Two questions about how central the question of origins is to your core beliefs

[Paraleptopecten (Timothy Campbell)]

@Burrawang

the magnitude or fierce ferocity of the Global catastrophe

That would make

@Burrawang

a fairly thick layer of fresh water on top of the salt water in deep areas.

mix into the ocean long before the flood ended. Depth wouldn’t matter–this is an ocean filled with tsunamis whose currents are going at over 30 mph. Nothing is making it through that sort of mixing as intact layers.

@Burrawang

“in reality they are merely slight variants within an existing already classified population, of that Genus.”

@Paraleptopecten

This is untrue and a slander against taxonomists.

This still implies that taxonomists and systematists are incompetent, because delineating and organizing species are their entire jobs.

@Burrawang

it is fairly reasonable to postulate that during the flood a fairly thick layer of fresh water would have been in the area of the surface given the torrential rain that fell on Earth for forty days and nights.

Not at the same time as having the flood be a churning mud slurry filled with tsunamis and with currents going over 30 mph. Also, that doesn’t help the sessile ones that sink in water.

@Burrawang

many of which would have remained alive and floating until the water drained off the land and they could put down roots in soil again.

How exactly do they grow in salt-saturated mud?

@Burrawang

As for seeds, they would have been dispersed according to the currents during the flood

And if the seeds are types that die on exposure to salt water?

@Burrawang

it doesn’t take very long for a barren landscape to become green with plants and biodiversity.

The problem is that there would be nowhere for the plant biodiversity to come from. Also, this would be a salt-saturated barren landscape, so the edges of the Salton Sea would be a better comparison.

@Burrawang

Who is trying to fit more animals onto the ark?

The same ones who are trying to fit radioactive decay into the flood.

@Burrawang

Hyperevolving proto-kinds, what unmitigated gibberish, no one that I know has ever made such a claim.

That’s exactly what this requires:

@Burrawang

There is no reason I can think of why this same process of rapid speciation hasn’t been occurring since the animals walked, flew, slithered and crawled off the ark those thousands of years ago.
Thus the massive diversity we see today would be far greater than the numbers of creatures that boarded the ark.

@Burrawang

you are an expert on the chemistry of the water that covered the globe during the catastrophic flood of Noah’s day are you?

No, but if it was salt water, slugs wouldn’t survive very well. If it was fresh water, they might survive, but then marine life would all go extinct. The fact that the same trends in d18O, the same compositions of salt deposits (which couldn’t have been formed in a global flood without killing basically everything), and the same global planktonic foraminifera are recognizable around the globe requires relatively even water properties.

@Burrawang

floating vegetation rafts

That were getting flipped and smashed by the tsunamis and irradiated beyond possibility of life…

The biggest problem with most YEC models is that they aren’t even just wrong, they’re inconsistent and incoherent. There’s a reason that oil companies use standard geological models to find oil, and it has nothing to do with “presuppositions” or “worldview”–it’s because they work. YEC models can’t even give wrong answers for where resources should be because they aren’t coherent enough to give any answers. That the flood is supposedly somehow ripping boulders out of plutons and scouring the landscape with continent-crossing tsunamis while also depositing clay is one of the most egregious examples.