Two challenges from a YEC professor

Faith & Science Conversation
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More likely vertical tectonics rather than plate tectonics, or perhaps both

Perhaps, but if they are marine fossil bearing, they couldn’t form slowly.

Assumes today’s oceanic current speeds. But the speeds would be much faster in a catastrophic global flood.

Can sedimentary rock be easily dated by radiometric dating? I don’t think so. And the “index” fossils. Their age is determined how? And then that age is assumed for other fossils in the same layers.

An assumption of geological uniformitarianism–the past is the key to the present. Of course, catastrophic geological processes can occur much more rapidly. And on a small scale, the catastrophic geological events after the Mount St Helens eruption demonstrate that finely layered sediments more than 100 feet deep can be laid down in a matter of hours.

Of course.

If there was a recent global flood, we would find all kinds and sizes of animals mixed together, which we do. And sometimes we might find both marine and land animals and plants together, which we do.

(January 2014) Nature News item, written by senior reporter Ewen Callaway, as an example of this.2

Its headline reads: “Debate over which mammals roamed with the dinosaurs: Genetic tree challenges fossil-based conclusion that placental mammals emerged only after mass extinction.” So now the fossil record shows mammals with dinosaurs in the fossil beds–and modern birds with beaks and bird feathers. And if a primate was found, would that be widely publicized? Maybe, maybe not.

Fossils of no less than 432 mammal species in Mesozoic rock have been identified by evolutionists, and this included nearly 100 complete mammal skeletons. The mammal fossils so far discovered have been described as including the remains of creatures that “look like” squirrels, hedgehogs, shrews, beavers and primates—all of which are placentals"- Carl Werner

Here’s what Dr Donald Burge, curator of vertebrate paleontology, College of Eastern Utah Prehistoric Museum, admitted:

“We find mammals in almost all of our [dinosaur dig] sites. These were not noticed years ago … . We have about 20,000 pounds of bentonite clay that has mammal fossils that we are trying to give away to some researcher. It’s not that they are not important, it’s just that you only live once and I specialized in something other than mammals. I specialize in reptiles and dinosaurs.” Interview with Carl Werner.

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That’s bizarre. Forming slowly is the definition of fossilization.

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My description is certainly a cartoonish oversimplification, but either way, I’m not aware of any geologist who posits a global flood on the basis of evidence.

Animal trackways, on the other hand, require a tranquil environment to fossilize. How one flood pulled off interlayering fossilized footprints with fossilized bones requiring a rapid burial is beyond me.

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First, Carl Werner is an ER doctor, not a paleontologist, and that article is from here: https://creation.com/werner-living-fossils. If anything, it supports evolution, because the “primate” it describes is this one” Primate ancestor of all humans likely roamed with the dinosaurs | Live Science
So, essentially a rat or squirrel like creature that became the ancestor of the primates and apes and us. Which is what evolution says happened. So, while correct in a sense, it really does not help the case of a young earth, but rather confirms that we (as in humanity) weren’t there. There is no argument that mammals on the other hand were, and were able to fill the voids that resulted when they survived what the non-avian dinosaurs could not.

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Sorry, a misstatement. They couldn’t have been buried slowly. And fossilization can occur rather rapidly under the right conditions, like those following a global flood.

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So let me correct this.

  1. If there was a global flood, we would see a chaotic ordering of species of it was really fast. There would be no logic to the fossil record or geological layers. If it was a giant flood that lasted months and months , or a year and then slowly went back down, we would find organism by weight and mass.

But we find none of the above. What we find is a logical fossil record that is found in a way corresponding to a superimposed geological layer.

What we see is the evolutionary tree of life in the fossil record. We see basal forms developing divergent traits which then becomes a new basal form as new divergent traits develop. Then, all of this also lines up with the genetic tree of life and with chemistry.

Which is why we never see humans predating the earliest primates. We never see primates predating the earliest monkeys. We never see monkeys predating the earliest mammals. We never see mammals predating the earliest tetrapods. We never see the tetrapods predating the earliest bony lunged fish. We never see the bony lunged fish predating the earliest gill fish.

You posted something about mammals and dinosaurs and some dude saying you only live once and he works on reptiles and dinosaurs… ok… how is that a counter argument to we never see humans or primates in the dinosaur era.

We can also do that with plants. The earliest angiosperms don’t predate the earliest gymnosperms which don’t predate the earliest ferns ( seedless vascular plants ) and they don’t predate the earliest mosses which don’t predate the earliest algae.

Now when we look at those clades and examples I mentioned for fauna and how it relates to genetics.

So humans are more closely related to chimpanzees than to gorillas, but more closely related to gorillas than to spider monkeys and more closely related them to to rats, and more closely related to rats than to fish and so on. We also see anatomical and morphological similarities between these clades.

We look and act a lot more like chimps than monkeys and more like those than horses and more like horses than lizards and more similar to lizards than to sharks.

It’s all very solid.

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Or a local flood. We see localised mudflows, lahars and all the rest of it happening on a regular basis even today.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: to demonstrate that the earth is young, it is not sufficient to show that some processes can happen quickly. It is necessary to show that all processes could have happened quickly in such a way as to leave exactly the same evidence that we see in reality, right down to the individual measurements, their trends, and the cross-correlations between them.

Anything less is cherry-picking.

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Borscht. (My 7th grade science teacher’s favorite euphemism :grin:, three score and some years ago.) Have you ever heard of silt? Ash? Little particulate? Slowly drifting down? Still water? Thousands of feet depth of ocean?

Below about 400 feet of depth, a submarine can sail smoothly under a Cat. 5 hurricane and not even know it’s there. The planet on which you pretend there was a global flood had to have had sea floors as slick as a billiard ball and no more than hundreds of feet in depth, certainly not multiple tens of thousands!

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Well, depends on your definition of primate. See the second link in my above post for the earliest primate.

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I’ll have to check it out. As far as I know the earliest primate is no older than 65 million years ago. They popped up as the dinosaurs were going extinct. They definitely don’t seem to be older than the earliest dinosaurs.

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It was just a typo for apes.

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Of course, we understand your first quote. And you are correct, the YEC position is that neither the ocean floor was as deep nor the continental land masses were as high before the flood than they are now.

I like the euphemism.

YEC “pretend” no such thing. That is a misunderstanding of what YEC geologists teach. But since the ocean floor and continents were completely remade during the global flood, all evidence of what they were like prior to the flood is gone.

“The mountains rose; the valleys sank down to the place which You established for them.” Psalm 104:8. Although the Bible is not a book of science, it does make statements that inform our investigations. This and similar verses indicate that there was a time in the past, likely before the flood, that the continents were flatter and the oceans less deep. For the water we know about on the surface of the earth, for a global covering flood, this would make sense. And remember that the biblical account also notes the opening of the fountains of the deep. This likely refers to other catastrophic geological events including earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

The ocean floor today is not littered with dead marine animals, bones and shells. That is because between organisms such as bacteria and animals such as burrowing worms, they quickly disintegrate. “Slowly drifting down” sediments would not cover dead marine animals quickly enough to prevent disintegration and thus allow for fossilization. Of course, that is unless present processes don’t inform us as to what happened in the past, which of course, in this case, we all agree they do.

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The complement to vertical tectonics is horizontal tectonics. Plate tectonics is common to both.

You miss the entire point here. Oceanic microfossils such as foraminifera, conodonts, and coccolithophores, are devastating to the idea of a catastrophic global flood. Anyone should be able to figure this out for themself, but to lay out the simple reason - the microfossil record shows a progressive succession of distinct morphologies. Oil companies use such fossil stratification to date geological formations. While local conditions might delay equalization a bit, in terms of geological time they are effectively global.

Let us assume your unjustified statement that oceanic speeds would be much faster in a catastrophic global flood. A high energy event would be chaotic and dispersive. That means, contrary to the data, that oceanic microfossils would not be segregated, but be thoroughly mixed. This rules out the occurrence of a high energy flood event being responsible for microfossil distribution. In general, the varieties of oceanic microfossils are separated not so much by location as by geological time.

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Except that wouldn’t allow them (or anything else small) to settle to the bottom when they died, so speeding up currents just produces other problems

If they contain ash, then yes. Another option is to do U/He dating on corals, since they absorb a bit of uranium from sea water, and helium can’t get incorporated into a skeleton, but can get trapped there if it forms in situ.

Absolute age is from radiometric dating. Relative age (which is what they are useful for), is just basic stratigraphy – "Busycon carica is only ever found in layers above Chesapecten jeffersonius, therefore Busycon carica lived after Chesapecten jeffersonius, that sort of thing.

Given that the deposits were not transported (unsorted, fragile shells, paired bivalves that don’t have hinge teeth, etc.), how could the other fossils be significantly different in age? Also, as every species that is sufficiently abundant can be used as an index fossil, it’s not just a few specimens that can be used for supporting a relative age determination, it can be tens of thousands or more.

But we don’t normally. The fact that I can tell approximate depth ranges in the sublayers in this picture, just from looking at the macroscopic shells, indicates that the changes in sea level were gradual:

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For instance, one of the layers at roughly waist-level in this picture has a comparative abundance of several taxa that like estuaries (Tagelus plebeius and Crassostrea virginica, most visibly), and otherwise looks like it was deposited in shallow (<~10 m) water, whereas the layer at roughly chest height with the abundant Mercenaria campechiensis looks like somewhat deeper (~20-30 m) water, again based on the fauna.

Yes, it would, as it would be an impressive temporal range extension.

Tell that to someone who does dredging off the coast or scuba diving for shells, and see what they think (I have personally done neither, but I have seen dredge samples). Continental shelves are covered in billions of subfossil mollusk shells, and a bunch of other skeletons mixed in with them.

They would if the place the organism fell into was anoxic, which is what is thought to be the origin for a decent number (though certainly not all) of the really intact marine vertebrate fossils.

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The idea that evolution is “progress” in any ethical or social sense is a popular error among both fans and opponents of evolution. Evolution says that we are evolving into something more advanced only in the biological sense that we (and everything else) are evolving further from where we were in the past in certain ways, though that can end up with convergence on a past condition as well. Evolution “progresses” towards what works effectively in the environmental setting where it occurs. But there are many possibilities. Evolution only tells us “if you have these genes or those behaviors, it increases or decreases your chances of passing on your genes.”

There is indeed a lot of bad theology and bad philosophy based on assumptions that we are Progressing. As Prince Caspian pointed out, we have to figure out the difference between Progress and Going Bad. Biology does not tell us that.

However, Christianity does not tell us that the world must be getting worse. We know that humans are fallen and will not achieve perfection by human effort. But there are various eschatological guesses as to whether we will see long-term ethical improvement or decline or continuing to muddle along about the same as always (with plenty of short-term ups and downs.)

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Of course, we understand your first quote. And you are correct, the YEC position is that neither the ocean floor was as deep nor the continental land masses were as high before the flood than they are now.

I like the euphemism.

YEC “pretend” no such thing. But since the ocean floor and continents were completely remade during the global flood, all evidence of what they were like prior to the flood is gone.

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A fundamental error in the original question (and in almost all flood geology claims) is that it is “here’s a perceived problem for standard geology, therefore the Flood did it.” It’s not unlike much political advertising - “here’s how awful my opponent is, so vote for me”. In neither case has there been any demonstration that the recommended alternative actually provides a better answer.

To make a valid case that a global flood could explain something, it is first necessary to give specific details about said flood. Where does the water come from, and where does it go? How fast is it moving? What is its chemistry like? Which geological layers are being attributed to it, versus ones formed before or after? Then it is possible to start checking whether the evidence matches the flood model or not. Of course, where the evidence doesn’t match, one can admit that the particular model ran into problems and try something different. But claiming that the flood was simultaneously violent and calm, fresh and salt, and producing layers before and after it happened is not reasonable. There must be an actual, coherent model in mind, rather than using the flood as a magic excuse for anything.

Unsurprisingly, as a large mountain range, the Himalayas have a variety of rock types which match the ages of various rock layers elsewhere. This includes marine sedimentary rocks, which contain fossils of ocean life. As already noted, plate tectonics has led to the gradual pushing up of the Himalayas as India collides with Asia. But the types of fossils change from layer to layer, in ways that cannot be accurately explained in a young-earth model. Neither hydraulic sorting, nor successive flooding of different environments, nor escape speed accounts for the actual pattern of fossils.

As the laws of thermodynamics tell us, doing any physical work creates some waste heat, increasing the overall entropy of the universe. Adding or taking away enough water to flood the entire globe requires a huge amount of work and thus releases enough heat to boil away the oceans. Likewise, speeding plate tectonics from the current rate that’s roughly the same as fingernail growth to the highway speeds necessary in a flood geology scenario would produce enough extra heat to vaporize the earth.

The question about conformities is too vague to be clear what it refers to. Various layers have conformities and unconformities in them; both are common geological features. A conformity is where one layer and the next layer seem to match up, with no significant disturbance in between. This could be a gradual transition between layers, such as a sandstone grading into muddy sandstone (graywacke) into sandy mudstone into mudstone, or it could be noticeably distinct layers that seem to fit together well without obvious indicators of a significant time gap. An unconformity, on the other hand, is where the boundary between layers has evidence of a time gap, generally from evidence that the bottom layer experienced erosion before the next layer was deposited on top of it. But there is no time for such erosion in a young-earth model. Each layer requires some time to form, and there are billions of layers.

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Typo fixed - fans and opponents, not proponents

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"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. "

Actually, the modern YEC version of Noah’s flood is not the same as historical ideas. There was debate in the 1500’s about how extensive the Flood was and whether fossils could possibly be old enough to be from the Flood. By the late 1600’s, people were beginning to suspect that it would probably take a long time to form all the layers. But how particular layers formed was still a significant question, and large floods are one possibility to consider. For example, Neptunism, quite popular in the mid-1700’s, suggested that the earth started out covered by an ocean chemically quite different from today, which deposited layer after layer and then started to retreat, exposing some land. By the mid-1770’s, it was clear to anyone studying geology that very long (though unknown how long) time intervals were needed to account for observed geological features. But some of the youngest layers had peculiar features. There were very large rocks, sometimes identifiable as having been moved across long distances. Broad valleys had been carved out. Many impressive extinct types of large land animals had been present, though the smaller life was often of modern species. The idea of catastrophism developed, in which most geological layers were deposited under ordinary conditions, but occasional major disruptive events occurred. Almost all geologists in the late 1700’s through the mid-1800’s were catastrophists. Often, Noah’s flood was thought to be a record of the most recent such catastrophe (with different authors having different ideas about how reliable an account was preserved, reflecting their theological biases). However, study of glaciers led to a recognition in the 1830’s and 1840’s that the peculiar features of these young geological layers were a better match for the effects of glaciers than of floods. Sedgwick is referring to two misconceptions; one, that all the gravel layers were of the same age and two, that they could be explained by a flood.

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Say you and yours with zip for evidence except for a misinterpretation of the Bible. You may think you have some science on your side because you use the Bible to justify your scientific claims, but what that really does is put your science into your biblical interpretation. So you have a nice circular argument with no real science and mistaken imagination of what the important realities are in the Bible (modern science is not one of them) and what the realities are in God’s very cool and very ancient universe.