No. How could evidence “hide itself”? Does evidence have a will? Where does the evidence hide?
And how could non-scoffers see signs of a global flood that happened long ago?
Escaping notice is not the same as hiding.
No I’m not. There are multiple verses in the Old Testament that show a fixed, non-moving earth. Do you want to see them? Should they be taken seriously?
It is the record of both–many fossils obviously lived their normal life: age distributions of species are about the same as of similar species in recent deposits, injuries happen and heal in the same ways, and most fossils are broken.
No, but that is mainly because crinoids are nowhere near as common as they used to be.
If we modify it to just limestone that thick, then also no, because turning sediment into limestone requires either significant pressure or percolating freshwater. We do see a few hundreds of meters of unconsolidated mixed biogenic and terrigenic sediment on top of a few kilometers of older limestone.
There is, but it is of a type fundamentally incompatible with a brief global flood: global planktonic foraminifera show exactly the same sequence of appearances and disappearances (ignoring unconformities for the moment) in all marine deposits.
At about the same speed at the ocean was moving in the recent past–about 5 mm in level per year. Not very mobile from a human perspective.
Not in the way I read this passage. Which seems to be a favorite of the YEC crowd.
First question, When did the fathers die? That sets the starting point. Basically they are saying nothing has changed recently. I assume they mean the patriarchs.
Second question, What escaped their notice? It couldn’t be the flood. That happened before the fathers died. What they failed to notice is creation was by the word of God and the future destruction of the world will be by the word of God.
There is an old joke somewhere that goes, “I brought you into this world and I can take you out.” Which is what Peter is really saying here.
You have the observation of a few whale carcasses and from those handful of examples you are saying that nothing different can ever happen. I just don’t see how you can make this claim.
You just gave an example of 40 nearly complete whale skeletons two paragraphs above.
Sequence Stratigraphy has made it clear that the sedimentary rock layers were formed from sediments that had been transported and deposited by moving waters–waters that were either transgressing or regressing over the continents. Transgressive deposited layers have a thinning-up order, while regressive layers have a coarsening-up order (in keeping with Walther’s Law).
In other words, the sedimentary rock layers of the fossil record were not formed by in situ, stationary sediments.
Consider this quote:
"Experimental Deposition of Carbonate Mud From Moving Suspensions: Importance of Flocculation and Implications For Modern and Ancient Carbonate Mud Deposition
“Just as previously assumed for terrigenous muds, there has been a long-standing notion that accumulation of abundant carbonate mud reflects quiescent conditions of offshore and deeper-water environments. These experiments demonstrate unequivocally that carbonate muds can also accumulate in energetic settings. In the sedimentary record of carbonate rocks, interbedded grainstones and lime mudstones may thus not necessarily reflect shifts in depositional energy (or water depth), but alternatively may imply a shift in supplied sediment type. The observations we report suggest that published interpretations of ancient lime muds and derived paleoceanographic conditions may need to be reevaluated.”
The Kaibab uplift and the Hawaiian Islands / Emperor seamount chain are relevant to whale fossilization.
But there were plenty of terrestrial plans and animals during the Absaroka megasequence (Pennsylvania-Triassic), weren’t there? And during this time, most of the continent was supposedly under water for about 75 million years (Sloss sequence diagram). How do you suppose these survived?
I guess I’m not familiar with the YEC argument here. Why should Kaibib uplift caused by subduction be a problem?
You are mocking an event whose historicity both Jesus (Matthew 24:37-39) and the Apostle Peter (2 Peter 3:3-6)–along with several Old Testament writers and prophets (1 Chronicles 1:4; Isaiah 54:9; Ezekiel 14:14, 20)–affirmed.
Yeah, you were probably thinking you were just being cute and funny. But really…do you think that was wise?
I’m questioning your interpretation. You should comment on the issues I raised, if you are able.
Burial in deep sediments by catastrophic flood waters does not fit the evolutionary paradigm of flooding by slowly, slowly, slowly rising ocean waters (one source: .01 inch per week).
Agree completely; thankyou for clarifying. I was trying to express that all fossil deposits everywhere could not be assigned to a single or narrow time slot.
It’s the microfossil sequence you refer to that is routinely useful for indexing hydrocarbon deposits. It seems odd to me that Tim Clarey, who has downhole experience, has never to my knowledge, addressed the role of foraminifera in exploration. This is from a review of Clarey’s book by Stephen Mitchell, a Christian and retired petroleum geologist
Carved in Stone by Dr. Timothy Clarey: An Old-Earth Response
Why are there no fossils from modern lifeforms in the early rocks? If we assume that all of the flora and fauna that we have today were created during creation week, then why does Clarey’s preflood section have no modern forms, not even pollen or microfossils? The same question applies to the rocks interpreted to have been deposited in the early flood. It is not just that they don’t have fossils from humans or mammals, though that is troubling, one should find modern microfauna or pollen. It is very difficult to find sediment from today, particularly shales, without these microfossils. The changes in these tiny fossils over time is also problematic for any flood model. Paleontologists can recognize much about depositional environments, ancient climates and the original water depth using microflora and faunal assemblages. Even so, changes in these assemblages are apparent through the different periods represented in the rock record. Why would this result from a global flood?
Notice below:
(PDF) How not to become a fossil-Taphonomy of modern whale falls (researchgate.net)
“Few whale carcasses have been reported from shallow waters (Smith, personal communication), which may be due to the high rate of scavenging and current activity that destroy and disperse the bones. In deep water, whale carcasses endure longer, and it takes a few years to several decades to completely destroy a skeleton (Smith and Baco 2003), depending on the specific environmental conditions.”
What is a whale fall? (noaa.gov)
“The whale skeleton can support rich communities for years to decades , both as a hard substrate (or surface) for invertebrate colonization and as a source of sulfides from the decay of organic compounds of whale bones. Microbes live off of the energy released from these chemical reactions and form the basis of ecosystems for as long as the food source lasts.”
As you can see, from these two sources, a whale fall generates and supports a microbe community–down to the sulfides, resulting from the final stage of bone disintegration.
Sure, there might be a case or two of some bones that escaping total breakdown, but these would certainly be the exception.
It’s also significant that in the fossil record, where whale bones fossilized by permineralization, many nearly complete skeletons have been found–such as in the Atacama desert in Chile (over 40 nearly complete skeletons). Now…have you ever read of nearly complete whale skeletons lying on the present-day ocean floor?
So, obviously the fossil record was not at all the product of marine animals just dying, and their skeletons drifting down into sea sediments.
Yeah, you might be right on this–especially in view of Genesis 8:2.
So, in this case, both the “floodgates” and the “fountains” were simply water sources.
It still seems to me that God used rift zones (and all the plate tectonics that go with them), in addition to these water sources, to flood the earth.
Even if only 1% of whales become fossilized, that still would result in many millions of fossils.
Have you never seen the jumbled mess of fossils in situ at Dinosaur National Monument in Utah? And China has a dinosaur fossil graveyard that looks just like it.
At the same time, there are fossil digs where there seems to have been two or more stages–where the dinosaurs were first killed by flooding, then were scavenged or the bodies just decayed so that the bones ended up being well-sorted by later flood flows.(such successive flows are recorded as various orders of sequences in the sedimentary rock record).
Let’s talk about the Hawaiian Islands/Emperor seamount chain first. It is very straightforward and easy to understand.
Why doesn’t that argue agains a global flood being responsible for everything and similar finds everywhere?
The basic meaning of “empirical” is “experiential.” That is, conclusions reached by direct–repeatable–testing, and then observation of test results to determine if a hypothesis is true or false. Right?
So, how does one test–repeatedly–a past event, to determine whether or not a hypothesized event actually happened?
And, how does one test–repeatedly–and then observe the test results of the hypothesis that a certain radioactive isotope has a half-life of 4.6 billion years?
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