Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham

Is there a typo in there? Is the second occurrence of the word "evaporation" supposed to be "lithification"?Also, the majority of sedimentary layers are marine and not former flood plains.--Percy

Your guess about what a worldwide flood would have done is just as useless as all the others here. You are talking about the deep unknowable past Faith. You don't have any evidence that the flood deposited ANY of the strata OR that it eroded ANYTHING. All you have done here and in other threads about the Grand Canyon is dream up fantasies.Your disappearing cracks are compete fabrications.Your explanation/s of the Grand Canyon are wild speculation.And when you whole-sale throw out behavior in the past being similar to behavior observed today, then you have absolutely no basis for making any hypothesis.

I have trouble seeing Faith's position on evidence as anything but irresolvably conflicted. For Faith there is almost no evidence that is from, to use her term, the "prehistoric past," and certainly the flood was not in the prehistoric past. For Faith there is little evidence that can't be considered.But when you do consider the evidence from what Faith thinks is the Flood it says that everything is very, very old, placing it all in the prehistoric past, and Faith can't consider such evidence.When Faith ignores this evidence then she feels free to conclude that the world is only 6000 years old, but that places all evidence from the flood in the historic past, and now its evidence can be considered.But when you do consider that evidence then you find that everything is very very old...And so on forever.--Percy

nope, you'd expect to see stuff like evaporite. there are kinds of sedimentary rock that show signs of water evaporating, or signs that area was a mud flat (eg: certain kinds of cracking or rippling or soft sediment deformation). water violently entering an area leaves tell-tale signs in the rock, but water going away also leaves evidence. quite. i was a bit more charitable in my second geology post, in allowing the assumption that a flood might conceivably produce a marine environment, so long as we're compressing geologic time in a YEC kind of way. in reality, violent flood events in flood plains leave very different kinds of rocks behind than marine transgressions. but the different is subtle enough that it's likely to be lost on someone who can't even see how a flood can't deposit sedimentary rock that forms in dry environments.Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.

Right, I understand, but I think the phrase "rock formed by evaporation" will be interpreted by Faith as reinforcement of her belief that rock forms through evaporation. As she's said, mud dries, clay dries, and so does rock.--Percy

Actually she is repeating it for you here... all she did in that thread was handwaving and fantasizing.

well, sometimes it does. it's one of about a dozen depositional environments. her flaw may be in thinking that all rock forms this way, but rock certainly can be formed by evaporation. mudstone or mudrock is also a thing, though those are actually not evaporites. they're formed by pressure in wet depositional environments. sedimentary rocks generally also expel their connate fluids during lithification, which is kind of like drying out, but that's not really quite the same thing as forming by drying out.edit: in any case, my point was that you'd expect to see a major marine transgression series, if you're assuming there was a world-wide flood and that it would present as multiple strata (and not just a simple flood plain):

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Sedimentary facies changes may indicate transgressions and regressions and are often easily identified, because of the unique conditions required to deposit each type of sediment. For instance, coarse-grained clastics like sand are usually deposited in nearshore, high-energy environments; fine-grained sediments however, such as silt and carbonate muds, are deposited farther offshore, in deep, low-energy waters.[1]

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Thus, a transgression reveals itself in the sedimentary column when there is a change from nearshore facies (such as sandstone) to offshore ones (such as marl), from the oldest to the youngest rocks. A regression will feature the opposite pattern, with offshore facies changing to nearshore ones.[1] The strata represent regressions less clearly, as their upper layers are often marked by an erosional unconformity.

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you would expect to see rock uniquely formed by deep marine environments, followed by rock formed by shallow marine environments, possibly followed by coastal, lagoon, mudflat, or even river/lake environments, followed by dry environments. and you'd expect to see this once, all at a very massive level, and globally. you wouldn't expect to see it nearly a dozen times in the geologic column, all in a specific area, if the flood accounted for the entire geologic column.Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.

That was my point. Of all the "billions" of fossils in the fossil record, not one person has found anything, either a life form or man-made structure, from Noah's time buried by what appear to be catastrophic flood debris and sediments. Not one.We know there are similarities in the fossil record, sharks, coelacanths, camels, mammoths, bears, and so on that lived prior to and coincident with modern humans, but they are always just a little bit different. It does not matter if it's hard for the lay person to see, the differences are there.

The strata suggest what the Flood would have done: lay down layers of sediments by precipitation or by waves the way the oceans lay down sand on beaches, only to a huge depth because the Flood was that huge. What's ridiculous is the usual idea that the strata were laid down over millions of years per rock and that each rock represents a whole time period on the earth. The idea that a time period is characterized by a particular kind of rock is actually funny, but conventional geology doesn't even blink. Why should it be? Water does deposit layers of sediments, and there would have been a LOT of sediments to deposit in a worldwide Flood. Great, that's more than anybody else here will grant. The only layer that is a problem is the cross bedded sandstone because the angle of repose supposedly means it had to have been aerially deposited. I suspect there is an answer to that too but I don't know what it is yet. Meanwhile there's no problem with the idea that all the sediments were carried in the water and then deposited wherever they were deposited. The idea that each layer represents a kind of environment is based on the contents of the rock on the ASSUMPTION that it was laid down over millions of years, but if it was all simply transported from one place to another in one gigantic Flood event the contents of the rock are irrelevant, they are just whatever was carried from one place to another. You've bought the standard scenario and haven't followed any of the Flood arguments. The Grand Canyon scenario you present is just the usual silliness. You've got the sea level rising and falling to accommodate the rock contents. Everybody complains that there's no source of water for the Flood or any place for it to go, while they easily accept water coming and going to huge depths to accommodate this ridiculous Rube-Goldbergish idea of how the strata formed over a couple billion years.

Of course anybody who denies that the Bible is God's own revelation to us is going to have a problem with starting from the Flood, but since it IS God's own revelation to us it would be foolish for science NOT to start there, because in that case the Biblical revelation IS evidence, the primary evidence, and all the rest of the evidence has to conform to it. Comparing THE worldwide Flood with any other flood is absurd. What you "would expect to see" based on such observations as you give is likely very far from what actually happened because you don't have the scale of the thing in mind.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

not on a global scale. but in the general case of local floods, i'd be high skeptical that there isn't evidence of humans in flood depositional rocks. for instance, the omo kibish formation was formed by annual fluvial flooding and contains some of the oldest modern homo sapiens. granted, that's more like 100,000-200,000 years ago, and not 4,000. but... you don't see many rocks that young in general. you certainly see lots of archaeological evidence of civilizations impacted by flooding events.but your point is correct: what we don't see is evidence for humans lower in the fossil record than we'd expect otherwise. if a flood accounted for the entire geologic column, we should see human (pre-flood) civilization mixed in with the fossils of the precambrian, etc. and we just don't. instead, we see a timeline ordered about how evolutionary theory predicted. and humans exist only very near the top. well, sure. if you have a pet dog, and it has a little of puppies, the puppies are going to be just a little different than their mother, and from each other. that's sort of how evolution works: heritable features vary from one generation to the next. as long as there is mutation and genetic drift, you will not get precise replicas even in asexual species, over durations this long. but then there are things like this species of triops well represented in jurassic (and even upper triassic). the same species. that's a pretty insignificant change even if you're not a lay person.

Which we have to assume was sorting the Flood did, for whatever reason. Since the conventional time scale is pure fantasy there is no reason to expect human remains at any particular point. For whatever reason, land creatures ended up in the upper strata. And since most of the uppermost strata washed away as the Flood water receded we can assume that most of the land animals and human remains went with it. The loss of these strata is quite apparent in the Grand Canyon area where it is clear they were originally laid down from the current rim of the Kaibab at least to the uppermost layer over the Grand Staircase to the north. Exactly. Even over a few thousand years you should expect quite a bit of change. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

The oceans don't lay down sand on beaches.

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where does beach sand come from?

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In a most basic sense, the sand on our beaches comes from the erosion of the land. In our area the beaches rely on sand transported from the mountains by the rivers and from eroding cliffs near the shoreline.

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The addition of new sand to the beaches is seasonal, occurring during rainy periods when the rivers flow and sediments are washed into the ocean. The Santa Clara river is capable of depositing huge quantities of sand during floods, but very little during dry years. For example, 52.4 million tons of sediment were discharged during the 1969 floods; floods that ended 30 years of relative drought when very little new sand was added to the beaches.

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Today the supply of new sand to our beaches has been greatly reduced by human activity. Over the past 50 years river sand has been restricted by dams in the watershed areas and mining of floodplain gravels by private industry. About 42 percent of the Ventura River watershed is blocked by dams (at Matilija, 1948, and Casitas, 1959) and 37 percent of the Santa Clara River watershed is dammed (Bouquet, 1934; Piru, 1955; Pyramid,1971; Castaic, 1972). These dams trap river sediments and starve the beaches of their natural supply of sand. In addition, the erosion of coastal bluffs along the Rincon coast has been eliminated by the construction of seawalls for Highway 101, removing the other primary source of beach sand for our area.

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Presently our beaches are eroding because of the of the reduction in the sand reaching the coast. However, Matilija Dam is no longer useful as a water supply because it is completely full of sediments; sediments that should be in the Ventura River and on our beaches. If obsolete dams like Matilija were removed our beaches would receive a much needed renewal of their rightful supply of sand.

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http://matilija-coalition.org/point/growing/sand.htmlSo now where does beach sand come from in your model? Are you sure 4,000 years of erosion is enough to account for the amount of sand on the shores?

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The most common natural process of sand formation is called weathering. Majority of sand comes from chemical and mechanical breakdown (weathering) of bedrocks. Such process can take hundreds or even millions of years depending on other mechanical processes such as temperature changes, wedging by plant roots or salt crystals, and ice gouging underneath glaciers. A waterfall continuously pounding on a huge rock would cause little bits and pieces of the rock to be detached.

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How Sand is Formed - Tech-FAQYour flood didn't lay down the sand, it laid down the geologic column according to your model. Nice flat layers everywhere.
Here's another problem for your model. The sand found in the geologic column had to form prior to the flood. But you only have less than 2,000 years of time to create that sand.

shoreline deposition, deep marine deposition, and shallow marine deposition all bear different geological markers. what you should see is the kind of deposition that happens in deep marine environments, followed by shallow deposition, followed by shoreline deposition. that's what a typical marine transgression and regression series looks like. each of those major segments are made up of individual layers.instead, what you see is repeated marine transgression and regression, like the flood came and went a dozen times, with totally dry periods in between. right. and the entire geologic column would then have to be:

• sedimentary rock
• deposited by water
• in the correct order, and
• with all layers, or if i'm being extremely generous, all of the lowest layers, showing the turbulent signs associated with flooding

but this is not what we see. instead, we see

• other kinds of rock interspersed between sedimentary formations
• other depositional environments interspersed between those associated with water
• the water layers in the wrong order, or repeating
• and no global flood plain.

it's really pretty clear: if you take the laws of physical geology, and make predictions based on the argument that there was a global flood and the assumption that it represents the entire geologic column, you get a testable hypothesis. you get a picture of what the geologic column should look like.and the geologic column does not look like that. i don't see why. we know how flooding deposits fossils. i posted a picture of such a flood plain earlier in this thread. it's you that's not granting that we know what this special fossilization condition looks like. the deserts in the middle of your flood are kind troublesome, yes. uh, no. water leaves evidence. the rocks either show evidence of water, either in their composition or in their weathering, or they do not. this is not an assumption. we know what deposition methods associated with water create in terms of rocks, and we know what water erosion looks like.also please note that nowhere in my argument did i refer to a time scale. this assumption is simply not part of determining the physical geology of how these rocks are formed. frankly, the flood arguments are "we don't understand physical geology, and we're just going to ignore stuff like uniformity, the law of superposition, depositional environments, weathering, and all this evidence that's pretty damned inconvenient to our worldview." i do not think you are understanding the finer points here about how not all lithification is aqueous, or how the order matters, or how the properties we know about rocks and weathering as they exist today applied in the past as well. you are simply claiming a special exception -- a miracle. and that's fine; but just say it's a miracle, and it defies the laws of physics, rather than claiming that the physical evidence supports it so long as you ignore all of the details and make ridiculous assumptions about how the rules must have changed. i chose it because the geology of the grand canyon area is extremely well documented on wikipedia. feel free to look up any of those rock formations. at least 75% of them have lengthy, individual pages detailing their depositional environments and how we know what they were. with citations. yes. in science, the conclusions proceed from the evidence. the rock layers show evidence of the sea rising and falling multiple times, so it's pretty reasonable to think that the sea level rose and fell multiple times. you can start with an assumption, and then use it to make a hypothesis -- a testable claim -- but if the evidence contradicts that hypothesis you have to discard it. that's how the scientific method works.it is not reasonable to start with the assumption, and then try to force the evidence to fit that assumption. if you believe that all the rocks in the geologic column were formed in one event of the sea level rising dramatically and then falling away dramatically, and instead the geologic column shows evidence for the sea level rising and falling many times with lots of dry spells in between... then you must reject that hypothesis. something about it is clearly incorrect, or there must be some other explanation as to how the initially ordered layers became jumbled, and how the law of superposition (and angular unconformities) no longer matter. and that's a pretty extraordinary claim, that would need extraordinary evidence. the problem with the global flood is that, by definition (or at least creationist claim) it covered the entire surface of the planet simultaneously. that requires more water than exists on this planet. sea level rising and falling globally does not require this, and that does indeed vary over time. additionally, in this particular example, it seems to be the whole tectonic plate shifting that caused it, not necessarily an increase in liquid water on the planet's surface. Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.

we'll leave the bible debates for another thread. i'm interested in discussing science here at the moment.this may surprise you, but i have no problem with starting with the flood. i misspoke a bit above when i said,

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science seeks to go the other way. start with the evidence, and draw conclusions.

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science actually doesn't start with the evidence, though the conclusions must necessarily be drawn from the evidence (rather than drawing the evidence from the conclusions). science, in fact, generally starts with imaginative leaps of faith. crazy guesses about the way the world maybe works. the problem is not starting with the assumption of the flood; it's ending with your initial assumptions and selecting evidence based on confirmation bias (ignoring the vast plethora falsifying evidence).by all means: start with the assumption of flood. but then use it, and the knowledge of the physical world, to make a testable hypothesis. and when that hypothesis is wrong, modify your assumptions. that's the scientific method. well, no. it doesn't have to. the evidence never has to conform to your initial assumptions. otherwise, there would be no way to discern truth at all. we'd all run around simply repeating our initial assumptions. being able to prove things wrong is the cornerstone of being able to determine if things might be right. why?listen, saying that the geologic strata is good evidence for the flood and then saying that the flood wouldn't look like any other flood is just operating from a different idea of evidence than any rational person would use. i might as well say that mount everest is good evidence for a meteor strike the size of the moon, and oh by the way, we shouldn't expect this one to leave a crater because it wasn't like any other meteor impact. you'd think i was daft. sure i do. what part about describing an entire mile of different depositional environments makes you think i don't have the scale of the thing in mind? if anything, i'm arguing for a much larger scale than you are.