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Author | Topic: Fossils, strata and the flood | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Flyer75 Member (Idle past 2452 days) Posts: 242 From: Dayton, OH Joined: |
Hello RAZD,
This is an example really and quite simply how the two sides interpret the exact same evidence but the interpretation is completely opposite. Both you and Faith agree with the evidence...that there is a sizable marine fossil record where it should not be...up high in the mountains. The difference is clearly how the two sides believe the fossils got there.
RAZD writes: This evidence shows that this growth occurred over periods of hundreds to thousands of years. If the growth occurred during the flood, can you explain how multiple generations of decades old individuals happened in less than a year? Can you explain how anything can be more that 1 year old in no more than one layer (or less if there are multiple layers)? Note that many of the organisms are intolerant of silt in the water, many are fragile. The following is from an AIG article (go ahead, flame away). I'll admit, I don't know allot about the author other then that he's a professor of geology at Cedarville University.
Should Fragile Shells Be Common in the Fossil Record?
| Answers in Genesis
"In modern oceans, shells gradually dissolve in sea water or are consumed by other organisms. Experiments have shown that many shells, especially thin and fragile ones, disappear completely in a short period of time. If the fossil record formed slowly, with individual rock layers taking hundreds or thousands of years to accumulate, you would expect fragile shell material to be relatively uncommon. Most of what we find should be thick and durable." So RAZD, wouldn't this make sense. If the fossils (former sea shells) were fragile and little, wouldn't they stand a better chance of being fossilized quickly in a catastrophic event as opposed to over thousands of years where yes, they would fall victim to the ocean silt and predators? I'm not an expert on this so I'm really just presenting the other side and throwing it out for discussion.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: The difference is that creationists do NOT deal with all the evidence. The Flood simply is not a viable explanation of the geological record. The order of the fossils - the subject of this thread - is one of the reasons why. And you will note that Faith has not dealt with it. We know that mountains grow by slow pressure deforming the rocks, pushing them upward. We know that the rock was already rock by that time. Conventional geology has absolutely no problem with this. Flood "geologists" have to explain how it could all happen is so short a time - without anyone noticing it or anything equivalent in modern times !
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Flyer75 Member (Idle past 2452 days) Posts: 242 From: Dayton, OH Joined: |
Think about what you just said Paul...of course, if Noah's flood were true, no one would have been around to observe. Noah and his family were in the ark. And no, there's been nothing equivalent in modern times either....I don't recall the earth being wiped out by anything in recent memory. We can observe small events and observe the results around that area though.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: I did think about it - and more than you did. If you want nobody to be around to observe you are stuck with allowing even less time, making an even bigger problem. You can't have the rock lithify and be deformed into a mountain in a few years ! And the size of the alleged Flood (which is ruled out by many other lines of evidence) makes no difference to that at all!
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Percy Member Posts: 22504 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.9 |
Hi Flyer75,
The author of your article (Should Fragile Shells Be Common in the Fossil Record? by John Whitmore) misunderstood Olszewski's paper. I'm not sure why he misunderstood it because he quoted the portions of Olszewski's paper that make clear what he was actually saying. Olszewski was addressing the mystery of why we find shells that are "10s, 100s, or even 1000s of years old" in settings where they should have been destroyed. The shells he's talking about aren't fossilized shells that are millions and millions of years old. They're just shells in what he calls the TAZ, the "taphonomically active zone," which he defines as "the interval where shells are likely to be destroyed." This is a higher layer than the DFB, the "depth of final burial," which he defines as the level "below which shells can no longer be reworked into the TAZ." So a shell in the TAZ level should apparently be destroyed in a period less than years, while a shell that makes it lower down into the DFB level is protected and should get fossilized. The mystery is why some shells in the TAZ level are so old. Old in this context doesn't mean the millions of years common for fossilized shells that have had the good fortune to be buried deeply and quickly enough to have suffered little or no destruction. Old means from 10s to 1000s of years. Just as on land, fossilization is uncommon. The fate of most organisms is recycling back into the environment through being eaten, scavenged, eroded, weathered, dissolved, and so on. Only in rare circumstances is an organism buried deeply and quickly enough after death to be preserved. If fossilization were not extremely rare then we would be awash in fossils. But rare as fossilization is, there are far more fossils than the most number of creatures that have ever been alive all at the same time. The flood couldn't have created all the fossils because the Earth couldn't sustain that much life all at once. --Percy
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Kitsune Member (Idle past 4329 days) Posts: 788 From: Leicester, UK Joined: |
God must have really been pissed off at the Martians . . .
Catastrophic Flood Channel of Ares Valles And there is increasing evidence of geological strata on Mars; no one who has been keeping up with the information from the rovers and the orbiters would think that Mars is nothing but an inert ball of rock disturbed by impact craters, as Mercury and Earth's Moon seem to be (though even "dead" worlds like these seem to yield no end of surprises).
Quasi-Periodic Bedding in the Sedimentary Rock Record of Mars We used 1-meter stereo topographic maps to demonstrate the presence of rhythmic bedding at several outcrops in the Arabia Terra region. Repeating beds are 10 meters thick, and one site contains hundreds of meters of strata bundled into larger units at a 10:1 thickness ratio. It is not clear whether or not these are aeolian deposits, but the beginning of the abstract suggests that the scientists believe that at least some of them were deposited in warm, wet conditions. Edited by Kitsune, : No reason given. Edited by Kitsune, : No reason given.
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Flyer75 Member (Idle past 2452 days) Posts: 242 From: Dayton, OH Joined: |
Thanks Percy for your post. But from what I can tell from the article, he does understand the difference. All Whitmore is asking is this:
"The real paradox for the old-age uniformitarian is that ocean mud is not accumulating fast enough for preservation to occur; so why does the fossil record have shelly material at all, if it has taken long periods of time to accumulate?" I think what he's asking is, "if these shells can't last along time, even 10 to 100 years, then why do we see fossils of them at all if according to theory, it takes tens of thousands or more years to fossilize? What am I missing here? Edited by Flyer75, : No reason given.
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Kitsune Member (Idle past 4329 days) Posts: 788 From: Leicester, UK Joined: |
The misunderstandings in this post cover topics in a dozen or more different threads here. But I can see that you are busy with many posts, so I'd like to focus on one bit that I have asked creationists about many times and never received a straightforward answer to. Can you give me one?
All the living things died at the same time just as God said they would So why, when we look at strata around the world, do we consistently see fossils in the same order (unless the strata have been locally disturbed)? Why do we always find trilobites near the bottom, dinosaurs above those, and human remains at the top? Never mixed together. And those heavy animals like elephants and rhinos, even they somehow consistently, all over the world ended up above those tiny trilobites in the hydrological sorting. Don't you think it's more likely that we would find diplodocus in the bottom strata, since they were so big and heavy? How does your alternative theory explain all of the above? Edited by Kitsune, : No reason given.
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RAZD Member (Idle past 1434 days) Posts: 20714 From: the other end of the sidewalk Joined:
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Hi Flyer75,
I'll admit, I don't know allot about the author other then that he's a professor of geology at Cedarville University. Not that it matters much.
Dr. John Whitmore
| Answers in Genesis
quote: An MS from the ICR?Institute for Creation Research - Wikipedia quote: And that's in bible friendly Texas. Loma Linda University - Wikipedia
quote: Not what I would call a hot school for getting a degree in biology, certainly not for a PhD with "emphasis" on Paleontology (what ever that means). Apparently all he has written is four articles for AIG (in four years), and a childrens book. Not a stellar curriculum vitae if you ask me, however who he is does not mean what he writes is hooey. What makes it hooey is statements like what you quoted:
"In modern oceans, shells gradually dissolve in sea water or are consumed by other organisms. Experiments have shown that many shells, especially thin and fragile ones, disappear completely in a short period of time. If the fossil record formed slowly, with individual rock layers taking hundreds or thousands of years to accumulate, you would expect fragile shell material to be relatively uncommon. Most of what we find should be thick and durable." Any instance that would cause local burial of shells would preserve the shells buried, and curiously, there are many instances of silt and sand slides every year, particularly at deltas, where shells of shallow ecology organisms would be abundant. This would preserve thick and thin shells in relatively similar proportions to their proportions in life. He makes this statement:
quote: Note that the actual measured age of the shells is ignored, and the quote is picked to suggest that "Taphonomist Thomas Olszewski is puzzled by the apparent discrepancy between modern studies and the fossil record" ... a typical ploy for a quote mining creationist. The paper this is quoted from is available on line athttp://palaios.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/full/19/1/39 Let's look at the conclusions of this paper:
quote: No puzzlement left, no discrepancy, just normal stochastic processes. Not surprising, as what was quoted by Dr. John Whitmore was from the introduction, rather than the conclusion. Introductions frequently set out the issue that the paper then proceeds to explain.
quote: The biggest problem facing Dr. John Whitmore is that his model is completely incapable of explaining the fossil shells of different ages - in his model there cannot be shells that are "10s, 100s, or even 1000s of years old" - they could only be the same age for a single event burial. Thus we have a failure to show that normal processes can explain why the shells in question are fossilized, and we have a total failure to explain all the evidence.
So RAZD, wouldn't this make sense. If the fossils (former sea shells) were fragile and little, wouldn't they stand a better chance of being fossilized quickly in a catastrophic event as opposed to over thousands of years where yes, they would fall victim to the ocean silt and predators? I'm not an expert on this so I'm really just presenting the other side and throwing it out for discussion. It makes sense that the shells are buried, it does not make sense that only one burial event occurred, and it does not take an extraordinary catastrophic event to cause something that is observed to happen every year, with small silt and sand slides, year after year for billions of years. Nor does the simplistic concept of Dr. John Whitmore explain multiple layers of shells showing undisturbed habitat and mature ecology with the sessile fossils buried in situ, and then covered by another layer of the same, and another, and another .... Nor does the simplistic concept of Dr. John Whitmore explain the gradual change in morphology of shells from layer to layer to layer. Enjoy we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand Rebel American Zen Deist ... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ... to share. • • • Join the effort to solve medical problems, AIDS/HIV, Cancer and more with Team EvC! (click) • • •
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Flyer75 Member (Idle past 2452 days) Posts: 242 From: Dayton, OH Joined: |
RAZD writes: The biggest problem facing Dr. John Whitmore is that his model is completely incapable of explaining the fossil shells of different ages - in his model there cannot be shells that are "10s, 100s, or even 1000s of years old" - they could only be the same age for a single event burial. Thanks RAZD for your clear and concise response. It was very helpful. I do have a question about the above quote and the age issue. I have zero clue what the age or lifespan of a shell could be. Is that what we are referring to here or is it something else? If it is actual age, why could there NOT be more then one or more generations found together from one major event? You've brought it up twice now so you must have a valid reason for stating it. Take care,Flyer
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1473 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
I said it was all part of the same event, I certainly did not say the upheaval was the only cause of volcanoes. You did say quote:-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There is no other way the strata and fossils could have been formed but by a worldwide Flood, the only kind of event capable of doing all that. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I assumed that "all that" also included the period of upheaval mentioned directly after; that broke apart continents, pushed up volcanoes, etc. So if the flood wasn't needed to cause volcanoes can I also assume its not needed to break up continents? STRATA AND FOSSILS were caused by the Flood. Volcanoes and tectonic activity accompanied the event OR followed it. AFTER I said. Part of the same event but I did not say the flood CAUSED it.
Do learn to read more carefully. It's hard enough debating these things without being misread. Fair enough, I was a bit quick on thinking I understood something that, to me, sounds pretty far out there. I will try and get a lot more clarification from you before I begin to think I understand you in these matters. Thank you.
Stop changing the subject. I was correcting your misreading. At least get what I'm saying and then raise other questions. I raised the question, the question still stands. I feel little need to raise more questions when the most obvious seems to be the unique properties of the water at that time. You said it right here in message 22: quote:-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There is no other way the strata and fossils could have been formed but by a worldwide Flood -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Water has currents and layers within itself. Ordinary water. Sediments are known to collect in layers at the mouths of rivers. Ordinary water does these things. The Flood would have been such a prodigious amount of water it carried tons of separated sediments and dead creatures and deposited them in enormous layers all over the earth. The weight of the layers themselves would have created the compression necessary for fossilization.
So either support your assertion with evidence or I am left with "magical water". No subject change required. (*** you do talk of this further down the post, fair is fair ***) I did not say fossils could ONLY be created in a worldwide flood
Good. I hope your clear enough that I can think I understand. conditions for such phenomena would have been met in such a worldwide event For the most part, correct. But all it takes is one example and it falls apart. There are plenty of counter examples that creationists fail to address. Cliffs of Dover to start. Nonsense. If the total picture is the best explanation then the single example that seems not to fit just awaits the understanding of how it fits. The geological explanation of the strata and the fossils is so utterly stupid by comparison that we don't need to explain everything by the Flood to recognize that it explains the overall picture beautifully. I see no problem with the Cliffs of Dover anyway. Just a deposit of limestone by the enormous Flood, one of many.
There is nothing magical about it except in your illogical mind. Hey now, don't forget you wrote this:
quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There is no other way the strata and fossils could have been formed but by a worldwide Flood -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You left me scratching my head. I think I have it figured out now though that the strata, fossils, volcanoes, and possibly more items can form from something other than a worldwide flood. I think this is progress! You added words where I had written none, you jumped to conclusions not based on what I had written. If you read it straight you wouldn't get the silly stuff out of it you are getting. The Flood itself, the water itself, broke up the land and separated out the sediments and carried them along with the bazillion dead creatures in the layers and currents that naturally occur in the oceans to their final resting places in the strata we see all over the earth. AS PART OF THE SAME EVENT volcanic and tectonic action seem to have also occurred -- what caused what I don't know and did not say, just that it all seems to have occurred as part of the same event. The breakup of the continents could have come some time after the Flood and yet it seems to have been part of the same general upheaval.
Why a few million years of a certain kind of limestone which suddenly changes to a few million years of a certain kind of clay? Because once the land isn't covered by ocean its pretty unlikely that it will continue to accumulate the corpses of marine organisms. I don't care how long it was underwater, once its not its done creating limestone layers. Rivers change direction and land rises and falls. You can find examples in your newspaper. Oh brother. Millions of years of nothing but limestone, then SUDDENLY allakazam! Millions of years of nothing but sandstone. What utter nonsense you all believe, when a worldwide Flood EASILY explains it all.
Thank you for admitting that Mars does not have strata like those on earth. No problem, I have eyes. I would neither make the claim nor suggest it. I believe I have explained myself enough on this matter, if you want further explanation or a quote just ask.
There is nothing about the look of Mars that suggests a worldwide Flood. The only item that isn't present on Mars that you have mentioned is continental breakup. Mars even does it better in some cases.(volcanoes and canyons) So the only thing that differs is that on Earth the layers are composed of different materials. I don't care how many times you flood Mars it will not have the same materials as Earth. Neither will Saturn. So obviously its going to look different, so how do we tell if the flood occurred? By looking at your other criteria - volcanoes, canyons, sedimentary layers, continental breakup. If I am missing any that you have mentioned please let me know. Volcanoes on Mars appear to have been created by meteors breaking through the crust and releasing the magma beneath so that the craters that form fill with lava. I see no Flood evidence of any sort. The Vallee Marineris clearly does not have layers of any sort. It has sheer walls from which erosion has fallen, all of one type of sediment.
I personally don't see why any of this has to do with a global flood but I don't see why it has to on Earth either. I'm sorry I mentioned Mars. It looks like a bald sphere with some pock marks and gashes and nothing at all like Earth, certainly no strata like Earth, which seems to make a good comparison, but since there's so much contention about Earth itself I wish I'd left well enough alone. The evidence for a worldwide Flood on Earth is excellent in its own right but those who reject the Bible refuse to consider this actual evidence.
How come for billions of years those layers just quietly accumulated with no canyon being cut into them until they were all there? Why not a mile down the road? How is it the grand canyon got eroded but other areas a mile away not at all? Rivers change direction, read a newspaper. You are missing the entire point.
Question is why did the world wait a few billion years before cutting the canyon through them all? Why did the world wait a few billion to move the town of Concepcion 10 feet west? The answer is that everything changes, some things take a long damn time. I have NO idea what you think the relevance is of such a comment. It's utterly unrelated to anything I said. You are describing changes that go on NOW, but if geo theory is correct they never went on before recent time. The evidence is the neat parallel of the layers that built up quietly for all those billions of years without even a river to disturb them.
And you know exactly what the surface of Mars is made of and that it couldn't be broken up into separated sediments just as Earth was? No, but evidence suggests that it all pretty much looks the same from the photos that I have seen. Certainly not the variety that is present on Earth. The idea is that the Earth wasn't separated into those separate sediments until the FLood did it.
There could be a larger variety of rock on Mars for all I know, a few rovers and satellite images on Mars is hardly comparable to our current knowledge of Earth.
None of it makes sense on the Old Earth idea. Things change, and not according to your schedule apparently.
You are looking at the wrong picture. I was talking about the one Percy posted. Percy was kind enough to re-post the image from my link. My link has the caption that explains what the image shows. No hot fudge, just layers of sedimentary rock eroded by wind. It looks like something that originally ran like lava.
(I didn't write much of anything on your flood evidence, I have been up since yesterday and tried to keep this post as short as possible. I didn't ignore it for any other reason and hope we can perhaps discuss it next post or on another thread? I hope I have, at least trivially, explained my point of view by simply saying "things change") No, you have completely missed the point that things did NOT change for billions of years according to the current geological theory that explains the strata as the accumulation of all that time, but then only SUDDENLY changed as canyons were SUDDENLY cut and mountains SUDDENLY raised AFTER ALL THE STRATA WERE ALREADY IN PLACE. The strata are THERE. They were laid down horizontally supposedly over billions of years. And only AFTER they were all in place, in "recent" time according to geo theory, did all the activity happen that eroded them, cut them, lifted them into mountains, or buckled them to make the Appalachian type mountains and so on. You can SEE the strata in all these formations. They were already THERE. A very quiet planet for biillions of years THEN all that activity? Give me a break. I don't think geologists think such a thing, they just managed to not notice this is the implication of their system. I'm sure they think all the same kinds of events that go on now also went on during all those ages when life was supposedly evolving. But the actual evidence is that nothing happened to disturb all those strata for billions of years, no canyon cutting, no deep erosion, no rivers cutting gorges through them, no wind altering their horizontality, no mountains buckling them and lifting them up -- all that ONLY happened in "recent" time IF their theory is correct. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Percy Member Posts: 22504 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.9 |
Flyer75 writes: I think what he's asking is, "if these shells can't last along time, even 10 to 100 years, then why do we see fossils of them at all if according to theory, it takes tens of thousands or more years to fossilize?" What am I missing here? A TAZ level is a destructive environment. Shells that spend any significant time in TAZ levels are unlikely to survive, which I would expect is true of most shells. Shells that become buried in DFB levels, which are preservative rather than destructive, have a much better chance of becoming fossilized. It would be quite a conundrum if shells had to spend significant time in TAZ levels before reaching DFB levels, but that's not the case. --Percy Edited by Percy, : Spelling, grammer, typos - sheesh!
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Flyer75 Member (Idle past 2452 days) Posts: 242 From: Dayton, OH Joined: |
Ok, thank you Percy. I had no clue what a TAZ level was so that certainly helps.
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Apothecus Member (Idle past 2440 days) Posts: 275 From: CA USA Joined: |
Ugh. Seriously, Faith?
There's plenty of evidence in my description in Message 22if you just think about it. Uh, I've now read it 4 times now and I have to ask, "Where?" All I see are your opinions.
What we actually see is best explained by what I described than by the usual geological explanations. No doubt. Why is that, do you think?
And if that's not good enough read the description just above this post. Yes, more of the same. Thank you for all that. The minute I try to politely ask for once again, and everyone now: supporting evidence, you give me more baseless, bald-faced, foundationless BS!! I'll try it a different way: I don't want to know what you think. Had I wanted to know that, I'd have simply stated, "Hey Faith, honey, I'd like to know what you think." But since I actually said, "I was wondering if you could support your assertions," I figured that'd be enough to get you to like, y'now, support your assertions. It's right there in plain english. You wouldn't be dodging my civil inquiry for any 'ol reason, would you? This is the science forum. Remember?
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1473 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
No, not opinion,
Evidence:Abundant fossils and separate sediments in layers over the entire earth, compressed to rock, takes prodigious amount of water to sort, takes prodigious amount of water to deposit in layers, takes enormous weight of strata to compress enough for fossilization. Couldn't happen except in a rapid event. Evidence against geo theory: no similar strata on other planets which there should be if geo theory were correct. Evidence against geo theory: Ridiculous fact that layers were untouched by normal events such as canyon cutting, erosion by wind and weather and rivers, buckling and raising up by tectonic forces, until ALL were neatly in place. Evidence all over the earth. That's evidence.
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