you see the problem there don’t you…if you actually had any formal training in wood technology you would immediately recognise that that argument is ridiculous…tree rings do not provide annual aging of trees…they signify seasonal changes…nothing more! (i cant believe you don’t already know this given others on these forums who would know it!)
Ice layers…irrelevant as all that signifies is the same as rock layering…its not indicative of time when catastrophic events such as floods impacts on the layering.
Secular scientists have long proposed that caves were formed by carbonic acid, a weak acid formed when carbon dioxide from the air dissolves into water in the soil.2 This water then seeps into the subsoil carbonate rock and dissolves it, forming an opening that progressively enlarges. Today this is observed to be a very slow process, and so it would take a long time for a cave to form this way.
But this uniformitarian notion has problems. In reacting with carbonate below the soil, the acid quickly becomes neutralized and cannot continue to dissolve the carbonate. The acid is usually neutralized within 10 m (35 ft) of the surface3—some even say within 1 m.4 But some caves have formed more than 1,000 m below the surface. If carbonic acid were the only mechanism for cave formation, how did such a weak acid descend so far into the earth without being neutralized? Secular scientists have tried, without much success, to devise some creative mechanisms to surmount this obstacle.
Sulfuric acid excavates caves quickly
This has changed, following recent discoveries in caves of the chemical products of reactions involving sulfuric acid. This is a much stronger acid that can dissolve carbonate very rapidly. Secular scientists are finding more and more caves with these reaction products, e.g., gypsum (calcium sulfate). Some suggest over 50% of caves were formed by sulfuric acid.5 It is increasingly probable that all caves were dissolved this way. Where the reaction products are missing, they were likely washed out at some time in the past.
Stalactites, stalagmites, and other speleothems would have formed rapidly during the Ice Age after the Flood.8 The post-Flood Ice Age was a unique period of Earth’s history, with mild (warmer) winters, cool summers, and heavy precipitation for about 500 years, until the ice sheets were at their greatest extent.9 Six main variables affect the formation of speleothems:
Cave temperature. The warmer the temperature, the faster speleothems grow. Immediately after the Flood, the rock would still be warm because of Flood burial. The deeper rock is buried, the hotter it becomes. Massive Flood erosion10 would expose hot carbonate rock, greatly aiding speleothem growth. The rock would remain warm for many years, aided by warmer winters.
Removal of CO2 from cave air. As the limestone from cave water forms speleothems, carbon dioxide (CO2) is given off. Too much CO2 in the air surrounding speleothems slows their growth. So, the more the CO2 is released from inside the cave into the outside air, the faster speleothems grow. The warmth of the rocks will hasten the rate at which the air containing CO2 moves out of the cave.
Evaporation of water off the speleothems. The drier the cave air, the more the evaporation, and the faster the speleothem growth. Secular scientists normally neglect this variable because the relative humidity in caves today is almost always near 100%, resulting in little evaporation of the cave water from the speleothem. In the past, however, the hot rocks warming the caves would increase the drying of cave air.
Drip rate from the ceiling. When precipitation (rainfall) is greater, this rate will be higher, causing faster speleothem growth. High precipitation is known to have been a major feature of the early to mid-Ice Age.
The thickness of the water film on the speleothems. High precipitation on the ground above will also result in a thicker film, and thus faster growth.
Calcium and carbonic acid levels in the drip water from the cave ceiling. When these are high, speleothems grow quickly. Acid levels are high when more CO2 is absorbed in the soil water above the cave, more organic matter is in the soil, more precipitation is on the ground surface, and the soil above is thicker and warmer. The thicker post-Flood soil would have had huge amounts of organic material left over from the Flood and would have also been warmer due to the factors already mentioned.
Images: Mrs Melanie Richards
Fig. 5. Schematic of the deposition of carbonates (A) and sandstone and shale (B) during the Flood followed by the Recessional Stage uplift and cracking of the carbonate (C), forming caves by rapid sulfuric acid dissolution (D)
I am not claiming the creationist arguments are not without errors…but for you to claim that creationists sciences are so wrong they cannot be trusted and then brush aside issues such as the Piltdown man among a host of other significant problems in the naturalism world view…given we are Christian here, i place my faith in the Biblical model any day of the week over a secular one that does not allow for God in science.
What i find really interesting is that a number of individuals who dissalow the creationist arguments really struggle with their faith…even individuals on these forums. Its quite clear that even they recognise the massive dilemma in placing trust in the book that appears to contradict science. That forces those individuals to simply ignore important theologies and doctrines in the bible…in doing that, they destroy the world view they are trying to align with. That causes faith issues…i don’t have any such problems.
Worse than that, there are fossil clams in supposedly flood-deposited layers that lived and died on top of other such layers with over a hundred such seasonal bands (measured by d18O values, thus directly coming from temperature with no possibility of false bands).
Ice layers with temperature-dependent isotope ratios that oscillate up and down with each layer… so, either the temperature oscillated up and down a few thousand times in a manner that looks exactly like seasons while a ridiculous amount of snow fell after a bunch of ice already got deposited and compressed with gasses showing larger, longer-term swings in temperature, after the flood; or these cores actually show much greater ages than a few thousand years.
And melted, and re-grew, and melted, and re-grew, about 40 times…
Let’s be generous and give the Ice Age 500 years to build up one ice sheet. Assuming a roughly comparable thickness to modern ice sheets, that would require about 24 meters of snow per year, average across the continent. As that is noticeably above the world record highest yearly average anywhere (17.6 m/yr, in a small town in northern Hokkaido), that is not reasonable without a specific mechanism proposed.
And that just contradicted the statement above about caves mostly forming from sulfuric acid dissolution.
That depositional scheme is incompatible with sections that oscillate among different water depths (including nearly every Cenozoic shallow marine deposit globally).
exactly…and that does not falsify the flood record in any way…its actually completely consistent with the biblical account of the flood.
Given you were not alive at the time of the flood…we have no other eyewitness evidence of it, we have two choices there…
Believe that the creator of this world knows what he was talking about when he revealed the creation and flood accounts to the prophet Moses or
turn to atheism and claim the naturalism uniformitarian view that what we see today is the same as it always has been and take our measurements accordingly.
given i am Christian, and miracles are real to me…the death and resurrection of Lazurus, the healing of blind man, the resurrection of Christ, the second coming…i mean none of those things are scientific, they go completely against science
We cannot rise from the dead after rotting in the grave
we cannot ascend into the sky against gravity
we cannot disappear into space without artificial life support
A man cannot appear again in the clouds of heaven and cause millions of people who are nothing but bones along with millions of individuals who are still alive, to rise up into the sky…
science claims the above examples are not supported by known scientific fact (as you claim).
i choose to have faith in the Bible account as related to us by Moses, Christ, and the apostles Peter, John, Paul and Luke…I believe the whole story, not just the convenient parts of it.
I might have missed part of your answer but…how do you explain the complete lack of archeological evidence of millions and millions of individuals who evolution says should have lived and died on this earth already? I mean we seem to have found more 65 million year old fossils than we have early hominids. Given the hominids are much sooner and should be buried far shallower, surely we would find a huge number of them if average life expectancy has increased over time as you believe, then that would mean there are far more deaths in ancient times than today…so we should see evidence of even more dead individuals from hundreds of thousands of years ago.
It seems to me that the complete lack of evidence of large population…mankind truly is a very recent addition to this world…that does not support old age to be honest…its supports the reverse actually…young age!
tell me something…how do you conclude that given movies such as “The day after tomorrow”?
That is but one example of a number of movies predicting catastrophic ice ages.
Are you telling me that the entire notion of that movie can not happen scientifically…that a catastrophic event of that nature isn’t possible or probable given the right environmental conditions?
If the conditions illustrated in that movie are scientifically possible, why should a global flood be impossible?
It seems to me that your claim there is not, a global flood cannot have caused this, but current time modelling suggests it cannot happen quickly! That does not prove anything other than, we disagree on time…not the event itself! Youre stuck in the uniformitarian mindset on these things, and that stems from “there is no room for God in science”!
there are even individuals on these forums who claim, God is bound by science. Given the resurrection of the dead and second coming of Christ debuncts that claim…any Christian who continues to stick to that claim “God is bound by science” they are deluding themselves!
The problem here David…you are so restricted by a nonchristian operations manual…you cannot see beyond it and that narrows your ability to consider any other cause…even one that actually better supports the evidence than the one you currently follow (particularly for those who are Christian and must adhere to the bible as their guide)
nope…it depends entirely on environmental factors during the season…its possible for a tree to show no growth or rapid growth over a longer period of time if the conditions are extreme enough.
Again, you are making the assumption that the earths temperatures and seasons have remained largely unchanged for millions of years…of course that could be true, but what if it isn’t true? (we have strong evidences supporting both options there)
I accept that we have no historical modelling that can say definitively one way or the other…the fact is, there is scientific debate about the realistic possibility of a catastrophe as outlined in the movie the Day after Tomorrow
the trouble with this discussion is not whether or not you guys agree with Creationism…the trouble is you make these outrageous statements trashing any other belief without even considering that perhaps that other theory has some significant evidences that support it…and that is the problem here. I spend my life getting evolution rammed down my throat, i then find evidence of a different view…and i think it better explains the story of the Bible to be honest. Its far more consistent with my fundamental world view.
They say that to be a Christian requires faith/hope. I don’t see why you should have a problem with that…however, I would argue that one should have significant problem when individuals trash the very writings from which faith is illustrated to us.
can you actually provide the reference for that…i cannot respond to something that i have no evidence from which to critique.
Sounds right to me. For decades, serial false and nonsensical claims have been habitually presented by recognized names in creation science. Exposing these deceptions is a matter of accountability.
But others were, including the ancient Egyptians who left detailed records of history and life which was ongoing during the YEC dates for the flood.
I hope you do know that Santa is not real, even though he has featured in hundreds of movies. Zombies, Godzilla…oh forget it. But no, as fun a popcorn disaster flick as Day After was, the troposphere is not going to fast freeze us anytime soon, or later.
You are confusing weather and seasons. Seasons are annual like the hymn Great is Thy Faithfullness relates. Trust me on this, I’m Canadian.
Summer and winter and springtime and harvest,
Sun, moon, and stars in their courses above
Join with all nature in manifold witness
To thy great faithfulness, mercy, and love.
If this is leading to the usual YEC dance around extra tree rings, look at the end of a 2 x 4. Those there are annual rings. Irregularities are not common, but the more often encountered are rings that are altogether missing, meaning the real date is even OLDER. But cross correlation corrects for the data. By the way, I was a ticketed lumber grader back in college days, although any kid gets what tree rings represent.
I don’t think so…because up until relatively recently, there were very few creation science arguments against the accepted secular view on origins!
The reason for the rise in the anti-secular view is largely to balance out the anti God notions presented as a result of neo-Darwinism.
Christians recognised the need to actually defend their faith with science, instead of allowing secularism to only present the science that supports its own agendas and goals.
If you wish to view that as some form of anti reality indoctrination, then id suggest i can throw the exact same defense back at you. The difference being, my scientific conclusions are consistent with the writings of the Bible (my world view). If your world view isn’t biblical, then i guess you should have no problem with that as you would also claim, your conclusions support your world view which is not biblical.
And before you claim your world view is biblical…read Exodus 20:8-11
8 “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. 11 For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
there is no allegory in the reading of the fourth commandment…its very clear and very specific. Also, the usual argument that Sabbath has no end…that is falsified by verse 8 and 9 (the very beginning of the text).
if you want to make some kind of argument that we are no longer bound by the Old Covenant…i hardly see how that makes any difference to the revelation by God to Moses and the Israelite people. The fact Christ also makes direct reference to the Flood and Sodom and Gomorah…that means Christ also took a literal view of the events as described by Moses. Therefore, the Old covenant keeping of the law has nothing to do with whether or not the flood should be read as an allegory. The law clearly says it is literal.
I do think so. When I was a teen, assuredly decades ago, I eagerly read Acts & Facts from ICR, and creationist literature from Herbert W. Armstrong’s The World Tomorrow. In turn, I gave speeches in English class and debates based on that material. My postings here are penance for the stain of my role in passing on such disinformation.
Just where does the flood account mention that there were temperature swings of a few dozen degrees every few days while huge amounts of snow fell every year?
How about 1., plus the fact that He knew what he was doing well enough not to communicate in a way that wouldn’t make sense to anyone for a couple millennia, and
3. Believe that God is actually faithful and neither causes pointless miracles that would only serve to fool people, nor messes with fundamental properties of His creation.
Science claims absolutely nothing about the above examples, because it cannot measure them.
There are a couple of major factors affecting the generally low number of human remains found:
Humans are flimsy–they have a skeleton that is made up of hundreds of bones, and they have lots of edible soft tissue outside of it to encourage scavengers to eat them and destroy their skeletons.
Before agriculture developed, there were probably only (very approximately) a hundred thousand people alive at any given time.
People generally live in places that are not the most conducive to fossilization, i.e., on land.
There are some difficulties in excavating every possible site that might have human remains (like “building foundations” and “landowner permission”).
The total number of human fossils known is on the order of a several thousand, which is in the same vague order of magnitude as other large mammals with wide ranges and a comparable age range(e.g., mammoths, which seem to have a few tens of thousands of specimens known), so I don’t see any real incongruities.
The specific reference that I can give is not the easiest to track down, but ages going over 100 years is from:
Moss, D. (2023, September 6). To the fossil record! Bivalve sclerochronology and paleobiology reunited [Oral presentation]. Bivalves–Where Are We Going?, Cambridge, England.
The process of measuring such is summarized pretty well here:
There is widespread use of sclerochronology for paleoclimate studies, but not much that looks at the ages of the shells used (the Moss presentation is the only example of which I am aware).
I would suggest you check whatever source you got this information from. They appear to be not telling the truth. The following is from here.
A fabrication that was questioned from day one by the experts.
And a final edit to add, I have been to Mt St. Helens and seen the debris fields exposed by the road cuts in the area. No geologist here but it isn’t hard to understand what you are seeing.
The foundational lie in the YEC claims about cave formation is that standard geology is secular and YEC is biblical. The reality is that standard geology is biblical and YEC is secular. Rather than seeking to make science biblical by doing good work, being honest, and otherwise applying biblical principles to the practice of science, or considering how the fact that everything is a part of God’s creation enables us to seek to learn how it works and apply that knowledge wisely, creation science and much ID seek to force the Bible to be scientific.
As alluded to already, tree rings can be tested for seasonal correlation by measuring the oxygen isotope patterns. An example of failing to check the aging pattern was the news story about “Abraclam Lincoln”, a large quohog from Florida. Somebody apparently looked at the ridges on the shell, assumed they were annual, and declared it was around 180 years old. Actually it was probably about 25, based on analyzing the isotope variations of other large clams in that genus.
More generally, stable isotope variations pose major problems for YEC, but as the public is generally unaware of them, there has not been much effort to explain them away. Isotope ratios vary both place to place and through time. Global isotope variations require the relevant atoms having time to mix around the globe and then get deposited as a distinct layer, thousands and thousands of times.
Treering patterns can also be checked against historical events, as can other annual variations like varves.
Absolutely. Anyone whose worldview proceeds from the Bible should expect that.
Or that thicker deposits of a given material will behave differently than thinner deposits. This is a basic element of how water-saturated materials behave: pile them up high and they slump where moderate heights can stay put. This is especially true when the thickness is vast as in the Grand Canyon; the pressure of the upper portion would have caused the lowest part to liquefy. This is actually observable in some Mount Saint Helens lahar deposits; the channels there could not cut deeper because the lower layers/sections kept liquefying and collapsing. But YECists ignore this part of the data and thus lie about the situation by excluding that doesn’t fit their scheme.
No, they claim the Grand Canyon was cut through recently deposited wet sediments – which is also physically impossible; a canyon that deep formed from run-off erosion through wet sediments would be many times* wider – it’s basic physics for upper-level university geology students.
. * just how much would depend on the constants of deformation associated with the various layers.
They provide datable rings, the formation depending on climate and species.
The counting has been verified by known historical events that had effects on trees. Here in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, tree ages back over five hundred years have been verified by fire damage from forest fires known to native peoples, and that span of time is sufficient to establish that rings are being counted correctly. In the more arid portions, trees hundreds to thousands of years old can be compared to volcanic eruptions for which dates are known either roughly or specifically, confirming the counting validity because the two sets of data, from rain forest and semiarid forest, match.
There are other corroborating sources, but those are sufficient to demonstrate that your claim is false.
This was presented in courses I took in geography, geology, glaciology, and forestry, which shows that the method and its validity have been tested in numerous ways and found to be valid.
BTW, growing up with thousands of acres of forests behind the house, we kids found numerous (massive) stumps from logging in pioneer days and had fun figuring out what year each particular tree was cut, using the above methods – and we almost never got the year wrong by more than one or two years (mostly we were off on the trees where the bark and some outer rings had rotted off). This required recognizing rings that grew during forest fires and other known events and counting forwards until we ran out of rings.
Where does it say that God revealed them? The fact is that it doesn’t – that’s an assumption that is forced on the text, not something that comes from the text.
You claim to have a biblical worldview yet none of your claims actually rest on the Bible – they rest on a priori assumptions about the Bible, i.e. on human wisdom.
You mean the movie that university physics professors pointed out as violating all the laws of thermodynamics? and butchers the scientific method?
Yeah, real good source there.
They aren’t.
You mean yourself – I don’t recall hearing that from anyone else.
What people claim is that God is bound by Himself, and that He is faithful, and that means that He doesn’t just perform miracles all over the place with no point or purpose to them. A faithful God would never pull the stunts YEC demands.
And that growth shows not in extra rings, but in the width and coloring of the rings. Heck, I learned that in 4-H forestry at the local Methodist church!
They are not scientific conclusions. They are attempts to explain away scientific conclusions.
Neither are they part of scripture. Rapid radioactive decay, rapid tectonic movement, rapid ice ages, baraminology with sheep and goats being the same animal, the planet mercury getting pounded with asteroids as punishment for whatever reason, none of that silliness is in the Bible.
And as regards the OP, that you deflected to Mt. St. Helens demonstrates that Yosemite presents yet another unanswerable conundrum for YEC.
What’s next? Arguing that humans and dinosaurs co-existed because you’ve seen Raquel Welch hiding from a Triceratops, Pterodactyls attacking submariners in Antarctica, and an Allosaur captured by cowboys?