I had the opportunity, nay pleasure, to attend a presentation by John Baumgardner about the flood and catastrophic plate tectonics. There are a number of thoughts I took from the experience that I would like to share with you all. There was so much that I thought it would be appropriate if I broke it into two topics.
Part 1 (this thread): Sharing and discussing my general impression of the presentation as well as going over some of the "flood geology" he used that has potentially gone unexplored on this forum. If these get deep enough they can be branched into sub topics.
Part 2: Discussing some of Baumgardner’s claims for catastrophic plate tectonics some of which I had not heard before. While we all know the basic fundamental problems with it, such as the fact that it would fry the earth, there were a number of strange claims that he made that I would like to share with you.
Starting with my general impressions, Baumgardner came across as a very pleasant man. He seemed very genuine and I feel that in this circumstance that I was NOT looking at a straight up con artist such as the Hovind variety. Throughout the presentation he was incredibly sure of himself stating many known untruths (known to me at least) to be emphatically true but with an amount of casualness that made his claims seem obvious at least to him.
My only other impression that I got about his character came at the end of the presentation when he took a few questions. A man objected to Baumgardner’s presentation very forcefully on theological grounds. To me Baumgardner’s shifted to an attitude of total denial. I could actually imagine that this man might be capable of deluding himself through the entire coursework necessary to attain a PHD in geophysics. What compounded this for me was his use of a number of very bogus and old creationist’s claims that anyone with as much intelligence as him without such a self delusion would have abandoned long ago. I get into those now.
What surprised me the most during his quick and light tour of flood geology was that he brought up the dusty old T-Rex blood. It was here I noticed the delusion because either he is so emotionally attached to this “evidence” that he accepts it unconditionally or he treated the refutation of it the same way he treated his opponent during the Q/A session with total denial.
He trotted out a number of other claims from basic to complex such as polystrate fossils, mechanisms for water transport of the Coconino sandstone, the Cambrian “explosion”, etc. There were a few though that caught me off guard and I would like to discuss them with the experts here. I have no doubt they are wrong it is just a matter of the details of why they are wrong due to my lack of specific expertise.
New/Unusual Claim #1: The fossil progression in the Grand Canyon proceeds from marine animals to terrestrial animals to flora which is consistent with the “higher ground” theory of the flood progression with vegetation mats being at the top. I seem to recall there being more marine fossils after the Coconino which is where the majority of the terrestrial fossils are. Can a resident expert please fill in the details?
New/Unusual Claim #2: There are rather large granitic intrusions in the Tapeats sandstone at the bottom of the GC that could only have been transported there by violent water. The pictures he showed of these intrusions were not very convincing so my first question would be do they really exist? If so then is there an alternate explanation for them? Certainly something violent enough to move a huge boulder there also would not have ONLY deposited sand and we should expect to see a conglomerate (perhaps of the glacial variety) if it truly was transported along with the rest of the sediment.
New/Unusual Claim #3: He showed a picture of a cross-bedded sandstone and then showed another picture of a conglomerate rock that was supposedly taken from the sandstone. He made it a point to show the large pebbles in the conglomerate to emphasize that point that only violent water could have created cross-bedding with such large grained sediment. I have never heard of cross-bedding in a conglomerate before. Does such thing actually exist? I only ask because his first picture was of a sandstone that looked very fine grained. The second picture looked more like a brechia conglomerate perhaps taken from a nearby formation or an entirely different rock all together.
New/Unusual Claim #4: He claimed that all coal beds show evidence of transportation of the organic elements it is composed of. I know I have heard this before but I have never heard a refutation of this. I know this is total crap because we have current day mechanism for the formation of coal via the accumulation of peat that we can watch. There must be some reason they THINK they were transported though and I was wondering if someone knew why.
This thread should be for surface discussion of Baumgardner and the claims I listed. Any deeper discussion of any of the claims or challenges to the refutation of any of the claims should probably go in its own thread. I didn’t put them each in their own thread because I didn’t want to clutter the PNT with a bunch of threads that might not have any interest.
Geo and Great Flood please.
{Added the "rocks and stuff" part to the title. - Adminnemooseus}
This message has been edited by Adminnemooseus, 03-13-2006 05:30 PM
™ Version 4.2
