We don’t “ponder explanations,” Gil. We examine evidence, then test hypotheses that fit all the extant evidence.
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I’m not very well acquainted with the Navajo Sandstone apart from having it seen (as a tourist) in some of the National Parks, but I have worked professionally in another famous extensive desert formation, the Rotliegend of NW Europe. This has been studied to death because it is the reservoir of a large number of economically very important gas fields in the UK, Netherlands, Germany and Poland. There is zero doubt that these rocks were deposited in an arid desert environment. The formation is virtually barren of fossils except for some pollen and even rarer insects and some amphibians (at the margins). The absence of marine fossils is striking. Overall, and in detail, the Rotliegend has all the characteristics of desert sediments: high-angle cross-bedded wind-blown sands, very well sorted and with frosted quartz grains, locally supplemented by conglomerates from proximal alluvial fans and braided streams, and some clays and evaporites laid down in ephemeral lakes and sabkhas. In all their details these characteristics are exactly what can be observed in modern deserts and extremely unlike any modern marine sediments.
Even more striking is the fact that plate tectonic reconstructions based on paleo-magnetism show that this part of the world, part of Pangea, was located in the subtropical desert belt, 10 - 30 degrees North, during the time of its deposition some 260 million years ago in the Permian.
How’s that for consilience between totally independent variables?
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In the context of creationism/ID, design never functions as an explanation. It’s merely an apologetic.
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It isn’t clear what you’re asking. Why do we only find dinosaur remains in flood sediments? Because other than that you’re not going to get sufficient rapid sedimentation to actually bury dinosaurs and their eggs.
There are two major selective effects in play. The first is the biological zonation itself. As the flood advances it hits different zones with different flora and fauna in them.
The second is speed/intelligence. Obviously there is going to be a difference in how different kinds of animals (and people) are able to effectively react to the rising waters of a global flood. Wonder why we don’t find people in flood layers? For one reason at least, because they weren’t hanging out there. They were actively seeking higher ground.
Additionally, their order in the column and great numbers allow reconstruction of evolutionary histories. These are histories that can be correlated to genetic trees among extant species.
Wasn’t the flood supposed to kill everyone but Noah’s immediate family?
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Obviously. I was addressing whether they got fossilized by rapid burial in sediments. They would have drowned and ‘bloated and floated’ for the most part.
Before this can be addressed we need to know which sediments are flood and which are post-flood. Do you, like many creationists, put the boundary at the K/T? Or is it somewhere else? If so, where?
And you know that there have been lots and lots of local floods, right?
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I’m asking about all remains, not just the eggs. We find other land life in lower strata, why no dinosaurs?
That’s not going to give a consistent order on a global basis. You need more than that - and you don’t have it.
That one doesn’t make sense either. Plants aren’t going to go anywhere, for one. For another dinosaurs are so varied any such order ought to be clear from their remains alone. And it isn’t.
so, three tries to explain the order, all superficial and none viable. Not a great record,
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I wish that I was there to see oak trees out run grasses up the hills!
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Even more surprising is that they stopped to gather all their tools, sewage, houses and ancestral graves with them when seeking higher ground.
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My response to Rupe video: The Navajo Sandstone: A Desert in the Middle of the Global Flood? – Naturalis Historia
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Almost all fossils are associated with sedimentary rock. Your problem is that the observed sorting contained therein is inexplicable by flood geology, and any lay person can easily see how this plain and simple fact demands that the earth be old.
The situation is even worse for YEC, if possible, with sea life. Crabs are found everywhere from the black depths of the abyss to tropical island trees, but you will not find any among the trilobites. Nothing in your seafood chowder is found in the Burgess shale of a couple of hundred species. No Cambrian starfish to be found anywhere. Did all the oysters flee to higher ground?
Do you even read the threads in which you post? Why your biological zonation and rising water explanations are detached from reality has already explained, and there is no need to repeat it to your satisfaction. Given that the data has for centuries now been vast and uniformly conclusive that the earth is ancient, defenders of ancient middle eastern cosmology have had to resort to increasingly delusional excuses, which have no merit of being found in scripture. You would do well to consider the apologist Augustine when he said…
Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?
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I suggest you reread the entire passage—of which you’ve quoted only a part—and you’ll see that it’s not an appeal to authority, not at all.
But they failed. So where does flood geology predict that we will find their fossilized remains?
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Kinda makes you wonder why nobody in Noah’s civilization had invented boats.
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A great deal of ponderous pondering has certainly been pondered over the millennia, to no definitive conclusion. Nature may well be teleological, I wager at the most fundamental level it is. There is, however, no way of knowing or detecting if that is the case, because there are other reasonable and credible explanations as to why things are as they are.
You mean this?:
.. which is just increasing the verbosity of your appeal to authority, containing literally nothing of substance whatsoever?
I’ll take your reply as a “no.”
If they were able to successfully seek higher ground until the end of the flood then we wouldn’t expect to find their remains anywhere. They didn’t get buried in sediment, they just drowned. I don’t think this is the full answer to why we don’t find them in lower layers, but I would definitely think it plays a role. As I’ve said repeatedly, there are always going to be unanswered questions about an event like this which we cannot witness or repeat.
I haven’t put any time into studying that question.
Sure. Some of them have even been witnessed and have given us insight into the catastrophic processes that are at work in such cases (such as the Mt. St. Helens eruption). What we see in the world is not explicable in terms of many isolated local floods, however. The evidence strongly supports a conclusion of one large global flood, and the Bible plainly records that is what happened. This conclusion is also supported by various cultural memories of a global flood spanning all continents. The Bible also tells us that people like yourself will arise to deny both creation and the global flood in 2 Peter 3, so those of us who read the Bible carefully will not be surprised by this development or discouraged by the many arguments from authority and appeals to popularity.