I am a Christian but not a YEC, for many reasons. I have never seen YECs attempt to answer “The Pollen Problem.” Joel Duff has called it “Flood Geology’s Abominable Mystery” - see academia.edu (the ASA link where I first found it seems to be down).
It is basically this: Genesis tells us there were fruit trees in Eden, predating the flood. But most of the “flood layers” (as YEC labels them) contain neither trees nor pollen. Worse, plants appear in a sequence, from the bottom up - ferns and their spores appear together, then higher up, flowering plants and their pollen appear together, then higher up, grasses and their pollens appear together. Nothing about bouancy or biomes can obviously account for that; it’s not like oak trees and oak pollen float equally well, whereas pine trees and pine pollen sink together to a lower level in the water.
I can’t imagine a way the flood could sort them that way without being an intelligent and deceptive agent. YECs, can you?
The only issue I have with this sort of “problem” is that it presumes a scientific question from an apologetic claim. That presumption is also an error.
That said, there probably are YECs making scientific claims along these lines, and they will certainly encounter big problems trying to explain it in any sensible way.
Nevertheless, insofar as young-earth creationists do make scientific claims about the Flood explaining the fossil record, the pollen data does create serious problems for them. It is a fascinating one that had never entered my mind before but has now entered my arsenal.
Oh yes, it’s an independent line of argument and a good one. My point is not to dive into such arguments before it is established what is being argued about. That is easily done by asking questions and drawing them out to make a verifiable claim of their own. I have yet to encounter a YEC who is not eager to explain things. With just a little patience we can have them defending their own claims, rather than our giving a science lecture to an uninterested audience.
The thing I like about this argument is that, unlike most, it’s not very technical. Everybody has experience with pollen.
If you consider:
All types of plants grow at all elevations
Pollen can be blown hundreds of miles and ends up everywhere, including the ocean floor, caves, and mines
Pollen fossilizes very well
…It’s pretty hard to imagine it not ending up in all flood sediments in abundance. A counter of “one time somebody found it in a lower layer” would not explain the overall pattern. You would expect disturbances or mistakes to create false data points occasionally.
