Objections to Evo-Timeframe Deposition of Strata

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Would it kill you all to suspend your detailed scientific knowledge just long enough to allow you to see the worldwide appearance of the geologic column from a layman's point of view and realize that it DOES LOOK like something that could have been created by a gymongous flood?

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The point isn't whether Noah's flood can explain a few superficial facts. The question should be, does the hypothesis of a global flood explain anything that the mainstream geologic theory does not?, and the answer is, no, there is nothing that a global flood can explain that remains a mystery in mainstream geology.The other question is to ask, are their phenomena that are explained better in mainstream geology, and the answer is, yes, the mainstream geologic theories explain why you never see human remains together with trilobites, or why the layers in the geologic record show evidence of very different depositional environments, or why radiometric dating is consistent not only with the relative ordering of the layers but with the ages assigned to specific fossil species.Another difference between the two that needs to be pointed out is that all of the phenomena and processes in geology are based on known scientific principles and can be seen to be occurring today. The flood, on the other hand, has to somehow explain where such a huge amount of water came from and to explain where it all went; alternatives, like the sudden creation of high mountains and low ocean depths, have to explain how this could have occurred in such a short time.Ever watch Perry Mason? In many episodes a person is charged with a crime because, from a less informed point of view, it appears that the person is guilty, but the hero uncovers evidence that demonstrates that the person is actually innocent. That is why we don't suspend our "detailed scientific knowledge" -- why, on earth, would we ignore evidence just to come to a preferred conclusion? We follow the evidence and the logical reasoning to where they take us, superficial appearances notwithstanding.

Yup, I was right that most of you couldn't just consider its appearance without explaining what it's made of and straw-manning me in the process too, except one person did say much of it WAS formed underwater.That's OK. I understand. Bye for now.

What would kill us is trying to figure out where to start the explanation. I agree. To the layman it looks like a big deposit of sediments haphazardly piled up on the surface of the earth. However, there are patterns that one cannnot ignore. These patterns are created by processes. We can see most of these processes at work today creating identical deposits. However, explaining all of these process, deposits and events is not a trivial task to be carried out on a message board. There are so many nuances and so many exceptions, suffice it to say that a young geologist is probably not really a geologist. I know this is not very satisfactory for you, but that is why you get all of these suggestions to 'get an education.'I have no good solution for you. I know that you will not simply accept what we say and I wouldn't want that either. Most of the time we just hope to shut up the militant YECs or make them think twice before making the same argument. But how do we deal with someone who has legit questions? Yes, but I'm not sure what you mean here. Not really any objections. In fact, I think that asking questions is the best path to knowledge. The problem here is the format of the discussion.

How do you account for the fact of such even depositions over millions of years in such nice straight horizontal layers as are seen in the Grand Canyon BEFORE a river comes along and makes a canyon through it all? Millions of years of undisturbed layering of various sediments, and then this disturbance of a river cutting through it? Big change at the end of the building-up process apparently. How do you account for it?Similar situation where you can see the strata thrust up at angles in mountains. Do you posit the same many millions of years in the building up of those strata? Are they the geological column itself simply upended? And the same question as the first one: How do you account for such an enormously long period of building up of the strata BEFORE the great upheaval of the mountains which put the originally horizontal strata at angles to the horizon? Why was the earth so quiet for so long that the strata could form in neat parallel layers of sediments, and then all of a sudden or so it seems we see all this activity - the cutting of a giant canyon, the upthrusting of mountains. How do geologists explain these phenomena?Thank you.

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How do you account for the fact of such even depositions over millions of years in such nice straight horizontal layers as are seen in the Grand Canyon BEFORE a river comes along and makes a canyon through it all?

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Well, as others tried to present in previous posts in this thread, we account for it by oberving it occurring right now.

The river doesn't have that much to do with it, actually. All of these sediments were deposited on the continental craton (basement rock) as seas, deserts, beaches, swamps and coral reef environments moved back and forth across it. This is not uncommon in the geological record. There was no major structural disturbance until the uplift of the Colorado Plateau and in that, the region was uplifted as a block. Was the depositional surface even all of that time. No. In detail we can see sand dunes and stream channels, but basically the terrain was fairly flat.

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Millions of years of undisturbed layering of various sediments, and then this disturbance of a river cutting through it?

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Well, why not? The region suffered very little tectonism and remained near sea level until the Tertiary, then it became possible for a canyon to be cut. The region was not near any active plate boundary until that time. Why shouldn't sediments simply be deposited for an extended length of time. By the way there were periods of erosion as well. They simply don't show up well because of the low relief of the region for most of the last 500Ma. Yes. But don't misunderstand. A single unit may be deposited abruptly, though not always. No. The stratigraphic section at that locality was tilted. Normal continental deposition. It's going on right now in many parts of the world. Is there a time limit on this type of sedimentation? I don't know of any. It is occurring now all along the eastern coast of North and South America. Been doing so for some hundred million years, in fact.I think your problem here is not a lack of knowledge so much as simple incredulity. You cannot fathom it, therefor it is impossible.

Again, a beginning geology book would be helpful, Faith.Mountains like the ones at Banff in the Canadian Rockies are a perfect example for your second paragraph. There was a shallow sea in that area at one time, and sediment built up in the bottom of that sea. It was undisturbed by weather because it was a seabottom: very little weather goes on down there. Sediment fell, stacked up, and gradually turned to rock. The whole stack subsided - it was adding the weight of the sediment to the mantle below, so the mantle very slowly oozed out of the way to compensate for that weight.Then, forces deeper in the mantle caused parts of the crust to move. The rock we're discussing was compressed sideways. It broke in places, and pieces were shoved up over other pieces and raised up above sea level. Erosion cut away some parts, and still is doing so. We see a snapshot of the middle of this process - all that nice rock will eventually erode away, and a bunch of it will get deposited as nice, flat layers of sediment, maybe up in Hudson's Bay or the Arctic Ocean. And those layers might get pushed up to make some future mountains....

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Well, as others tried to present in previous posts in this thread, we account for it by oberving it occurring right now.

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Thank you for your answer but that is not the question I asked. But I won't repeat it.Your answer raises another question I'd like to ask:Why would evolutionists suppose that we could extrapolate from the everyday processes we are observing right now to the processes involved in a one-time catastrophic worldwide flood? That seems to be the answer to every creationist observation, but no creationist supposes that anything like our normal geological processes could apply to such a cataclysm.Thank you again.

Remembering that I'm not a geologist (and even then you might want an expert on the area) I'll give you a rough rundown from memory.There are a lot of websites. I might get time to find them later.Going way back, to the time of the dinosaurs the middle of north america was a shallow sea streaching from the artic to the gulf of mexico. I think this was both because there were high seas in the warmer climate and that side of North America was lower (the atlantic did not exist).This laid down the layers of sediment that are the rocks of today. Though the lowest portions of the Grand Canyon cut down to about twice that far back.When the Atlantic opened somewhere a bit before the 65 Myr ago end of the time of the dinosaurs the Rocky mts, being on the front of North America started to rise. This lifted the land in the middle of the continent as well and the sea drained.It was sometime after that that the Grand canyon was started (but I don't remember when). The land has continued to raise as the river has cut down into it. This has occured over the last 30 to 50 million years or so. We'd have to look at the age of the oldest rocks at the top of the canyon to determine when the last sediment layers were put down.This is the kind of thing that has formed the geology of the earth over and over. The shifing of the plates, raising of mountains and moving seas and rivers have shaped different parts at different times. At some points in time one piece is under a sea and a lot of deposits are built up at another time another place is getting a net deposit of sediment from a sea, rivers off a mountain range or desert.The reason there is time for a very great depth of sediments to build up is that there may be 100 million years where the conditions are right for it before they change. Then they can stand up to weathering for more 100's of millions of years.The Rockies are 'young' mountains that started to raise as North America broke away and started to move into what we call the Pacific. The Appalations are what is left of Rocky sized mountains from the time before when North America joined with Europe and Africa. That was, I don't remember, but something like 250 million years ago. They had been raising and weathering for nearly 200 million years before the Rockies started to raise.The earth is never stable and unchanging but there are long periods when conditions suitable for sediment deposit hold. These periods can run to more than 100 million years (to be corrected by a real geologist). That is plenty of time to build up a lot of rock even if only a little is deposited. If only 1/100 of an inch of final compressed rock is deposited in a year then 1 million years will give you rock nearly 1,000 feet thick.The reason there are quiet times and then not might not be known. However, the plates move on the underlying mantle and may, like foam on heating water, move in various chaotic ways. Once continents are slammed together one could take it that some big deal pulling is required to drag 'em apart again.The surface of the earth has been through this several times. That is why the sea floors are all 'young' and only the cores of continents have remained pretty much intact since the crust hardened about 4 billion years ago.With all the upheaval there isn't much left that is more than some 100's of millions of years old (though how much that is I don't know).

So MILLIONS of years of relatively quiet stratification occurred everywhere, but at least in all the places where we can see it (an awful lot of them) and THEN very recently disruptions came along, rivers cut through them, tectonics made mountains of them, erosion wore them down etc etc etc. I agree, that's how it had to happen. It's accounting for the long period of quiet that seems difficult considering all the activity we have today. Tectonic movement is a very recent thing, didn't happen for those millions of years, right? Somehow the earth just got active recently, while for millions of years it was amazingly quiet. Then in spite of all the observable activity now, quiet deposition is considered to be occurring that could go on for another millions of years? OK. You have an answer. Thank you.

If one is proposing a very different process and I'd have to say a "catastrophic world-wide flood" would be that then one has to try to figure out what effects it would have. What processes are the creationists proposing? Whenever we try to get that clear we find that the flood was both violent and calm, fast and long lasting etc etc. In other words we get contradiction and no clear answers that work.We have asked here a number of times for the details of what is being proposed as the alternative theory. Questions like:1) Which layers are pre flood, which are flood, and which are post flood?There have been some attempts on creationist sites to answer this (though it seems to get avoided a lot). When such details are given there turn out to be many inconsistancies and problems. Some have been discussed here about a year ago.2) Give a "catastrophic" flood why isn't there a sharp layer in the geologic record that shows this? It should be world wide, very thick and well marked. Heck we have found the rather sharp layer from the end of the cretaceous meteor strike and it was small in comparison and, we say, nearly 65 million years ago. Why can't we point to the layer of a larger catastrophie only 4 or 5 thousand years ago? This is a biggy. Give a flood only a few thousand years ago the traces of it shoud be everywhere and very, very clear.3) Where did the water come from and go to?4) Why do the various dates of the geology not all point to one time a very few thousand years ago? Why do they instead correlate rather well with the order of the starta determined almost two centuries before absolute dating was possible?and more and more all questions not even asked by the so-called "flood -geologists" and certainly not well answered.What we do find is that at some point most break down and decide that God pulled a miracle. That no natural process can account for it all.However, that presents a problem. Miracles are articles of faith. Evenyone is entitled to them but no one is entitled to force their faith on others. Those who go on about hydroplate theories and the like are trying to make it into science. They want it in the science classrooms. If they can't make it into science then they have no right in science classrooms. Miracles aren't science they don't have evidence or require any. Science does require objective evidence.This message has been edited by NosyNed, 02-19-2005 18:56 AM

The short answer is that we do not presuppose a worldwide, biblical flood. We let the evidence lead where it may. The evidence does not give us a whiff of a notion that there was ever such an event. This was discovered by YEC geologists, by the way. If you have a description of a geological feature we should see resulting from such a flood, that does not also support normal mainstream events, then please let us know. Usually, YECs are asking us for what those features might be.

Read closely. I never said this. No. There were many disruptions around the world. Some places, however, remained quiet. I'm not sure why this is hard to understand. No. Tectonism is common throughout the geological record... just not everywhere at once. At the GC it didn't happen for many millions of years. Prior to that there was plenty of activity. If you've ever looked at the deepest rocks in the canyon, you would understand. No. You sound confused. And frustrated. I think I have explained this before. If such tectonism were so widespread as you seem to think it should be, then what has happened at the Bahamas Bank in your lifetime? Mountain building? Earthquakes? How can you say that tectonism is a 'recent thing'?

Not at all! Plates probably shuffled around faster way back in the Archaean than they do now, and they've never stopped moving. You're forgetting that nearly all those flat strata and nearly all those mountains are from sediment that's been through the whole cycle several times over.Added by edit:
Some areas, like much of Quebec, have only rafted around a bit without getting crumpled up at all for a couple of billion years. Other areas, like the western US or Banff, were fairly static and calm until maybe 100 million years ago and then got crumpled. Places like Sumatra or the Coast Ranges of California are getting crumpled right now, while we Texans are just sittin' and slowly eroding.It's a big planet. Lots of things can go on in different places at one time.This message has been edited by Coragyps, 02-19-2005 19:21 AM

NO! That is not what anyone has said. What has been said is "MILLIONS of years of relatively quiet stratification occurred in some places while great upheavals happen in others. No one is saying that either. Such actions have been going on continuously since the first day the earth had form. In fact, the new young Rockies show signs of an older mountain range that was worn down to the roots. Nope. Been going on for about 4 Billion years or so. Nope and no one has said that. Someplace it's quiet, in others it can be very violent. Research what actually happened during the recent tsunami. Yup. I never even felt the tsunami. Did you?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion