Panda’s Thumb has a great article on why Young Earth Creationism (YEC) is incapable of explaining geologic features created by glaciation. One such example is Yosemite, a valley carved out of solid granite by glaciers multiple kilometers thick over many ice ages and many millennia.
The problems for YEC are legion. Since these glaciers cut through what is considered flood deposits by most YEC’s, these ice ages had to happen after the flood, just 4500 years ago or so. They are going to have to explain how you get continent spanning glaciers kilometers thick. They are going to have to explain how solid, unfractured granite can be carved out in such short time periods. This was enough ice to lower ocean levels by 130 m, so it’s no small task.
Earth use to be surrounded by rings of ice like
Saturn. After the flood, all the water that evaporated made the atmospheric humidity higher which warmed the rings enough giant chunks of ice feel to earth and slid around creating stuff like what you’re asking.
I was once told something like that about something. Obviously I don’t believe it because it’s stupid. But i imagine the argument is something like that. I once heard also ice rings for the flood water, and even ice rings acting like magnifying lenses destroying stuff.
“The climate changed really fast”. No, not a good argument, besides being dishonest about the clear evidence that multiple intervals of glaciation and retreat have occurred in the Pleistocene and many other times at various points earlier in the geological record. More fundamentally, there is no effort to actually model the effects of the YEC idea and test that against the physical evidence.
YEC’s once proposed a vapor canopy that they claimed held all the water necessary to flood the globe. Once people pointed out that such a canopy would make the Earth more inhospitable than most autoclaves they changed their tune.
Those of us who are familiar with YEC have noticed this trend. I, and probably others, have come to the conclusion that YEC is more about making the creationist in the pew feel justified in their interpretation of the Bible than it is about doing science. In showbiz they would call it a 50 foot car. This is a beat up car they bought for cheap and only fix up to the point it looks normal from 50 feet away. If you get any closer you start to notice all of the problems with the car, and you definitely don’t want to try and start it. The same for YEC.
Given the volcanic eruption of mount st hellens produced canyons hundreds of feet thick, and erosion uncharacteristic of the usual expectations…id suggest you are leaning on termite eaten posts.
Before blindly stoushing with nonesense that is completely ignorant of the science, first “properly” study the opposing arguments scientific evidence. Failing to do that makes a mockey of the the word intelligence!
You are claiming the assumpion that theory is fact…its not. Theory is theory because it attempts to make judgement on assumptions. Just because an academic manages to string together a series of supporting arguments and obtain a high disctinction in a paper. That does not make that theory right. Mount St Hellens clearly illustrated the problem you have there with uniformatarianism.
We all know that the caebon dating timeline was sig ificantly scewed around 500bc…it experienced an enormous flatline at that time…the “Holstat Disaster” . this is but one significant example of prpblem with radiometric dating methods.
Might i also add in another one…Piltdown man. A fabrication that fooled the world for almost 5 decades! There are plenty of other seriously quesrionable evolutionary screwups that we can add to the list…so i would blow my trumpet if i were you.
Explaining glaciation as something that happened really fast is like seeing a plowed field and proclaiming that all those rows are there because a small child ran swiftly through the field dragging a stick.
YECists seem to think that testing a model involves coming up with some hypotheses that seem favorable to support the model; they forget (or don’t know) that it means testing every possible implication to see how it stands up.
The physics involved in those canyons when applied to the scale of the Grand Canyon make the Grand Canyon impossible. It’s like comparing a sand castle to a skyscraper: the material of the first does not have the strength to build the second, and the processes of their formation/construction are entirely different.
You should try doing that. Your comparison is a perfect example of what is being said: YEC isn’t about examining the truth or data, it;s about making up stuff that satisfies those who prefer to not to have to really think.
This shows ignorance of either Mount Saint Helens or of uniformitarianism – there’s only a contradiction if you think that exploding volcanoes are unnatural.
A great example of how science corrects itself.
YECers should learn from that.
What were the walls of those canyons made out of? How does it compare to the unfractured granite that makes up the walls of the Yosemite canyon?
The scientific evidence from creationists is addressed in the article linked in the opening post.
Where am I claiming that? I have always been very careful to separate observations from theory.
I’m picking my jaw off the ground as we speak.
Who has a problem with uniformitarianism? You are pointing to a process that is happening in the present (i.e. the Mt. St. Helens eruption), and then claiming the same process would have been active in the past. That’s uniformitarianism.
It’s not a problem for 14C dating because the method is already calibrated for historic changes in 14C atmospheric concentrations. That’s the part you are making up, when you claim this is a problem for carbon dating.
Of course its a prpblem…because it means that you cannot know how many other plateaus have occured.
Also, human carbon dating can be influenced by diet…an individual who is vegetarian will produce different results to one who eats predominantly meat.
Thats the entire problem here …when these methods are used, they must rely on the aechelogical historical record …piltdown man is an exampke of where a total f$%kup was made for 50 years…its not the only example btw…there are quite a number of others. One other issue, the lack of dead bodies. If the earth is millions of years old and we date back as far as we do, where are they all?
The fact there are so few supports a much shorter timeline
We can know this. We have annual records that go back 50,000+ years in the form of tree rings, lake varves, ice layers, speleothems, and more.
What???
Yes, scientists make mistakes. No one is claiming scientists are infallible or inerrant. Do you think this means you can just ignore all of the evidence?
You will also notice that you are talking about everything but the topic of the thread. Why is that?
It’s already been mentioned, but it is nearly impossible to find any YEC argument that accurately represents the opposing arguments, or even the range of YEC arguments on a topic. To be credible at all, you have got to apply equal standards to your own arguments as to others. In fact, it’s prudent to try to be stricter in examining your own arguments, as a counter to the temptation to confirmation bias.
The claims that Mount Saint Helens supports a young earth position are not honest. They do not accurately present the evidence and they do not accurately represent the findings of geological research. The extrapolation from channels carved into ash piles to canyons in rock is a typical YEC uniformitarian argument. It is uniformitarian in that it assumes that a particular process can be extrapolated at a consistent rate in the past. The assumption of constant rates in this case is not reasonable, nor is the application of a rate based on channels in ash to canyons of very different form in solid rock reasonable. But it does highlight the hypocrisy of young-earth claims that calling something uniformitarian is an adequate excuse to ignore it. (One source argued that atheists have to make uniformitarian assumptions to reconstruct the past, therefore uniformitarian assumptions are atheistic, therefore uniformitarian arguments can be dismissed. By the same reasoning, the fact that atheists breathe oxygen means that YECs shouldn’t.) The reality is that all reconstruction of the past depends on uniformitarian assumptions. Reading the Bible to find out about the past depends on the uniformitarian assumption that language does not abruptly change without anyone noticing, so that we can read and understand it. It depends on the uniformitarian assumptions that the laws of nature do not change; otherwise, we can’t tell what is a miracle or not. Any given uniformitarian assumption should be tested to see if the evidence supports it; Lyell made several incorrect ones, for example. But uniformitarianism is expected in a universe created and sustained by a God Who doesn’t change.
Not only does Yosemite have canyons cut into solid, sturdy rock, those canyons have the U-shaped profile of a glacially shaped valley, not the V of water-carved. Claiming that St. Helens matches that shows no study of the evidence. Even the carving of the weaker rocks of upstate New York (largely shale) into the gorges of the Finger Lakes region makes no sense in a young earth context - previous stream channels cutting into marine fossiliferous sedimentary rocks were gouged out hundreds of feet deep, and the gorges have had extensive sediments piling up in them after that.
You are seriously comparing volcanic ash to granite? Typical of YEC. It’s just yak yak yak without the slightest thought.
The aftermath of the Mount St. Helens explosion is exactly what conventional geologists would expect, and confirms the geological pattern associated with the tectonic and volcanic activity of the US Pacific Northwest, which goes back tens of millions of years. There is not the slightest thing about St. Helens that overturns any understanding of geology that has been held for decades, and that record is demonstrably incompatible with YEC.
Note that, although there were suspicions about Piltdown Man early on, and it definitely did not fit with the evolutionary evidence available by the mid-1900’s, the final proof that it was bogus came from 14C dating. It is not consistent to dismiss 14C dating and endorse it. Also, Piltdown was a deliberate effort at fraud, almost certainly by someone out for fame.
Nitrogen isotope ratios are affected by how many steps up the food chain you are (and thus show that many fossils did eat meat, contrary to some YEC claims.) Being further up the food chain does not have any significant effect on 14C ratios, but what you eat does have impacts. If you get your food from ancient carbon, 14C dating will accurately show that your carbon source is old. Those of us living on land or in shallow water generally get most of our carbon fairly freshly from the air by way of photosynthesis (including eating things that photosynthesized or eating what ate what photosynthesized), and so have a modern 14C date. (Modern 14C levels are extra high thanks to atmospheric nuclear bomb tests.)
This is Hollywood’s “50 foot car” I spoke about earlier. YEC arguments fall apart at the most cursory of inspection. For them, they are convinced by “Mt. St Helens made a canyon, so all canyons can be made quickly”. It never occurs them that the material that makes up the canyon walls might make a difference.
A flood can cut through solid, unfractured granite at the same rate as loose volcanic ash? Really? Do YECs expect us to fall for this?
