Another book, not available digitally (but I got my local public library to buy it) is beautiful as well as scientific. Of the eleven contributing authors, nine are evangelical Christians.
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This quote illustrates a common misconception: that a scientist must hold to the deep-time view of earth’s history in order to be a true scientist. It certainly does not take such a view for an exploration geologist to find oil. Dr. Tim Clarey, who is a geologist and hydrologist, and who was employed by Chevron for many years as an exploration geologist, does not hold to the deep-time model.
Thanks for the references. I’ll check them out.
I meant to include above,
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The [rare] exception that proves the rule, as they say?
You are correct that you don’t have to believe in science to be a scientist. But the term quack is often used for a reason. YEC is not a scientific idea, it’s a biblical interpretation that masquerades as science using pseudoscience. It’s not a conspiracy theory on why the majority of scientists , including geologists, accept where it leads us despite a few rejecting it.
This is the issue.
You’re misrepresenting data by geologists who did the work you try to cite , yet they disagree. Then to further support it you cite outliers that seem to be viewed overall as wrong.
Since it seems you are a young earther. I am curious how many years ago was the flood. You mention places like Pangea and geological periods like the Cretaceous but you seem at times to believe completely dismiss their concepts.
What’s a YEC geological eras compared to science.
For what it is worth, I spent several years embedded with Chevron in refining. I can tell you for a fact that if Tim Clarey was doing exploration for that company, he was working under supervision and following conventional guidance. If he ever showed up to the conference table without work done to best practices and rational based on accepted geology, he would not have been employed long. Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake and dry wells lead to dry bank accounts. Finding oil requires an understanding and acceptance of the age of formation, rock porosity and migration, temperature and pressure history over geological time, folding, and capping. Evolutionary dating of microfossils and degree of cooking is employed in the search where available. I know geologists, including Christian geologists, in the industry and none are YEC.
Petroleum basin and petroleum system modeling is detailed and encompasses millions of years. This is what oil companies expect, emphasis mine:
(BPSM) tracks the evolution of a basin through time as it fills with fluids and sediments that may eventually generate or contain hydrocarbons … On the other hand, BPSM simulates the hydrocarbon-generation process to calculate the charge, or the volume of hydrocarbons available for entrapment, as well as the fluid flow, to predict the volumes and locations of accumulations and their properties. The distance scale typically is tens to hundreds of kilometers, and the periods covered may reach hundreds of millions of years.
You may want to go through the postings of the late Glen Morton @gbob on this forum. Glen was a Christian who started out YEC and spent an entire career in oil exploration. His take:
When I left YEC in disgust in the in 1987, the biggest part of my disgust concerned the utter lack of interest in geologic data. I could put data in front of them, show them pictures, explain what the pictures meant, and the data was still ignored, treated as if it didn’t exist.
You can read his story here.
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Of obstinate hyper-uniformitarians like Darwin or Lyell, yes.
If you go through what would be needed to change the rate of decay, what would happen is that all nucleons would disintegrate.
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More “impossible to tell once you get that early” evidence.
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This is what it’s ALL about. Having to make reality a lie because God.
"You are confusing the lateral sequence of facies, which is Walther’s Law, with the rate of deposition, which obeys Stokes’ Law (to be precise, Stokes’ law is for the simple case of spherical shapes, but the considerations apply to other things). "
No, Stokes’ law does involve spherical shapes, as you acknowledged–and it concerns itself with viscosity, not sedimentation. On the other hand, Walther’s Law describes sediment layering, where there is a “fining up” of sediment layers in a transgressive phase, and a “coarsing up” in a regressive phase.
And geologists have applied Walther’s Law not only to the megasequences, but even to the parasequences within them. In fact, in an earlier comment, I gave the Tonto Group in the Grand Canyon (just as geologists have) as a classic example of Walther’s Law at work–where the Tapeats Sandstone is overlain by Bright Angel Shale, which is overlain by Muav Limestone.
The land deposits preserved from the upper Jurassic through Cretaceous include much of the Rocky Mountain region and the edges of the Appalachian region. Evaporites from parts of that time are best-studied along the Gulf Coast region, due to its relevance for petroleum. There are other evaporites of various ages around North America and other regions of the world.
Also, there are plenty of pointers to slow deposition during the Zuni sequence. Widespread volcaic ash layers (now bentonites) in the Cretaceous Interior Seaway require settling over time through calm water. If the water were highly agitated and full of stirred-up sediment, the ash would simply be blended in, not forming distinct layers. The “teepee buttes” are carbonate mounds formed by biological and chemical alteration of hydrocarbons slowly seeping out of the seafloor. Sedimentation had to be slow enough to allow the local concentration of hydrocarbons, and for animals to be attracted by it. The types of oysters, inoceramid clams, calcareous nannofossils, foraminifera, ammonoids, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and all sorts of other organisms change as you go up layer by layer.
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But Dr. Clarey used deep-time models to find oil. His rejection of deep time is due to his theological commitment to young-earth teachings. Your argument illustrates a common misconception that the credentials of someone who supports your view ought to impress everyone, while people with similar credentials who critique your view can be dismissed. A scientist must admit that the scientific data clearly and strongly support a vast age for the earth in order to be a truthful scientist. Of course, many scientists deal with topics unrelated to the age of the earth and may not be particularly informed. And it is possible to honestly look for alternative explanations. But the fact that hundreds of young-earthers have worked for oil companies, and not one has been able to use young-earth models to find a drop of oil, is not an argument for a young earth. If a young-earth model were true, there would not be a significant difference between the amount of heat, pressure, and time experienced by the organic material in different layers. Yet in reality, oil and gas are found in particular layers that match the expectation for being slowly cooked from dead stuff into simper hydrocarbons. Flood geology claims that catastrophic flooding occurred which should have jumbled everything together, yet oil and gas exploration finds distinct layers that have different types of microfossils, different chemical properties, different magnetism, etc., etc., and this sequence is consistent globally. Oil and gas gets trapped in buried structures such as reefs, which could not exist during a flood geology flood. Diapirs are another good structure for trapping petroleum. They are giant bulges of salt that push their way up through surrounding layers, bending the layers into shapes that can trap the oil. The salt deposition could not occur during a global flood unless salinity was so high as to kill almost all aquatic life, and there must be time for the layers above to form and then for the salt to squash and flow upward. Many other possible petroleum traps exist, all formed by long-term old-earth processes.
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You need to step back from myopic details where your interpretation is easily refuted and look at the big picture (that includes the God and the cosmos – he was not short of time).
“A Review of Tectonic Models and Analytical Data from Almora-Dadeldhura Klippe, Northwest India and Far Western Nepal”
If you have trouble downloading the paper, private message me your personal inbox and I can send you the PDF as an attachment.
TBH, I did not fully understand much of this paper because I am not a geologist. I took a lot of math in high school, college, and grad school, but I would need to do some intensive background in geology to really work out the equations and data.
Some of the basic equations of tectonics are covered in a few pages of an OpenLibre geology text:
A more extensive review of plate tectonic modeling can be found here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323176942_Plate_tectonic_modelling_Review_and_perspectives
I have come to the conclusion that it would take me years of effort to really grasp how plate tectonics models work, and why. You have lots of fun ahead of you if you choose to explore the topic in depth.
Or you could just be like me, and acknowledge that tens of thousands of geophysicists in academia and industry have very good reasons to believe what they believe, and they do a good job of checking on each other to make sure the works that get published are valid.
Blessings,
Chris
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Stokes’ law (with further modifications in light of the shapes of the particles) tells how fast a particle will settle through a fluid. Smaller particles have a high ratio of surface area to mass, so friction slows them down a lot. This determines how quickly a layer could be deposited - how big are the pieces in it? Walther’s law describes the pattern - what types of facies are usually found in a sequence. But Walther’s law requires slow, gradual change. Tsunamis mix everything up and don’t produce a pattern like Walther’s. Actual major floods, such as the refilling of the Mediterranean after the Messinian, do not follow Walther’s law. Instead, there is an abrupt change from one facies to a quite different one. Such a change can also occur if there is a long gap of nondeposition between one layer and the next. Examining the contact layer is a good clue. For example, in an ocean setting, there will often be evidence that the contact between layers was sitting exposed on the ocean floor for a long time. Animals make holes down into the lower layer, there may be chemical changes at the surface, if the lower layer is hard there may be attached organisms like corals or oysters growing on it, there’s often an accumulation of worn bone and teeth. Such surfaces would have no time to form during a flood geology flood, as Kurt Wise pointed out. But they are found throughout the geologic record.
Michael Tuomey’s 1848 Geology of South Carolina has a short section discussing how geology supports a biblical picture. He briefly dismisses young-earth concerns as a thing of the past, noting that about five minutes of studying the rocks should be enough to show that they are quite old. He doesn’t accept the evolutionary ideas favored by a minority in his day, but particularly focuses on the fact that the geological and biblical records both pointed back to a beginning, not to the eternal cycles popular in “Enlightenment” imagination.
His estimate of five minutes, though, presupposes the understanding that had developed over 200 years. Steno, in the 1660’s, was the first to publish on understanding the pattern of rock layers. In particular, he pointed out that layers underneath would be older than those above, and layers with matching features found in different places could be identified as being the same layer (among other patterns). Building on this, by the late 1600’s, it was clear that there were a lot of geological layers, and people began to suspect that they might require a while to form. By the early 1700’s, it was clear that a single flood was not a possible explanation - the layers did not show hydraulic sorting, and looked like ordinary accumulations of sediment such as could be seen slowly piling up today. As people looked at various parts of Europe, and eventually other regions in the world, they began to see that some of the same layers could be recognized quite widely, as well as finding that the total number of layers was quite large. They also began to notice that the fossils also showed patterns, with different types in different layers. The accumulated evidence by the 1770’s firmly established a vast, though quite uncertain, age of the earth. (Much of this work was done by Christians, in part because most of the educated were clergy.) The progress in a geological understanding of the age of the earth should not be confused with religious or philosophical speculations, though both atheistic and young-earth sources often do so. About 1800, Cuvier firmly established that extinction had occurred and the use of fossils to identify layers was on solid scientific ground. All of the geological layers seemed to be pre-human, in contrast to deistic speculation about eternal cycles of the earth and humanity. Likewise, the observed pattern was for simper life to dominate the older layers, while more complex organisms gradually added to the sequence. No fixed patterns in sea level, temperature, etc. were apparent; instead, one had to go out and observe the rocks to determine what the conditions were at their formation.
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Definitely, as long as it fits in to a match box of 2448 BCE when Peleg was born and named for its greatest manifestation. Because Jesus.
Actually, a number of articles point out that there is a “fining up” landward of sediment deposition, with tsunamis…just as Walther’s Law says of transgressing waters. And the tsunamis of the Flood, moving massive amounts of sediment across continents, were in a league of their own.
Thanks for the materials, Chris.
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What? I’m neither trying to impress nor dismiss anyone. I’m simply saying that you don’t have to have a uniformitarian world view in order to do geology.