R.K. Goldhammer, the bulk of whose career was doing
reef studies for oil companies. (Hint: porous reef structures can
make ideal reservoirs.)

Those are immediate, short-term depositional environments. You must
be able to understand and recognize these before you can understand
the distinctive offset patterns that form during sea transgression
(moving inland) and regression.

Shorter-term, smaller amplitude patterns are associated with ice ages.
Larger scale and amplitude transgression/regression ("onlap/offlap")
patterns are associated with the formation and breakup of supercontinents.

> So how do you get the sea level to increase the
thousands of feet necessary to cover the western states time and again?
Do you ascribe to the flopping shelf idea?

I don't know what you mean by "flopping shelf" idea. I must have
missed those presentations. ;-)

Global ("eustatic") sea level changes range about 250 meters (by
the conservative "Exxon model"), which corresponds to about 800 feet.
That's peanuts compared to the scale of ongoing measured uplift
of the western United States.

http://www.earth.ox.ac.uk/~tony/watts/new_pages/watts11.html





In the Flood model these are explained by very large and fast moving influxes
of water which would leave behind large relatively even layers of debris and
sediment.

And move an intact multi-kilometer high reef to deposit in West Texas?

Yes.

You're positing that the Guadalupe Mountains of West Texas were carried
intact by floodwaters? OK. Unaddressably absurd, so OK.



Another of the "none" is the relatively rapid change from one type of
formation to an adjacent one of entirely different description often equally
widespread but with slightly offset borders. A uniformitarian model would
predict gradual changes in content which would have the effect of blurring
stratigraphic boundaries.

Who came up with *your* "uniformitarian model"? Certainly not the pioneering
geologists who studied ACTUAL FRIGGING ROCK FORMATIONS.

Like 17th Century Nicolaus Steno, who first diagrammed the
stratigraphy of Tuscany's sedimentary geology?

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/Giants/Steno/steno5.html

Like 18th Century James "the present is key to the past" Hutton?

http://www.educa.rcanaria.es/penelope/uk_confburek.htm#Fig.%203


} To summarise, Hutton¹s geology rests on the concept of continuous
} natural processes working over periods of time that are infinitely
} long compared with a human life span. Decay and erosion of the land
} produce the sediments and running water moves it to the sea. The
} internal heat of the earth converts them from sediments to rocks.

I'm talking about boundaries that are in perfect conformity over large
areas.

What kind of boundaries? Where? How large an area?

> Is is reasonable to expect that a process of sedimentation of some
type, suddenly changes to some other type of sediment.

Are you talking about what geologists term "discontinuities"?
We see those forming in depositional environments in the REAL
WORLD, TODAY.


You just accept that hook line and sinker without thinking about it.
> Have you ever questioned that?

My geo profs have always encouraged questions and challenges,
and I've been happy to provide. Unlike metamorphic or igneous
geology, sedimentary geology involves a lot of gross sensory
interaction: We've walked on exposed sand-ripple surfaces,
excavated worm burrows and ammonite fossils, stubbed our toes
on stromatolites...and the profs get a kick out of handing out
shovels and having the students dig several feet into a point
bar (or beach), to expose the as yet unconsolidated deposition
patterns.

Besides the in-your-face fieldwork and the fondling of hand
samples (both fossils and exemplar paleocurrent-formed rocks),
and analyzing cores (including shales formed by tens of meters
of bioturbated muds) many of the depositional patterns can be
reproduced by simple physical experiments involving wind- and
water-tanks and flumes.

I can't think of many things in my life which had so much
interactive and intellectual confirmation. I also attended
many optional research presentations and have been impressed
by the critical grilling that presenters have received
regarding their methods, data, and conclusions.


I'm not saying this proves there was a flood, just that, in this case,
> my model works better than yours. So, live with it.

How does your "flood model" address many tens of meters of
fossilized muds bioturbated by worms and clams that in life
live within a meter of the sea floor?


In the Flood model these are explained by sequential influxes from different
sources and directions.

Can you be more specific in how this Flood model explains strata which contain
oyster beds in situ several meters above other oyster beds in situ, smack dab
in the middle of the Cretaceous limestone formations of central Texas? And
how about the giant reef in West Texas?

When did I say my model explains everything? The easiest one though is the
giant reef. An asteroid impact in the gulf could easily do the moving at
least.

There's a whole complex of reef formations around that Permian sea.
Perhaps there was an Intelligent Asteroid that positioned them at
*just the right* places with respect to the shoreline formations....

...Creationism also predicts stasis of a sort, that that animals we see
today have existed as long as there were animals. That too is
spectacularly false.

Spectacularly? You don't get out much.

I have seen enough Triassic and Jurassic fossils to know that life then does
not match what is around today. Mechanisms notwithstanding, evolution is an
obvious fact.

I will agree that change is an obvious fact, if that's what you meant.

Aye. Evolution of life on Earth is the observation (organisms being different
in times past, and our offspring will continue to accumulate differences in
their genome over the coming generations via mechanisms of DNA inheritance
observed today.)

Yes this is all true. But *observed changes* in the geological record rarely
amount to enough change to cross even a species boundary.

For those organisms in environments kindest to fossil preservation,
the evolution of many species (trilobites, gastropods, foramenifera,
to name a few of the most abundant) is long-established. In any case,
I don't think that fossil sequences is near the best form of evidence
used to show common descent, behind, for example, DNA patterns and
biogeography, both of which deal with organisms that do not fossilize
well.


Noelie
--
You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not
reason himself into in the first place. --Jonathan Swift

.

Loading