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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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Allan miller.
I’m not sure you understand me. the continents moving, from the same or similar power they invoke to explain continental drift is the origin of the energy for the pressure. Satan/Gods allowance included not just the earth being flooded but the roots of the landmass being uprooted.
A new idea for you but we think this. We combine the flood and the continent creation, from a previous single mass, in the flood year.
So this is the reason for the earth being covered with sedimentary rock. 70%.
The fantastic pressure suddenly from moving hugh land masses created segregated flows within a already flooded world.
The ark would be protected by God.
yet i do provide a mechanism for sediment collection/depositing. Since its from flow events it would be orderly. layering.
Its another idea to see this pressure ramming sediment into lower deposits and doing the work that everyone must admitt happened to explain sediment turning to stone. of biology to oil or stuff into limestone etc. Same mechanism.
The weight is important to your sides ideas of turning sediment into stone.
anyways nobody saw this sediment inot stone thing and details must be worked out but hypothesis is there for our models.
The layering is just that. layered sediment from segregated flows within the mass of the water over months etc.
I think it works.
Omaguin.
I never said the rain made friction.
All there was was the continents moving and this in some way, some pattern, some timeframe, created the pressure to collect/deposit sediment on hugh scales.
Why not> I have had people question me about heat but those are details that can be explained before they explain it didn’t happen.
Robert,
So? It still does, even if you did not mention it.
So does rain falling generate:
A) No heat
B) Some heat
from friction with the air it is falling through?
It’s ok if you don’t know – I’ll explain!
Omaguin.
i don’t know but it sounds like you think it does. fine. Its irrelevant to anything I have been going on about.
It doesn’t affect mechanisms during the flood year.
Continental drift is conventionally explained by radioactive decay generating internal heat, which means both that there is a molten or plastic layer under the continents, and there are convection currents within it. But they move pretty slowly – a couple of cm a year.
The radiation, heat and strain energy from this process dissipates, and good for us that it does. If you propose to ‘speed this up’, you are invoking a huge megatonnage of radiaoactive decay, the application of that heat-energy over a much shorter period of time, and a few hundred million years’ worth of earthquakes in one year. Instead of taking 130 million years to open up, the Atlantic opened up in a year, fuelled by a nuclear bomb. So, even if you could make the magma move vastly faster, you are applying 130 million times the energy per unit time.
Where is all that heat and radiation going to go?
What is all the turbulence going to do up aloft, or to the banding of sediments?
Yes, you’ve said this a few dozen times now, and I’ve told you why it doesn’t work the same number. To summarise:
-There is insufficient energy in floodwater to cause continents to move
-There is insufficient energy in sub-crust convection to allow the continents to move more than a couple of cm in a year.
So what makes them move?
-Continents moving does not of itself generate sediment.
-The mass of sediment is greater than could be contained within your floodwaters
-If lithification came from overburden pressure, where is that nonlithified overburden now?
-Saturated sediment cannot simply be squeezed like a sponge to remove water if the surroundings are under the same mechanical constraint. The water has to go up, and this cannot be done quickly, not least because of that enormous overburden getting in the way.
What was the bloody point of it then? He could have just made a bubble, or killed the things that displeased him. You are trying to argue for a naturalistic approach to the evidence, but when the going gets tough, just cheat.
Rubbish. The ordering, if any, should be on sedimentation rate, not on apparent evolutionary succession of the organisms within. But since these ‘flows’ will be carrying energy (they must, else they would not flow) the predominant pattern would be turbulent disorder.
Settling sediment does not ‘ram’. It is not an impact mechanism that the conventional account invokes, but steadily increasing weight, due largely to net input from the land. If all the sediment is suspended in the sea, it does not get heavier as it settles. You have a one-time generation of sediment with no net input. There is insufficient weight in that system. So it is NOT the same mechanism ‘speeded up’. You are limited by the amount of weight you can get in the sea at once.
As to limestone, it requires the gathering together of vast quantities of marine creatures to the almost total exclusion of everything else. There are more organisms than the sea could accommodate, with more carbonates in their shells than could be held in solution at one time. In the conventional account, they did not all live at the same time, a perfectly simple and obvious resolution of this dilemma. And they lay where they died, not needing to be gathered together by some fantasy mechanism that nonetheless leaves them as if lying undisturbed on a seabed, unperturbed by turbulence, and not squashed by the vast pressures.
Weight and heat are parts of the process, certainly. But you don’t have enough of either, and, like baking a cake, it cannot simply be speeded up, unless you have evidence to the contrary.
Oh, the “were you there?” gambit. Tedious. It is still possible to calculate the parameters, and to experimentally investigate mechanism. Yours is simply unworkable. Still awaiting the evidence that pressure can rapidly lithify saturated sediment.
Science would beg to differ.
Robert,
If you don’t know the answer then how have you determined it’s irrelevant?
What does not affect mechanisms during the flood year? The thing that you do not know the effect of? If you don’t know it’s effect then how do you know it’s irrelevant?
People like you never want to focus on the detail. All your claim is really is many little details together – that’s all any claim is.
If you can’t focus on the smallest detail then you must understand that is the foundation for everything else. Everything is supported by that tiny detail, and if it fails then so does everything else.
So, Robert, I ask again, how much does 1 raindrop heat up the surrounding air as it falls?
If you don’t know, how can you exclude it as irrelevant?
Omaguin.
Its irrelevant as i see it. If it is relevant just say why.
Small details like these are not just small but irrelevant I think.
Although I will be wary now burn when its raining!
Allan miller
again you say I say the water moved the continents. it didn’t. its just a mechanism underground. its only speculation it moved CM’s a year. We just speed it up.
I understand there are issues with heat being created by these separating/then smashing continents.
Yet it is, FIRST, a mechanism to create fantastic pressure within a flooded world.
In short segregated flow events sweeping around in a time frame.
so it could sweep up hugh hugh chuncks of sediment from here and , in a mass, throw it over there. constantly.
Also the moving continents/water flows would dig out the oceans, to the preent depths, and so another source for sediment.
Then I add a mechanism of how depositing a high sediment load on another one could easily slam the lower into stone by the process everyone invokes for sediment into stone.
Its a option that fast can mimic your slow idea. I don’t know if slow would work anyways. its just presumed.
I think the bible, the evidence of nature, and imagination/insight can supply a mechanism for the pressure waves, the sediment sources, the sediment into stone mechanism, and other details.
If it waas great pressure from great loads it would be very special in such power.
There is no way for anyone to say its impossible. there is no way to experiment with it.
Likewise no way to experiment with your side.
I expect and welcome all fossils and all sediment turned to stone as it suggests a great event occurring at once. not unlikely slow accumulations and processes.
Robert,
And that is why you’ll never be able to convince people who care about the details.
Details are irrelevant to you.
Robert Byers:
(with apologies to everyone foolish enough to click on any of these tedious reposts of the same argument over and over!)
So what’s the connection to the Flood?
It is moving cm’s a year right now. You can see it happening from satellites and GPS in real time. You can’t just ‘speed up’ the underlying mechanism. It’s a combination of convection and gravitational sliding away from upwelling regions and towards mantle ‘downdrafts’. You would have a continent move 10000 kms in a year (32 cm a second!), simply through increase in those mechanisms, without boiling the oceans. This is impossible, mechanically and energetically. You’d need to generate and consume >1km of fresh ocean floor every hour. You’d be removing magma from the well faster than it could rise, stopping the ‘downhill’ slide from upwelling to downdraft, and rapidly exporting heat from the interior, again turning the mechanism off.
What moves the continents? There has to be energy, or they are going nowhere. You can’t create your ‘fantastic pressure’ out of thin air. Continental motion is caused by heat energy. You want to speed it up 130 million times, you need 130 million times the energy (as a minimum – even if you could move the magma fast enough it would not mean that any increased internal roiling would be coupled with the same efficiency to continental motion as is currently applied. The faster it goes, the more the gears spin).
Where does the energy come from?
Where does the energy come from?
ARE YOU DEAF? IT’S NOT THE SAME GODDAMNED MECHANISM! It is not continental motion or ocean deepening that generates sediment, but weathering. It is not ‘slamming’ that lithifies, it is accumulation.
There is a limit to the amount of sediment you can suspend in the ocean at one time. It is insufficient to lithify the amount of sediment you need to account for (or indeed any sediment, for reasons I’ve outlined before). Further, the upper part of the column should remain unlithified, being under less pressure. Where is it now?
You don’t know ‘slow’ would work, but you do know ‘fast’ would? Heh.
The Bible offers water. Nothing else. The rest, you are making up, with a poor grasp of mechanics to go with it.
I say it is impossible. It would be easy to show it wasn’t. You can easily experiment with pressure and temperature in the lab. You can show your basic mechanism works, and that saturated sediment can be rapidly lithified. Something ‘Flood Scientists’ should be trumpeting to the world. They seem curiously reluctant to do the obvious supporting experiment. Or to address the energy calculations.
Of course one can experiment, in the lab and the field. One can investigate erosion, sedimentation, and lithification in progress. One can also calculate – density, volume, energy flux, material flow, solution limits, organism numbers and chemical load – these are all entirely consistent with the ‘slow’ account, but completely at odds with a single event.
It really doesn’t suggest that at all. Isotope gradients, organismal stratification, distinct rock types one atop the other, unconformities, fragile shallow sea-bed organisms undisturbed one atop the other for 1000’s of metres, the sheer mass of sedimentary rock, the complete lack of turbulent mixing of layers, the generally unsquashed nature of fossils, the insufficient remnant of unconsolidated sediment, the impermeability of large masses of sediment, the presence of pebbles of sedimentary rock within other sedimentary rocks, apparently cyclic seashore sediments, airborne sediments deep in the strata – all of these argue against your single, rapid event. Evidence for? Two paragraphs in the Bible.
Allan Miller.
YES we are saying the continents broke up , at the same time, as the flooding. Two different things as part of the flood year.
Yes we can speculate the continents break up from the world of the underground in the earths crust.
We don’t need to enslave ourselves to slow ideas of CM a year.
So the pressure is from this. Your energy needed to create flow episodes/waves in a flooded world.
This same great, two, fast actions can carve out the oceans and provide some of the sediment needed. By the continents breaking.moving they are digging up the oceans.
One does not need to see suspended sediment in the water but whole chuncks collected and desposited at once.
I guess suspended sediment is also another option but I’m not thinking that way.
We just have great loads sudden;y picked up and deposited. No middleman of suspended sediment in water.
Weathering is irrelevant to sediment creation when dealing with great mechanisms as YEC speculates on.
The top layer might be turned to stone as a part of the whole action.
anyways everybody must account for it. where is your weight?
Experiments are not easy to do and neither side does turn sediment into stone.
You offer a list of criticisms but first thing first.
YEC does provide a mechanism and a model to explain, from biblical boundaries, the great sedimentary layers and layering and biology within.
Likewise the shape of the dry land and lots of details.
This is not a repetitive discussion but how conflicting concepts fight it out.
Boxing matches do repeat but for good reasons. the other guy is too.
But what could cause the continents to break up in such a coincidental manner? Water isn’t enough, and neither are convection or gravity. This is the most ad hoc part of your entire fairy tale.
If you want it faster, you have to supply more energy from somewhere. You have no idea where this might come from, nor how it might be coupled to rapid movement. Try making any convectional surface move 130 million times faster. You also have to deal with the fact that you are getting one or two kilometres of fresh lava across the sea floor every hour. This has several implications, not least that it would not form a stable platform for your sediment to collect on and ‘ram’. Every time one of your fantasy lithification events occurred, an hour later a kilometre-wide lava-filled crack would have opened up, requiring another event to fill it in. Whether continuous or intermittent, this sedimentation would leave a very distinctive profile, thanks to the conveyor belt on which it is landing.
From what? You have said the water played no part, now you say it does. Make your mind up. Water is insufficient to move continents. Gravity is insufficient to do more than make them slip a little, unless lubricated, and then it requires convectional assistance. Neither of these is sufficient to move continents hundreds of millions of times faster than they currently move. F=ma. Simple physics.
They must inevitably have some residence time in water – unless you are now invoking a massive aerial bombardment as well, to top up the water-borne load. This would be distinctively different. And would not be expected to contain sea organisms. Also, sedimentary rock is generally composed of fine grains, rarely anything that could be considered a ‘chunk’.
I dare say, but it is not irrelevant to the conventional account, which is why I mention it
Bollocks. Another invention.
FROM WEATHERING! Have you not been paying attention?
It doesn’t explain a damned thing. You haven’t addressed one single detail.
Aw c’mon Allan, don’t you know that ‘POOF’ can accomplish (ETA: and explain) ANYthing? :p
Byers is a goner, but hopefully your points will be taken seriously by ‘onlookers’.
On another note, I was just reading an article that pertains to Meyer’s claims about the Cambrian Explosion, etc. There are some things in it that also pertain to my posts in the CSI circularity thread. For those of you who haven’t read it, or who have read it and want to refamiliarize yourself with it, click on this link:
http://www.talkreason.org/articles/Meyer.cfm
Byers should read it too, along with the following articles:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dinosaur/blood.html
http://www.talkreason.org/articles/DinoBlood.cfm
Not that reading the above articles will have any curative effect on Byers’ religious handicap, but one can always hope. All three articles are illustrative of the willfully dishonest methods by which religious zealots push their theocratic agenda.
Cheers, I’ll have a squint.
I don’t really expect Byers to see the ridiculousness of his claims, and I think the ‘onlookers’ nodded off weeks ago! It’s just a bit of a shoot-’em-down computer game, with ideas in place of aliens.
I’m idly curious if Byers will explain why the archaeological record has 5 different extinction events spaced by vast stretches of time through geological history instead of just the one his biblical story would explain.
Allan Miller
I see progress in understanding here.
the bible does say the depths were broken up in the flood. We can speculkate this included the lower crust of earth. The destruction of the planet was a purpose and so we can see other things going on. Remember all life had to be killed and just a flooded earth wouldn’t kill the sea creatures. Another thing was needed.
Why not see the mystery crust as able to break up the single landmass at once!
who says such things can’t be done in those levels.
So the power to break then the power to push the water into flows endlessly for months etc
The continents breaking up is needed as the energy source for the segregated water flows which are the agent for collection/deposition.
Cause and effect.
You say the weathering provides the weight.
Fine but you need weight for the top layer too.
Therefore you must be saying it vanished after it did its job of squeezing the layer beneath it. Thats easy to say. Any evidence other then a line of reasoning.
Anyways there easily mechanisms in YEC models for sediment turning into stone instantly and why its everywhere.
The evidence for the flood is the unnatural sed rock layers.
You are looking at the flood year and not millions of years in a unlikely unproven model as we see it.
creodont2
my ideas are from biblical boundaries, natures evidence, insight/thinking.
Its up to your side too to prove its points. not just me.
I like the name creodont.
I see creodonts, like marsupials, ars just placentals or rather the same creatures that upon migration collectively adapt a few like traits . Creodonts are said to be convergent evolution in witness like marsupials but they are just the same old dumb creatures.
I wrote an essay on it called “POst Flood Marsupial Migration Explained” by Robert Byers. just google.
hey. why the accusations of dishonest etc etc.
They are false and so not competent evaluation.
Are evolutionists not competent in evaluating evidence?
Aardvark.
I don’t think the word is archaeological but I could be corrected.
All these extinction events we squeeze into a single event in the flood year. They all were killed by the same mechanism. The layering idea is false.
since they believe in layering they believe in different fossil life ages in same layers. then say they document creatures that by the nEXT layer are extinct. So extinct is repitive.
actually its the same simple event represented by different flows in the water powerfully collecting/depositing sediment chuncks/critters caught within.
how can you see a extinct in fossils? Only the lack of them later equals extinction in the former age.
Without the geology they have no biological story whatsoever. the biology, in fossils, is silent. It speaks only through the mouth of geology.
a great intellectual scientific absurdity for investigation where they claim to be doing scientific methodology.
Oh brother.
By the way creodonts were only post flood and went extinct a few centuries after the flood.
Robert
What physical evidence is there for that? Or did you perhaps dream it?
Heh heh. I doubt it.
Chapter and verse, please. The ‘springs of the great deep’ indicates that there were already oceans, not that the continents scuttled halfway round the globe to make room for ‘em.
If your God was a petty, limited and rather unimaginative soul, maybe. Shame he couldn’t do anything about the diseases and parasites.
I do. Not without miracles, anyway. You are invoking naturalistic mechanisms, but then rewriting the laws of physics and the properties of matter to suit.
Something you are hazy about. The continents breaking up itself needs an energy source. You need to impart some serious energy to move a continent halfway across the globe. It’s as if the continents were somehow on a hair-trigger of mysterious potential, then a mouse sneezed.
Well the top layer is mud – recently weathered sediment. I just don’t need a globe’s worth of it to exist at once. You do.
No, it doesn’t need to vanish. There is much less to start with, at any one time. Consider a continent and adjoining shelf that are not moving relative to each other. The continent weathers progressively onto the shelf, so each layer is lithified by the one above. The conditions for accumulation of solid sediment are most favourable at these continental margins. That’s where most of the mud is, substantially less than the overburden required for to lithify 70% of the earth’s surface at once.
In truth, continental margins change, due to drift, sea level change and up/down shift. So the zone of sedimentary rock formation is continually migrating, gradually spreading sedimentary rock about the surface of the earth. If the top-layer mud happens to rise above sea level, it simply washes off, and becomes part of the overburden at the new margin. There is no net increase in mud. There is also a mechanism of consumption, at subduction zones (and you can test the gases coming out of volcanoes, and confirm that they really do come from ocean sediment).
But you are trying to account for 70% of the earth’s rocks in one go. You need much more overburden at one time, so you have to wave it away with your magic wand.
And yet you can’t actually turn sediment into stone instantly, a very easily demonstrated process if it were truly a worldwide phenomenon. I could show you rock in various stages of lithification, progressively down in a drilled core. Take such a core and complete the process on the top layers.
What’s ‘unnatural’ is the complete lack of evidence for a flood in those same rock layers. They accord entirely with steady deposition and accumulation – the global stratification, the lack of mixing, the disconformities, the isotopes, the fossils, the lack of sorting on any parameters that would be expected of single-event deposition. They even sort according to similarities in the DNA of modern exemplars of their types, or their physical resemblance to modern forms! None of this can possibly be caused by continents moving 130 million times faster than now, grinding, digging, delving and moving huge volumes of the earth’s crust in days. Unless it was miraculous, and your God is deceitful as well as petulant.
Byers said:
“my ideas are from biblical boundaries, natures evidence, insight/thinking.”
Don’t you mean biblical fairy tales, ignorance and distortions of nature’s evidence, and delusions?
“Its up to your side too to prove its points. not just me.”
Prove? And what do you mean by my “side”?
“I like the name creodont.”
Me too, but likely for a very different reason than you do.
“I see creodonts, like marsupials, ars just placentals or rather the same creatures that upon migration collectively adapt a few like traits . Creodonts are said to be convergent evolution in witness like marsupials but they are just the same old dumb creatures.”
It’s so nice of you to take time out of your busy schedule of admiring your exceptional ‘specially created in the image of God’ superiority to voice your nonsensical opinion about “dumb creatures”.
“I wrote an essay on it called “POst Flood Marsupial Migration Explained” by Robert Byers. just google.”
I’ve read it, and I want my destroyed brain cells back.
“hey. why the accusations of dishonest etc etc.”
If you don’t see the willful dishonesty of creationists, as is pointed out in those articles (and many others), you’ve got a lot to learn.
“They are false and so not competent evaluation.
Are evolutionists not competent in evaluating evidence?”
Try again, in English that makes sense.
oMaguin.
The fossilization events that are needed to make the creodont fossils must of come from a unique event. They are above the k-t line and I see this as the flood line.
SO after the world was repopulated ,a few centuries , there was important events that created sediment flow and once again entombing/fossilizing instantly the post flood creatures. In some areas “creodonts” were ccaught up and so document a interesting point.
They were different only a little from present creatures but on this :LITTLE they were wrongly classified. Just like marsupials.
Allan Miller.
I guess we are ending this soon but it was a great rumble. this is how truth should be fought out. Too long has origin issues been in contention. Time to settle things.
I see your criticisms to the model this YEC presents.
We are deaqling with great forces that only with difficulty do men figure out.
I see the lower crust as powerful in its options to break apart the plates fast. We both agree at least slow. Either way its moved in the past anbd was not witnessed.
Who says it couldn’t be fast. Its a strange world down there.
My top layer complaint to you was how the top layer was turned to stone BY YOUR idea.
Where is the sediment weight to do the trick.What is there now couldn’t be enough weight and often there is nothing.
Your side must invoke it was there to press the lower sed into rock but then was eroded away.
By the way core drillings will find different stages in how the lower layers are turning into stone.
HOWEVER I say its just lower stages that were in process of changing by the quick instant event(s). Its not evidence they are NOW or were over TIME turning into stone. All that is seen is a result I say they are not turning slowly into stone but only are a picture of a event that lasted days or hours in the past. Then they stopped in the present stage.
We have done our damn best to persuade each other. I can go on but if your done its fine.
Creodont2
YES I insist we are intellectually and morally, anything, superior to everything else in biology. Call me a people-ist if you must but its true blue me.
nope. yEC/ID creationists revolution and invasion of origin issues in these or past days never had truck or trade with moral corruption.
we are the good guys and accusations against our intergrity etc etc are false and a wee bit more wrong then that.
I’m sure the majority on both/all sides act and talk in integrity and morality.
i do think we have a slight better moral CURVE then our oponents for many reasons but no big whoop.
Yes a odd creationist can do a dirty deed in some way but not a accurate sample us.
Yes you can sample identifiable groups.
Apparently, your god did when it invented the laws of physics. Take it up with the big man upstairs if you’ve a problem with that.
There’s a huge difference between creationists/IDists and actual scientists. Scientists look at the evidence and try to explain it, while various creationists look at the explanations and try to explain away the evidence (denial when all else fails).
This means that putting evidence before them won’t work. Because for them the evidence is the problem, the enemy that must be vanquished. Robert just is one of the most transparently vacuous of that type.
Glen Davidson
Nicely and succinctly put.
Robert, could you please detail what evidence would be required for you to give up your belief that a global flood occurred sometime in the past four thousand years (or whatever time period you profess)?
Patrick.
We deal in truth. the bible, natures truth, human insight.
no games. This subject was about the evidence of nature for the results found in nature.
Its up to both sides to demonstrate why their models are right and the other wrong.
No one was there. its based on post event forensics.
creationists are like Sherlock Holmes . We do a better job of looking at the evidence because we already know whodunnit.
Its intellectually easier.
Finally origin issues move in small obscure circles and don’t get the real weight of human competence in investigation.
Byers also posts his drivel on the ncse.com blog and he recently made some comments that I responded to (see this thread http://ncse.com/blog/2015/01/top-5-creationist-claims-grand-canyon-1-great-unconformity-0016078#disqus_thread).
I’m posting my response here because I think it’s relevant to Byers’ comments here:
(Among other things, Byers said): “Is the bible untrue? is christ nOT the son of God? Jesus said Noah existed directly!”
Byers, you often insist that biological evidence (“gooey stuff”) is the ONLY thing that should be used to support evolutionary theory and you insist that the biological evidence that evolutionary scientists find, study, and explain is misinterpreted and erroneously explained because of faulty/biased ‘lines of reasoning’. You also say that geological evidence, radiometric dating evidence, fossil evidence, chemical evidence, etc., etc., etc., are not biological evidence and that none of it supports evolutionary theory, an old Earth timeline, or anything else that goes against your YEC religious beliefs.
Since you’re a ‘good Christian’ and would never even think of having/employing a double standard (LOL) and bearing false witness (LOL) you must be highly confident that you can honestly and scientifically provide lots of biological evidence (“gooey stuff”) to support all of your YEC beliefs and claims. I’m sure (LOL) that you would never resort to or rely on mere ‘lines of reasoning’ to support your claims.
So tell me, Robert, what biological evidence (“gooey stuff”) can you provide to show that the biblical characters “God”, “Jesus”, and “Noah” ever actually existed? What biological evidence (“gooey stuff”) can you provide that shows “christ” to be “the son of God”?
What biological evidence can you provide to show that the biblical flood occurred and that it occurred about 4,000 years ago? What biological evidence can you provide to show that the biblical character Noah lived for 900+ years? What biological evidence can you provide to show that only the life forms that were allegedly on the biblical ark survived the biblical flood? What biological evidence can you provide to show that only the life forms that were allegedly on the biblical ark (the alleged individual survivors of the alleged flood) were the only ‘kinds’ and individuals that diversified (evolved) into all of the subsequent life forms that allegedly repopulated the Earth? What biological evidence can you provide to show that the alleged diversification (evolution) and repopulation happened VERY rapidly?
What biological evidence can you provide to show that all life forms that have ever lived all lived within the last six thousand years? What biological evidence can you provide to show that all life forms were created by ‘yhwh-jesus-holy-ghost’ (aka the biblical ‘God’), and that humans were ‘specially created in the image of God’, and that absolutely nothing in the universe is older than about six thousand years?
Let’s see your gooey stuff evidence, Robert. No ‘lines of reasoning’ allowed.
Robert,
You contradict yourself. 😉
You have also failed to answer the question. What evidence would convince you that the biblical flood story does not reflect historical fact?
creodont2
Its too much off thread to prove the bible truths.
I do insist evolutionary biology is not a study using bio sci evidence but relies on supporting evidence entirely for its great claims.
Creationism starts off saying we have a witness to the scene.
Then we back things up with the evidence of nature and use sci methodolgy as much as possible.
Its your side that raised the stakes.
You said you proved your points and that by bio sci investigation.
Origin matters are complicated and difficult to investigate. its about past and gone events and processes.
Its difficult to do science on them. one must accept its more tenative then true sci theories and investigation.
And I explained that. Succession coupled with lateral motion of the active zone. Each new layer of mud adds to the weight of the layers below, and lithifies that which was mud, but in a successive manner (which would also lead to banding of the sediments, precisely what we see). The lithified strata are always x metres below the surface, but the surface is constantly being added to. Yesterday’s mud becomes tomorrow’s rock as it is buried.
Not necessarily. And even if eroded, it has to go somewhere, since mud doesn’t evaporate. The point is, I don’t need to cover 70% of the planet in mud at once. You do.
Suppose the pressure is enough to lithify sediment 1000 feet below the surface. After 1000 feet of accumulation, the bottom layer lithifies. Add 50 feet on top, you have 50 feet of rock at the bottom, and so on. There is never more than 1000 feet of mud, but I don’t need 1000 feet of mud worldwide at the same time. Fresh non-biogenic sediment appears primarily at the continental margins, and so at any one time the volume of fresh sediment is approx (length of coastline x extent offshore x 1000 feet), as opposed to (in your model) 70% of the surface area of the planet x 1000 feet. So there is mainly a current continental margin’s worth of mud to account for – ie, I only need to account for what there is.
The location of the continental coastline changes, and so gradually 70% of the planet is covered by this moving edge – the active zone, where rivers input and waves redistribute, and the accumulation lithifies.
But your model just doesn’t work. You’d have continental rifts opening up at the rate of over a kilometer an hour, which also requires subduction at the other sides of each plate at the same net rate. If your lithification event occurs early, you leave many kilometers of bare fresh ocean floor in the oceans, but a mass of rock on the other side of the continent which is going to be massively foreshortened by the shrinkage of subduction. Most of your sedimentary rock is going to be crumpled (and it isn’t), and there should be more on the Pacific than the Atlantic side (and there isn’t). If it occurs late, you have covered 70% of the planet in this lithifying mud, which you then need to just magic away, and you have placed lithification after orogeny (mountain-building, caused by plate collision), which would struggle to account for why most mountain ranges contain vast amounts of sedimentary rock.
In reality, the evidence shows that the processes of continental motion, erosion and lithification are in continual interplay, with a great series of events of plate breakup and re-annealing, not a one-act play into which a mud shower must somehow be fit.
I would also note that there is sedimentary rock on Mars. It would be interesting to know if that, too, comes from God’s petulant stomping all over his sandcastle.
If you are looking through sediment that has the same basic grain composition, you see a progressive increase in cementation and reduction in porosity. You can clearly tell the grains themselves all came from the nearby land, by analysis. Only someone clinging to their tale come Hell or high water (heh) would insist that two different processes were at work through this boundary-free continuum – Layer A, the Flood-sourced sediment now lithified, Layer B the mud that caused it to lithify and Layer C the mud that has washed off the land since. There are no such layers, and no need to invoke 2 different processes for what amounts to the same thing compressed.
I find it peculiar that you should wish to deny even the possibility of rock slowly lithifying under accumulation, yet insist, against all contrary mechanical and chemical considerations, that it can happen quickly. I say again, the latter could far more easily be shown in a lab than the former, yet you can’t even give this basic proof of concept.
The alternative, far more plausible and far less desperate, is that the drilling core all represents the same thing: outwash from the land, with progressive lithification with increasing age and pressure.
Robert,
You continue to refrain from answering my very straightforward question: What evidence would it take to convince you that the biblical flood story does not represent historical reality?
I’ll make it even easier, as a yes or no question: Is there any evidence that would convince you that the biblical flood story is not true?
In response to my challenge to byers to provide biological evidence for the biblical flood and his other creocrap claims, byers puked up this evasive, dishonest mess:
“creodont2
Its too much off thread to prove the bible truths.”
Coward. You always run away from supporting your claims and accusations.
“I do insist evolutionary biology is not a study using bio sci evidence but relies on supporting evidence entirely for its great claims.”
So says the first grade dropout.
“Creationism starts off saying we have a witness to the scene.”
Yeah, you creobots totally rely on delusional, arrogant bullshit.
“Then we back things up with the evidence of nature and use sci methodolgy as much as possible.”
NO, you just ignore and distort evidence, run away from supporting your claims, make shit up and preach it, and denigrate scientists.
“Its your side that raised the stakes.”
What the hell does that even mean?
“You said you proved your points and that by bio sci investigation.”
LIAR. I never said that.
“Origin matters are complicated and difficult to investigate. its about past and gone events and processes.”
Yeah, I know, and I also know that you don’t have a clue about origins or anything else.
“Its difficult to do science on them. one must accept its more tenative then true sci theories and investigation.”
Save your evasive sermons for your fellow god-pushing morons and just provide the biological evidence to support your claims.
Like other science hating god pushers you’re all mouth, byers. You go on and on and on about what you think is wrong with science, and especially evolutionary science, but you NEVER provide ANY evidence to support your ridiculous creationist claims. You don’t know anything about science and evolution, yet you constantly denigrate the hard work and productive results of those who do. You’re an illiterate, ignorant, arrogant disgrace to the human race.
Patrick. its so off thread and not about me. its a strange line of questioning.It means nothing to weighing evideences as presented by one side or another
Just make a thread, of substance, and then we can rumble.
I don’t avoid origin rumbles.
Creodont2
Its no fun and no intellectual value to discuss with you when your wEiRdLy malicious and speak as one who has a bigger problem with me then disagreement about origin issues.
Allan Miller
On the main points.
I understand your your process claim. i understand your top layer claim. however to turn the top layer of present sed rock into stone would require a weight that is not found today. Thats why I say your side must invoke it was eroded away after it did the deed. A minor point but I’m stressing we both need that last weight to explain the lasy layer on top.
You questioned me on this.
yEC doesn’t need mud thousand feet thick. Sediment from the land or dug up in the, present, great holes called sea depths is the source.
We don’t need it continuous .
i don’t see the reason why there need be a great gap as the plates break up in sediment loads and so it turning to stone.
Its all about , after the landmass breaking up, pressure on the water collectinhg/depositing the sediment layers and those in segregated flows.
Fast and furious and constantly relative to the speed of breakup.
Probably the last acxt indeed having less results in sediment and so a lower level of sediment. Yet not your canyon concept.
We would expect the mts to be a last act of plate collision and so have sed layers on top of them.
Something like that.
I’m not against sediment slowly turning to stone but just saying its not happening today and that never happened.
Any present core drill that can find segregated layers of sediment in different degrees of change from sediment to rock NEED ONLY be seen as a picture of a past event and not a present one or one that has been going on .
Especially above the k-t line.
In some local area its fine about grain likeness.
In any area grain size/compression etc would have a continuum from my model. The not yet turned to stone sediment BUT on its way is in reality a snapshop of the last act in a last hour. Not evidence of continuing process..
Not proof of it anyways.
Actually this YEC would predict sedimentary rock and layers on mars IF there was a source for water.
All one needs is a great movement of water to push sediment into some single block of sed rock or layers by some interaction of waves. Though not like here.
Therefore since , I understand, they say there is and so could of been ICE on mars then a mere impact/comet could heat/vaporizeish the ice and in less clobbered areas create a sudden flood of water and possibly that water bumping into each other.
Its fine to find sed rock on any such cosmic body.
Robert,
On the contrary, it is completely relevant to the topic. Please answer the question: What evidence, if any, would convince you that the biblical flood story is not true?
This reminds me of the disagreement between PZ Myers and Jerry Coyne over what evidence would convince either of them of the existence of God. Jerry’s POV. I found myself agreeing with PZ on this issue. Hypothetical questions, such as Coyne posed, are meaningless. One needn’t ask the question until the real evidence is there to consider.
Oh wait…
Let’s try some hypothetical evidences, such as god talks directly to you.
Hmmmm. I have a nephew who is schizophrenic. Something talks to him that I can’t hear. I also know an internet poster who hears god talking. He is quite rational, but something causes occasional auditory hallucinations.
The nephew poses the question, how do we know his hallucinations are not real. The other guy does not believe his voices are real, but a believer might argue that he is an actual prophet and is willfully ignoring the voice of god.
I don’t think I have ever heard a productive discussion of this.
It’s not altogether easy to explain that the hallucinating ones should believe your perceptions while they should not believe their own perceptions. John Nash said that he figured out that the father with his little girl whom he kept seeing must not be real because years went by and the girl never grew up at all–but someone who didn’t have the strong belief that little girls must grow up over time wouldn’t be troubled by that.
Fortunately, most schizophrenics aren’t especially bothered by the fact that their delusions aren’t taught by the schools. Byers and Dembski are, though. Well, we have a book (or a theology) that tells us what happened, and our poor epistemologic standards also support our beliefs (or at least prevent their falsification), and still those beliefs aren’t being taught in the schools as the equal of science. We’re persecuted!
Glen Davidson
God doesn’t directly talk to anyone. The bible says so.
If people hear voices its , I say, just their memory being triggered to make a story.
There is no difference between hearing voices and hearing a song in ones head. Which we all experience now and then.
Its irritating but with schizophrenia its , unhappily, sticky.
I , pretty sure, heard in high school classes that claim that if one evcer had a song stuck in ones head one has just experience exactly what is happening in schizophrenia.
I am sure this can be healed. I don’t know how but its there.
Robert,
You are still avoiding my very simple question: What evidence, if any, would convince you that the biblical flood story is not true?
I’m not trying to trick you in any way. My guess is that there is no evidence that will convince you — if that’s the case please just say so.
If it’s easier, please describe what you considered to be the strongest objective, empirical evidence supporting the idea that the biblical flood took place.
I said why I’m avoiding it.
Anything like this should have its own thread.
Backing up the bible would be the evidence I got into with the sed rock layers on earth. The great accumulation of sediment/biology layed all over the earth. on the dry land.
Its pretty good evidence.
Robert Byers,
Claiming the explanandum as evidence of one’s proposed cause of it is empty. What’s the evidence for my mechanism? Why, “The great accumulation of sediment/biology layed all over the earth.”. See how that works?
In fact the bible makes no mention of sediment, or continental movement, or the actual height of hills before and after, and your ideas simply don’t work as a matter of simple physics.
It rained, possibly with more water from ‘the deep’. That’s all the bible said. There is no way that could lead to the stratification and lithification observed. Short-term flood-borne sediments don’t sort like that. They sort according to particle size. This is found nowhere, to any significant depth. The strata accord entirely with presently observable processes, and not at all with the bible account.
18th century geology was all about finding evidence for the biblical flood.
And here is the canonical essay:
http://www.philvaz.com/apologetics/p82.htm
Allan Miller,
Yes our little floods sort by particle size. yet the great flood from great pressure could in no way sort that way. Not just that it did it another way but impossible for such micro management.
This was macro sorting not witnessed by the modern processes.
it was fantastic power in fantastic depths.
I think all sed rock layers show this power with variations due to dissipation of it here and there.
Its a working model i think and I see the other side as very unlikely.
In fact its not happening today anywhere.