A test for claimed knowledge of how macroevolution occurs

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( By the way, if there are problems explaining how the Flood could have laid down the strata, there are surely a lot more problems trying to explain how they got laid down over hundreds of millions of years, often a single discreet sediment to represent a time period of millions of years in which a very particular group of living thins supposedly lived and roamed, after which they were replaced with a new group of living things and a completely different sedimentary substrate, very nicely straight, flat and horizontal as we see them. I find that REALLY incomprehnsible myself.)

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A lot of that is saying that you can’t understand the world as it is now. Sediments are being deposited in many places. Things are living in those places (and I know that you can’t understand that even though it is obvious). Creatures die in those places, and - sometimes at least - their remains are buried. Sometimes even remains from elsewhere end up buried there.And the rest is the fact that things change. The environment is not constant. The things living in the region are not constant (even - in fact especially - today there are invasive species arriving and thriving in various parts of the world).

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Anyway your answer is strata formed in quieter phase, canyon formed by catastrophic flow.

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Except it wasn’t. The canyon meanders, proving that it wasn’t produced by catastrophic flow. It was cut by the river. After the meanders formed in the river.

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Sediments don't lay themselves down so nicely flat and straight over millions of years.

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Don’t they ? And don’t forget that the rock layers are compressed in the lithification process which would tend to flatten them. And, of course, we do have erosional features in the strata, too.

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Reality suggests a gradual increase in your evolved creatures rather than a preponderance, even an exclusion, in each amazingly flat and straight burial ground.

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I don’t know what you are trying to say in that first part.

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But we've **** the thread topic WAY behind. We need to get back to macroevolution

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I guess that jumping between the idea that the Colorado river couldn’t carve the Grand Canyon and the idea that it carved it in a few thousand years must be a real strain on even your closed mind.

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The strata are really really really flat and straight.

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Except where they aren’t. We’ve got buried sand dunes, rivers, even massive monadnocks in the strata - just to name some of the things we’ve discussed.

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The existence of foreign objects and other things in the strata doesn't change the fact that the strata themselves are very very flat and straight.

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Erosional features are hardly “foreign objects”. Nor is the structure of the stratum itself. So the fact is that the strata are nowhere near as flat as you insist.

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Which, again, along with the peculiar collections of particular fossils, besides often being of just one identifiable sediment, seems to me to be very hard to explain in terms of time periods of millions of years.

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The first is not at all hard to explain given long periods of time. It is explaining it without long periods of time that is the trouble. The second is, I think, less common than you think. Most formations seem to be pretty mixed. As you certainly ought to know.

The trouble is, Faith, is that your viewpoint is trash.By which I mean you don’t bother to with the evidence your reasoning is appalling, you repeat falsified arguments again and again. Making up excuses without regard to the truth - which is your usual mode of thought - is not going to convince anybody who isn’t desperate to be convinced.If you can’t come up with something that stands up to rational examination that isn’t our fault.Repeating the same old false assertions and defeated arguments is a waste of your time. They won’t magically get better. So of course they get trashed again - it’s all they deserve. Learning from discussion and improving your arguments - or even abandoning hopeless nonsense like your Flood geology - would be the better way to go. But it is up or you to do that.

I wish that meant that it got through to you. But I’m sure it didn’t.A pity. But it’s your choice.

I doubt it. But maybe you will try to do better instead of blaming other people for your faults. If you don’t, then it didn’t get through.

As I thought. Too bad. But on your own head be it. Because it will be. And it will be your own fault.

It could be better. But you have to make the effort to be better. You actually have to learn to think critically about your own arguments, you have to make the efforts to get things right. You have to stop the misrepresentations and the smears and admit to your faults.If you don’t do that, you’ll get what you earned. And that is what you complain about.

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I'm pretty sure all you mean by my ignorance is my refusal to accept the tenets of the ToE and the Old Earth.

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Alternatively you are - as usual - ignoring facts you don’t like.For instance your wilful ignorance of what the strata are really like was exposed again with this example Message 63Or we have the recent rerun of your misunderstanding of Walther’s Law (aside from not understanding the Law itself) as mentioned here Message 74. Why you think a massive flood carrying huge amounts of sediment would be exactly like a slow change in sea level I have no idea. And it hardly seems that you do either.Or your inability to address the points here Message 31So your claim that we don’t explain your ignorance is a great example of what you are doing wrong.

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I want to answer this but for the moment will only say that I gather my "ignorance" is embodied in having a view of things you disagree with, as I supposed, and in your aggressive misinterpretations of what I have in mind.

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Ah, goalpost-moving, falsehoods and false accusations.

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I say the strata are straight and flat and you tell me I'm ignorant of phenomena such as the Temple Butte limestone, which is untrue, it just doesn't apply to the current statement

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Of course you miss the fact that it makes a nonsense of your idea that the strata are “pure” but you ignore that. And how can your claim of flatness stand - or your claim that there is no erosion in between the strata when the Temple Butte Limestone is filling ancient valleys ?

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AND I can answer it and have answered it many times.

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You can make up excuses - but even setting aside the question of whether your excuses make sense you don’t have or look for evidence to support your excuses. Another criticism vindicated.

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Thanks for the examples, though it gets tyresome to be told I'm ignorant when such examples are the reason for it and all you mean about what I need to learn is YOUR interpretation of those examples.

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You mean that it is tiresome to be proven wrong so easily. But that is your problem for making claims that are so easily seen to be false. A lesson that you obviously haven’t learned since you end with yet another obviously us falsehood.It is a fact that the Temple Butte Limestone is not flat, and that it fills the paleovalleys.It is a fact that the Temple Butte Limestone is not purely one type of sediment. It isn’t even one sort of rock, and the dolomites contain sand, too.It is a fact that the rock sequences typical of transgression and regression are merely examples of Walther’s law. It is a fact that a Flood transporting large amounts of sediment in very little time should not produce the same outcome as gradual changes in sea level (you would be the first to say so if it was convenient). Surely even you can see that the Flood would be more like a hurricane than a slow change over centuries or millennia - if it covered even the mountains in forty days, low-lying coastal regions would surely be underwater very quickly.It is a fact that you often make claims which would need numerical justification, yet you rarely, if ever, have the numbers to hand.I could go on, but none of these are interpretation.

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The problem is that I agree with every word you said already, though I thlnk perhaps I should say it myself from time to time (I do say it though, but I'm not believed). I don't doubt any of that about the scientific mind and the scientific pursuit, though clearly that's how I'm coming across. The thing is you thlnk all that honest endeavor has arrived at truth, so that what you are really saying is that I should acknowledge THAT, their conclusions and not just their methods and motivations.

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Wrong, as usual. We would like you to be honest and accept that the evidence is strong and that scientifically the case is pretty much as closed as it can get on many issues - the scientific case that the Earth is far older than your views allow, for instance, is unassailable, even if the exact age might conceivably be revised (up or down).You don’t have to accept that science is correct, and we don’t insist on that.

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This is where I get into the questions about the Historical Sciences that also brings ire and enmity down on my head.

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By which you mean you get caught inventing false excuses and people prove you wrong. The ire and enmity mainly comes from you.

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But the sciences of the past really don't have the safeguards of the hard sciences of the laboratory so that all the sincere honest scientific work on those sciences is ultimately subjective and can be wrong even if the whole scientific community agrees.

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They have far more than you will admit to. And you have to admit it is much better than making nonsensical claims that even you don’t seem to understand, like your assertion that the order of the fossil record is an “illusion”. But apparently we are supposed to “acknowledge” such points while you refuse to acknowledge real science.

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Of course uniformitarianism makes sense to anyone who thlnks the Bible is bunk, as you do. I don't know if there is any other clue to a truly different past than the Bible, but from the Bible we have the description of a different climate, and the assertion that human beings had a longevity of eight or nine hundred years before the Flood and that after the Flood the longevity declined over the first few centuries but still reached into the hundreds

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The Bible doesn’t actually even mention a different climate. And the ages are a commonplace of myth from the region. Check out the Sumerian King List. Not to mention the fact that myths without evidence have little scientific value.

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So yes, my intransigence is indeed the problem, but the intransigence comes from believing a completely different worldview

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No, it’s not that. It’s the lack of intellectual honesty, the lack of concern about the truth. Disagreements are one thing. Making things up and complaining they we don’t believe them is quite another. And that is hardly the limit of your bad behaviour.

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I thlnk the sciences of the past are less reliable simply because it's all determined from the point of view of the present, and at least in the case of geology what must have happened to bring about the observable inert results of it all has to be extrapolated and interpreted without any help other than what we already thlnk and know about the present.

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Less reliable does not mean unreliable, nor does it mean that any and all conclusions are hopelessly unreliable. There can be huge numbers of cross-checks (RAZD’s dating correlations is an example) which can greatly reduce the possibility of error. What do ice layer deposition, tree growth and the deposition of varves in lakes have to do with the radioactive decay of C14? Or even each other ? Well the passage of time is the obvious one. But what would cause them all to produce the same results ? (Within the limits of the methods, limits which are taken into account)On the other hand you feel free to make up anything you like with no evidence beyond the fact that it supports your views - and you expect us to take it as a serious possibility. Anyone can see that that is just nuts.

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Anyway the enmity can't be abolished

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You could try being less abrasive and arrogant and hostile. You could try being more honest. You could try not posting the same nonsense again and again. But you won’t.