I believed the same thing until just a few years ago. It never occurred to me that footprints and worm tunnels and other things like that would have been erased in a “rapid burial.” So when we see layers of fossil bones between layers of fossil footprints and other things, there’s no way all of those things could have been laid down in a single event.
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WIth respect to that question, even my Giant African Landsail knows to try and climb out of the water when I bath it. More to the point, wouldn’t we, therefore, expect to find human remains in lots of tight clusters (alongside fossils of other intelligent creatures) since by the same logic they would have been the first to rush to high ground?
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That’s what I would think and expect to find, but we don’t. And it makes you wonder, where would all the human bones be?
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No, Around here if you climbed the highest hill near to you in a global flood, you would wind up on a hilltop isolated by flood waters from everything else, then be swept away as it covered the hill you were on. There are a lot of flash floods in our area, and I know of many people who can attest to the water rising to waist deep in minutes, trapping them in their houses, so there may not have even been time for that.
I suspect that in a tremendous downpour that would cover the earth, most people and animals would be pretty much trapped near their home turf. Ultimately, there would be no high ground, and most would be washed downstream, assuming there was a downstream, to either be trapped in debris or their bloating corpses would float to the top in a few days, to sink later when decomp progressed and they decompressed. They would then be pretty evenly distributed I would imagine, as they bobbed about the surface of the waters.
What a gruesome thought. Especially if the population was in the billions as some YEC folks proclaim. I would suspect most other animals would similarly be evenly distributed in a global flood of that nature.
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I just wanted to add based on some of the comments that by believing in evolution it leads to you losing faith and discrediting scripture is simply not true. For me the opposite happened. Biologos is one of the organizations that helped strengthen my faith. My faith was not weak before either. It was fine and this fortified it.
But first leading up to that.
As a Christian who studies the word in depth I could not have helped but to notice things that just simply seemed like lies and contradictions. That was the first issue. That’s not with science but things that did not work smoothly when taken literally within the stories themselves. That resulted in me studying out works that hoped to harmonize the story seamlessly. That’s when I begin to view genesis as an ahistorical , not historical, tale and when I started realizing that all these numbers (7,10,40) and names tied to fate had to be literary techniques to link archetypal patterns together. I also started to realize lies were not lies, but were hyperbolic statements and statements shaped by their understanding of the world. Such as the whole world coming to Egypt for grain and the sun moving around earth and so on and sea dragons and Jonah and genealogies that jumped around and so on. O started to wonder about canonization. Where does scripture stare that men would have the unquestioning power to determine what books belonged hundreds of years later. Why did the Torah mention the book of Jasher that we no longer have and why did Mark have earlier Vs later manuscripts and where did Jude learn about Satan and Michael arguing over the body of Moses or about who Enoch prophesied about.
All this time that these things were attacking my faith I worked through it and have a really solid faith now not shaken by anything. During this time I never considered the contradictions between science and a literal interpretation. When I got to that bridge I knew without a doubt I believed in God and it was beyond reasonable doubt. When faced with the conflict between a literal interpretation of scripture and science I easily got over it because I already faced and overcame that same issue but within textual analysis. So it easily allowed me to work through it.
My faith is stronger than even and a big part of that is from being able to see the three “books” God gave humanity to understand him, us, and his creation. The book of scriptures ( bible and related texts) the book of science ( to understand his creations) and the books of philosophy ( human reasoning guided by scripture, experiences, and data).
So no believing in evolution does not lead someone to lack of faith or throwing the Bible out. It does result in people reshaping their paradigm on scriptures purpose and writing styles along with many other reasons.
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Hi, Ernie.
Have you noticed that Genesis has two different creation stories with different orders and methods of creation?
They both can’t be literal history, as their facts are mutually exclusive.
Thanks, Phil, that is really helpful. 
Since I think it’s really important to practice Proverbs 18:17, I did some background research.
The first thing I notice is that the CreationWiki article on red shift quantization relies on unpublished research from no earlier than 14 years ago. The published sources it cites are from even farther back, decades earlier. Thus the sample sizes relied upon are tiny and subject to sampling bias.
I continued by looking through credible sources identified by a Google search. What I found it this: Now that robust samples (for example from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey) are available and properly cataloged, the quantization effect has largely disappeared. To the extent red-shift quantization of quasars does exist, there are good explanations for it:
- massive-scale supergalactic structures
- quantum mechanics-based quantization of H emission spectra
I quote from a recently minted astrophysics Ph.D:
Throughout the 2000’s conflicting results were published using the same data. The conflict seems to center on the selection effects of the surveys, and the corrections applied to account for them. I did a quick search for ‘redshift quantisation’ on the Arxiv and found no papers since 2009, which suggests the supporting data has been comprehensibly discredited, or explained away by natural mechanisms.
There are two explanations for the quantization that do not require exotic cosmologies. The first is the large scale clustering of galaxies that traces the cosmic web. The walls and filaments formed in this web leads to groupings of galaxies around specific redshifts along the line of sight. The second explanation is the quantisation of emission from Hydrogen, known as the Lyman series. Since photons can only be released with certain energies, the measured redshifts are also quantised (this is only true in low pressure and temperature environments, otherwise pressure and thermal broadening occur).
Source
The supposed problem of red-shift quantization was a great sound bite from a “creation science” website that seemed to make sense. However, the problem disappears upon careful examination by the scientific community.
This is consistent with my experience with “creation science”: it produces pithy sound bites, but falls apart upon careful examination.
I do not have time to carefully examine every point you made, my friend @cewoldt . Now that I have given you an example of how you can put Proverbs 18:17 into practice, though, you can apply the practice yourself. It will take some time and effort, but you can do it. And if you find anything confusing, there’s a good community here that can help answer your questions.
Best,
Chris
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Hi Craig,
Christy counts the consensus theories of the scientific community as being credible. This is not hard for a literate person to do, even if the finer points of the scientific analysis might be somewhat obscure.
Speaking of non-scientists and scientists: Could you share some of your own background with regard to formal scientific training? Have you pursued any advanced scientific degrees, or are you currently enrolled in such a program?
Best,
Chris
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You might be interested in this paper:
Mutations change DNA sequences. Changes in DNA sequences can change phenotype. Phenotypes pass through the filter of natural selection. Seems pretty straightforward to me.
That’s not what I read:
It is always interesting to hear the conspiracy theories that fly around in YEC circles. This appears to be yet another one of those conspiracy theories.
Aren’t you dismissing radiometric dating with a wave of the hand?
If red shift is thrown out, we can still see galaxies that are millions and billions of light-years away. This can be measured with standard candles such as type Ia supernovae.
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This is the sort of lay explanations that I appreciate learning from when I visit. Thanks!
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Hi Craig,
Some radiometric methods such as K-Ar and U-Th have very large standard error of measurement–on the order of hundreds of thousands or perhaps even a few million years.
Measuring the age of a 100ya rock with such a method is of course going to entail a proportionally large measurement error. Remember that the standard error of measurement is basically the same, whether you are using a 100ya rock or a 100mya rock.
Measuring the age of a 100ya rock with such a method is like weighing a postage stamp on a truck scale with a recognized 20 kg standard error. Suppose the truck scale says that a postage stamp weighs 20 kilograms. Does that mean that truck scale is unreliable for measuring trucks?
Best,
Chris Falter
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Or measuring the length of your driveway with your car’s odometer. The 50 ft driveway will always measure .1 miles or 0 miles.
With the rocks it is similar but a little different in some cases as the volcanic rocks tested were not always fully molten and had their geologic clocks reset, but were actually old rocks from the volcano that were expelled and mixed with fresh magma and thus were accurately dated as older, in my understanding of it. In any case, the dating was accurate in context given the material dated, whether by error bars or the nature of the specimen.
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Ernie. go look up the Creation Research Society web site. You will find I published quite a bit back in the 1970s and 80s. Look up Glenn R Morton (one paper I Robert Morton). I worked in the oil industry and when I was 29 was in charge of recruiting and training geophysicists for Atlantic Richfield, which at the time employed 50,000 people, probably 1000 geophysicists. I hired geophysicists from Christian Heritage College, Henry Morris’ college. After a few years, they either left the industry because they couldn’t justify what they saw with what Henry taught, or they gave up the young earth. We didn’t indoctrinate them, it was the data that did it. And at the time, I was still a YEC myself. But by the mid 1980s, I threw in the towel.
The geologic data simply doesn’t support a young earth. Throughout out the geologic column, are burrows. There is one formation which which concerned me greatly, the Haymond formation of west Texas. It consists of about 15000 layers of sand and shale o
“Two thirds of the Haymond is composed of a repititious alternation of fine- and very fine-grained olive brown sandstone and black shale in beds from a millimeter to 5 cm thick. The formation is estimated to have more than 15,000 sandstone beds greater than 5 mm thick.” p. 87.
"Tool-mark casts (chiefly groove casts), flute casts and flute-lineation casts are common current-formed sole marks. Trace fossils in the form of sand-filled burrows are present on every sandstone sole, but nearly absent within sandstone beds. ~ Earle F. McBride,“Stratigraphy and Sedimentology of the Haymond Formation,” in Earle F. McBride, Stratigraphy, Sedimentary Structures and Origin of Flysch and Pre-Flysch Rocks, Marathon Basin, Texas (Dallas: Dallas Geological Society, 1969), p. 87-88
Give each layer 1 day for recolonization of burrowers the debosit would require 41 years. Haymond formation is about 1300 m and the entire geologic column is about 5000 m thick. If it was deposited by Noah flood then the math would be like this: 1300/5000*326=95 days this means 157 couplets / day. with burrows. Each day 157 times, one must have shale laid down, worms burrow into the shale and have the sand come in and fill in the burrows with sand, and the worms are never seen escaping the sand-catastrophe, so the next layer of shale must be laid down, worms burrow into it and sand fill those burrows, over and over for 95 days. There are NO shale filled burrows into the sand.
This seems impossible to do given the turbulence of the global flood. Below is what the formation looks like and notice after it solidified (diagenesis takes more than a year) it was uplifted and turned on its end.
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I read extensively, a few years ago, presentations on all sides of this debate, with charges and counter charges. The best I could come up with is that it wasn’t conclusive either way, but several authorities judged that more took the young earth view than the old, but that both were represented. And if that is what it true, it is interesting but doesn’t inform us too much one way or the other. Well, I don’t remember the specifics this far out, just the summary conclusion I reached, and that may also be a bit faded these years later.
If many views were present then must some of them have been wrong? Were some perhaps not really Christians at all? I suspect if you could access what each of them believed you would conclude that all were indeed Christians. From what I can tell the mission of this website is primarily to spread the word that those who become convinced of the rightness of science need not leave their faith behind, that science and faith can be compatible. I don’t think anyone here questions the faith of those who hold to YEC, only the long-term durability of a faith at odds with science.
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Great to see you’ve looked into it already. In which case I definitely recommend checking out the book I recommended. I don’t know what presentations you were engaging with so perhaps i am misunderstanding your use of these terms. However, I would gently suggest that when discussing the Patristic period both old earth creationist and young earth creationist are anachronistic descriptions.
“Presentations” is not very definitive, I agree. Well, full length books, articles, lectures and YouTube videos to be more precise. I may look at the recommended book as well–I don’t think that was on my original reading list. We have recently downsized our living space and concurrently, our library. So I will see if I can obtain this through inter library loan. I just received Who Was Adam Rana and Ross from Walla Walla University Library, so will read that first.
Also, I find in my “research” that YEC, OEC and EC all state that their motive is primarily removing obstacles to faith so that people can come to know Jesus Christ as Savior. One YEC individual credibly reports tens of thousands of people reached with the Good News through creation evangelism (in a nominal Christian nation moving toward secularism) with thousands of decisions for Christ. Frankly, I hesitate to be more specific because I fear that some overly zealous EC might create confusion by launching a counter initiative to set these folks straight. Philippians 1:15-18 should inform us on this issue.
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I could not agree more. Personally, it bothers me not where a Christian ultimately lands on creationist issues. I don’t seek to ‘convert’ others but will discuss it if I am asked directly or if it comes up (like here on the forum for example). At the end of the day, so long as they have thoroughly thought through the implications of the their creationist position I’m good.
What I do take issue with is certain creationist groups who seem to be more concerned with total ideological victory than gracious dialogue and mutual growth in the faith. Iron sharpens iron, but not so one can publicly shiv fellow believers for their views on science and evolution. Christ is all in all not creation theology (of whatever flavour). On that point, I’m glad we can unite on common ground. 
Be blessed, Liam
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I read extensively, a few years ago, presentations on all sides of this debate, with charges and counter charges. The best I could come up with is that it wasn’t conclusive either way, but several authorities judged that more took the young earth view than the old, but that both were represented.
I know that to people who don’t see much geologic information it could appear to be inconclusive. I can assure you it isn’t. For one, try to explain the 157 times per day a year long flood requires for each couplet of shale and sand. That is 9 minutes for each layer of shale, burrowing and then sand deposition. Apart from the problems of souring these two different lithologies, shale doesn’t even settle out in 9 m. Shale is made up by extremely small particles. Have you ever stirred up the muddy bottom a lake and lost the ability to see anything in the muddy water? That is shale.
Furthermore, throughout what would be flood deposits, the fossiliferous rocks, we have animals behaving at every level like there is no flood going on.
From the Cambrian, the lowest level of generally fossiliferous rock (yes I know there are Precambrian fossils, but young earthers generally say the fossiliferous sediments were deposited by the Flood.
Let’s consider one thing before we go further, the thickness of the fossiliferous rocks. I did a paper with another geophysicist and we proved from gravity and seismic that 200 miles south of New Orleans there were 50,000 feet of sediment. She did other work and showed under New Orleans, where the Missisippi River has been dumping sediment for more than 200 million years, there is 75,000 feet of sedimentary rock. But even a modest 36,500 ft thickness, which is not uncommon, requires 100 feet per day of average deposition during the flood. As you look at the pictures, ask yourself why there at these rates of deposition why all the fossils are not found at the bottom of the flood? Ask yourself how they had time to make theses tracks. From below are oldest to youngest, (lowest to highest in geologic column.
From the Cambrian, worm tracks, and ripples. this is shallow water.
From the Pennsylvanian,
Triassic. A dinosaur walked into a still body of water. How do I know it is still water? Rapidly running water would wash his prints away immediately. this isn’t the flood. There are rain drops on the shore. Remember, this layer lies above several thousand feet of supposedly flood deposited sediment, so this isn’t the start of the flood.
Mesozoic age. A horseshoe crab had time to peacefully die as he walked in a spiral, slowly dying. this was not a rapid death by the flood.
From the Paleocene, Ducks nibbled their dinner as if nothing special were happening.
And all the while these animals are living their life as if no flood is going on, Plants are growing in sediments which are in the middle of the flood deposited fossil sediments
Contrary to claims that there are no roots under coal, I will show you two cases, one from Canada and one from the US. both show the roots of plants which formed coal. The plant matter wasn’t washed in as YECs claim. The first is from the Cretaceous of the US, the second two are from the Cretaceous in Canada. Both show plants acting like there was no flood.
Edited to add, It took me a while to find the source of the picture below. I got a pic of this from a friend I worked with. Here is what I wrote about it before. It is from the Cretaceous not the Pennsylvanian, so I edited that to fix it as well, Often the claim is made that the entire geologic column was deposited in a huge catastrophe which lasted only 1 year. There is much evidence that the geologic column took a long time to be deposited. A core taken from the Murfin Drilling Co. Colorado State No. 1-16 well at the end of 1983 showed about 250 successive layers of roots in a 3-foot length of core. Below is a small part of the core which shows the roots and the layers that they truncate into. Each layer represents one year of growth. This core represents about 10 years worth of growth. The data from this core is inconsistent with the concept that the geologic column was rapidly deposited. I must emphasize that this coal was found in the middle of the geologic column there in Colorado below several thousand feed of sediment. My friend said he nicked this piece from the core cause he found it so interesting and they were looking for oil, not coal. lol
I will show that worms, clionid sponges etc are doing their thing, burrowing into rocks and sediments later.
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