Like that of Michael Tuomey?
Of relevance to the thread, and somewhat tangential to the point in the quote, (this is also a useful passage to point out to anyone claiming that the idea of an old earth was to support evolution):
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"Report on the Geology of South Carolina (pp. 58-59), from 1848. The immediately prior pages argue against Lamarkian evolution, and for the best-fit model of the time, individual creation of species, but note that there are some components of the fossil record that look somewhat like Lamarkian-style evolution. [To avoid a bad counter-argument for a third time, the geologist who died in 1857 was not the same person as the Tammany Hall politician who was still active in the 1870s.]
What bothered me initially was the thought that, if a human were actually found in undisturbed rocks from 70 MYA — which is, of course, impossible — I’m confident that people would not actually abandon evolution. I crinkled my brow and wondered, “Gosh, does that make evolution unfalsifiable?”
But it doesn’t. To understand why, you have to understand how science actually works.
If a given scientific model accommodates, say, 100 million various bits of information from across various disciples, and one bit of information doesn’t fit, that one bit doesn’t force people to abandon the model. What it ̯does do is get that 1 bit of information put on a “this doesn’t fit” list. That list gathers and gets vetted by generations of scientists, until someone comes along and says, “Aha! Here’s a new model that accommodates all 100,000,001 bits of information.” This is what I understand happened with relativity over and against Newtonian physics, for instance. For evolution, such a new model would have to elegantly explain why we have exactly the distribution we have for all the other countless fossils we’ve described to date… AND the one anachronistic human. It would not be enough to say, “evolution is a bunch of stupid ballyhoo.” It would have to say, “This is why it looks for all the world like evolution is true AND there’s also this weird Homo sapiens fossil in Late Cretaceous rocks.”
My mentor in my scientific field, a respected pioneer, used to tell me, “You can’t beat something with nothing.” He would go on, “So that was his story. It’s not enough to say it’s wrong. What’s your story?” The one who has the story that most elegantly and convincingly explains ALL the data wins the day.
The problem with YEC is that it doesn’t have any good explanation for why we see the extremely coherent, high-definition, beautifully elegant picture of creation that we do when we look through evolutionary lenses. In and of itself, finding a 70 million year old Homo sapiens won’t convince people of anything.
As a reminder, this is from a previous exchange here.
I’m sorry Jon, but that’s just deflection. Whataboutism.
If you think that I am in error to dispute a particular young earthist claim, then it is up to you to point out the mistakes in my reasoning. If I have misunderstood the procedures involved, or haven’t taken something into account, it is up to you to explain to me what I am overlooking or have misunderstood. If you think that I am wrong to say that a young earthist teacher is lying, then it is up to you to justify their claims and to explain to me precisely why I am in error to say that they are lying. But you do need to provide evidence, explain precisely what mistakes I am making, and justify any corrections that you bring. You will not do this by simply hand-waving away the points that I make as “outlandish accusations.”
It’s one thing to be attacked or persecuted for genuine and honest Christian faith, Jon. It is a different matter entirely to be confronted for sloppy thinking, falsehood, unjustified assertions, or resistance to critique.
The truth of all being discussed on this Biologos website, is one of worldviews through which an individual interprets the world we live in. As professing Christians, being truthful is a given, or at least it should be a given. We all have an audience of One in Heaven who sees all that we do. We should always be mindful of Him and make our actions, our words and thoughts in alignment with Jesus who showed us how to live.
Jon, my worldview is simply that honest reporting and honest interpretation of accurate information is non-negotiable. Honesty has rules and if you don’t want to be accused of dishonesty then you need to stick to them. If you think that I am not applying the rules fairly, or that the rules that I am applying are invalid, then it is up to you to explain exactly why you think they are unfair or invalid. If you are in any doubt about what rules I am applying or why I am applying them, then it is up to you to ask for clarification.
If I understand correctly from what you have inferred about yourself on a previous occasion, I’m certainly not sure, but see that it is possible that you once believed as I do now, that evolution is a deceptive unfalsifiable lie, devoid of any real supporting evidence and that belief in eons of the deeptime billions of years is just a modern myth that sets itself up against the truth of real creation about 6,000 Earth years ago as the Bible so clearly informs us through simple addition of the provided genealogies.
I’ve explained what I’ve changed my position on here:
What I’ve had to rethink the most—and what’s given me a lot of angst in the process—has been the role of facts, reason, science, evidence, learning, academia and the like. This is something that I’ve ended up rethinking twice. The other Christians who I know fall into a pretty wide spectrum. Some of them are well educated and responsible, but others at the other end of the scale are thoroughly anti-intellectual. Some of them take the line that facts are of the devil, that reason is the enemy of…
Bottom line: I’ve learned the hard way, through painful experience, that not taking mainstream science seriously is simply not an option. I’ve learned the hard way that science has rules and honesty has rules, and that not sticking to the rules has consequences. The change that I’ve made has been is simply to tighten my standards and to insist that the rules be adhered to by anyone trying to challenge a scientific theory, evolution included. If you want to try to make a case that evolution is a “deceptive unfalsifiable lie,” then that’s up to you, but I expect you to stick to the rules while doing so.
No, it doesn’t. It results in net loss of information that turned out to be less useful than other information.
That is misleading. Insertions increase the amount of information, whole genome duplication increases the amount of information, novel allopolyploidy increases the amount of information. Each of those has been observed in living organisms.
Burrawang:
THIS SIMPLY DOES NOT HAPPEN!
Therefore evolution is false, it is a falsified theory.
In almost no other field of science would such a situation exist, but there we have it:EVOLUTION IS THE DESPERATELY DECEITFUL LIE THAT IS LEADING MANY AWAY FROM THE LIFE GIVING TRUTH OF THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHRIST OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR.
And, given that this has been pointed out to be untrue repeatedly already, this is either willful ignorance or lying.
Umm…
Burrawang:
As a consequence any measurements provided for events that allegedly took place millions of ears ago are fraught
That has been known to be false for 250 years.
Paraleptopecten:
For instances, a global flood should not consistently separate Chesapecten jeffersonius and Carolinapecten solarioides into different layers, as they lived in similar habitats and are similar shapes and sizes. What it should sort by is something like size or depth range, which bear almost no resemblance to patterns in fossil deposits as a whole. Completely un-size sorted deposits with repeated ups and downs in sea level (based on physiological requirements, sediment type, and stable isotope ratios) cannot have been moved after deposition significantly, nor deposited during a single flood event.
There is no way to get large endolithic bivalve holes in a rock in less than a few years of exposure to clean seawater. Let’s take an example of the strata at one mine in Horry County, South Carolina: the bottom of the pit hits a clayy limestone that has occasional dinosaur bones in other places and some bioturbation of its surface, above this there is a thick, hard limestone with lots of endolithic bivalve burrows in its upper surface that then got eroded down, then a non-leached shell marl with multiple transgressive-regressive pulses within it. This indicates the following sequence of events:
1 The clayy limestone is deposited.
2 It is colonized by various animals at its surface (takes a few years at an unrealistic minimum).
[a bunch of other layers get deposited and eroded away, based on other sites]
3 The animals whose skeletons compose the limestone live and die (a few centuries at an unrealistic minimum, given the known lifespans of some of the animals in it).
4 The sediment later to become limestone is exposed to fresh groundwater for a few decades at an unrealistic minimum (fastest way for limestone to form).
5 The limestone goes back under the ocean, is excavated from topsoil by water motion, and is then colonized by (among other things) lithophagiform mussels. These mussels live for a decade or more to get to their final sizes.
6 Sea level goes back down and the surface of the limestone is eroded down such that some burrows are only a few mm deep.
[a couple more layers come and go based on other sites]
7 Sea level rises again, and a new marine fauna colonizes the top of the limestone.
8 Sea level then drops and rises about three more times (over at least a few centuries, again based solely on measured lifespans).
9 Sea level drops a final time, a river erodes through the site, and leaves a sand layer at the top outside of its channel (at least a few decades more).
10 The river moves elsewhere.
11 People arrive in the area, as the sea level and river courses have not changed significantly since human habitation.
This means that the layers here took more than 500 years to be deposited, with sea level going up and down by intervals of over 30 meters during that time (which adds at least 2000 years more to allow for deposition of clay-sized grains in the layers). If that was during the flood, then the flood took centuries. If it was after, then we would have records of sea level changes of that size range in archeological deposits. The only other option is a pointless, deceptive miracle.
From Michael Tuomey in 1848 again: “It was usual, at one time, to refer the phenomenon of the distribution of organic remains in these rocks to the deluge; but no one, who has ever examined a fossiliferous deposit for five minutes, can hold such an opinion. The manner in which fossil shells are embedded shows most conclusively that the animals to which they belonged lived and dies where we find them, and they could not have been disturbed by the waters of a deluge.”
They tell us is a highly structured and theologized fashion about a flood that covered all the hills on the flat earth under the solid firmament with fifteen cubits of water. Calling it a globe is adding to the text. Calling it mountains rather than hills is choosing a specific possible translation over another.
Like Michael Tuomey had?
Depending on their structure, there are a few options. Some of them are material that washed into and then out of a river and got dumped onto the sea floor. Others show sea level varying back and forth gradually over time. And yet others are tsunami deposits or landslides, or other similar events. There are far more deposits that are consistently marine than that have jumbles.
By pointing out that this is still a lie; most deposits do show bioturbation and/or weathering. A few do not.
Burrawang:
The coal seams are made up of vast forests of pine trees here in Australia, consisting of various pine tree species, with visible jumbled tree trunks that are coalified sandwiched in between vast sheets of sandstone, with what looks like forest litter at the top and bottom of each seam.
How would they be in distinct seams if they were getting violently transported in a flood?
Yes, if your worldview demands honesty, you will do the calculation based on the actual measurements instead of demanding that they be fudged to bit predetermined outcomes. And the actual measurements require billions of years, fundamental constants changing in ways that would turn the planet into a ball of radioactive plasma or make atoms fall apart, or a pointless deceptive miracle.
How about rivers flooding? There aren’t very many dinosaur graveyards–dozens, not thousands. What there are thousands of is shallow marine deposits which show life as usual occurring for all of the organisms in them.
Precisely–why is anything freshwater or marine alive today if the flood behaved the way it is often described in popular writings?
Burrawang:
Yes, the Linean classification system or more accurately the binomial nomenclature invented by the devout Christian, Swedish Naturalist Carolus Linnaeus does have many examples where taxonomists have separated and designated ‘new’ species, but this is typically a matter of making an arbitrary distinction, thus very broadly speaking, a mammal remains a mammal, a plant remains a plant, a reptile remains a reptile etc., and a little less broadly, a cat remains a cat within the cat kind, a horse remains within the horse kind, a dog remains a dog within the dog kind, a grass remains a grass within the grass kind etc., I hope you get the picture here.
The biggest problem with most YEC models is that they aren’t even just wrong, they’re inconsistent and incoherent. There’s a reason that oil companies use standard geological models to find oil, and it has nothing to do with “presuppositions” or “worldview”–it’s because they work. YEC models can’t even give wrong answers for where resources should be because they aren’t coherent enough to give any answers. That the flood is supposedly somehow ripping boulders out of plutons and scouring the landscape with continent-crossing tsunamis while also depositing clay is one of the most egregious examples.