Which creationist is it that says folded rocks with cracks don’t exist? Truly, I’d like to know.
Actually, creationists love to see folded rocks, particularly the ones that have layer upon layer, often many meters thick, strata that putatively took tens of thousands or millions of years to lay down, but have little or no cracking and undoubtedly were all laid down at the same time during a flood and folded while they were still wet.
Geologic formations commonly show clear evidence that the rocks could not have been hard and brittle before they were folded, but were plastic and soft. The rock must have been deformed while the sediment was still unconsolidated and saturated with water. They are evidence of catastrophic processes, not slow accumulation over long periods of time.
And depending on the conditions, with less saturation or none, the rocks can still crack and obviously do.
The events after the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in Washington State are a good example of rapid deposition of sedimentary layers even with only a minor catastrophe, (geologically speaking), the same or similar to those that are reputed to have been laid down one at a time over thousands or millions of years.
In the second of their “ten best evidences for a young Earth,” he showcases a rock formation in the Grand Canyon that he claims has folded without fracturing. He includes a photo of it, which is poorly photographed and has people in it, ostensibly to give a sense of scale. He specifically states that there are no fractures in the rock formation at the hinge of the fold. Yet in other, more sharply exposed photographs of the same rock formation, including some on the AIG website itself, fractures in the hinge of the fold are clearly visible – in the very places where his own photograph has people standing in front of them.
Even if his claim about the fold having no fractures had been correct, however, his wet deformation hypothesis still defies the laws of gravity. The rock formation is over thirty metres tall. Soft sediment on that scale simply does not retain its structure like that.
Don’t understand why? It’s the same reason why you can’t build a skyscraper the same way that you would build a mud hut. Andrew Snelling’s wet deformation hypothesis is like trying to build the Burj Khalifa out of clay rather than steel reinforced concrete. It would collapse before you got as far as the second floor, let alone to 828 metres.
Mount St Helens is not analogous to the Grand Canyon.
Not all sedimentary rocks are created equal. Volcanic ash is not the same as shale, or limestone, or sandstone, or evaporite. Shale is formed from tiny particles of clay, a few microns across, that can only settle out on very still water over long periods of time. Evaporite forms when a body of water evaporates in hot, dry conditions, as we see happening in places like the Dead Sea today. It does not form in turbulent, flood conditions, period.
Also, the canyons that were carved in Mount St Helens are totally different to the Grand Canyon. The canyons at Mount St Helens are relatively straight. The Grand Canyon twists and turns and bends and meanders all over the place. Twists and turns and bends are carved out by slow, meandering rivers, not by rapid torrents.
Claiming that the Grand Canyon could have formed quickly because Mount St Helens formed quickly is like claiming that snails can crawl at 70 miles an hour because cheetahs sprint at 70 miles an hour. It’s a complete non sequitur.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
108
Being that open is unusual. I wasn’t. My cult deconstructed itself authoritatively, benignly and I continued in that. It always did as it went along in a minor key, letting go of insane ‘healing’ ‘doctrine’, anti-evolutionism, divorce and remarriage. Then it went major. The reconstruction was neo-trinitarian, which was oxygen at the time. The ‘emergent’ followed [for me], the balance was in the favour of reconstruction. Until 11 years ago I was TE-ID-EC in the background. Rare earth still until only 4 ago. Then the balance tilted… not much lower I can go!
The point of my short discussion on Mt. St. Helens was simply to show that minor catastrophic processes can result in rapid deposition of layers and rapid erosion.
I think we can agree on several issues:
Andrew Snelling’s BD hypothesis for the origin of the Grand Canyon is unlikely, (but I am not throwing Snelling under the bus.)
The process of the formation of the Grand Canyon differs in significant ways from that of the canyon near Mt St Helens.
The formation of the Grand Canyon was not due to uniformitarian processes–“the present is the key to the past.” In other words, the relatively small river at the bottom of the canyon did not carve it out over millions of years. Rather, the canyon was formed by a series of catastrophic events, either events scattered throughout millions of years or a few months during the abative phase of the worldwide flood of Noah’s time.
Where we disagree then is that you would choose the former, and I the latter. Of course, I can’t speak for you–just taking my best shot at it.
YEC sees Genesis as history, not as a myth to communicate spiritual lessons. We use this as foundational assumption for our research projects. After all, God did promise to never again destroy the earth with a flood. But if the Genesis flood was a localized event, God has not kept his word, as there have been many destructive local floods in the history of humankind.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
111
Yes, due to Fermi’s paradox; we were ‘special’, until I realized, only 3-4 years ago, that that was nonsense. Even young Dickie Dawkins seems to imagine that there are hyperintelligent aliens who’ve gone to Kardashev II at least. The reason that we can’t watch the neighbours’ TV is because of signal to noise ratio. Despite Voyager I at 150 AU (less than 1/4% of a light year in 44 years) sending back data from beyond the heliopause on 23 W (!!!), radio communication from one star system to another is absolutely impossible, let alone transport. It is all technologically, economically, politically impossible everywhere. The principle of mediocrity is as powerful as the reality of material eternity.
If Werner were the least bit honest he wouldn’t claim that mammal and bird fossils alongside dinosaur fossils are a problem for the theory of evolution.
That point refutes nearly all of flood geology. If local events can produce the observations then you don’t need a global flood.
I would agree.
There is no evidence that will change a YEC’s mind, at least not at AiG. No matter what the evidence is they will claim that there was a recent global flood, and that the Earth is young. No. Matter. What.
It seems that if we put the shoe on the other foot–show how another religion pleads specially for their presuppositions–that we might realize how hypocritical we are–at least, sometimes.
And my point was that minor catastrophic processes can only result in rapid deposition and erosion of some forms of layers but not others. As I said, volcanic ash is not the same as shale, sandstone, limestone, or evaporites.
I think you missed my point that channels carved by catastrophic events do not meander about like the Grand Canyon, but are relatively straight.
Yes, but what is Genesis the history of? It’s specifically the history of Israel. If the Genesis flood was a localised event, it would have referred to the world as known to Noah and not to the whole planet. This being the case, the promise would have been made specifically to Noah, his descendants, and ultimately to the nation of Israel.
Has God ever wiped out the entire Jewish people with a flood since? I think you’ll find that He hasn’t.
Have you guys ever heard of the Atlas of Creation? It’s a book series by Muslim creationist Adnan Oktar under the pen name Harun Yahya. He sent copies to everybody, all over the world. He claims evolution has never occurred and that critters are exactly as God originally created them.
Biologist PZ_Myers wrote: “The general pattern of the book is repetitious and predictable: the book shows a picture of a fossil and a photo of a living animal, and declares that they haven’t changed a bit, therefore evolution is false. Over and over. It gets old fast, and it’s usually wrong (they have changed!) and the photography, while lovely, is entirely stolen.”
Oktar might have been more careful–he actually used a picture of a fishing lure, with hook and all, instead of a real animal.
Exactly. Catastrophic flood waters don’t stop and go in the opposite direction several times in a short distance, and they certainly don’t stay in a single channel.
You only get these features from a river moving slowly across a relatively flat plane. These meanders incised into the Colorado plateau as it was slowly uplifted over millions of years.