Two challenges from a YEC professor

[T_aquaticus]

@jammycakes

If I recall correctly, fossils on top of mountains were one of the first things that early geologists picked up on that told them that wherever, whenever and however extensive Noah’s Flood was, it couldn’t have created the fossil record. It’s one of the oldest arguments against a young earth that there is.

The fact that the fossil and geologic record could not have been produced by one event is yet another piece of evidence that argued against the type of Noachian flood promoted by YEC’s. This is a speech given by Adam Sedgwick as he stepped down as chair of the Royal Society in 1831.

…But theories of diluvial gravel, like all other ardent generalizations of an advancing science, must ever be regarded but as shifting hypotheses to be modified by every new fact, till at length they become accordant with all the phenomena of nature.

In retreating where we have advanced too far, there is neither compromise of dignity nor loss of strength; for in doing this, we partake but of the common fortune of every one who enters on a field of investigation like our own…

Bearing upon this difficult question, there is, I think, one great negative conclusion now incontestably established – that the vast masses of diluvial gravel, scattered almost over the surface of the earth, do not belong to one violent and transitory period. It was indeed a most unwarranted conclusion, when we assumed the contemporaneity of all the superficial gravel on the earth. We saw the clearest traces of diluvial action, and we had, in our sacred histories, the record of a general deluge. On this double testimony it was, that we gave a unity to a vast succession of phenomena, not one of which we perfectly comprehended, and under the name diluvium, classed them all together.

To seek the light of physical truth by reasoning of this kind, is, in the language of Bacon, to seek the living among the dead, and will ever end in erroneous induction. Our errors were, however, natural, and of the same kind which lead many excellent observers of a former century to refer all the secondary formations of geology to the Noachian deluge. Having been myself a believer, and, to the best of my power, a propagator of what I now regard as a philosophic heresy, and having more than once been quoted for opinions I do not now maintain, I think it right, as one of my last acts before I quit this Chair, thus publicly to read my recantation.

We ought, indeed, to have paused before we first adopted the diluvian theory, and referred all our old superficial gravel to the action of the Mosaic flood…
(Sedgwick, 1831, p. 312-314)
The Talk.Origins Archive Post of the Month: April 2002

So even by the early 1800’s it was obvious to even the those who once supported the YEC version of Noah’s flood that the evidence just wasn’t there. Notably, this was even before Darwin.