Thanks, that’s exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. So, if rock age calculation works, then oil should never be hit above rocks older than X million years, whatever the cutoff is for oil formation. Is that what we see? I am somewhat doubtful because I faintly recall stories of oil quite near the surface of the earth. I suppose such stories could be explained by erosion, in which case we cam test the age of rocks near the surface. At any rate, it is all a very fascinating topic. Is there anything like a graduate textbook on the topic you might recommend?
Since it’s a liquid can’t it move around? I remember reading about a petroleum spring found once.
Then maybe upper layers is not a control.
Definitely not. I just don’t know if it could be affected by earthquakes and other things like fossils that don’t move as easily. I feel like fossilized species would be a better indicator about strata authenticity concerning dating.
I don’t know anything about this though just laymen thoughts. I will probably never study it either. But I was imagining like 15 glass cups stacked inside one another with water in number 4. But if I slammed them, and cracked number four you may find it in layer 5 if it’s liquid all the way. But maybe oil gets pressurized into coal? Don’t know.
Problem with fossils is circularity of dating. At least with oil there’s a falsifiable hypothesis.
Except the same argument as with geological layers and fossil fuels.
If we only find these species at this layer, or at that layer and never find these species below this layer or above this layer we can price together a time period based on species. With those species, we can then compare it to things the minerals there and know if it was underwater or not. We can look at those species and see if it shows up on two continents drifted apart from back when Pangea was here. Lots of multiple fields working together all pointing towards a single picture. Once we get within a few thousand years it also becomes more clear of some thing was around it not by seeing if it was marked by human weapons and so on. If we never find T. rex in the same layers as humans it kind of blows apart the idea that we coexisted.
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La Brae tar pits would be a prominent example. Interesting place.
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I can certainly see the appeal of that sort of argument, but it is a whole lot more to piece together and evaluate, so I’d just have to take someone’s word for it, which I loath to do. I like science that I can verify for myself, and not rely on appeals to authority for major premises and conclusions.
Also, the other great thing about the oil test is if evolutionists are wrong there is a lot of oil money to be made by creationists! I don’t see how creationists can make much money if they turn out to be right about fossils.
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You’ve mentioned mathematics and it’s contention with evolution’s timeline.
I could not find the actual study. But I barely looked. When googling mathematical probability, and improbability, I came across several arguments by mathematicians that claim evolution had plenty of time.
He is wrong. Otherwise, genetic algorithms would replace programmers and I’d be out of a job. Modern computers can easily match evolutionary timelines. I am still gainfully employed as a software developer, ergo evolution is false 
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This is a caution to me, too.
“The greatest danger besetting American Evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind as to its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough. This cannot take place apart from profound immersion for a period of years in the history of thought and spirit. People are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning money or serving the church or preaching the Gospel. They have no idea of the infinite value of spending years of leisure in conversing with the greatest minds and souls of the past, and thereby ripening and sharpening and enlarging their powers of thinking. The result is that the arena of creative thinking is abdicated and vacated to the enemy. Who among the evangelicals can stand up to the great secular or naturalistic or atheistic scholars on their own terms of scholarship and research? Who among the evangelical scholars is quoted as a normative source by the greatest secular authorities on history or philosophy or psychology or sociology or politics? Does your mode of thinking have the slightest chance of becoming the dominant mode of thinking in the great universities of Europe and America which stamp your entire civilization with their own spirit and ideas?” (Charles Malik, cited in Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind , 26.)
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Disclaimer, I worked mostly in midstream, and I’m not a geologist. But these look promising:
Practical Petroleum Geochemistry For Exploration and Production
Here is a free geology textbook sponsored by the British Columbia government
Physical Geology with this brief chapter for Fossil Fuels
Not in a really simple way I am afraid. Geology is somewhat more chaotic than a lab bench, it is just the way nature rolls. Hydrocarbon tends to migrate and fractionate in situ, in fact this is how a commercial reservoir is formed. For a classic well, you need porous rock for flow, and an impervious domed cap for containment.
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So how would you tell all the other scientific fields how to calculate time? What’s the more logical and scientific explanation and process to determine that age of the world? Because the other guys option is a 6-10k old earth where every species was created as clade originators fully equipped with all the dna to work around toxins, climates, and catastrophic events involving space that popped out every species that all died and ended up in their respective layers and mutated into millions and millions of species during this time.
As stated before if genesis is literal as he claims that means all dinosaurs evolved and died within a 1,000 years or either Noah had them on his ark and so many other things. If evolution is not scientifically backed, then we know creationism is definitely not either. One side seems to have all the science backing it up from dozens and dozens of fields and the other has almost none on the theological or scientific side.
The line that’s being drawn is that almost all scientists are stupid brainwashed people pushing their own agenda and working together to make
All these fields work or either that’s the data that’s coming up.
Because it’s not just one fields that will be wrong. It’s botanist, entomologist, astronomers, geneticists and so on. By the time all these things keep gettin stripped away and accused of being false I doubt even gravity and time would have s leg to stand on.
That’s a tough argument to sell in the face of millions of peer reviewed scientific papers. Since the other guy routinely seems to want to avoid a theological debate, and it seems them ones are drawn as mentioned before on science being right across the board, or wrong across the board with no other scientific explanation i am pulling out. Then conversation to me seems to have dipped into what it was like in my sixth grade science class.
It’s more frustrating then interesting to enjoyable and all I can think of is verses about fools and rocks. I think one of the most annoying feelings I can get, and this is not directed at you just in general and how the entire conversation keeps going as whole from the very start, is how stupid I feel knowing no matter what you say or present, the other person will never get it. You can show them receipts, you can explain logically how no man in a red suit can fly around the whole world in one night and so on and some will just stand wholeheartedly behind Santa is real. Once it gets to that point it’s not worth the time To try to pretend they will have a “ahah” moment.
So best luck to everyone.
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I am not sure those are the only two alternatives. What else? I don’t know. I do think old earth seems more plausible than literal Genesis, based on what little I know about these fields. I am surprised that the evidence does not seem as solid on closer examination, and the argumentation seems a bit circular or at least inconclusive. The two arguments I tried to verify myself, biochemical mutation rates and phylogenetic signal, leave me with mixed reviews. Mutation has held up the best so far. Phylogenetic signal seems mathematically fallacious.
The basic weird thing is the closrr the claims get to the fields where I have expertise, the weaker they appear, or outright false. And math is the most rigorous. So if the claims fall aprt in the most rigorous fields where i know something, this casts a doubt in my mind regarding evolution fields claim i know less about. i hope this makes sense. i am just left with a weird feeling about the state of evolutionary theory and even old earth, so i am looking for hard verifiable claims.
I am sorry I have made this not fun. I will try to do better.
I do think your fossil argument sounds pretty good, anf will get more books to be better informed on that part. if you can recommend any i would appreciate it.
Also your nature pictures are amazing and among my favorite.
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Has nothing to do with you. Just its obvious the thread will never seem to get past what it is. I already know what I know and it’s useless for me to keep reminding myself of what I remember already.
It’s like a political debate where you see no matter what is brought up there is a republican twist to it and a Democrat twist to it and almost 99% of the time what one side agrees on the other disagrees. No matter what is said it’s already decided on what team. I’m guilty of it as well. No hard feelings.
I just sat back and added up all the time I spent and realized it was mostly just a waste. If a discussion results in everyone learning what they already knew it essentially just was a waste. It’s not about any one individual making it fun, I meant it’s not entertaining for me to essentially text to myself what i already believe and I feel that’s basically what the convo is on my part.
I have learned from you regarding fossils and mimicry argument, and from others about rock dating and oil, and Henry’s variation overlap argument. I have learned a lot from everyone.
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I think it worthwhile. One, there are always those who lurk these forums, and some of them are really trying to sort it all out. Two, posting for me anyways, serves to focus, clarify, and articulate my thoughts. Three, even with those who are fairly fixed in their positions, the object is constructive engagement, not a take down.
Of course, there are also posters who do not engage in any meaningful way, and that can become a waste.
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That would require the creation to have fossils already in the ground when it was created. Is that really what you are going for here?
The rocks we are talking about are found above fossils in the geologic column. This means that the rocks are younger than the fossils, at least in standard geology. So why would God create the Earth with fossils already in the ground. Is God just trying to fool us into thinking these species used to exist?
Any evidence for this?
HOW???
Evolution has nothing to do with it. We are talking about basic physics and geology, not evolution. Also, if Genesis is true then I shouldn’t need to start with the premise that it is true. I should be able to start with just the evidence, and that evidence will lead me to the correct conclusions.
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What you would need to show is how common anomalies are and why they shouldn’t be discarded. There is anomalous data in every single scientific field.
Feigned persecution is not a replacement for scientific evidence.
Would a worldwide apocalypse of randomly exploding nuclear bombs be good enough? If radioactivity can change all willy-nilly as YEC’s claim, then nuclear bombs should be either randomly exploding or becoming inert. They are all balanced on a knife’s edge near criticality, and a small increase in half-lives would cause them to go boom.
Unfortunately, professional creationists make their money by misrepresenting science.
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There is actually a control: 100 years ago, drilling was a lot more random. And a lot less successful.
Thus geologists pass logic and probability 101 with flying colors.
Peace,
Chris
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