You didn’t read far enough. The 40 nearly complete whale skeletons are not found at sea bottoms today--they are only found in sedimentary rock layers.
Which tells us, the conditions for their becoming fossilized, rather than being consumed by bacteria, required rapid, complete, and deep burial in sediments. And such conditions do not exist when the bones of a marine animal merely drift down into ocean sediments.
So, we might say that, for fossilization of bones to occur, massive sediments must suddenly fall on the bones…not the bones fall into the sediments.
Or, put another way, ancient inland seas did not give us fossils. Rather, catastrophic ocean flows of sediments did.
Again, where do you start with your basis for investigation?
Do you start blindly without an driving force…no “need for knowledge”?
I would strongly argue that if you attempt to make the claim that your search for knowledge is not based on a philosophical principal, then you are a fool. Educators all over the world have consistently proven that we search because we have a desire to know. Kids naturally do this from a very young age…indeed from birth really.
So, then you face a dilemma…which philosophical position do you take before your search for this kind of knowledge begins?
You have but two options…there is a God or, there is no God!
If you take the position there is a God, then I challenge you to please print out the 4th commandment and place it on the back of your toilet doorwhere it will be a constant reminder to you who God is and what he considers important.
“Identified in the beds were over 40 individual rorquals - the type of large cetacean that includes the modern blue, fin and minke whales.
“The team immediately noticed that the skeletons were nearly all complete, and that their death poses had clear commonalities. Many had come to rest facing in the same direction and upside down, for example.”
How does a layer have mud that takes days to settle out of still water in it if the layer was transported?
No. That sediment washed off of the continents, was precipitated from ions in the water into skeletons, or came from volcanic ash or meteoritic dust, drifted to the bottom, and has sat there. The fact that the sediment is unsorted and contains fine mud is completely incompatible with mass-transport.
They don’t. But ordinary wave action, hurricanes, and flooded rivers over the course of a long time do. Hurricane Camille dumped over 40 inches of rain in parts of the Virginia Blue Ridge, flooding the James to the point that boulders in tree roots got transported all the way to the coast. The James is not a huge river.
And if you take the position that there is a God, then I challenge you to please print out Deuteronomy 25:13-16 and place it on the back of your toilet door where it will be a constant reminder to you who God is and what he considers important.
¹³Do not have two differing weights in your bag — one heavy, one light. ¹⁴Do not have two differing measures in your house — one large, one small. ¹⁵You must have accurate and honest weights and measures, so that you may live long in the land the Lᴏʀᴅ your God is giving you. ¹⁶For the Lᴏʀᴅ your God detests anyone who does these things, anyone who deals dishonestly.
I wish I had a better knowledge of geology, as I find it fascinating, but just a quick read makes me think you have misunderstood sequence stratigraphy. It does not even remotely hold that sedimentary deposits are formed by mass transport of sediment from the ocean bottoms onto the land. They always go downhill from higher land to lower levels. Of course, due to uplifts and depressions, sometimes what is uphill and downhill changes. From what I see, sequence stratigraphy does not change the view of deep time, and even provide support for it, as it proposes that something like a sandstone formation may be an ancient valley that was later filled with sandy sediments (from highland erosion) when sea levels rose.
Perhaps the most striking example is when around 5 million years ago, the Mediterranean nearly dried up, and an ancient Nile river precursor cut deep canyons draining into the deep basin left behind. Later, when the Mediterranean filled, those ancient canyons filled with water, much like fjords, and sediment filled the deep canyons with layers of gravel and sand washed down from the highlands by the Nile until filled. Wells drilled into the Nile delta show this infilling. A much more detailed review can be found on Joel Duff’s blog here, as well as a similar series on the Dead Sea: Squeezing the Lost Grand Canyon of Egypt into the Young Earth Paradigm: An impossible* Task – Naturalis Historia.
Note that this link takes you to first of a series of blog entries, of which the third is the most descriptive of the actual process.
You want me to “comment on the issues” you raise in this quote?
First, you challenge God on why He should command certain animals to be sacrificed. Animals sacrifices are propitiatory–point to Christ (Leviticus 17:10,11; John 1:29). So, this was God’s revealed will. Is that not o.k. with you?
“They desperately need to set up a shelter and find a source of fresh water! And now they must farm in saline muck filled with bloated animal carcasses. Good luck! I’d rather die in the flood.”
Yet, the biblical account says, that when they existed the ark, “And God blessed Noah and his sons…” (Genesis 9:1). Actually, that does sound like “Good luck!” to me. And they quickly got back to living–no indication of any temptation to suicide here!
And…if you had just disembarked from that ark, I seriously doubt you yourself would have been looking for a strong rope to hang yourself with. (And…I seriously doubt that you would have been denying the historicity of the Flood!).
hmmm if one maintains that the uniformatarianism approach is to be ones source of all scientific discovery, then it is no surprise that these whales are claimed to have died 2-7 million years ago (btw a long range of time there) from an algae bloom.
Personally I think that Creation Science puts forward a view that not only maintains philosophical consistency with the Biblical flood, it makes sense…
The sandstone strata containing the whale fossils are contained within a local area called the Caldera basin (figure 4).11
Similar localised basins are found at a number of places along the western coast of Chile. Although the basins are relatively small for Flood deposits, the characteristics of the sediments in these basins (figures 2 and 5) and the abundant fossils contained in them indicate that deposition took place during a period of rapid and major coastal subsidence.12 Coastal subsidence of this nature is exactly what we would expect in the second part of the Flood when the ocean basins sank, the continents rose and the floodwaters flowed into the ocean. And major coastal subsidence explains the rapid burial of the whales and other creatures because rapid burial was needed soon after death to preserve the fossils. After the ocean basins had mostly subsided and the waters had almost completely drained from the land, the whales and other animals that perished in the catastrophe were buried—toward the end of Noah’s Flood. As Robert Raeburn commented on one of the web news reports, the mystery disappears when we interpret the rocks and the fossils from a Bible perspective.Chile desert whale fossils
Is this how science works? Betting on the odds of at least a few whales “beating the system”?
Bacteria have supposedly been on the earth for 3.8 billion years. And they have been busy at their jobs, voraciously consuming whale (and other) bones in oceans and seas…for 3.8 billion years. But… you are betting that a very small percentage of these whales somehow slipped by some napping bacteria, in some sleepy ocean waters “once upon a time”…and got themselves fossilized!
It just had to have happened to at least a few, out of all those billion whales!
Is this really how science works?
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
298
“Broken up” crinoids. In fact, also lots of broken up bivalves, too.
Doesn’t that evidence catastrophic waters? How do broken up crinoids and bivalves evidence a relatively peaceful death? How would peaceful waters end up depositing such widespread “brokenness”?
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
300
As Alfred Russel Lord Wallace said to Darwin when he lost the plot on the mammalian eye, that’s your lack of imagination. What was the wave action like? The heat? The frost? The pH? Of the rain.
O.k., let’s not get lost in our words here. The past event is not the hypothesis–rather, we hypothesize ABOUT the past event. Specifically, we propose what we think might have happened in the past. Then, we set up a test, to see if our proposition is true or false. And having run the test, we are able to observe our test results–which either prove or disprove our hypothesis/proposition.
So, no, you do not observe the hypothesis–rather, you test it, then you observe the results of your test.
“We are using observations in the present to test our hypotheses of what happened in the past.” Exactly! And this is what the OP here is all about!
“Starlight. Naturally occurring nuclear reactors. Consilience between independent decay chains. Consilience between radiometric dating and non-radiometric dating methods.”
Thanks for this response–and the link you forwarded. I will give consideration and study to these points.
Thanks, Phil. Yes, I’ve come across this study–but not this article.
The point I would make on this is, these bones had been been buried under tons of sediment layers, which enabled them to become fossilized–permineralization had occurred with them.
So, their bones were compressed within sedimentary rock layers.
In other words, these bones did not go through the four stages of consumption that occur when whale carcasses simply drift down into ocean sediments because they were rapidly, completely, and deeply buried by muddy ocean sediments.
I believe “the moral of the story” here is, marine (not just whale) bones did not become fossilized by simply drifting down into ancient inland seas, but instead by being catastrophically buried under muddy sediments deposited by catastrophic flood waters.
Can you document an example where whale bones in “a low-oxygen area on the ocean floor with a moderate rate of sedimentation” not only escaped bone-eating bacteria, but also became fossilized with this “moderate rate of sedimentation”?
Who says the stages of decomposition had to occur during the Flood? Sounds like the Flood overtook a “ichthyosaur fall” that was in the process–thus preventing the bones from complete decomposition, as the remaining bones (and ecosystems) were quick-buried under tons of muddy sediments.
According to most scientific articles I have read, fossilization of this skull would require burial under deep layers of watery sediments. Just sitting out in a creek would not fossilize it–in fact, it would likely just break down…just as happened with the skeletons of thousands of other bison who used to roam the plains. Has anyone found any of them in the process of fossilization?