Flood Geology Cannot Explain Sedimentary Formations. Here's Why

Faith & Science Conversation
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The formation containing the cave I’ve been discussing is the Arbuckle limestone, which was deposited during the Ordovician, when there was plenty of marine life, but not yet land vertebrates. Its limestone and dolomite is the product of creatures such as gastropods, echinoderms, bivalves, and stromatolites which inhabited tidal and shallow sea regions over a period of elevated sea level during the first of the recognized major sedimentary sequences, the Sauk.

Geological studies have placed the Sauk sequence as an interval of a hundred million years or so. The megasequence terminology, but decidedly different meaning, have been appropriated by YEC to designate phases of Noah’s flood spanning a few weeks or months, so reduced by a factor of a billion. One of many details they gloss over, is that the stable isotopic ratio for the carbon, strontium, and oxygen making up the formation, display trending variations. There are various drivers for this which can play out over geologic time. However, in a scenario of rapid deposition in a matter of weeks under turbulent conditions, there is no real plausible explanation for any sort of variation.

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Why would you do that? Aren’t you assuming uniformitarianism, that what you do in the present will have bearing on the past? Aren’t you assuming sedimentation acts the same in the past as it does now?

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I recall petrified wood that formed covered with about 1.5m of lava over them, on a geology (volcanology) field trip. What was really fascinating was that these occurred amidst cavities where the lava had knocked trees down without covering them, resulting in tree-shaped hollow spots due to the trees with oxygen available combusting.

And then they ignore both the historical and grammatical parts of the method!

I caught chatGPT doing that, giving “quotes” from references that didn’t exist.

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I beg to differ…see the white areas in the video below…this is layers of sandstone across the US continent that cannot have been deposited over millions of years. Seismic data doesnt support it

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Yeah but what was the elevation 66 million years ago? You assume its hardly changed obviously.

I claim a catestrophic event changed it, you dont. How do you explain the sandstone deposit across the continent? The various layers which contain the sandstone combined form upwards of 3 miles thickness! There is seismic evidence of shattering of rocks across the continent in these layers that according to evolutionary timing have taken millions of years for the seismic event to do that…even though the rocks are from the same time period according to radiometric dating. It doesnt take a seismic wave millions of years to cross the US continent…a few hours at most!

Lets hope the “robot” who liked your comment had a momentary brain freeze, cause if they didnt…???

Yours is not a rebuttal, it playing games with figures and then using misinformation about elevation as supporting evidence to make big conclusions. Its never so simple as that, even i realise this. You may as well claim a flood cant go over mount Everest! No one believes that at its current altitude that happened.

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Is there some point you are making there or is this simply a jab with a stick at the wrong individual?

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My point is that you are using uniformitarianism, even though you claim Christians shouldn’t use it because it’s atheistic/secular.

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“It would take millions of years to accumulate deposits for thick formations of sandstone”

“Yeah, so if it took that long how do you explain thick sandstone?”

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why? my suggesting someone do a little experiment and you demand uniformatarianism…that is entire problem with these discussions. Am i not capable of driving a motor vehicle just like you may? am I not able to perform building and construction renovations just like someone else? The 15 years of earthmoving and 6000+ hours of experience driving bobcats and mini excavators…are these pseudo operator hours? Am I not a properly qualified teacher because my bachelors degree came from a pseudo college/university? Am i a pseudo parent because i teach my children YEC and you dont? Id argue your theology and bible knowledge is crap if i used your own pseudo claims and i would have excellent grounds to do so. Its about as silly as the argument i read in a forum post recently where the evidence to deny the creationist view was that the elevations were too high for noahs flood 66 million years ago so the bible must be wrong. Given that we both agree with the notion of techtonic plate movement, i cannot see how the individual could even make such an argument. Both sides agree with techtonic plate movement…its just the time involved we disagree on.

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Ron, Im not sure what your point there is? Are you saying that the sandstone wasnt formed in floodwaters?

How is that claim supported in microsope imaging of what are clearly sand grains surrounded by material that is usually found in formations deposited by water?

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You have also ignored the seismic shattering problem in Kurt Wise video of what radiometric dating shows are the same ages rocks across the US. If these were not deformed in a single event, how can the evolutionary geology view explain that the earthquake shockwave that did this to those rocks, took millions of years to travel across the United States?

I am not claiming that everything YEC find it accurate or that it cannot be explained away with alternative theories…just that you must also accept, naturalisms claims are not necessarily without their own significant issues and that playing the numbers game of we have more scientists who agree than you do, does not provide adequite answers or justify the postion you are taking.

I believe that when i read the bible and science study from guys like Kurt Wise align with a normal reading of the bible using language, statements of Noah made by Christ is pasages such as Matthew 24 are consistent with the science and therefore im satisfied that my book of faith (the bible) aligns with what is being observed there. I dont have to take Christies approach in 2019 where she says that after 5 years of searching shes decided the bible is irrelevant to the gospel (im paraphrasing what she said). I have made a choice, that the bible is more important than naturalisms conclusions…these guys are finding alternative conclusions that would help Christies 5 years of searching see the bible in a manner that is consistent with normal reading of language…not a modern twisting of it in specification locations only where naturalism and theology disagree.

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You are expecting the outcome of the experiment to apply to the past under the assumption that the past works the same as the present. That is uniformitarianism. It’s the same assumption you and other creationists reject when it comes to things like radiometric dating.

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Lots of asteroids splashing tsunamis across continents to produce sedimentary deposits is one YEC model. Although occasional asteroids have splashed down from time to time in geologic history, they are rather rare events, and the YEC model would melt the earth, not to mention the unlikelihood of the ark doing well in a continent-crossing tsunami.

One stream can and does produce different sedimentary conditions in different places; I was in a river last week myself (sadly, many people are unwillingly in that river right now, thanks to Helene). But rivers do not deposit fine mud and boulders at the same time in the same place. If you have a layer of sediment being deposited worldwide by a global flood, the flood has to be carrying the distinctive features of that layer (e.g., types of fossils, stable isotope ratios) around the world within the time available to form that layer. Each of the countless layers has to be carried across 40,000 km within the tiny fraction of the flood year available for it. That water has to be moving awfully fast; modern currents take about 300 years to do that. You can’t simultaneously have the same water moving fast enough to carry things around the globe millions of times in a year and have it slow enough to deposit fine mud. This is why creation science needs to develop actual detailed models, test them, admit where they don’t work, and try to come up with something better, if they want to develop honest scientific models of how their ideas could work. But if the goal is to fool people into thinking that a young-earth model is scientifically legitimate, having as vague a model as possible and claiming that it explains anything is going to be more effective for that.

There are too many wrong claims in the video of Wise for me to take the time to watch it all and find out exactly what is being said about the sandstone. No, the features produced by Mount Saint Helens do not give justification for claiming that all geologic features formed rapidly. No, not all the listed features were ever generally believed to only happen slowly. There is no sandstone layer extending across the continent. There are sandstones in the southwestern US that are made of sand that eroded from the Appalachians, in the eastern U.S., which seems like the most likely Why would a flood wash them to there? In reality, the Appalachians being in the middle of Pangea, across the continent was the shortest way for a river to go to head for the ocean. The grains are well-worn, showing that they took a long time to be transported. They are identified as from the Appalachians based on radiometric dating.

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Yeah – and the time proposed by YEC ‘geology’ would vaporize the continental plates, eliminating them . . . but they’re still here, moving according to the laws of physics that God hasn’t changed on a whim.

Of course it does – that’s what one should expect from a God called “faithful and true”, not changing the rules on us.

I gave up about eight minutes in after getting tired of the sloppiness and errors.

I caught myself wondering, “Have you ever even looked at a USGS geological map?”!

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“Deposited by water” does not equate to “formed in floodwaters”. There are sandstone deposits along one bay near where I live that has bands where the voids between grains are filled with fine clay particles, but there was no flood involved; these bands correspond to the periodic massive earthquakes that strike the US Pacific Northwest – the quakes cause landslides on the slopes along the bay, which dirties the water with fine clay particles, which mix with sand as it is deposited. As the water clears due to particle settling, new sand deposits become “clean” again.

This makes no sense at all.

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True. And “formed in floodwaters” does not equate to “formed in Noah’s floodwaters”.

Looking at these before and after slider pictures for Helen’s damage on CNN, it is clear that a lot of sediment suddenly buried a lot of stuff. And like every flood ever, the debris is also clearly chaotic and unsorted, with a mess of silt and boulders and everything else jumbled together. Don’t even need to ask Snelling or Clarey, just exercise one’s own observational science.

There is rain now, there was rain in the past.
There are numerous floods every year, there were floods in the past.
There are shorelines now, there have been shores in the past.
There is freeze-thaw erosion now, and every winter and spring in the past.

Do YEC think seasons, climate, and weather are some sort of uniformitarian worldview dodge? There has always been water driven geological processes, always has been and expect more to come. So finding geological evidence of both slow processes and sudden events is normal, expected, and not necessarily anything to do with Noah.

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I was reminded of something an ecology professor said: “One in five hundred doesn’t mean it can’t happen this year”. That was a comment on our just having had a once in two hundred year winter and we were in the middle of an even worse one, a once in two hundred followed immediately by a once in five hundred.

Once in a thousand, as with Helene, doesn’t mean no worries!

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Not in a scenario where 3/4 of the earth is covered by water it wont.

Thats the entire problem with that ridiculous argument…it fails to consider the average depth of water exceeds the exposed landmass today.amd that YEC dont claim and instantaneous event…it is believed that the rapid techtonic movement continued after the flood.

In any case, given the mountains due to uplift are considerably higher than in the past, youve got big problem there St Roymond…both sides already agree on that part.

Your understanding of water in controlling heat the lab isnt particularly well demonstrated in that claim. I have already highlighted this dilemma before on these forums and yet you blindly go on ignoring an obvious dilemma for that notion.

May i suggest you do some automotive study into how an internal combustion engine works and why a high performance race car engine for example, doesnt simply melt!

The scientist who came up with that tripe you subscribe too may be educated, however in this claim, hes about as intelligent as a monkey with its hand stuck in a jar of peanuts too stupid to let the fistfull of peanuts go in order to get hand out!

Btw,
Since you apparently dont believe in the concept of radiators and heat exchangers, given the earths core may produce nuclear energy something like 7 times hotter than the sun, havent you wondered why the earths own core doesnt simply burn us all up?

Also, talking about the earths core, we do not know what it was like preflood with any certanty. No one other than God knows that and he hasnt said anymore more than what is written in the bible about the catestrophic flood event. The rest is nothing more than guesswork based only on what we observe today.

We dont know what Adam and Eve looked like, we dont know what the garden of Eden looked like, we do not know what the weather was like. Our use of science uses presuppositions… its all best guess based on extrapolations using todays observations as a benchmark.

Given we live in a world where the environment is also said in the bible to be corrupted by sin, how can any Christian rely on modern observations in order to define the preflood past?.

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What problem? The height of Earth’s mountain ranges fit fine with scientific time frames of geology, and given measured movements of a few millimeters or centimeters per year work with the planet’s energy balance.

Either you need to check your facts or have miscommunicated here.

So then do you accept uniformatarianism as a working principle of geology?

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That makes 0 difference (okay, maybe as much as 3% to the temperature, but not to the survivability). The energy from radiometric decay would turn the entire planet into a ball of plasma (bright blue plasma, specifically). That from just the plates zooming around would heat the surface of the earth to about 1000 k, or hot enough to mostly melt the crust.

Because the total amount of heat being radiated is only enough to warm the earth’s surface by about 1 k.

But we can use the fact that speeding up radiometric decay requires either vaporizing the planet or making every atom larger than hydrogen fall apart, to decide that it is not a viable explanation for anything that requires the earth to exist before and after.

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