I doubt it. Forget about the shale. How about the very existence of the limestone? (And that doesn’t solve the distant starlight problem, speaking of big pictures. 
)
You overlook the point that even uniformitarians say that much of the continent was flooded by the Sauk sequence—flooding that was responsible for depositing the Muav Limestone.
I notice in all that, that you still have not offered any data or research to substantiate that reservoir modeling which is used be petroleum engineers is nullified by your concerns with bacteria. If you wish to characterize the requirement to justify your assertion as motivated by indignance, fine by me, but do bear in mind that I’m not the one claiming to know more about oil reservoirs that reservoir geologists.
Ron, I am a minister with well over 50 years of Bible study under my belt. But even I know not to take offense at being questioned on matters in my field of study. And science especially must welcome being questioned— in fact, it’s the only way it can progress.
I asked a very legitimate question about the likelihood of oil escaping biodegradation by oil-eating bacteria over hundreds of millions of years in oil reservoirs—especially since we know these microbes are there…and we know they reproduce about every 30 minutes—that’s a lot of oil-eating bugs in reservoirs over hundreds of millions of years.
Now, are you able to address this question?
And how long does it take for limestone to form, and limestone to turn into marble?
2 Likes
I have invited you multiple times to present the geophysical mathematics to support your assertions, but you have never been able to.
Do you understand why I and probably every other reader is forced to conclude, based on the information you have presented and not presented, that you do not have the experience and knowledge to justify your claims?
Congratulations on a life well spent in service of God’s beloved church, and the people of the world who need the message of the hope of the gospel.
But…do you expect your readers to agree that you can speak authoritatively on geophysics based on this background?
And why have been urging us to throw all the work of tens of thousands of geophysicists on the trash heap? Without even a cursory mathematical investigation of the field, much less a deep investigation of methodology and modeling? Is that respectful of the geophysics profession and the tens of thousands (many of them devout Christians) who pursue that calling?
Sure. But I would characterize the vast majority of your sentences in this thread as assertions of opinion, not as questions seeking more information.
Best,
Chris
3 Likes
Why are you asking me? - I simply provided a paper by industry experts concerning the formation of hydrocarbon reservoirs over millions of years. Immediately above I stated that, once again, I’m not the one claiming to know more about oil reservoirs than reservoir geologists. You are the one raising this objection to a scientific paper while providing no response whatsoever to anything actually in the paper. If you want to know why bugs have not eaten all the oil, you are invited to do your own homework.
2 Likes
You diminish the import of Psalm 8:4, not only because of the vastness of the size of the universe, but also because of the vastness of its antiquity. God was not short of time that he had to bow to your interpretation.
Assuming a start with 2 microbes reproducing every 30 minutes, from a flood date of 4500 years ago, yields a count of 2^78,840,000, which vastly exceeds the number of all the particles in the visible universe. Actually, within the first week following the flood there would be more reservoir microbes than atoms in the Earth. So it is evident that there must be more to reservoir ecology carrying capacities than chomping and multiplying.
As I have said twice already, the ocean did not transport that sediment there from the sea bed, because it wouldn’t need to, and would smash all the potential fossils if it did: most of that sediment is terrigenic or biogenic, i.e. most of it washed off the land after the ocean rose, and settled in place (for clay or sand), or was formed in place from marine organisms (for shell-hash deposits and limestones).
As to burying things quickly, the rarity of perfect specimens (which anyone who has collected at a fossil site can attest to) demonstrates that rapid burial was infrequent. Small-scale events like underwater landslides, terrestrial floods smothering the area in mud, anoxia, very soft mud that organisms get buried in fast, storms, etc. can produce the frequency of rapid burial we find.
A series of megatsunamis would not do a good job of preserving fragile organisms in mud: it would wash all the sediment away and destroy every potential fossil present.
2 Likes
So you must be more than familiar with Paul Ricouer.
Chris, better slow down in your reading. I did not at all say that anyone who disagrees with me is arrogant. Rather, I said it was arrogant for a uniformitarian geologist to say that only uniformitarians can be geologists. Big difference.
Congratulations. Thank you for your service (sincerely). I often think how grateful I am that I wound up a family doc instead of a pastor…more partners, better hours, kinder feedback from my “congregation”… You have indeed accomplished something to be proud of.
Thanks.
No, we know that powerful tectonics (Jesus was a tekton!) which are operating right now as then, at mere millimetres a year, moved the ocean by upthrusting the land. No magic non-uniformitarian hydraulics are necessary at all. Uniformitarianism transforms God of course.
Thank you, Randy! I appreciate your encouragement!
1 Like
Actually, I’m not. Should I check him out?
: ) well, after 50 years of fundamentalism, it would be a bit of a challenge.
Even the uniformitarian interpretation of Sloss sequences accounts for the sedimentary layers as coming primarily from the ocean–a slowly, slowly rising ocean (at a blistering rate of .01 inch/week!–and I am correcting the earlier rate I gave)–layers laid down by both a “transgressive,” then “regressive” ocean flow over the continent.
So, these sediments were not already upon the continent–they were transported from the ocean, to the continent…and then spread across most of it.
And keep in mind, this is based upon actual geological data, taken from borehole samples through the sedimentary layers.
But another evidence that the sediments were from the ocean instead of from the continent: look at the lifeforms that were suddenly encased within these sediments. They are shallow marine life: such as, trilobites, brachiopods, and molluscs. These sediments were their habitat–thus, were marine sediments, not land sediments, when they were transported by the flooding (“transgressing”) ocean waters.
Study of the megasequences also reveals that these layers were not “washed off the land.” Rather, they remained intact as they were covered by the “regressing” (or retreating) flood waters. Only during the Tejas sequence–the last sequence, at which time the Flood waters were draining off the continent–do we find certain amounts of sediments being washed off the continent (for example, into the Gulf of Mexico).
For him, or for me? 
The individual particles making up the layers either washed off the land or formed under water in place, they were not transported as a sheet–that would destroy all of the fossils or prospective fossils. “Sediment deposited under elevated ocean that then compacted into rock layers” is different from “layers transported from under ocean onto continent by massive tsunami”.
1 Like