Niles Eldridge looked at the development of the cornet:
You can intentionally created a nested hierarchy. That isn’t in dispute.
What is in dispute is that simply designing things for functional reasons inadvertently results in a nested hierarchy as an expected byproduct of the designing process.
You have no model of design from which it logically follows that significant amounts of nesting hierarchical structure will come to exist in the data between genealogically unrelated things.
That means you have to posit intent behind it’s creation. That the designer put that structure into the data on purpose despite there being no functional reason to do so. But since it is not a priori expected on design and merely accounted for after the fact by positing intent behind it’s creation, while common descent naturally predicts it (that is to say, it is a priori expected on common descent), it is strong evidence favoring common descent over separate creation.
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Yes, both creationists and evolutionists have heat problems and light time travel problems. Figuring this stuff out is very hard.
You think the water went away?
I don’t necessarily subscribe to the theory of catastrophic plate tectonics. I’m agnostic on the question at the moment, as there are major unsolved questions and problems with those theories. One need not be committed to a particular theory of how the continents arose to believe in a global flood.
It’s not clear what you’re getting at with this. The fact is, we do see geological layers that span worldwide across continents, which is very strong evidence for the flood.
That’s not what I believe. The flood buried the fossils as it was ascending, in the order in which they were encountered. Then as the waters receeded from the rising continents these layers were rapidly eroded.
Not a conspiracy theory, just an obvious fact.
Whether you take me seriously is between you and God, it makes no difference to me.
Actually, I’m told that all participants here are required to respect all religious beliefs.
I don’t believe the Flood violated physics. Our limited knowledge of both physics and the actual events that occurred 4500 years ago is not a violation of physics.
Much like you, I cannot unsee all the evidence for biblical history. I cannot un-read the Bible, where it clearly states that God created in 6 literal days only thousands of years ago. I do see lots of evidence for the Bible’s history, but ultimately my decision to believe it rests on my trust in God–that God both knows the truth and is able to accurately and clearly communicate it in his word.
The answer is that I don’t know if this claim is true because this is the first I’ve heard of it. And if it does happen to be true, I would agree it would be an interesting question for creation scientists to tackle, but ultimately it boils down to a fairly weak argument from silence. There could be a whole slew of possible reasons why a global flood (a unique one-time event) might result in unexpected effects like this.
The flood buried the fossils as it was ascending, in the order in which they were encountered. Then as the waters receeded from the rising continents these layers were rapidly eroded.
You are free to believe that, but among other problems, it does nothing to explain the global pattern of sorting of pollen which is the topic of this discussion. You have not yet offered a solution to that.
Could we please try to stick to this topic? Maybe another young earth creationist wants to try to offer a solution?
If you are referring to the Cosmic Microwave Background horizon problem, that is not a question of the speed of light, but thermal uniformity which is another matter. The speed of light rules out exchange of radiation as a solution. There remains much of big bang cosmology we do not know.
The distant starlight problem, however, is a creationist exclusive. The problem is that there is no problem. That radio transmissions from voyager now take a day to reach ground control is what is expected. That the explosion of SN1987 took 168,000 years to be seen on earth is in line with physics. We have cataloged millions of galaxies whose light has traveled for billions of years - no problem whatsoever.
There is no distant starlight problem, except as invented in the minds of YEC. The problem does not exist in the real world. It is like the road travel time from NYC to LA problem. At the speed limit, it will take a bit longer than 40 hours - it is that simple.
The act of burying requires not just water, but massive material transport, which is by definition high energy. You cannot have water transport of rock and soil and placid burial of carcasses. If a river floods, cows float away.
There are wetland biomes, and mammals and reptiles which lived in wetlands. There are desert biomes, and tropical biomes, with mammals and reptiles to be found together. Why are you suggesting that reptiles and mammals, along with the other creatures as dimetrodons and such, isolate into separate biomes?
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How could anyone forget scd’s “trcuk” diagram?
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I would be very interested if you could name these layers that span worldwide across continents. I suspect you may be confused by layers that can be correlated across continents. Such correlation is in the vast majority achieved through biostratigraphy and/or radiometric dating. Are you now accepting these tools?
How does that work with pollen, especially with pollen types that only appear higher in the stratigraphic column. Why are these not found in deeper layers as well? Evolutionary answer: because the plants that generate those pollen weren’t around yet during those older times. YEC answer:…?
Also, how does that work with planktonic foraminifera, the ones that float in the ocean? Their biome extends over entire oceans and their fossil remains show exquisite zonation based on tiny differences in size and morphology - evolutionary answer, again: because the types of forams living at any particular time differ from earlier and later times. How does a Flood manage to sort these minute shells so universally?
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It would be especially confusing for rising waters to sort fish → tetrapods → cetaceans.
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Lots of things which are one-time, non-repeatable events can produce confusing results for people who were not there to witness them happening. But one thing that is not confusing is the Bible’s clear indication that this is indeed what happened. The flood makes the most sense of the big picture we see all around us. That is not to say there are not conundrums and interesting research questions-many of which will never be answered in this age because the events cannot be repeated.
I probably shouldn’t engage, but doesn’t this kind of give the game away? It’s perfectly fine to say that you don’t need an answer because the flood was miraculous and non-repeatable, but that means that ‘flood geology’ is explicitly not scientific.
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If you are committed to a global flood, you do you. If some granny says that the devil made the dinosaur fossils, I just shrug and hope she is happy. But what you are doing is proselytizing pseudoscience to explain away clear evidence.
The observed sorting pervasive in geology is what would be expected given separation by time. That is not a condundrum, not confusing, and nobody outside of YEC is confused. Your suggestion that the sorting is due to flooding of separate biomes does not work, because different classes of animals are found together in all types of habitats. That has nothing to do with how often the event happens, or whether there was on the spot reporting.
If the shoe doesn’t fit, maybe try not wearing it.
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Just so we are on the same page, do you agree that there is a very strong signal of vertical zonation when it comes to fossil pollen and planktonic microfossils, or are you even disputing that? Can you give us a simple answer to this simple question?
By all reasonable yardsticks virtually all pollen as well as all planktonic foraminifera ought to be vertically mixed up if the rocks in which they are found were formed essentially simultaneous in one short-lived global event, whatever its exact nature. If temporal separation can’t be the reason, the only separation we should see would be regional, reflecting different biomes across the globe. Within each biome all pollen-producing plants and planktonic forams would be living, and dying, essentially at the same time so their remains would be buried together.
The reality is very, very different: yes, not only are there regional variations but within such individual regions there is a very, very clear and persistent vertical zonation as well. This is so clear that entire scientific sub-disciplines have been established (palynology, micropaleontology) that make good use of this fact, not only scientifically but also in hydrocarbon exploration.
This state of affairs goes far beyond an ‘interesting research question’ or a ‘conundrum’. It is a fundamental problem with your basic model of producing these sedimentary rocks at the same time. Your model doesn’t allow for the most obvious and simplest variable to explain this: change over time. You haven’t even started to suggest possible, let alone plausible alternative explanations for the very strong signal of this vertical zonation. Instead, all you have is an a-priori belief that the Bible says it all happened within the span of one year, and that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God. If that allows you to obliterate the signal into non-existence, fine for you, but don’t go round pretending that there is anything scientific about such a position.
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I specifically said I didn’t believe the Flood violated physics. There’s no need to suggest that the Flood happened due to a miracle–the Bible doesn’t specify the mechanistic cause that started the Flood. It could have been miraculous, but without the Bible specifying that I’m not going to jump to that conclusion.
When you say it’s non-repeatable and therefore “not scientific”, I am puzzled. Are you not aware that non-repeatable events happen every day? We use science (i.e. forensic science) to investigate past events that cannot be repeated. This brings us again to the important distinction between historical and operational science.
Saying I “don’t need an answer” isn’t really an honest takeaway, either. Whether I would like to know is irrelevant. There are simply some things that historical science cannot answer. Repeatability is the main thing that enables us to answer questions about the natural world using operational science (the scientific method). When you’re dealing with an event which wasn’t witnessed and cannot be repeated, the amount of information we’ll be able to reliably determine goes way down.
He might as well condense every one of his posts to “God said it; I believe it; that settles it.” All the attempts at scientific explanation are just window dressing.
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You don’t know they “ought to be mixed up”. That’s just brash. The only way you could actually know with any degree of certainty what Noah’s flood “should” look like, down to the detail of where we should expect to find the pollen, is if you could be there yourself to document and witness the event.
It wasn’t a simultaneous event as I said, it was an event that took 150 days to reach its zenith. Why should I engage in dialogue with someone who isn’t interested in getting these basic facts right?
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It is implied in your own statement for what you think may have happened. Turbulent Floodwaters are need to pick up the sediment need to bury all those fossils. You cannot have turbulence without mixing. At the same time you need the waters to be calm so the sediment settles out. At the same time you need water that somehow deposits sediments that look like modern aeolian sand dunes. At the same time living creatures are leaving tracks in those sand dunes. The list goes on.
From this side of the fence. Flood Geology looks like a series of ad hoc claims with no relation to any other, and often contradicting other claims. It can never make sense as a whole. That’s not your fault, but it is the problem you are facing.
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@faded_Glory wrote “essentially simultaneous”, not simultaneous, and I think you are mischaracterizing what he wrote. From a perspective of mainstream geology 150 days might as well be simultaneous, and it is not unreasonable to ask how it is all necessary events occurred in such a short span of time.
We also have…
Which sums up the point very well. There is nothing scientific about your claims, and it also calls into question an interpretation of the Bible that, by testing against science and the laws of physics, cannot be literally true. I do no think is serves anyone, and certainly not those who maintain a faith in a Deity, to mock that faith with falsehoods. If you were arguing for a Flat Earth rather than Noah’s Flood, it would not be any different.
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Pure creationist propaganda. You are just as antagonistic to observational science as its historical applications. Rates for radioactive decay can be measured repeatedly and cross matches with other measuring techniques, but out of thin air YEC proposes acceleration which has never been observed and violates theory. YEC has no use for measured rates of tectonic movement, fabricating rates that have zero operational support. YEC ignores the laboratory measurement of gypsum crystal growth by orders of magnitude. YEC couldn’t care less about dynamic galactic jets measurably streaming gas into space over hundreds of thousands of light years, or literal observatories imaging infall of material into forming stars.
Again and again, creationists habitually reject observation in favor of ad hoc stories, concocting ideas that do not posses a whiff of observation. They decry uniformarianism for allowing that the present is key to the past, while ignoring the understanding of the present is by definition operational science. The reason is clear, creationists reject operational science because operational science is devastating to creationism. They are mutually exclusive, and this is made explicit in the AiG statement of faith which refers to science in general:
No apparent, perceived, or claimed evidence in any field of study, including science, history, and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the clear teaching of Scripture obtained by historical-grammatical interpretation.
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Yes @faded_Glory, you don’t know that this wasn’t an extra special flood, where each species of pollen and plankton went down its own special pipe, into its own special holding tank, so that it could be sprayed out onto the ocean floor (after it had settled down from all the turbulence) in its own special layer.
That this, or any other artifice required to create all these layers in such a short time, stretches the meaning of the word “flood” well past breaking point, is hardly a flaw in YEC ‘science’.
If you know that it had to have happened this way, the mental gymnastics required to achieve this outcome is purely recreational.
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