CMI and Wikipedia on Collapsing Arches

No, here is what the quote actually states:

Not “some”, but most. And on what basis they are claiming that any of them must necessarily be older than a few thousand years is not clear. It’s just an assertion based on an old-earth paradigm. They are collapsing at an extremely high rate. Unless they are forming at a rate on average of one per year, they certainly are decreasing in number over time.

And now that I’ve produced not one, but two independent sources documenting this fact, is anybody here yet ready to apologize for alleging dishonesty, and alleging there was no basis for this?

I’ve extended the quote to include the section @PDPrice omitted:

… , said Paul Geimer, a geophysicist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Erosive features are notoriously hard to date, he said, because most of the diagnostic evidence is transported away by wind and water. “Our best guess is that the smaller arches are on the order of hundreds to thousands of years old, while the largest arches may be in the range of 100,000 years old.”

So the article does say that some arches are about 100,000 years old. This isn’t within a YEC timeframe. @John_Harshman is correct, and @PDPrice is being dishonest by
(i) only quoting the age of the younger arches, not the older ones, and
(ii) saying that @John_Harshman was wrong when he wasn’t, and
(iii) quibbling over @John_Harshman’s use of ‘some’ rather than ‘most’ while ignoring his own implicit extension of ‘most’ to ‘all’.

Definitely not. Apart from the fact that you still have no real basis for your claim about collapsing arches, examples of your dishonesty (demonstrated, not alleged) are multiplying.

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@PDPrice, there is a very simple way to establish your credibility in your claim that 43 arches have collapsed since 1970 or 1977 or whenever.

Provide a link to an authoritative primary source that actually lists them, together with their precise locations and dates of collapse.

If the figure has any merit, such a list should not be hard to find. On the other hand, any “independent source” that does not provide such a list is not “documenting this fact,” but just sloppily repeating unsubstantiated hearsay and rumour.

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I contacted Arches Natl Park myself. They don’t keep records in house for the number of collapsed arches, but in their response they quoted:

"according to an out of print document “The Arches of Arches National Park (Supplement Two)” by Moore, Stevens, and McCarrick, 41 arches have fallen from 1977 to 1993.
In more recent years there have been 2 known arches that fell - Wall Arch in 2008 and Rainbow Arch in 2018. "

At this point, whenever I see a creationist use the term “evolutionist”, I mentally substitute the phrase “people with a functioning brain and a frigging clue”, and it all works out fine.

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Do you accept the Arches Natural Park description that new arches are forming all the time as rapidly as they are falling?

Every story of the park’s 2,000 arches will end at some point. However, new arches are forming at a similar pace, which will continue the story of Arches National Park.

Studying The Fate Of Arches

Will you retract the demonstrably false claim no new arches are forming?

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The violence of the global flood and seismic reshaping of the earth would have collapsed any arches standing at the time, so if arches are falling faster than they are forming due to normal erosion, that is evidence against Noah’s flood.

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The arches were formed during the Recessive Stage, when the continents had been uplifted and the water was rushing off creating fast erosional features. That’s why we now observe they are collapsing much faster than forming (if forming at all).

Gotta love that Creationist intellectual honesty. This was already posted and ignored in the first Arches thread last month.

This is from the U.S. Park Service on Arches National Park.

Water carried away sand grains one by one and widened the cracks into narrow canyons. Today, the thin rock walls between these canyons are called fins, because they look something like a fish’s fins. In cooler months, water in the form of rain and snow enters tiny cracks in the fins, freezes and expands, and causes little pieces of sandstone to flake off. After a long time, the tiny cracks break all the way through the fin and an arch is formed. Arches are still forming today, and many ages and sizes of arches are found throughout the park. How were arches formed? Over time, parallel fractures in surface rock eroded to form “fins.” As the process of erosion continued, arches were created where the fins were worn completely through.

Arches National Park: Geology

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Aside from the complete lack of evidence of this having happened, that would imply the solid rock displacing faster than water could abate to begin with. That is not a serious proposition.

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Faster? What would make you say that? The huge currents of water would pack a massive erosive punch.

How did your magic Flood manage to deposit the thousands of feet of sandstone AND compress it into solid rock hard enough to support an arch all while underwater in the first place? Looks like physics and geologic reality is disproving your fantasies once again.

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I maintain that tectonic movement is on the order of a few centimeters per year, and even that occasions earthquakes of immense energy. It is you promoting continents moving at speeds faster than water can drain off, so you tell me.

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Since PD is now just reposting all the discredited claims he made in the last “arch” thread I might as well repost some of the evidence he ran from.

PDPrice, your YEC source says natural arches were formed by receding Flood waters, correct?

Here is the Catherine Creek Arch in Washington state.

You can see from the shadow it’s a complete arch with a through passage. The thing is this arch is formed from basalt, which is solidified lava.

Please tell us how the Flood waters managed to rapidly carve this arch in Flood deposited molten lava without it collapsing.

Anyone want to bet he ignores this again? :slightly_smiling_face:

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Where did the water go to? Where is it now? Or has it all been changed into wine?

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The continents were uplifted. That means the water is all still here, in the huge, deep basins we call the ocean floor.

Why didn’t the ocean floors just go back down to where they were before your Flood?

Were there no continents and oceans before the flood then? What about those mountains that were supposedly covered by the Flood, where were they?

How much and how fast was this supposed uplift, and is the rate compatible with what we know of tectonic movements and rock physics? Or is this just a play-doh model?

Here’s the sequence: 1) Relatively more flat topography before Flood (there were still mountains, but not as high as today)
2) Fountains of the deep broke open, whole world flooded
3) The mountains rose up, and the valleys sank down (as per Ps 104), causing the water to drain down into the deep basins of the ocean floor.

See above.

You mean is it compatible with the assumption of uniformitarianism? Obviously not. Nothing we can witness happening today would produce this result: it was a one-time event. This is exactly why uniformitarianism fails as a methodology to explain geology.

Oh. So that article you linked is wrong? Because that’s not what it says.