Thank you very much for your reply Faith. I know you are getting swamped.
Unintentional I assure you, and if it's possible, if the thread is still open, I might still try to answer you there.
I look forward to it. There is lots of interesting things to discuss and understand about genetics.
Yeah, others have mentioned it, but we're talking BILLIONS of years, BILLIONS, and we're talking the WHOLE EARTH.
It is extremely rare to find sedimentary rock that is BILLIONS of years old. After that much time the rock is usually weathered away or converted into other forms of rock called metamorphic rock. Few sedimentary layers are billions of years old.
One thing I think you are forgetting is that sedimentary rocks are constantly being made. All the rocks weren't made 4 billion years ago to just sit around and wait for us to find them. While there were lots of sedimentary rocks back billions of years ago we only find ones that are mostly in the millions of years old.
Millions of years is still a long time but given that deposition never ceases there are always new sediments being deposited. Most of the sedimentary layers of the grand canyon, I think, are less than 1 billion years old at the oldest. Someone will correct me if I am wrong.
Granting irregularities in the horizontal strata, they are nevertheless remarkably straight and horizontal given weathering.
Small particles of things like to settle as far down as they can (thank you gravity). This is why sediment starts out initially flat.
Some places in the world you can still see flat sediment but actually most of the places it has been disturbed quite considerably.
Even when it does settle "flat" it still often shows features of how weathering affected it. Sand dunes for example show cross bedding in the patters that the winds blew the sand over time. River and shallow ocean deposits show ripple marks. Sediment only is "flat" when you look at it over huge areas with respect to topography.
Since this all is a matter of imagination on both sides as applied to the idea of the building of the column, there being no way to prove that the depositions you are talking could or could not explain it, you finding it reasonable, I finding it preposterous in the extreme, there is simply no way at all to have this discussion.
The reason I find it reasonable is only because we can watch it happening today. We can watch the Mississippi delta and measure year after year how much sediment gets piled up on top. We can then find old harden rocks that look exactly like the delta sediment and predict that we should also find other river deposits nearby that are evidence of the river's channel. When we do we know that they theory is strong. Geologists would have had a hard time trying to figure out what was going on with older rocks if they couldn't see the stuff they do happening today.
Another great example is limestone. Limestone is formed when little ocean critters with shells die and sink to the bottom of the ocean. Over time these creatures get compacted and form a hard rock made entirely out of little fossils. We can measure how fast this is happening in the ocean today and that tells us how fast it was likely to have happened in the past. These layers can be 1000s of feet think which would have taken quite a long time to deposit. The reason that this could not have happened in a flood is because so many creatures would have had to be alive at the time of the flood when you uncompact them that there would have been no room for anything else.
Again, over BILLIONS of years and the ENTIRE scope of the planet you expect this process to continue to the point that the perfect stratifications we see in so many HUGE examples such as the Grand Canyon and the Rockies and the formations of the Southwest etc. etc. etc. are explained by it.
We almost never find perfectly "flat" strata in the way I think you are trying to mean it. Most of the worlds sedimentary rocks are twisted, folded, cracked, overturned, etc. The grand canyon is a spectacular example because when you look at it in detail you can see that the bottom layers are actually intersected by the higher layers at an angle. This is called a disconformity and is a great example of how layers don't always stay flat. The higher layers of the grand canyon are flat because it was recently an ocean basin and major geologic activity has yet to mess with it too much.
The Rockies are a bad example of flat strata but a good example of how flat strata becomes bent and broken. As the Rockies were built up by tectonic forces it started to slowly squish the sedimentary layers that had been flat for a time into curvy and fractured layers. Overall, layers don't stay flat for very long, relativly speaking.
Well OK, you believe that, what can I say?
I never believe in anything blindly. I believe in what I do because of my knowledge and experience. I believe in classical geology because I have studied it some and know
why they theories are they way they are. I believe in God because of personal experiences that I have that cause me to believe. Both are knowledge, one is scientific knowledge and the other is spiritual knowledge. Their sources are seperate but their validity is the same to me.
By the way, for a fun second-term drinking game, chug a beer every time you hear the phrase, "...contentious but futile protest vote by democrats." By the time Jeb Bush is elected president you will be so wasted you wont even notice the war in Syria.
-- Jon Stewart, The Daily Show
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