Coal 'coincidentally correlated' with marine innundations

Why coal is ancient:

• No Carbon-14 exists in any coal anywhere, giving it a minimum age of at least 50,000 years. Dating of carbon from roughly the same proposed time at Biblical and related archeological sites yields the expected ages, so there is no evidence of fiddling with physical laws.
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• Radiometric dating and geologic column positioning indicate two major periods of coal formation, one during the Pennsylvanian, the other during the Cretaceous. In other words, millions and millions of years ago.
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• Coal beds lay embedded within the geologic column amidst layers containing fossils that differ considerably from modern forms.

Why it couldn't have happened all at once:

• The world's estimated coal reserves are around 1 trillion metric tons. The estimated total world photosynthesis based biomass production annually is around 0.1 trillion metric tons, and that's the amount produced during the entire year, not the amount in existence at a given point in time.
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  So do the math. In order for this Creationist scenario to be true there would have had to have been 100 times the total vegetable biomass produced in an entire year in existence all at the same time in the form of vegetative sea mats (100 times, not 10 times, conservatively assuming vegetation is 90% water and that therefore a ton of coal requires 10 tons of vegetation).
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• Heat, pressure and time are required to form coal. Without it you have only peat.

--Percy

Read it again. It isn't just 100 times the vegetation we have at present. It's 100 times the vegetation produced over the course of an entire year being present just during your flood in sea mats alone. And that's assuming every single ounce of sea mat becomes coal, that none escapes coalification and simply decays and returns its elements to the environment. Burial is a chancy process, so even if we give any piece of sea mat a 10% probability of burial, now you need at least 1000 times more than today's annual biomass production.Just like all the other unlikelihoods and impossibilities I'm sure you'll again state that you have no problem imagining this, but that's not science. Imagine all you like, but you still need evidence. The problem in science isn't to convince yourself, but to convince others. As long as the only people you can convince are other evangelical Christians then you quite obviously have a religious, not a scientific, viewpoint.--Percy

Tranquility Base writes:

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If you want to believe it happened over tens of millions of years in primarily two coal ages, feel free Percy.

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It has nothing to do with wanting to believe anything. Why in the world would I have any predisposition toward two coal forming eras versus one or three or seventeen? Why would I care whether coal formed a billion years ago, a million years ago, or yesterday?The answer is I don't care. I could care less when coal formed. It doesn't matter to me at all.What I care about is following the evidence where it leads. I've got God's hard evidence telling me it formed one way, and then there's you with a book written by ancient Jews who were intent on communicating a religious message but that you claim:

• It also communicates scientific information
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• You've interpreted this information correctly
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• It states that evidence of ancient coal is wrong or incorrectly interpreted.

Before you can begin to convince anyone else of this I think you're going to have to take a step back and try to get a better idea of just how hugely unlikely all this sounds.--Percy

I already tracked down the full abstract earlier today, and anyway I can't see anything in it that hints at "rapid marine innundations". Is this the same kind of thing where evangelicals look at geologic layers and see flood evidence where no one else does?Using the word "lucicrous" and supporting that characterization are two different things. You've done the former but not the latter, and clearly the authors do not agree with you.Enjoyed the exchanges, going to bed now. Good night! --Percy