Ask, and ye shall receive!
During recent discussions, it was suggested that Darwin’s Doubt raised unanswerable questions for the theory of evolution. Discuss.
324 thoughts on “Stephen Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt and the Cambrian Explosion”
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I don’t really understand this post, Guillermoe. In my paragraph about the use of design, I was simply relaying my speculation of how an IDer would respond, based on my reading of a bunch of their postings at UD. What they generally do is point to, say, the planning out of a playwright or an architect and say something like “It’s anything relevantly similar to what’s going on THERE.” Then, if pressed on what these relevant similarities are thought to be, they will burden shift by saying something like “Look–you’re the one with the evolutionary theory, and we’ve pointed out shortcomings to it. Design is whatever you need that you don’t have to get the origin of life, thinking things, the human knee, etc., etc.”
With respect to the God biz., I gave what I take to be a traditional definition, I believe since medieval times. The idea is, if nothing has that conglomeration of properties, there is no God, and if something does, it’s God because it does. Nothing else would be worthy of worship. You ask “How does anyone know that God has those properties?” That suggests either that you have a different definition, maybe, “The thing that created the universe” or “The thing described in XXXXX” (where XXXXX is some scripture or other”. Or it could mean that you are using the term “God” as some sort of proper name (what Kripke calls a “rigid designator”). On that view, we’re asking the question about some particular individual that has been named, regardless of what properties, he/she/it has. On that view, however, the question of whether God exists doesn’t make any sense, because a strict proper name of that kind, a term that is not a disguised description, must have a referent. That’s one reason for trying to figure out what the term generally connotes and taking that to be a general definition of “God.” Hence the medieval def. (Of course, Anselm liked “That being than which, nothing greater can be conceived.”)
Anyhow, as you directed your questions to Byers and he’s obviously one of the last of the Biblical literalists, he likely means “The Guy talked about in the Bible, (wrote the Commandments, was The Word, etc.)”. So suppose he gives that answer–what do you do with it?
You’ve asked him (and phoodoo) those questions now many many times. They clearly don’t or can’t answer, so I was just trying to give a sense of what they’d likely say if they would/could. What do you do with that info?
Right. I’ll be waiting.
That’s right, a mere waft of your hand – “great flows” – and there it is, explained! Not.
No, I’m looking to explain. You are the one trying to ‘explain away’. The details matter. If you flood a planet over a 40 day period, but when you look it doesn’t appear one bit as one would expect if the planet had been so flooded, but looks instead exactly as if a succession of slow depositional events had occurred, then the one with the greater congruence with reality is the one to go with IMO.
The mistake you are making is in attempting to find a naturalistic approach to the flood. You eschew miracles, save presumably for a bit more rain than can realistically be contained in the atmosphere, and the transport of representatives of a global fauna to the ark. You say that the evidence points directly to the expected physical consequences of a global flood. But the evidence does not. The world is nothing like it would be a Flood were the cause of the strata and the biology caught up within. Water acting suddenly and in bulk just does not cause the gross consequences – ‘mere details’ such as thousand-metre columns of shallow-water fossils, isotopic gradients, species stratification or entire mountain ranges – that exist.
On the contrary, so arranged as to obliterate ALL evidence of this global cataclysm, and leave the fossils in the most peculiar sequence. Almost as if God wants to fool us into thinking the Flood did not happen. Only people like yourself can see the Flood in the strata we have. People deeply wedded to a particular book. To everybody else, it’s nothing like the debris of a single flood.
So we’d expect to find lots of pigs below the K-T line then? There are no mammals beyond a few rodent-like forms. Nor house-bricks. Not a cart, or a boot, or a plough, or a ship, or a human skeleton … nothing.
Allan Miller,
Ka-BLAM! That’s a great post, I think. Beautifully summarizes the two positions–one rational and scientific, the other entirely religious.
I want to hear the answer from people like them. From people saying that evolution does not make sense. I want them to make sense with there explanations of design, gods, creation, etc. Or to acknowledge that they can’t make sense.
I think two of the problems in these discussions are that we put our focus on defending evolution and that we give for certain that we understand the meaning of certain terms. There is no reason for that. If I accept evolution and someone has a better explanation involving god, I will hear it. Of course, I heard of god all my life and have a vague idea of what it might be. But with my idea of god, explaining the universe with god doesn’t work. So, I would need this person to tell me exactly what he means with god in his explanation involving god that is better than evolution. The same for desing, creation, sudden appearance.
Usually, the result is no answer, of course. But if this person is a honest debater, at least he will realize that something is not right with his explanation. You see; you can twist evidence. The more complex the evidence, the easier it is to twist it. But you can’t twist the lack of basic definitions.
The scientific mind can account for that very easily and rationally: the devil rearranged the fossil remains to delude us. Science is so simple!!
Of course, an asshole like myself would answer “What is the devil?”
I was eleven years old when Life Magazine came out with a series called The Epic of Man, which included the first mass media discussion of human evolution. I was taking confirmation classes at the time, and can recall having this exact thought about evolution.
My older sister informed me that confirmation classes had been moved to an earlier age to get kids before they became skeptical. I guess I took the hint, because I bought the 1956 version of comparative religion for dummies and decided I was mostly a pantheist.
Devil’s bones is a variant of Last Thursdayism.
You won’t get that. “Design” for them is just shorthand for “whatever science is currently having trouble explaining”; “God” is whatever made things this way; and that He/She/It must exist follows from the the fact that science is not complete.
Is it fallacious? Yes, but so elegantly so!
walto,
But it’s not the same if we say it than if they say. I want them to say it. I can’t force them to admit it. But I can ask and the lack of an answer speaks clearly enough. So I will go on asking. Even if there is no answer, it’s a point for me.
I think that “Let the childern come to me” is not as innocent and sweet as it seems to be at first glance.
Guillermoe,
A doorstepping Baptist once told me that Satan had closed my mind to the Truth. Powerful rascal, ain’t he?
If we believe Exodus, it was probably Yahweh who closed your mind.
Apparently something undetectable beings do for their amusement. But you have free will–unless, of course, you don’t.
Glen Davidson
Brings to mind a bit from the movie Time Bandits, in which there is a very brief discussion of whether god created evil.
Ask, and ye shall receive!
Who asked, and what was received?
Did you read The Gospel of Satan, by Patrick Graham. Very, very interesting conjecture.. Basically, god was just a pretentious bastard that put the armony of this universe and all the others (?) by creating us..
phoodoo made the claim that there were unanswerable questions raised in the book Darwin’s Doubt and this was a thread for phoodoo to note one or two of those questions so we could discuss if they really are unanswerable as claimed and if that somehow supports ID if true.
For some very strange reason phoodoo has not been back since the thread was created.
Would you like to have a go Mung? I’m sure you’ve read the book (I’ve not) and so perhaps you can take phoo’s place?
Allan Miller,
Well as i said the real strata(depostional events0 simply show segregated depositional events. Simply YEC puts these events within a chaotic year. by powerful fantastic water pressure. Stripping the seas here and the land there and landing them over there. it seems so obvvioius to me the earth shows this. i don’t see slow events doing this. They are toop clean for slow actions. remember the rare special mechanisms for sediment and company to be turned into stone in the first place. No sediment is on its way today to be turned to stone.
The unclean would not mean the later udeas in the bible. Not about pigs. the dinos would be the unclean.
A creationist would predict the preflood world would, as a option, be a unclean dominance. The post flood a clean dominance by the ratio on the ark. likewise in the seas. So a creationist would not expect to find mammals below the k-t line as a option.
There are other points here too.
The bible recognizes a fauna issue and the fossils easily show , as a option, the fauna issue of clean/unclean.
The bible , in effect, predicted long ago that buried creatures showing the old worlds fauna types would be unrelated to later fauna types.
🙂
Robert Byers,
You mentioned design. You meantioned creation. You made conclussion on the fossil record as if it was complete. You mentioned that living organisms “suddenly appeared”. Can you be more clear and explain what are you talking about exactly?
Can you describe what exactly you mean by design? What is a “design” process that produces biodiversity?
Can you also describe what “god” is? Can you describe what “creation” is, how it happens?
How do you know you are not missing fossils?
How do living organisms “suddenly appear”?
If you don’t explain these processes, it is useless to provide “evidence” for them. “I have this evidence to prove this process for which I have a name but I don’t know what the hell is going on”? Obviously, it doesn’t work like that…
Robert Byers,
So if the world was populated by organisms such as those that trooped to the ark, and a flood wiped out their relatives, you wouldn’t expect to find a single trace of those relatives anywhere within the flood debris? Just shells and arthropods and dinosaurs and fish and stuff, plus a few not-very-modern mammals which got left off the Ark entirely?
Ah, now we’re getting somewhere! Fantastic water pressure. It would have to be. Because at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, nearly 11,000 metres down, the sediment is … mud. If it rained to the height of Everest, nearly 9,000m, that would not even double that pressure. And of course it would have to rain at 6 inches a minute worldwide continuously for 40 days to do that. You can have less water if you like – people try and explain the limestone atop Everest by arguing that the Himalayas got … sort of … pushed up by all the water. Water can move mountains, but only veeeeeery sloooooowly, and grain by grain. But if you have less water, you have less pressure. You don’t have enough as it is.
Why not just say “it was all just one big Miracle”?.
I’ve never encountered a YEC who understood hydrostatic pressure.
Allan Miller,
Before the flood the clean would be segregated just the people. So one can speculate the fossil remains only account for some of the earth and no reason to catch the segregated clean areas. Clean creatures might only of accounted for 1-3% of creature life. There are other ideas also such as mammals, some, today are not actually seen in some creatures found in fossils but said to be reptiles etc etc.
I don’t expect to find horses or bunnies with the unclean world.
Water pressure, we speculate, would come from the continents breaking up suddenly. The great deep areas only existed after the flood. they were created by great pressure in the water.
The great mountains also were created by crashing continents. There was probably only small mountains at best before the flood. All mts show they were created by the energy in the earth crust. so during/after the flood.
it all works.
Robert Byers,
But they should be somewhere, surely? The whole purpose of the flood was to get rid of Creation. All of it. The Bible makes no mention of segregation. Nor does it even hint that the fauna of the pre-Flood world was nothing like that after. That was the whole bleedin’ point of the Ark, to preserve it!
One does wonder why God created such an excess of ‘unclean’ life, before deciding he needed to give it a rinse. If you wanted to get rid of (a selection of) marine arthropods, more water is maybe not the optimum method.
Try it. You can generate whatever water pressure you like in a lab, and see if you can turn mud into rock with it. And at the same time preserve animals within it undeformed, in neat striated succession.
The Bible says the flood covered the “high mountains”. Heretic!
The Bible says nothing about the earth’s crust. Just water. A flood. A story told round campfires to explain the shells high up in mountain rocks.
The mountains were indeed generated by crustal motion, but their form is consistent with slow, somewhat plastic deformation, not catastrophe. Pitch will flow, but shatters if you hit it with a hammer. Likewise hot rock.
The energy required to raise a mountain or move a continent is substantial. The more rapidly you apply energy, the hotter it gets. The conventional account of tectonics and orogeny is slow convection of the underlying magma, over millions of years. The heat energy is readily dissipated. If, by some means, you propose that an equivalent amount of energy were applied in a few days, the seas would boil. They’d be boiling anyway, due to the potential energy conversion of such massive amounts of falling rain.
Yeah, so does my marzipan car.
You seem unsure. Can you think of any way that you can become more sure about your claims?
Speculating is fine, if it’s the first step in a process. You never seem to go beyond that first step.
Why?
They’re not clean animals, according to the Bible. Another area that you seem not to know.
What’s not remotely explained, even by YEC ad hoc guesses, is why the really common fossils are shallow-water organisms, yet trilobites are fairly common in the Cambrian and somewhat later and completely gone by the time of the dinosaurs, replaced by crustaceans and other animals. None of them is clean according to the Bible.
It would be interesting if any YEC could explain heat distribution in the earth’s crust. The way ocean crusts are hot near rift zones, cooling off to tepid at most in the really old rocks, is an interesting phenomenon simply and easily explained by the radiometric ages of those rocks. Then there are old rift zones on land in Arkansas and nearby states, and some in Minnesota, with mineral deposits clearly deposited hot, that are now very old and cold. Michigan has some large regions of rock metamorphism–involving great heat–that are now cool. Huge amounts of hot rock were extruded to form the Siberian Traps, now cool. None of these once-hot regions could cool down to today’s levels, except over millions of years.
A few YECs will acknowledge problems with heat in the earth–since it’s such a straightforward issue that their ad hoc solutions don’t even begin to paper over. Robert could give it a shot. And no, flood waters won’t do it, heat transfer in huge stacks of hot rock being the problem. Bring on the miracles.
Yes I know, this won’t affect Byers. It’s just interesting (to me, at least) geology that YECs give excuse for bringing up on a forum.
Glen Davidson
Moving this back from the ‘ID is dead’ thread – sorry, my fault it resurfaced there.
Byers
Details are absolutely vital. You can’t just waft them away as if they don’t matter, and then carry on pretending you are doing science. If you want to say “it was all a big miracle”, then fine, say it and be on your way. But if you are invoking naturalistic processes, those naturalistic processes must be assumed to act like naturalistic processes do now. Water had the same density it does now, sediment has the same suspension characteristics, a quart could not be squeezed into a pint pot. Otherwise you can just say ‘magic water’, having whatever properties it needed to do the job.
Ferchrissakes, I’ve told you why not!
‘Uniquely’? What does that mean? A completely unrepeatable process, a miracle? Why in hell would you need weight to accomplish this miracle? Why not just invoke a weightless miracle and have done? If you are invoking weight, and its effect on sediment, you have to account for it, and consider physics. There is not enough weight in an added 5 miles of water (in fact, you have less than 5 miles, because you avoid the need to cover Everest by saying ‘low hills’). If you have 5 miles of slurry instead, it would be heavier, but still insufficient to turn it all to rock as it settles out. You need settlement and further input from land, but your land is blanketed by water, and so not subject to erosion, other than by undersea turbulence. Careful, you can’t have too much turbulence or you’ll tip the Ark over.
Wave those hands, Robert! Wave ’em like there’s no tomorrow!
You don’t add a significant amount to the mechanics by making the water flow turbulently. Water’s just the wrong kind of material to turn mud into stone. Not least because water is one of the ingredients of mud. It just pushes it about if you squirt it, and it just sits there if you overlay it. What you do, however, is make it vanishingly unlikely that flat bedding of the kind we see from bottom to top of the succession, with fossils preserved in apparent evolutionary sequence, will be the result.
And, to repeat, YEC CANNOT speed up the process invoked in the conventional account, which involves the erosion of continents and their deposition as an overburden which acts as a piston and also thermally insulates, allowing the slow heat of radioactive decay and the slow percolation through fissures and cracks to allow out the water. You don’t have the mass or potential energy in your low continents, and you cover them with a flood before any serious erosion can take place. And you have a one-time load of sediment, not serial burial which is vital for creating lithification conditions. You can’t just take the initial sediment, all in suspension at once, then use the upper part of it to supply the pressure to turn the lower part into rock. Archimedes would have a fit.
You can’t just ‘speed it up’ without magic.
Allan miller.
you make my case by the mechanism you invoke.
You say there is a sediment layer, then a piston action (I like that concept) working upon another sediment deposited, then heat to insulate and bang sediment turns to stone in its segregated strata.
So creationism just speeds it up. why nopt?
We have another origin for the sudden deposition of MORE layers, over hours/days/weeks, and this load plus , i think the weight of the water or the punch of the water, etc options, instantly insulates and squeezes.
by this same mechanism in areas where its biological layers etc it turns into instant oil/gas etc.
it works fine for us and is more likely. not your slow erosion, slow weight, slow thermal heating, concept.
just a big banf for the buck of a great flood.
the sediment loads can be found from the sea floor/land etc./
your right about the mts being low very likely.
Why do you see a difference from YEC mechanism and yours save for time??
No, I absolutely do not.
So see if you can speed that process up in the lab, using plausible pressures. You won’t be able to. The problem is physics.
Sigh. I thought I’d made that pretty clear.
Because (among many, many other things) there is far more sediment than you can account for. What are you imagining – a land of low hills and shallow seas? OK, now it rains, hard. In next to no time the low hills are covered. Therefore THERE IS NO MORE EROSION. You can’t speed up something that is not happening.
Now consider the seas. Soon, whatever sediment there was is already in there, and has already added its weight to the water. It starts to settle out. IT DOESN’T GET ANY HEAVIER. The seas get deeper. THERE IS NO MORE PRESSURE BEYOND THE WATER. It’s not enough.
The sediment is saturated. The upper layers of sediment will not act as a ‘piston’ in that scenario, driving out the water. You won’t get the ‘piston’ action from a single sedimentation event. Apart from the fact that the pressure is insufficient, THERE IS NOWHERE FOR IT TO GO.
In the conventional account, rain falls upon land. This happens every few days. The water flows to the sea, carrying grains and dissolved minerals. This adds MASS to the sea. It settles out in layers. Gradually, the continent disappears, ground down by steady attrition. The overburden compresses the lower part, and water finds its way out by outgassing and percolation. These are limited by physics. You can’t move this quantity of water by this mechanism, even in a year, and certainly not using water pressure!
You CAN’T just speed this up, and grind down a continent in a matter of days. Particularly if it is low. Being low has 2 consequences: not enough material, and it would be covered by the flood in days, and the process would simply STOP. It’s not just time, it’s mechanism. You ascribe properties to water that it simply does not possess. Magic water.
Robert,
A simple question.
Did the flood require a miracle at any point?
Yes/No.
Allan Miller.
For some reason I don’t get the “quote” etc part in the comments anymore. anyone know why?
First things first.
you complain there is not enough sediment.
What if there was??
Lets say there is. why shouldn’t the mechanism , BOTH, of us need simply with us be speeded up?
Simply A sediment load SMASHING into/on top of a underlying sediment load deposited earlier is what I imagine.
Then you say the sediment load would be saturated and the overlying sediment load would be saturated.
Well once again i invoke the moving pressure, pressure head in hydraulics, and its smashing into unlying sediment layers everywhere as a , option, for how the water was squeezed out or heated away. Why not?
It could be just heat or actual water moving out in a sponge way.
On the higher ground, thoiugh covered by water, this would be more likely then in the deeper seas.
AGAIN. I see the basics for our model as in the models geologists MUST invoke.
The sediment material easily can be accounted for I think.
Its the mechanism here though that works for us.
Piston and heat from fantastic pressureized sediment loads on top of each other.
The very power that laid the sediment load did the instant work of turning underlying sediment layers into stone.
It works even with details needing to be filled in.
Its not impossible at all to account very well for layered strata and its quick stoning.
In fact it seems more likely then slow ideas.
OMagain.
All the universe is a working miracle.
I don’t see a miracle needed but this YEC speculates the flood came from Satan and not God.
God takes responsibility but it was satan doing all the killing and crashing.
Satan is held back by God always and so its still not a miracle.
That function was provided by a plugin. But the plugins were causing other problems (running out of memory), so are disabled.
Robert,
Very well. What or who started the flood process?
Day 1 – no flood.
Day 2 – flood starts.
What happened on day 2 to start the flood?
Neil Rickert
Then its not me? Will this be fixed? is it TSZ issue?
On day two the agent would influence the mechanisms of nature.
Its just nature getting a shove. I guess you could say the shove is a miracle.
its not important.
Robert,
On the contrary. You’ve just shown that all your talk about “physics” is meaningless. You don’t know or care if what you claim is physically possible and you don’t need to – it was all a miracle.
Where did the water come from? A miracle?
Where did the water go? A miracle?
Why are the fossils sorted as if by time yet in a way a flood could not possible arrange? A miracle.
http://my-online-log.com/tech/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/miracle.jpg
So stop pretending what you believe is related to science, it’s not. Any process that requires a miracle is not scientific.
Robert,
How?
Perhaps Robert skipped over the part where it says, “God caused…”
I don’t know how many times I need to say this. You can’t just conjure up enough sediment. It has to come from somewhere, and it has to exist somewhere after being moved. Where are you going to store it? The ‘conventional’ sediment comes from the land, with material dissolved in rivers or carried as silt and boulders, initially loosened by freeze-thaw, solution, vegetation or by the grinding action of other materials. It takes years to do this. It takes a lot of such ground-down continent to create the pressure to lithify.
In the case of limestone, it has to dissolve and then pass through the bodies of shallow-water sea creatures, with far more calcium and magnesium carbonate than the oceans could even hold in solution, and far more creatures than could co-exist simultaneously.
The non-solution processes don’t even happen if the land is covered in water.
So …. you can’t just ‘speed it up’.
So it should be a simple matter to construct a piece of laboratory apparatus that smashes some mud and see if it turns to rock. It won’t. And where do you get the SMASHING force from? Rain? That’s just ridiculous. To say nothing of its effect on the poor old Ark, and those delicate fossil corals that you have hitherto ignored, layered 1000 metres high all facing upwards as in life, or the desert sands, the evaporites, the stromatolites, and so on and so on and so on. All the detail you just ignore as inconvenient.
How many more times? You can’t squeeze water out of a saturated sediment using a head of water! Imagine trying to set up an apparatus to do it. Set up a porous piston over some mud, then pour water in on top. Use as much depth as you like – 1000 miles if you want. What’s going to happen? Make the piston impermeable. What happens now?
And you need to get the water out of a sediment load as deep as the Rockies. Not gonna happen in a year. Just not. Try smashing mud and see if you can dry it out with pressure. No. You have to squeeeeeze it. You can’t rush water, especially when you are trying to get it through narrow pipes. The more you’ve got, the longer it takes.
As to heat – why is magma hot? Radioactive decay. It’s not an instant process. The kind of energy you’d need to blow out the water with heat would require megatons of radiation. Which, again, would be a bit troublesome for poor old Noah, bobbing on the surface as if nothing is happening down below, to say nothing of the effect on the sediment. It’s like saying you can just ‘speed up’ the baking of a cake by making the oven sun-hot.
So these cataclysmically smashed sediments happen also have air gaps the size of the Rockies? Wouldn’t they just fill with sediment and the overlying water?
No. The conventional account essentially uses the water cycle to generate the sediment. Water evaporates, falls as snow or rain, grinds down the continents, carries it to the seas which remain the same depth. You have just flooded the land. You’ve stopped the ‘geologist’s’ process stone dead. So it is a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT MODEL.
From low, flooded hills? No.
It only bloody rained!
Once again, consult Mr Archimedes. If the sediment is suspended in water, layers below cannot get more pressurised as it settles. There is also a limit to the amount of sediment you can get into the water, and it has to come from somewhere. Additionally, such settled sediment would be layered, with the largest chunks at the bottom and gradually finer sediments above. This is not what we find. And it should be possible to point to just one lab experiment where a ‘flood geologist’ had actually turned a sediment to stone. You can generate ‘fantastic pressures’ in a lab. They’re obviously too busy conning folks out of donations – I watched a televangelist last night. What a hoot!
Not to anyone who understands physics, chemistry and geology.
Omagain
I don’t get your point. Its a fine line between god etc influence over nature and nature acting alone after being wound up.
Thats what it is. Jesus stopped the wind/waves once and so its gods action upon nature. i guess a miracle.
Allan Miller
Well you did complain again about where the sediment came from.
Yet if its there then first things first.
Could the sediment , under pressure, be used to squeeze lower sediment into stone instantly. YES. Why not?
Your side must do the same mechanism except with time to allow the overlying weight to bring the pressure.
You complain about the smashing pressure source. i do have a source.
Its not the rain or minor wave action, even in such a flood minor is relative,.
it was from the tremendous pressure created from the sudden moving continents.
YEC believes in the continent whole as the first status and the flood broke it up into its present state. this pressure was fantastic and would smash sediment loads in their layers into other sediment load layers in constant actions.
Water will not enter water, remember Leonardo Da vinci, and indeed in geomorphology its noted water will turn other water and so create vortices and rock carving.
so I can see the pressure head of water/on sediment squeezing out the water/like a sponge in a lower layer.
Even while under water. Heat also somehow involved or created.
Details are around all this.
It seems hard to imagine a lab test for such pressure but maybe someday.
Again the equation is everyone must explain sediment into stone from overlying pressure.
YEC speeds it up and i see it as working as a model.
the sediment would come from smashed edges of continents/dug up sea beds and level land with its overburdon of soil. Possibly that bing thousands of feet back in those days.
It can be found by speculation
There would also be biological collected pockets and this the origin of oil/gas etc.
If it’s WHERE then ‘first things first’? Surely ‘first thing’ IS the material, and its location. You are avoiding explicitly invoking magic, but you just conjure up mountains of the stuff from nowhere, more than can actually be accommodated in the space available, then have it travel by a mechanism inadequate to move such a bulk to settle with more force than it can actually acquire, then have the water driven out of it more rapidly than it can actually be driven out, creating layering that is not at all what would be expected if you were right – all to support a story. Put it where you like, it cannot do what you need it to do in the time and conditions you need it to do it in.
NO. I’ve told you why not, a good dozen times. It’s not an instant process. Sediment in water settles, it does not travel faster than gravity and viscosity permit. It provides little in the way of impact. And you have no mechanism to rapidly drive out the water. Rapidly applied or more intense pressure and heat do not simply speed up a slower process. Try it with your spuds. Keep doubling the heat, you don’t keep halving the cooking time. Some things take time. Lithification is one. Try speeding up the baking of a cake, or the firing of a pot.
Water does not have the capacity to move a continent, other than grain by grain. This part of your story is pure fantasy. (What am I saying – “this part”? Hahahaha!). You think you can make it more impressive by invoking continents smashing, but your motive force is still … water. Doesn’t work.
It has to go up, down or sideways. To get into a neighbouring void, that would have to be under less pressure. And not already full of something. It’s not at all clear why or how such voids would exist. And it would still take time to move a Himalayas’ worth of water into them. And we should be able to find these voids; they will have a different character from the neighbouring rock. There are no such voids.
The water has to go upwards. It has to find a way through the overburden. This is not instant either. It takes many years for percolation to occur. Even if you boil it.
You can create massive pressures in the lab, right now, more than enough to prove the flood geologists’ point. Quit stalling.
Yet you haven’t addressed any of the reasons why you cannot just ‘speed it up’. You cannot speed up erosion, so you need all the sediment just sitting there, or available by instant continent-grinding. Then you just kind of … gather it up, and suddenly (handwave, handwave) you get rock.
Why? Just cos?
– If it was soil it would contain pollen, plants and dateable carbon.
– If it was ‘smashed continent edge’ it would sort with boulders at the bottom and finer sediment at the top.
– As it was not supposed to rain in those days, there would be little erosional sediment on the sea bed.
But yeah … thousands of feet. Why not? In The Beginning God created thousands of feet of sediment. He thought it might come in handy.
Classic! Most geologists use hammers, drills, instruments, chemistry, that kind of thing.
Robert,
So model it! Do the mathematics!
For example, how much heat would the rain generate by friction from the air as it falls?
But see, Dembski called it. Our level of detail is pathetic, but they don’t have to match even that.
Well, calling it worked in third grade.
Glen Davidson
Allan Miller
Its not the water moving the continents but they are breaking from underneath. They simply create the great pressure in the water which creates segregated, mighty, flow events that pick, deposit, pick up and deposit on top, and all this from great pressure.
Its segregated flow events that are doing the work. Going every way and back.
Thats the power source.
So smashing a hugh sediment load into another one beneath is easy. It being so great it would squeeze, possibly sort, sediment types and all into stone.
by pressure and possibly heat action.
Water does not enter itself and if it bumps into itself it will create pressure.
The pressure is there to squeeze the sediment into stone by various means.
your side must also invoke pressure from overlying weight of sediment.
Speed it up and its the same result.
The sediment is everywhere. The water pressure/continents moving created the great depths in the seas and so all that material was there to be used.
And so on.
you must show the mechanism, I provide doesn’t work as opposed to the lack of material.
Water pressure isn’t enough. It doesn’t cause ‘segregated, mighty flow events’. Please refer to my post of … oooh, mid-December sometime … when I pointed out that the bottom of the Marianas Trench is comprised of mud, and not going anywhere other than by tectonic motion, fuelled by convection from beneath.
You are really trying to invoke turbulence. Certainly, if the rainfall were unevenly distributed, there would be some flow as it finds its level. The land would initially be scoured (though there is less and less of it as the flood progresses, and it’s not clear why any of it would be particularly fragmented, requiring as it does prolonged rain, ice or wind action). But such turbulence isn’t enough to physically break up a continent. That’s just preposterous.
And let’s not forget Noah and his floating zoo. You can’t just localise the energy. Water transmits energy – that’s why a 15-metre 1600-km landslip in the middle of the Indian Ocean caused devastation right around the rim hundreds of miles away from the site. Of course boats at sea simply experienced a mild rise and fall. But the waves from the kind of event you are supposing would be f*#+ing ENORMOUS, and would travel right around the flooded globe, meeting themselves and creating massive surface turbulence.
See: The Law of Conservation of Energy. Your ‘flows’ are merely transferring energy from elsewhere. You need an input of energy in the first place. In the ‘slow’ world, the energy comes from the sun (evaporates water which falls as rain/snow, also generates wind) or radioactive decay (generates internal heat and convection of magma). This energy is slowly applied. Apply the same amount of energy over 40 days, from God knows where, the planet blows up!
There’s no reason to expect any sorting other than by sedimentation rate, which is rarely found.
The pressure is (largely) the weight of the water above, not water bumping into anything.
Once more, you can’t speed up ‘my side’s’ mechanism – attrition of continental rock by weather – by adding more liquid water. You just can’t. This is the most dispiriting thing about such discussions – the complete failure to recognise that a point has been addressed, again and again and again and …
The continents move and seas deepen because a layer of water sufficient to cover a low-lying landscape made them do so? That’s just nonsense.
Transport of the material must be part of the mechanism. It takes energy, which just kind of appears (along with the sediment) in your model. But rapid burial even of mysteriously sourced sediment will not cause rapid lithification of the lower layers. You have provided no evidence that it can, despite this being very amenable to mechanical study.
I see four main issues:
– Getting the water out (hint: water at twice the temperature or twice the pressure does not travel twice as fast, ignoring the rate changes at the phase transitions),
– Supplying the heat for the ‘baking’ process without boiling Noah (he’s already been boiled, but that’s a separate issue) or metamorphically transforming the sediment itself. Some sediments are metamorphosed, but most aren’t.
– The nature of the ‘curing’ process of lithification. It takes time, just like firing a clay pot does. You can’t just speed it up by saying “I just speed it up”.
– Such instant burial would squash animals and plants. They aren’t (generally) squashed. They appear to be mineralised first, at lower pressure, a process which takes time.
And … limestone. It’s not just generic ‘sediment’, it’s mostly animals or evaporites. How they come to be gathered together in thousand-metre lithified successions looking for all the world like a succession of shallow-sea beds is not clear. Unless, of course, they are a succession of shallow-sea beds. That’s 10% of the world’s sedimentary rock.
Me:
Loose talk. Mostly organisms or evaporites.
I have introduced a new strange idea to you.
YEC sees the continents as having been a single whole before the flood. We all know the continents separated. They call it continental drift.
We say continental redeye. I do.
so the present continents got to where they are in a single year. so we imagine early fits and starts.
this did not come from the rain but was a coincedence. not of its own will; but a part of the plan.
So the energy input, we speculate, came from fantastic pressure of these continents, say a month in to the flood or so and lasting for months etc.
This is the pressure that moved the water to deposite, dig out, and possess segregated flows within a flooded world.
This pressure landing segregated sediment loads from segregated flow events on top of each other.
this fantastic pressure smashing out water soaked sediment and turning it into stone. Case after case.
YES destroying most creatures bodies but not all. So the middle of the continents keeping intake the creatures because relatively more quiet. Yet still turning them also to stone by some pressure loads.
Heat probably a minor factor in these events. Not a general boiling on the planet.
So we see no difference in our mechanism from the one the other side suggessts.
We just speed it up.
Yes details but it still is just pressure acting on sediment.
You also say this but slow it down. Yet its still pressure from weight.
Our weight is from a great clobbering instantly.
It is a good model. its not actually different but faster.
i don’t see the trench today as relevant to the mechanism I suggest.
I think my clarification here should change your four points list.
No, you’ve just made something up. Not even in the Bible.
Oh, yeah! That explains it! It was a coincidence …. ! Why not just say “It was all one big Miracle”? You keep trying to do science, is the real problem. But your naturalistic explanations simply don’t work.
The continents can reasonably be supposed to have been in isostatic equilibrrium when the Flood came.
You can suppose they weren’t I suppose … so, you think this disequilibrium was triggered into settlement by the Flood, and the continents found a new level which involved these SOLID continents moving through oceanic crust halfway across the globe, generating a huge mass of loose sediment (more, lest we forget, than could be contained at one time in the oceans, and 10% consisting almost entirely of marine organisms) which then settled out, caused the lower mud to lithify, THEN was thrust up to make the Rockies, Himalayas, Alps etc … all of this energy being provided by the gravitational potential energy of disequilibrium? Sorry, that’s not enough either. Nowhere near.
And all the while this massive energetic redistribution is going on, Noah and his zoo were simply bobbing along unperturbed on the surface? Remember the Boxing Day tsunami – that was just a 15-foot slip. Multiply that up by the number of pressure-slips involved in getting the continents halfway round the globe. It would be a tad choppy.
Pressure doesn’t move things. Force does. The energy has to come from somewhere. So far you have provided two wholly inadequate sources: added water, and continental instability (gravity, essentially).
You throw in this word ‘segregated’ a lot. Yet things aren’t massively different in different parts of the world, they are different as one ascends the geological column. This does not indicate a geographical separation, but a temporal one.
Once more, you can’t get water rapidly out of sediment by simply hitting it, any more than you could dry out a flooded plain by giving it a good whack.
You can’t avoid generating heat, is the point. This is why it’s called thermodynamics. Applying energy over a short time generates heat more quickly than it can be dissipated. That’s why you can make fire by rubbing sticks together quickly, but not slowly. You are imagining a vast amount of energy input, far too quickly to dissipate, if you are imagining the continents migrating in a few days.
You can’t ‘just speed it up’. I know I’ve said this before … sigh … Tell the people at Jack Daniels to “just speed it up”! Some things take time. Lithification is one. Moving continents is another. Erosion is a third.
No, we don’t say this at all. The overburden pressure serves only to contribute to the process of turning sediment into rock. It has no other part in the overall mechanism – generating sediment and moving it. Nor does it move the continents.
It is totally different. The sole point of congruence is that it involves reference to sediment pressure. You have yet to provide any evidence that you even can ‘clobber’ sediment and have it instantly lithify.
Not one bit of it. You haven’t gone near the points, other than to repeat your unworkable ‘just speed it up’ mantra. And you haven’t even mentioned limestone.
Robert,
Speaking of such things, did the amount of heat caused by the mere friction of all that rain falling in air
A) Not heat up the earth at all?
B) Heated up the earth a little?
C) Heated up the earth a lot?
D) Other?