Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham

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,

quote:

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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.

okay, what reason?no, honest question. in science, old models are continually overturned for newer ones if they do a better job of explaining the evidence (and make a testable claim that can work towards verifying the new argument while disproving the old). so... propose a mechanism for hydrologic sorting that results in an apparent evolutionary history of fossils, and makes a prediction not accounted for the theory of evolution we can test and verify.i'm pretty sure there's a nobel prize in this. well, setting aside your assumptions about the time-scale (a topic i'll leave for later), yes. based on your assumptions that the entire geologic column is accounted for by the flood, your argument is correct: there is no reason to expect human (or any other particular species) remains at any particular point.so... why do we see humans only at a particular point?Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.

okay. that's fine. let me know if you come up with something.in the meantime, i'm going to go with the model that has explanations consistent with the evidence and what we know of natural laws. i'll be happy to change my mind if a better model is proposed, though.

faith noticed it too. i think it's a bit late to jump in now, and i haven't seen any particular topics there i felt like responding to. though perhaps this whole subtopic should be moved there? it'd be more on-topic. granted, which is why i posted more geology, detailing the rock layers of that specific natural formation, and how each layer was deposited. the major point being that while there are layers that show signs of receding/drying/evaporating water, they are interspersed with marine layers, dry layers, volcanic layers, etc. there's about 8 marine transgression series shown there. far from being accounted for by single flood that put the entire area under water and then dried up, the rock strata show that the area has been under water and dried up at least a half dozen times.Edited by arachnophilia, : redundant picture is redundant.

other than percy's input, i wasn't aware you had made such an argument. you're aware fluvial erosion on particulates and fluvial erosion on rock are, in fact, different, right? a few of the strata in the region actually show signs of fluvial deposition and erosion within the layer during deposition, and fluvial erosion on the layer itself as part of the river channel. think of it like "perimortem" and "postmortem" when you're watching bones or CSI or whatever.

uh, percy, expulsion of connate fluids is generally a phase in lithification. water need not evaporate to be expelled from sedimentary rock as it "dries". this, in fact, still happens in deep marine deposition.

neither of those positions is accurate. the trilobite family tree looks something like this: with higher in the fossil record on the left, and lower on the right. it's true that most varieties lived concurrently in the cambrian. it's also true that some varieties went extinct, as best as we can tell, before the end of the cambrian, and others in the devonian, and the last by the end of the permian.there was wild diversification in the cambrian, but you still can use trilobites like a "cheat sheet" to take a stab at which rock layer you're looking at. at least until the specific examples are shown to exist higher than previously though. it's not an absolute dating method by anyways.

and i'm saying that it's the "humans" and "human civilizations" angle that you should work, because i can find plenty of animals that existed in practically identical forms both 4300 years ago, and 43 million years ago.we need to find, say, the city that cain's descendants built at the bottom of the precambrian rock. _{but i'm not going to hold my breath on that one.}

the effects a river has on loose sediment and the effects a river has on rock are not the same.

Dr. A. is talking about non lithified strata. you know, the stuff we dig the cities of the bible out of.

yes, i frankly don't understand it either. compression is indeed the most common method that causes connate fluids to be expelled in sedimentary lithification.but there are a number of problems beyond the "not slumping" issue. one is that there are two very large angular unconformities in the area, that cut through the grand canyon. these require that the layers below were exposed, turned on an angle, weathered away, and then had more strata piled on top. that's basically impossible to do while the sediment (note: one of those unconformities is partly volcanic) is wet, or you get soft-structure deformation. angular pressure on soft (drying) sediment distorts it. angular pressure on hard rocks sometimes distort them, too, though that distortion looks different.

there's a river in the grand canyon.and if you're arguing that it was cut by rushing water, that's a river.

different sediments, sure. geologic column? well, they are, but it's kind of like arguing whether or not the fire on the candles is part of the birthday cake. it's all the stuff below that really matters.what Dr. A. is saying is that transitional forms would then not be part of the geologic column, and would exist all on top of it, and everything below would necessarily be a pre-noachide-evolutionary-explosion "kind".Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.

wait. so the flood doesn't explain all the strata?

then how do you explain the angular unconformity and the signs of weathering between some strata (particularly at the unconformity)?