Hi Jeff. You talk about a YEC model and pieces coming together. As a geologist I don’t see this at all. Consider the distribution patterns of fossils in the sedimentary rocks. All that YEC says is that ‘the Flood caused it’. But that is not really an explanation, is it now? Yes, a Flood would likely cause lots of dead animals and plants, and their fossils could be preserved in sediment, sure, but ‘Flood’ says nothing at all about why they fossils follow the clear pattern of ordering both vertically and laterally over the globe.
In contrast, mainstream geology has by now a very detailed model of the fossil distribution, with the main causes being evolution and plate tectonics. Then, behind these two key words lie massive amounts of much more fine grained explanations based on observations and theory that you could read up in textbooks and the primary literature.
When we measure a stratigraphic section and we see the fossil content systematically changing from bottom to top, we can simply explain that because the animals didn’t live all together at the same time, unlike in a Flood scenario. Therefore, obviously, they didn’t die all together at the same time, and therefore their preserved remains are systematically vertically segregated as time went by and the sedimentary column was deposited with the fossils inside it. Straightforward, no?
I have never seen a YEC explanation of this ubiquitous fact of the fossil distribution that gets beyond children’s cartoon concepts (‘little mammals outran big dinosaurs up the hill’ or some sort of nonsense).
Yet the undeniable fact of systematic fossil sorting has been recognised by now for some 250 years. It was the very basis of our understanding of geological history, long before absolute dating came on the scene. Why is it so hard for YEC to come up with some realistic models for this, even tentatively? Instead, it is essentially ignored as an inconvenient truth, or explained away by armwaving and silly stories that don’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny.
So here we have a fundamental fact of geology and Earth history, and YEC hasn’t got anything sensible to say about it.