quote:During the Ham on Nye debate last February 4, Bill led off with a great example to throw Ken off balance. He pointed out that (ironically), the Creation Museum itself was built upon rocks which refuted flood geology! Bill even brought a piece of fossiliferous limestone from a road cut nearby to show that it was full of fossils, delicately preserved, and not the kind of thing a flood would produce. He explained it briefly, but I don’t know how many people got the pointand given the humorless nature of most creationists who don’t catch on to sarcasm and snark, I doubt they even noticed the irony that their entire model was refuted by the rocks beneath them at that very place.
... Consequently, modern limestones are formed in shallow clear tropical waters far from the mud of land-based rivers: the Bahamas, Bermuda, Yucatan, the Atlantic Coast of Florida (but not the Gulf side, where Mississippi mud darkens the waters), the Persian Gulf, and the southwest Pacific and Great Barrier Reef of Australia. Nowhere else! Not only is this a very restricted setting, but under no circumstances do limestones (today or in the past) show any evidence of being formed in the muddy, turbulent, cold waters of a typical floodor even a supernatural flood. If you look at them closely, they are accumulations of layer after layer of fossil communities, slowly building on top of each other in quiet waters, often with delicate organisms (such as the stick-like bryozoans and delicate corals and sponges) buried in life position, with no evidence that they had been battered and toppled by the powerful energy of flood waters. ...
Next, let’s look more closely at the rocks of the region around the Creation Museum. That area of northern Kentucky, southwest Ohio, and southeast Indiana is underlain by upper Ordovician rocks (445-460 m.y. old) that are part of a structure known as the Cincinnati Arch’; the older rocks of the region (Ordovician in this case) have been buckled upward in an arch-like feature and exposed to erosion, while younger rocks (Silurian, Devonian, and Carboniferous) are trapped in the basins on each side of the arch. The Cincinnati Arch is world-famous as a place to see an amazing sequence of thousands of individual beds full of delicately preserved fossils, reaching several thousand feet in thickness, and loaded in every bed with a huge diversity of fossils. It is often called the Cradle of American Paleontology for that reason, since many famous paleontologists started their careers in Cincinnati, working on these amazing beds and their fossils. When I took a Knox College geology class there on a field trip in 1984, I could not believe how rich every bed was with fossils, and how the ground in some places is literally paved with the shells of brachiopods that you can collect by the bagful! It’s so rich that almost ANY road cut or quarry yields great fossils, and even Bill Nye (not a paleontologist) could find some with a short stop at any random outcrop.
The key point about these beds is that there are thousands of individual layers, and each one is full of delicate fossils like branching bryozoans and stick-like corals, some delicately preserved in life position as they were buried in a gentle rain of sedimentand this repeats, over and over again. Under no circumstances could a single flood do this! Most of these rocks are limestones--under no circumstances do floods produce these! ...
But the real clincher is the many different coral fossils in the Ordovician beds around the region. I took my students to several outcrops in northern Kentucky just down the road from Ham’s monstrosity. In many cases, you can find these huge coral heads from an extinct coral group (tabulate corals), known as favositids (honeycomb corals to the amateurs). You will find layers in the road cuts where coral heads had grown up from one layer (once an ancient sea bottom) over many decades, since inside the corals are growth lines that often show decades of growth. Then this coral head was buried in a gentle rain of sediment, and a new coral head (which also has growth lines showing decades of life) is growing from the old sea bottom in the layer above the previous one. This goes on, layer after layer, and is widespread across a large area of ancient sea bottom. ...
This is one of hundreds of lines of evidence that Bill could have mentioned to show the earth is not 6000 years old, nor is the rock record produced by the mythical Noah’s flood. To any reasonable mind, this evidence bespeaks decades to centuries to grow these corals, and to accumulate thousands of years of layers of sediment, all showing the flood myth is bunk. Yet the creationists must accomplish incredible mental gyrations to fit this mythology with the real world, by using confirmation bias and cherry-picking the few examples of rocks on earth that can be misinterpreted to support them and ignoring the 99.99% that don’t, and thus reducing their cognitive dissonance of trying to believe two contradictory things at the same time. They are indeed like the the foolish man of the Bible, building his house (or museum) on the sand of lies.
He doesn't mince words.
There are similar layers of growth in other areas, such as Brachiopods on Mt Everest -- a clam-like order that typically grows on stalks attached to the ground -- where the shells show growth rings, the stalks show they grew undisturbed in location for decades, where they were gradually buried by slowly accumulating sediment as other younger brachiopods grew on top of those sediments forming overlapping layers of decades of growth.
The world is old, and to believe in a global flood is delusional.
I can't help but think of Huxley's essay, "On a Piece of Chalk" from 1868. In it, he uses a rock that everyone is familiar with to drive home some very important points. He discusses just how massive these chalk layers are, and then points out how they were built from the tiniest of creatures. Even in 1868 it was obvious to everyone that these deposits required massive amounts of time, and this was well before radiometric dating made it on to the scene.
Ken Ham is known for simplifying geology to the point of stupidity. He will say that floods produce mud, and what do we see in the geology record? MUD!!!!
As Huxley, Nye, and now RAZD point out so very well, it isn't mud. It is life. That is what creationists can not explain, how you can get a thousand feet of the worlds tiniest sea creatures stacked on top of each other instead of the mud we would expect from a flood.
"No less certain it is that the time during which the countries we now call south-east England, France, Germany, Poland, Russia, Egypt, Arabia, Syria, were more or less completely covered by a deep sea, was of considerable duration. We have already seen that the chalk is, in places, more than a thousand feet thick. I think you will agree with me, that it must have taken some time for the skeletons of animalcules of a hundredth of an inch in diameter to heap up such a mass as that. I have said that throughout the thickness of the chalk the remains of other animals are scattered. These remains are often in the most exquisite state of preservation. The valves of the shell-fishes are commonly adherent; the long spines of some of the sea-urchins, which would be detached by the smallest jar, often remain in their places. In a word, it is certain that these animals have lived and died [21] when the place which they now occupy was the surface of as much of the chalk as had then been deposited; and that each has been covered up by the layer of Globigerina mud, upon which the creatures imbedded a little higher up have, in like manner, lived and died."--Thomas Huxley, "On a Piece of Chalk"
I can't help but think of Huxley's essay, "On a Piece of Chalk" from 1868. ...
Indeed, and Donald Prothero mentions similar in the House of Cards article:
quote: ... In fact, the devout creationist geologists of the early 1800s realized this as soon as they began to carefully study and map and collect rocks and fossils all over Europe. They began as flood geologists (a popular idea before 1795), but by the 1830s, they had all abandoned any notion of a Genesis flood. When you know what the rocks really look like, the idea is laughable!
quote:In Leonardo's day there were several hypotheses of how it was that shells and other living creatures were found in rocks on the tops of mountans. Some believed the shells to have been carried there by the Biblical Flood; others thought that these shells had grown in the rocks. Leonardo had no patience with either hypothesis, and refuted both using his careful observations. Concerning the second hypothesis, he wrote that "such an opinion cannot exist in a brain of much reason; because here are the years of their growth, numbered on their shells, and there are large and small ones to be seen which could not have grown without food, and could not have fed without motion -- and here they could not move." There was every sign that these shells had once been living organisms. What about the Great Flood mentioned in the Bible? Leonardo doubted the existence of a single worldwide flood, noting that there would have been no place for the water to go when it receded. He also noted that "if the shells had been carried by the muddy deluge they would have been mixed up, and separated from each other amidst the mud, and not in regular steps and layers -- as we see them now in our time." He noted that rain falling on mountains rushed downhill, not uphill, and suggested that any Great Flood would have carried fossils away from the land, not towards it. He described sessile fossils such as oysters and corals, and considered it impossible that one flood could have carried them 300 miles inland, or that they could have crawled 300 miles in the forty days and nights of the Biblical flood.
The world is old, very old, and belief in a world wide flood is delusional.
The world is old, very old, and belief in a world wide flood is delusional.
Getting back to Ham v. Nye, I think it would have been realy cool if Nye had taken a piece of chalk and put it under a microscope for all to see. Then show them pictures of the cliffs at Dover.
If anyone remains unconvinced at that point, take away their membership cards in the human race.
The mystery isn't why we can't find sufficiently persuasive facts, because we have. The mystery is why people hold beliefs that facts can't touch. I think our failure in convincing creationists isn't one of facts but of human spirit. The same indomitable human will that leads to our greatest achievements also causes creationists to cling tenaciously to their beliefs.
The same indomitable human will that leads to our greatest achievements also causes creationists to cling tenaciously to their beliefs.
In my view your explanation is extremely charitable. I doubt that one Creationist in fifty has any real appreciation of the science that they deny. Yeah, Senator Paul Broun from Georgia, the medical doctor who insists that evolution is 'lies from the pits of Hell', maintains that position in the face of the evidence. Michael Behe knows better, but maintains his silly positions. But that kind of 'indomitable will' isn't what I'm seeing here. Unless you think a bag of hammers has super enhanced will power.
I understand that it is rude and elitist to say it, but for the most part, the Creationists here seem to be composed of folks whose last science course was a painful, junior high school memory with the occasional poster who has taken some kind of physics/biology for poets course under duress. Maybe there used to be lots of exceptions to that who posted here, but apparently those guys are long gone.
I suppose I ought to say something positive. That Leonardo da Vinci was an absolute genius.
Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846)
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. Galileo Galilei
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
The mystery isn't why we can't find sufficiently persuasive facts, because we have. ...
Indeed. I'll bet that you could dig down into rock in any location in the world and you would find evidence of an old age and a continuity of life for billions of years.
After all the original hobby geologists were looking for evidence of the flood and they found that the earth was old and that there was no flood. And that is just looking at surface evidence, before radiometric dating methods confirmed the old ages.
... The mystery is why people hold beliefs that facts can't touch. I...
Well I look at what Dawkins said about evolution deniers -- that they were either stupid, ignorant, insane or malicious ... or tortured.
I put deluded in there between ignorant and insane. Mislead is another term, but it is a little kinder than deluded, and doesn't carry the emotional undertones that deluded has, and which are very much in evidence: there is an emotional commitment to these false ideas and they have been instilled in people by people that are (perhaps unwittingly) malicious in spreading the false ideas without vetting them against reality.
It's like an infection of delusion from person to person, where emotion is used rather than rational evaluation.
Ignorant, delusional, mislead people can be cured with knowledge, but they have to want to change. This is where it becomes a psychological issue, treatment of clinical delusion is only possible when the people want to change.
So what do they get by holding on to delusions? Is it worth it?
... The same indomitable human will that leads to our greatest achievements also causes creationists to cling tenaciously to their beliefs.
Yes, people are basically stubborn, especially where it comes to cherished beliefs, and this is why cognitive dissonance arises.
The world is old, very very very old, and denial serves no real purpose, provides not benefit, not any that I can see.
I understand that it is rude and elitist to say it, but for the most part, the Creationists here seem to be composed of folks whose last science course was a painful, junior high school memory with the occasional poster who has taken some kind of physics/biology for poets course under duress. Maybe there used to be lots of exceptions to that who posted here, but apparently those guys are long gone.
That's about what I sense as well. They have been told that experts have looked at the science, and that YEC is supported by it. That's about all they need to know. I think deep down they know better than to go digging into the supposed YEC science. Think of it as plausible deniability.
I guess I'm asking us to consider who among us has no irrational stance on anything. There but for the grace of God go us, except that God granted us no such grace and we are in all likelihood treading our own irrational path on some topic or another. We err if we deem creationists to be poor misbegotten souls of an inferior caste. They are us and we are them.
we are in all likelihood treading our own irrational path on some topic or another
That's fine. I admit to holding some non-rational beliefs.
Being compassionate and understanding is one thing. Excusing pigheadedness is fine. But elevating ignorance and illogic to the level of being virtues is something else.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846)
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him. Galileo Galilei
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass
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