The first video doesn’t show anything clearly enough to even tell what they’re talking about. And the line, “It looks like soft sediment deformation” is a laugh; from that high up there’s no way to tell that.
The second video just lies by omission: rock bending can occur without fracturing the rock if it happens slowly enough, the speed being dependent on pressure and temperature.
Not just water, water from the great deep that fills the universe – that’s the ‘cosmology’ of the ANE and the OT. That source is beneath the underworld where Sheol is located, under the flat earth-disk under its solid sky-dome that keeps the waters above, the portion of the great deep that lies above the earth-disk, from surging down and destroying the earth.
Yes, there is, and it’s called “physics”: unconsolidated sediments cannot sustain the kinds of slopes that consolidated rock can, which means that the Grand Canyon and its “mini” version are two entirely different phenomena, one having been cut while the rock was solid and the other cut through unconsolidated sediments.
Which is on the order of arresting someone for having red hair as a robber was reported to have even though the robber was 6 feet 4 inches tall and slender while the guy being arrested is 5 feet 8 inches tall and obese – superficial similarities pointed to while major differences are ignored.
Of course it is: you can’t say that a formation cut in one kind of material demonstrates that a feature in an entirely different kind of material was cut the same way; it’s like expecting to find dunes built of gravel in a river flood plain because you see dunes of sand along a beach. Different materials cut in different ways.
Except that the YEC version relies on lying by ignoring vast amounts of data while the OE version relies on careful measurement and physics.
But there is a lot we do know 100%, such as the ages of uplifted mountain ranges and the angles of repose of different materials under different conditions – those are based on physics, in fact on physics that apply to the construction of highways and canals, of dams and building foundations. Sure, it means using algebra and geometry and calculus, but those apply to the ordinary world in ways that if YEC was correct would mean that a lot of things we build – such as highway bridges – are inherently unsafe, which we know they aren’t because we’ve been building them for over a century and haven’t had the kinds of disasters we should have seen.
Here’s an example of a difference which proves that the Grand Canyon is not young: first, assume that somehow the GC sediments were cut by retreating flood waters and didn’t just collapse into the growing watercourse; then ask what would we see along the edges of the canyon. One huge thing we would see but don’t are the crumbling blocks of sediment spread along the sides, formed by differential drying – the exposed material would dry faster and contract, causing fissures that would progress inward into the sediments, causing faster drying in those fissures, until the still-wet material at the back ends of those fissures failed and the drier blocks detached due to gravity. Another is that wet sediments don’t turn into rock, the water has to mostly come out first, and when you have strata as distinct as in the GC the water would ooze along the boundaries between the strata, causing two things: streaks on the canyon walls as minerals carried by the water stained the rock they were flowing over, and sagging exposed strata due to near-saturation by the escaping water.
If the only point is that there are layers, so what? Layers can form in numerous ways, so the fact that two different formations have layers is meaningless.
So we do know 100% that the Earth is not young; from physical aspects of rocks we know that it is at the very least several hundreds of thousands of years old.
Which is based on imposing a modern scientific worldview onto the scriptures. It’s an approach based on assuming that the historical context is irrelevant, specifically in the case of the “begats” that ages and generations got recorded the way a modern genealogist would – but we know that in the ANE genealogies weren’t done that way; they used symbolic ages, felt free to skip generations, often ignored embarrassing ancestors, and even invented connections that were pure fabrication. Though I shouldn’t limit that to the ANE; the Greeks and Romans did the same thing, making genealogies that purported to show that a certain king was descended from Ulysses or a certain general had Apollo himself as an ancestor (there are even genealogies that trace a lineage back to someone of whom it is known they had no children!).
It’s also a bit of misdirection. Within the structure of either of the two literary types to which the opening Creation account conforms the days are meant to be taken as ordinary days, but they are not meant to be taken that way WRT anything outside the story. Modern western minds have trouble grasping that way of thinking, but it was common those millennia ago.
Isn’t it odd that the sequence “evening … morning” doesn’t describe a day but rather a night?
In the ANE pretty universally darkness and thus the night were seen as enemies of order, a foe to be fought starting every evening continuing through morning in order to keep the passage of the sun on his barque or in his chariot clear so the sun could rise again for a new day. But the Genesis writer was having none of this: by including the period of night as the last part of each day he relegated the night to the position of just one more thing that YHWH-Elohim had decreed – no battle needed because YHWH-Elohim was in fact the Creator also of the night. It was a major slam on the entire ANE understanding of the relationship between deity and darkness; all the gods of all the nations were seen as potentially in danger, capable of losing the battle against night and thus surrendering existence to chaos, but YHWH-Elohim’s “battle” had been won the moment He had separated darkness from light and given useful darkness its name: “night”. Night was transformed from being a time of worry and terror to one for sleep and rest with the result of having the energy to face a new day.
In the YEC version that “evening . . . morning” refrain is just a marker of time. When the Creation story is read as an ancient Israelite would have heard it, it is rich with theology!
Quite true. Oddly, it also isn’t relevant to evangelism; Jesus never said, “Go then and fight to make Genesis understood scientifically” – in fact He didn’t even mention Genesis in His message, instead saying, “Come to Me, all who labor and are heavy-burdened, and I will give you rest”. Yet millions of dollars and millions of man-hours are thrown into an endeavor that by my observations only serves to make people turn away from Christ!
