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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1701 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
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Author | Topic: Glenn Morton's Evidence Examined | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
edge Member (Idle past 1963 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined: |
This is not true.
Well, you know what they say about " ... even a blind squirrel...". My viewpoint that it is possible, but the reason for using geology is to improve your chances of finding oil. And that has worked in the modern era, particularly with some of the new techniques and basin analysis. My only direct use of radiometric dating and oil exploration was as part of the study of the thermal history of a basin. Without a radiometric date, a given intrusive could not be fit into the story. Another direct use of evolutionary theory and old ages would be in palynology where we depend on evolutionary changes to provide data about target zones in drilling. The YEC geological interpretation would make this impossible. It would be hard to imagine oil exploration these days without some kind of understanding of sedimentary sequences. As we have seen on the last few threads, such things certainly don't fit into Faith's version of geology. Glad you're back, by the way...
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edge Member (Idle past 1963 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined:
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Normal meanders:
Meanders form in low-gradient (slope) topography, near base level. They are considered to represent a mature stage of stream development because erosion has operated to a point where there is limited vertical relief (i.e., no mountains). Typically, they form in broad plains or piedmonts near sea level. examples occur all over the world, but most of us are familiar with the Mississippi River meanders in the mid-continent area of the United States. They usually do not form deep canyons because they cannot erode below base level. They form on flat terrain. So did the one in the Grand Canyon pictured above. But that one cut very deep. What's the difference? Volume of water perhaps? Now in case anyone hasn't noticed, the Colorado River, in the Grand Canyon is not near sea level. This suggests that the region has been uplifted since the formation of meanders. What does uplift do? It causes high relief and a lowering of base level. This allows the stream to down cut in a geologically rapid way. A modern example would be the progress of the Niagara Falls as it works its way upstream forming a gorge. So, the morphology of the canyon shows two stages: 1. Mature stream with meandering course. 2. Youthful stream with high gradients and active erosion. The meandering pattern was established long before and guided the down cutting of what we see now as the Grand Canyon. And that is why they are called 'incised' meanders. The width of the canyon has little to do with stream erosion per se. It is caused by the fact that the rocks cannot support vertical walls and will recede farther and farther outward as the canyon gets deeper. Think of trying to cut a narrow trench in sand or soil. Without retaining walls, you cannot do it. So, Faith wants this to be one catastrophic drainage event. It turns out that we have an example in the Lake Missoula floods which are a 'break-out' event that resulted in the channeled scablands in Washington state. Unfortunately for Faith, the scablands look nothing like what we see in, or around, or above the Grand Canyon. For one, there are no meanders. That type of flow regime simply does not produce meanders. Braided streams, perhaps, but no meanders. The other item I'd like to address is the 'soft-but-not-too-soft' state of the Grand Canyon rocks during erosion. Basically, we know that the rocks had to have a fairly high competence to maintain a mile deep canyon. This would not be possible if the rocks were not completely lithified prior to erosion of the canyon. Furthermore, we can see some straight side canyons that had to be controlled by fractures and faults which could not be maintained in a soft sediment that some YECs say made up the stratigraphy. If Faith's scenario were correct we've wasted a lot of time an money shoring up trenches for workers at construction sites over the years. However, I'm pretty sure that they appreciated the safety factor. There are a lot more interesting factors to consider in the formation of streams and canyons. One thing to remember that they are all evolving and all geologically temporary.
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edge Member (Idle past 1963 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined:
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Someone doesn't understand how basic erosion works. That river could have been *smaller* when it started cutting and the walls would still slope back like that.
In fact, I think that most people don't understand that. When people say that a stream is 'underfit' for its valley, my professor used to say that 'all streams are underfit.' The walls have to fall in and that changes the rate of erosion in the stream. It creates another dam or restriction which is eventually burst and then the stream resumes its 'normal' flow. Most erosion is probably episodic. Edited by edge, : No reason given.
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edge Member (Idle past 1963 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined: |
And may also be positional; during one episode there will be deposition upstream of a damming event with minor erosion down stream followed by major erosion down stream after the dam bursts.
All kinds of complications. For instance, along Clear Creek out of Denver there are hanging gravels on the canyon walls from when the stream was up there. I understand that some in the area have placer gold. But your point is that streams are complex and often very old. It's kind of hard to discuss in a message board forum.
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edge Member (Idle past 1963 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined:
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With regard to fossil sorting, you said:
The most likely explanation seems to be that they were sorted according to their original location rather than their species characteristics, size, shape or anything like that.
So, if this is the case, could you please give us the mammal location on earth at the time of the trilobites?
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edge Member (Idle past 1963 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined: |
Meanwhile, there is equally good reason to regard the OE explanation as untenable. That was my point of course which you are ignoring. And when the utter nonsense is recognized of millions of years to produce a variation that normally takes at most a few centuries, if that, there's no need even to ask you for a "mechanism," since the idea is simply nonsensical.
No one is saying that the changes are not rapid, only that they took place a long time ago.
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edge Member (Idle past 1963 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined:
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What happens to the rocks after they are deposited is irrelevant to the point I'm making about their original flatness. But the vast preponderance of the strata are STILL FLAT.
Nonsense. What happens after the sediments are deposited is important because that is when we see them in the rock record ... long after deposition. I have no problem with 'flatness', except that it results in the question: 'What is 'flat'? And at what scale? In virtually all cases, true 'flatness' is impossible, at least in the regional sense. We know this because formations are not everywhere equal in thickness; that is, their upper and lower contacts must diverge.
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edge Member (Idle past 1963 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined:
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Yeah I got it already. The idea is absurd that the changes would occur rapidly and then they'd not change at all for millions of years.
Why would they change?
Change is one of the most predictable things in biology it seems to me. Every single generation of offspring differs from its parents by some degree, even when it's very slow. Over not a LOT of time you should start to see the changes even in that case. Consider genetic drift. And let a bunch of them become reproductively isolated and you should get recognizable changes in very short order.
So, tell us how fast that is. How long does it take to make a phenotypic change in a species and how is that preserved in the fossil record?
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edge Member (Idle past 1963 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined: |
Well, I would assume they weren't occupying the same piece of real estate. You want more than that?
Of course. That would be evidence supporting your position.
But if they show up together in the same layer that doesn't prove they shared an original location if that's what you are implying; they just got put together during the Flood for some reason.
Well, then show us where mammals and trilobites are found together. In either case, there should be a Cambrian mammal location somewhere in the world if you are correct.
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edge Member (Idle past 1963 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined:
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I, for one, have no idea what point you're trying to make about the original flatness. How does that support YE over OE?
I don't think there is anything remarkable about sediments being 'flat'. In most cases, they were deposited in a gravitational field and being soft, could not support any other shape. If there are no disturbing factors, sure, the sediments have flat contacts and beds. What that has to do with anything else, who knows?
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edge Member (Idle past 1963 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined: |
Yeah y'all can rationalize the most egregious absurdities. I don't think you have any feeling at all for how long a million years is.
So, you admit that it's simply personal incredulity for you?
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edge Member (Idle past 1963 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined:
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What you see in the rock record is either flatness or tectonic deformation.
In that case, you are ruling out an entire field of primary sedimentary structures.
It's tectonic deformation I'm saying is irrelevant because it changes the basic flatness of the rock when it was deposited and the point I'm making is about the flatnes. The point, starting back in Message 134 is about the featureless barren flatness of the original deposition, which ought to show that any tracks or other impressions found on it occurred on a vast mud flat and not in the sort of environment or landscape that OE geo theory imputes to the history of the rocks.
Sure, if you have a continuous depositional environment, you will get a continuous layer of sediment related to that environment. If there is a shallow sea from Kansas to Illinois, you will get a continuous layer of siltstone or limestone. However, its thickness will vary and it may have some sedimentary structures that break up the 'flatness'.
EVERY rock where such surface impressions are found had to have been such a vast damp sedimentary surface and not a livable habitat.
Why not? Why do we see trilobite tracks in some of these places or shells or burrows? What is 'unlivable' about it? Why do we see inoceramid clams living in the Niobrara Formation in Kansas if the environment were unlivable?
That calls the whole theory of former landscapes, environments and time periods into question.
Then why do we find lake sediments with fish and insects and bird fossils in them?
Supposedly it shows the wrongness of the Flood interpretation but actually it shows much more the wrongness of the OE interpretation. Long tides would provide time gaps for such impressions to have occurred during the Flood. Also as I explained somewhere earlier have somewhat dried out the mud so that the impressions would remain.
Yes, long enough gaps for termite mounds and dinosaur nests to miraculously appear; and for supposedly dead tetrapods to leave their footprints in sandstone. Sorry, but your flood does not hold water.
I don't know why this is a problem at all. How could I ever mean "true" or perfect flatness? I know we're dealing with rocks and YECs impute thousands of years to them so how could I mean any kind of perfect flatness?
Hey, you're the one making the assertion. If you want to define it, that might help.
I also know that thickness must vary along the extent of any layered rock. It was deposited, according to YE creationism, in the Flood after all, and there couldn't have been perfect evenness of sedimentary deposition. But Steno's original horizontality rules in the strata and I'm sure he too could see the variations he nevertheless had no problem calling horizontal. Why is this a question? The flatness is obviously relative, but it is obvious, it is visible, it's apparent in photo after photo of strata that have been posted here, as well as cross sections and other illustrations. The deviations from flatness are minuscule.
At that scale, it appears to be flat. All formations will appear to be flat at some point.
The point I was trying to make is not affected by such minuscule variations in the flatness. We're still talking about a vast mud plain in which the tracks and the ripples and the raindrops and the burrows are to be found, NOT a livable habitat.
Well, then why are the creatures leaving footprints in an unlivable habitat? Why do they build nests? Why do they dig burrows? How do they reproduce?
It's a ROCK. It was a vast mud flat at one point. It was NEVER a "landscape."
A mudflat is a landscape. Edited by Admin, : Fix quote.
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edge Member (Idle past 1963 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined:
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Here is a schematic cross-section from Utah to Iowa showing some of the strata that Faith describes.
If we look at the Kansas part of the section we see the Niobrara Limestone at fairly shallow depths and even cropping out in some places. Theoretically, this formation is unlivable according to Faith. And yet we see such fossils as inoceramid clam fossils in the Niobrara. These creatures grew to be quite large as shown by this page in Wikipedia (Inoceramus - Wikipedia). My question is how did these creatures get to their current location in an unlivable environment? They apparently had no problem growing to great size and eventually forming fossils several feet across. So, if the environment was unlivable, how did they grow so large? How did they get there in the first place? I mean, it's not like they went out on a tidal flat in search of food and got caught in a rising tide. I also remember a YEC canard that creatures were running like crazy from the rising flood waters ... So, why did they come back between tides? More YEC mysteries here. Please explain.
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edge Member (Idle past 1963 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined:
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All you are saying is that a creationist dare not say anything against the OE theory.
Actually, I don't see anyone stopping you. If you are loath to say something it suggests that you have a problem with your belief system.
No right to think about it without a degree, ...
In general, I'd say that most YECs don't really think about it. That's part of the problem.
... though even those with the relevant degrees are not qualified to judge by many comments at EvC.
Well, the point is that if someone makes a comment, they should be prepared to defend it. Even professional YECs have run away from these forums.
Why would I be here except to try to find arguments against OE? Why would there be a site for this kind of debate if we're not allowed to object to the status quo?
As I have noted above, you can say anything you want. The problem is that we expect one to present an argument. If you can't do that, you will be forever frustrated here.
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edge Member (Idle past 1963 days) Posts: 4696 From: Colorado, USA Joined:
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Here is an instructive image of a transitional contact between two formations in northern Iraq.
As you can see, there are two distinctive formations representing a change from a lower limestone to an upper marl (a limey mudstone). In between is a 'transitional zone' where limestone slowly gives way to more mudstone. This is not a 'sharp contact' as the ones that Faith frequently refers to. It represents a very slow transition during which the sedimentary environment moves back and forth between the two until the mudstone finally prevails. The problem is, how do we represent this transitional contact on a cross-section or map? Usually, what is done is some kind of description such as the recognized contact being the 'last limestone at the top of the Kometan Formation'. Possibly we might use the first appearance of a given fossil species. The point here is that, while we think of contacts as being sharp, they often are not. It all depends on how fast the environment changes (in geological terms). I'm not sure if this is on topic here, since we have some topic creep, but for whatever it's worth ...
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