Glenn Morton's Evidence Examined

I am certainly no expert on geology. I've had only one college-level geology course. I have a high level of expertise in only one geology-related area, radiometric dating.I am merely reporting what I've been told by former YECs who worked successfully in oil exploration while operating under a YEC paradigm. I quizzed Glenn Morton, Steve Robertson, and another of their former colleagues about this a few years ago. They all assured me that it is true. They identify (from seismic surveys) the layers and features that are likely to contain oil. They may refer to these layers by their geologic names, but they do not need to know the real ages of the layers.

Exactly. Being YEC won't help you find oil.

It would be good for you to read a bit more about him. He is a good example of a YEC who was not content to just sweep problems under the rug, but to try to address them.As his story shows, he started doing this while he was still a YEC. He saw problems and presented them to YEC audiences in a search for answers. But rather than getting answers, he was told to keep quiet; he was raising uncomfortable questions that the YEC leaders could not answer. They were content sweeping these problems under the rug, but not Glenn.

Yes, Jon is serious. Glenn is a politically conservative libertarian-leaning Texan who works in the oil industry. He believes that much of climate science is politically driven rather than data driven, and that politically-motivated science is being forced on the public. He is somewhat tired of talking about the OEC-YEC issue, and is more interested nowadays in attacking the scientific establishment, science funding, peer review, etc.Glenn sees similarities between the ways that climate skeptics are attacked and the ways that YECs are attacked. Even though he is fully convinced that YEC is wrong, his libertarian leanings predominate here, and he wants parents to be allowed to teach their children what they wish (including wrong science). This is largely why he pulled down his website. He saw his work being used to attack such freedoms and to attack Christianity in general.[i don't have references, but Glenn is a personal friend of mine.]

For Faith and any other YECs who may be lurking here who are wondering about dating, I highly recommend Dan Wonderly's book
"God's Time Records in Ancient Sediments". Dan was a geology professor for a short time at Grace College (John Whitcomb was on faculty at the seminary). Dan did not have expertise in radiometric dating, so his book focuses exclusively on non-radiometric evidence for an old earth. The book is a bit dated now, but is still quite good.

Faith, there is a lot of interpretation and assumption underlying your comments.I disagree that "There would have been no need whatever for Noah to build an ark to carry all animals if the Flood were not global".
1) If the flood covered a large enough region, it would still take significant time for animals to repopulate the area, so there would still be a need to have animals handy for food.
2) many of the animals in the account were "clean" animals for sacrifice. There would also have been a need to have animals handy for sacrifice if the flood were not global.I agree that Noah would have had time to have "escaped to any area that would have been spared the Flood". But escape was not God's only goal. Noah's task was also to be a testimony to those around him and was to provide a "type" of Christ (1 Pet 3).FYI, Glenn Morton did lots of thinking about the Flood, and concluded that Noah's flood must correlate to the infilling of the Mediterranean, about 5 million years ago. This would make Noah and Adam Neanderthals. Very few people agree with Glenn on this.Edited by kbertsche, : No reason given.Edited by kbertsche, : No reason given.

You are overstating things here a bit. Yes, it is probably true that the mainstream, traditional interpretation of the Flood throughout history is that it was global. But this mainstream, traditional view is VERY different from the modern "flood geology" view which you hold.The mainstream view credited the Flood as depositing silt and putting seashells on tops of mountains. But it did NOT see the Flood as radically changing earth's geography (cutting the Grand Canyon, for example). This view did not come about until the early 20th century when George McReady Price dreamed it up at the encouragement of Ellen G. White. It did not enter mainstream Christian circles until Morris and Whitcomb reworked Price's views and republished them as "The Genesis Flood" in about 1960.This "flood geology" is definitely NOT a "traditional, historically accepted view." It is based on questionable biblical exegesis (e.g. fanciful and novel interpretations of "the fountains of the great deep" and the "land being divided", and overly literalistic interpretations of numerous passages) and on profound ignorance of geology.

I think this is a good approach, and I would like to encourage others to focus on filling in the details of Glenn's arguments rather than adding new arguments to the mix. Glenn was a committed YEC when he started seeing details in his seismic surveys that could not be explained from a YEC perspective. The things that Glenn observed convinced him YEC was wrong, and they might be persuasive to other YECs as well.For example, Glenn saw evidence of underground canyons buried under thick layers of sedimentary rock. How can this be explained in a YEC paradigm? Is it believable that the Flood laid down a thick layer of sediment, hardened it, carved deep canyons into it, and then covered it with another thick layer of sediment, all in less than a year? I don't think this is very believable.

Glenn had lots of other evidence on his old website that he found persuasive as well, such as fossilized burrows. Some of these articles must still be around, or findable through the way back machine.I recall that while still a YEC, Glenn did a simple calculation disproving the "canopy theory" and presented this to his fellow YECs. (The "canopy theory" is the old YEC idea that enough water to cover the whole globe was suspended in a "vapor canopy" above the earth, which also supposedly had the benefit of shielding cosmic radiation and allowing much longer lifespans before the Flood. Glenn explained that if thousands of feet of water are above the earth in a vapor canopy, this would transfer pressure to the atmosphere and to the earth, and we would feel the same pressure as if we were thousands of feet underwater. We would not survive this pressure.)

Glenn briefly mentions cicada burrows at this page from Old Earth Ministries, and briefly mentions burrows again here. I'll see if I can find more.The fossilization isn't the notable thing; fossilization merely allows them to be preserved. The notable thing is that they are burrows; they reveal the life of creatures in the past. These creatures made burrows in soft soil, not rock. This took months, not seconds. But if the Flood were depositing the thousands of feet of sediment and quickly compressing it to rock at the rate that YECs claim, there is simply not enough time for this to occur.With this and many other evidences for an old earth, the notable thing is not simply evidence for age, but also evidence for history. We see evidence of how things happened; evidence for a sequence of events in the past. And we know that this sequence required time to occur.Edited by kbertsche, : No reason given.

Here is a link to Glenn's old page on burrows through the "wayback machine". Some excerpts from his page are below:

quote:

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Burrows and burrowing throughout the geologic column are a great challenge to the young-earth paradigm. If there was a global flood which laid down all the rocks in a one year period, then there should be little time for burrowing animals to burrow. and they should become fewer and fewer the higher up one goes in the rock record. This is because the animals should have been killed and buried down deep and they should not have lived to burrow in the later stages of the flood.
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What does this burrow say about the 'global' flood? It says a lot. The animal which dug this spiral burrow was in no hurry to escape the flood. He dug down in a spiral and then up in a spiral. There were hundreds of these burrows in that shale. About the top of the central burrow, you can see a horizontal line. That is about the level of the former ocean bottom, where the burrowing animal came out of his burrow into the sea. You can see a very slight color difference (from greenish to orangish above) in the rocks above that level. They differ slightly in lithology.

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These burrows are NOT escape burrows as is often claimed by YECs when faced with this data. Escape burrows are straight up. this thing is eating the organic matter in the mud. The maker of this burrow is not in a hurry.

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Once again, young-earth creationism fails to explain this data. There are around 15,000 feet of sediment beneath this burrow and stratigraphically another 5,000 above it. To deposit 20,000 feet of sediment in a one year flood requires 54 feet of deposition per day. and that means 2.28 feet per hour. If sediment were raining down on that poor burrower while he was going down, he would have to then burrow further up to get to the ocean than the level at which he started. Clearly you can see that this isn't the case.
  —Glenn Morton

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I said what Faith reported above, and I believe my comments to this effect in another thread are what prompted her to start the current one.My information on this comes from personal conversations with Glenn Morton (who was head of oil exploration for a major oil company) and two of his colleagues, including Steve Robertson. Perhaps some of my information is incorrect; I appreciate corrections from anyone who has firsthand (or even secondhand) knowledge of how commercial oil exploration is actually done. (I.e. not from "armchair geologists" or even academics who have no knowledge of what is actually done in commercial practice.)Based on my conversations with Glenn and his colleagues, I see a number of misconceptions being repeated in this thread.
1) it has been assumed in this thread that oil is found by geologists. From what I understand, this is false. "Finding oil" means drilling a well that produces oil. This is done by the oil exploration teams of major oil companies, using a variety of techniques. The head of he exploration team is generally an experienced oil businessman, who is perhaps a geophysicist like Glenn. Geophysics is a branch of physics, not geology. (Glenn is NOT a geologist and is proud that he never took a geology class in his life.) Geophysicists are trained more in acoustics than in geology, and are skilled at analyzing seismic and other survey data. As I understand it, Glenn always had at least one geologist and a number of geophysicists on his team. But their information was often inconsistent and was always incomplete. It was left to Glenn to make a case to his management whether or not to drill in any specific location.
2) it has been claimed by some in this thread that it is necessary to know the geologic history of a site in order to find oil. This is not true. If one is near a known large oil field, all that is needed is good interpretation of seismic surveys to identify faults, salt domes, and other features that might have trapped a significant amount of oil. (and most oil exploration today is done near already-known oil fields.)

But this is exactly the point of this thread. The strata themselves show evidence that they were laid down SLOWLY, not rapidly. This is what Glenn Morton saw as he looked. He saw evidence of buried ancient river systems. He saw animal burrows. He saw many, many other things which are documented on his old pages.And I posted a link to Dan Wonderly's book, which details similar NON-radiometric evidence for age. Dan raises examples such as coral reefs which are thousands of feet thick; the growth rate of coral sets a minimum age of something like 100,000 years for these reefs.

Faith, your response is very disappointing. I know that you don't want to make detailed comments on radioactive dating, because this is a specialized field outside of your expertise. Fine; that's perfectly understandable. So I recommended to you some good NON-radiometric evidences for an old earth (by a couple of evangelical Christians who are also scientists), and you essentially dismissed them! Yes, you looked at one article by Glenn Morton, but you don't seem to have looked at his burrows page that I suggested. And you have not looked at Wonderly's evidence at all (who was on faculty at the same institution as John Whitcomb, one of the founders of modern YEC)!If you are to be well-informed on any topic, you really need to look at the arguments of the other side. If you are to push YEC as strongly as you do, you really need to be aware of Morton's and Wonderly's arguments (and to read their own presentation of them, not biased summary of them by YECs).