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?
Well if you agree with it you’d better make sure you’re doing it.
And if anyone calls you out for not doing it, you need to be prepared to justify yourself, and not respond with accusations of “atheism” or attempts to change the subject.
Thou shalt not quote mine.
Thou shalt not fudge measurements.
Thou shalt not misrepresent evidence.
Thou shalt not attack straw men.
I would strongly argue that if you were to attempt to make the claim that any of these are based on a philosophical principle, then you would be a liar.
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Have you ever walked along the littoral?
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One example of how beaches tear things up is the rainbow beaches (from broken up glass bottles)
Glass Beach In Russia Turns Empty Beer Bottles Into Colourful Pebbles (traveltriangle.com)
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That may well be, but bones buried in a flash flood and persisting may well be fossilized given time and proper conditions. That skull was buried, then later erosion brought it back to view. Bison caught in a flash flood and buried under sediment would not be that different that the group of mammoths caught in a similar situation at Mammoth National Monument where they were caught in rising water and covered in sediment, but from what I can see were never covered by rising seas, just river sediment History & Culture - Waco Mammoth National Monument (U.S. National Park Service).
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Can anyone tell me whether I must believe faith ‘geology’ rather than know geology, independently of whether Jesus was God incarnate?
And why I must if He was?
May I do both?
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Actually, quite a few people went down with the wreckage–as evidenced by all the pairs of shoes (I incorrectly said, “trousers” before) found onboard…shoes that used to have bones in them!
Here’s the narration:
Why You Won’t Find Bodies On The Titanic | Titanic: 20 Years Later with James Cameron - YouTube
“You won’t find bodies at Titanic. You won’t find skeletons. The bones actually dissolve into solution very rapidly at that depth.
“What anybody has explored the wreck finds is pairs of shoes .
“It takes years for a skeleton to vanish, but the shoes treated ith tannic acid—they won’t eat them.
“There’s a scene where we were filming, and we came across a pair of woman’s shoes—next to a pair of girl’s shoes.
“These were people. Those shoes got to the bottom on people . They were in their cabin…(because the cabin was all around, the destruction of it).
“And there was a hand-mirror. This is the human element. This is what people touched. It’s what they lived with.”
Does this give us any insight into why we don’t find the bones (so, certainly not fossilized bones) of marine animals on the seafloor? …and why marine fossils in the fossil record were not formed at the bottom of ancient inland seas?
Even all 1,500 of the people who went down with the Titanic had been scavenged in this way, how, pray tell, do you reconcile your claim that you can generalise this to everywhere in every ocean, every sea, every river and every estuary worldwide with this observation made by @glipsnort above?
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But from what I’ve been able to read, submarine landslides mostly occur on continental margins–not in inland seas (like Hudson Bay). And, keep in mind, the subject at hand is inland seas–specifically, hypothesized ancient inland seas.
But you forget: I’m not operating by your billions-of-years time scale. I’m arguing that bacteria today are doing what they were created to do, only a few thousand years ago–namely, eat bones.
The biodiversity of YEC World is… unbelievable. Ten billion species. The ecology was linearly a thousand times more complex. Therefore a million. Or even a billion. But as we have to believe that the fundamental constants of nature are inconstant by a factor of a million, because Jesus, AND even if Jesus weren’t God incarnate, i.e. it stands alone as proper, realer than real science understood by realer than real scientists, it’s actually easy to believe.
Wow! Britain alone, which has a very poor avian fauna, would have had two hundred thousand species of bird! Happy Daze! It’s terrible what sin did.
Thanks for these examples–and I found a couple more, even.
You make a valid point that such preservation of bones is rare, yet is possible contingent upon burial in sediments. For example, one article said the H.L. Hunley was covered in 3 feet of sediment–plus the submarine was encrusted by 1200 lb. of “concretion.”
In the case of the Titanic, skeletons on the ship were not buried in sediments, so were completely consumed.
Of course, in this OP, I am trying to reason through the application of such finds to the fossilization of marine animal bones in hypothesized ancient inland seas. So, let’s say that a small percentage of these bones managed to bury themselves deeply enough in these sediments to escape consumption by scavengers and bacteria. Now, what evidence do we have that such bones would then become permineralized–thus, fossilized–while buried at the bottom of the sea?
So, for example, the preserved bones of the Antikythera–from 2,000 years ago…buried in ocean sediments…why hadn’t they at least begun to fossilize? In fact, some studies, such as below, have concluded that permineralization can occur over a few years, or even over a few days, depending on geochemical conditions:
They all happened when global sea level was at its highest point, during the Zuni megasequence (Jurassic-Cretaceous). Of course, Old-Earthers stretch this period out over about 20 millions–which doesn’t sound much like “at the same time.”
But all the megasequences along with all other four billion years of geology apart from 1656 years happened during 190 days.