Question from a YEC: What explains sedimentary rock other than a worldwide flood?

Faith & Science Conversation
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Ah, the old, ‘The biologists support me in private’ ploy.

He’s lying. This isn’t something one with any actual experience with the worldwide biological research community could be honestly mistaken about. Among mainstream biologists, common descent is viewed as the central, organizing framework for understanding biological diversity. While there are plenty of disagreements about the details of evolution, the core reality is far too useful and far too well supported to be the subject of doubt.

Seriously, how does this make even the tiniest bit of sense to you? Why would thousands of evolutionary biologists, and hundreds of thousands of biologists whose work touches on evolution or depends on it in some way, spend their lives studying and relying on something they know to be false? Why not just take a job in biotech industry, where the hours are shorter and the pay better? And why would anyone bother enforcing such a ridiculous orthodoxy? What’s the gain in forcing others to study something you know to be false?

Yeah, but there’s the rub.

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Okay, okay, it’s possible he’s merely delusional on this subject. Regardless, his claim bears no resemblance to the actual view of biologists.

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Wow, you heard me! :grin: (How many times have I heard YECs say that we’re calling God a liar by not taking ‘the plain meaning’ of Genesis 1. :grimacing:)

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I’m still waiting for one (or both) of you to explain how layers of sedimentary rock wound up on top of a 10,500-ft mountain. Did ongoing volcanic activity create that mountain after Noah’s flood laid down the sediments in multiple alternating layers of sandstone (desert) and limestone (seas)? Was each layer changed from sediment to rock instantaneously, or did that take time? If it took time to lay the sediments and for the sand or mud to become rock, how close to the present are we before the mountain appears?

The whole idea of “YEC geology” is ludicrous.

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Yes – the “shifting sands” of science are like the top few millimeters of a dune that’s five meters tall.

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And what, precisely, about tanagers that look like fringillids isn’t convergence?

Given that you are arguing against a paleontologist, knowing a few things about non-paleo geology seems likely.

Any that assert that plate tectonics was sped way up or that megatsunamis deposited lots of layers, the former of which would require vaporizing the planet, the latter would just smash all of the fossils, neither of which happened.

Like Milankovitch Cycle-level sea level variations, which I have personally seen 8 of in sequence.

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Facts don’t care about your feelings. Check this out.

Addendum: This 2020 Science mag article that experimentally verified the hypothesis generated controversy for implanting a human gene into marmoset embryos, then ethically destroying them at 100 days.
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.abb2401

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This is pretty cool. But hardly any support for YEC. More like why the universe needs to NOT be only 6,000 years old.

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From mountains to canyons. While they are at it, they can explain how Egypt features a canyon to rival the Grand Canyon, carved in the sediment supposedly laid down by the Flood, but now deeply buried and erased from the memory of ancient history. The following from Joel Duff:

I - The Lost Grand Canyon of Egypt: Another Monument to an Ancient Earth – Naturalis Historia

II - The Lost Grand Canyon of Egypt, Origins of the Nile River Valley – Naturalis Historia

III - The Lost Grand Canyon of Egypt, A Brief Chronology of Events – Naturalis Historia

IV - Squeezing the Lost Grand Canyon of Egypt into the Young Earth Paradigm: An impossible* Task – Naturalis Historia

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Love me some @Joel_Duff! haha

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He’s no longer active here so I won’t tag him, but Stephen Matheson had a fantastic explanation of how a tiny mutation (a single substitution in the case of ARHGAP11B and bigger brains) can make a huge difference on his old blog:

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The MC postulates that the earth’s climate is very sensitive to small changes. And that is what the climate change hysteria is based on, without taking into account much more significant factors like cloud cover.

And help me please. What are the necessary factors to create an ice age? First there has to be a lot of snow over many years, and it has to persist during the summer time. How can those both happen? Cold air doesn’t produce much precipitation, and snow and ice melt in sunlight with temperatures as low as 18 degrees. Put another way, how can air that cold hold much moisture, or how can warmer air not melt the previous winter’s snowfall during the warmer months?

So yes, there was at least one ice age, but how did it occur? And what evidence do we have of more than one when the last one would likely cover the evidence of a previous one. And of course, how would you tell the difference between one ice age advancing and retreating several times before ending as opposed to several ice ages?

And how do we know that the current climate change is more than just ordinary cycles, or even a continuing rebound from the last one?

I’ve lived through several failed predictions of impending doom in my relatively short lifetime–74 years–including the concern of entering into another mini ice age. Why should we believe what some climate scientists are saying. And why do so many climate scientists disagree despite the continued political and media campaigns to silence and discredit them?

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It wasn’t post flood warmer oceans and a cooler atmosphere if that is what you are leading up to.

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Giving him the undeserved benefit of the doubt, it might actually be an honest question without a canned and bogus answer waiting in the wings. Is it, @cewoldt? Given YECism’s extensive record here, it would be a surprise. (I don’t know enough geology to give you an answer.)

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Depending on how “small” is defined, yes.

For the short-term ice-ages (individual Milankovitch Cycle-length, not the broader one that we are still in), at present, we don’t know many of the details about why one factor contributes more than another, but they correlate with periods of low orbital eccentricity, and/or low axial tilt. For the long-term ones (Cryogenian, late Ordovician, Carboniferous, Pleistocene, etc.), the main factors seem to be either a significant increase in atmospheric oxygen, and/or a concentration of continents near the poles.

Essentially, the issue isn’t so much “lots of snow” as “As a long-term average, there is more snow falling than melting”–the same sort of pattern, but in reverse, from what most glaciers are showing now.

In some cases, we have deposits from one at the bottom of a valley, then non-glacial deposits, then another round of glacial deposits, and so on. For the really long-term ones, it boils down to sequence stratigraphy: dropstones and glacial erratics in rocks in the local mountains in a few spots are in layers that are clearly beneath the ones where I am sitting, which are clearly beneath all of the coastal plain fossiliferous layers, which are clearly beneath layers relating to the most recent ice age.

That is simply a matter of definitions–are we talking about the “short”-term ones (tens of thousands of years) or long-term ones (millions to tens of millions).

Essentially, because it’s way too fast to be any of the ordinary cycles (similar magnitude of change to part of a cycle, but hundreds of times faster). Also, there’s nothing else going on that would cause that much of a change, besides the fact that people started releasing lots and lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Also, that carbon dioxide is old carbon dioxide–it’s isotopic ratios match oil or coal, not something recently alive.

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Thanks for your reply. What were the isotopes that were measured in the CO2 and the oil and coal? And how much is the “lots and lots” compared to what we would normally see?

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Mostly 13C and 14C. I’m uncertain of the pattern for 13C, but the lack of 14C indicates in the CO2 compared to normal indicates “old”. The current rate of anthropogenic release of CO2 is about 20 gigatonnes per year, it appears.

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The Data: What 13C Tells Us

Plants use the lighter 12C preferentially to 13C. Since oil and coal are made of plants, fossil fuel is depleted in 13C. When burned, fossil fuel returns the depleted CO2 back to the atmosphere, and the proportions of these contributing stable isotopes are easily and reliably measurable.

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A few years ago I read an article about a team developing the tech to increase snowfall on mountaintops; as I recall they were making mist with nano-size water particles with a tiny bit of salinity. One comment in the article was that if the technology worked on actual mountaintops as the in-lab research indicated, putting one of these systems in place on every glacier still in existence or known to have existed historically (on the order of a third of a million sites altogether) should over a period of twenty years change the planet’s albedo sufficiently to cut the rate of temperature increase measurably – but to go from merely measurable to significant couldn’t be done just using mountaintops, it would require some pretty large areas covered.

So it isn’t just more snow falling than melting, it’s the area that the non-melting snow covers.

The argument may have been settled by now, but when I was taking coastal geology there were some rocks buried in sediments somewhere on the northern Oregon coast that seemingly could only be explained as glacial erratics except for the fact that glaciers never covered the coast that far south, and geologists argued over how the rocks got there (I liked the “carried by iceberg” proposal).

In glacial geology some glacial moraines could be dated because they contained volcanic ash from the Mt. Mazama eruption which IIRC was about 7.5k years ago. Careful examination could differentiate between the ash being deposited on an active moraine versus an orphaned one.

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