I am not well-versed enough in the topic to attempt a full response to your article, but I did let Dr. Rupe know you had written it. Perhaps he will respond.
After briefly looking through it, though, I do notice one strawman right away–you state that the Flood was “one continuous event” (implying that there should be no trackways). That’s an oversimplification. Mike Oard’s BEDS model (briefly exposed diluvial sediments) was developed to explain certain features (like footprints and dino eggs, etc.) some of which you brought up in your article.
The flood was not an instantaneous event, even if it was continuous. It took many days to unfold, and there would have been ebbs and flows throughout that period in local areas. That could have allowed for brief pauses in sedimentation long enough for trackways to be produced (and even eggs laid) by animals that were attempting to seek higher ground.
The many other claims you make in the article I will defer to Dr. Rupe on answering, if he so chooses.
What that chart doesn’t mention is that all life apparently dies by the end of the 40th day (Genesis 7:21). That would seem to be a problem for BEDS.
But of course the reality is that evidence is firmly against the Flood as a literal event. That is why the people most familiar with the evidence almost universally reject it. Indeed, that’s why Creationists have to invent things like BEDS to try to explain away the evidence.
And nobody ever got caught off guard literally anywhere in the entire world that left evidence behind, or in the wrong place from which they couldn’t escape.
They left nothing behind in the entirety of the precambrian, nor the cambrian, ordovician, silurian, devonian, carboniferous, permian, triassic, jurassic, cretaceous, nor even paleogene or miocene strata. Nothing. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Null. Void.
Not even a single clay brick. Not a single piece of ceramic pottery. This can’t be believed by a thinking person.
I don’t see that in Genesis. It reads to me like: it rained 40 days and nights, during which the waters rose. Then the “waters prevailed” (sat at the same high level) for 150 days. Then God sent a wind to dry up the waters, and the water level began to fall. There is no “rising and falling” or “ebbs and flows” mentioned. Where are you getting that? Isn’t the most important principle for YECs to believe the text exactly as it reads?
(I have the same critique about “kinds”, but that’s a separate discussion.)
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.
Again, I don’t see anything in the text that indicates that people outran the flood for a while. As Jesus described it:
[Mat 24:37-44 ESV] 37 For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. 38 For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, 39 and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. 40 Then two men will be in the field; one will be taken and one left. 41 Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken and one left. 42 Therefore, stay awake, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. 43 But know this, that if the master of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. 44 Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.
If they saw the flood coming and outran it for more than a month, that would seem to undermine Jesus’ point that he will return without warning. He says people were “unaware until the flood came and swept them all away” and that his coming will likewise be so sudden, at a specific “hour”, that two men will be at work in a field and one will be swept away, etc.
I think it’s clear in Scripture that the flood caught people by surprise. They didn’t make it to the mountains, and certainly, as someone else said, they didn’t pack up their houses and tools and gravesites and garbage mounds and move. So there should be evidence of human occupation in the “flood layers.”
Shouldn’t it be obvious from the geological record, if nothing like it ever happened at any other time? So why can’t you tell? Why do Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic strata look more or less the same? (Except for the fossils in them and oxygen levels near the start.)
I will note in passing that your “higher levels” and “ecological zone” explanation can’t account for the sorting of marine fossils. Did whales flee to high ground? Did sea urchins? Maybe you need a little more study.
How would you know? You haven’t looked at the evidence, as you admit above. You don’t know where in the record it starts and ends, so you can’t say anything about what we should see.
I will also advise you that if you propose to overturn everything we know about geology, earth history, and numerous other fields, it would be important to first learn something about those fields. “I haven’t put any time into studying” is not a point in your favor.
The bible is not evidence. Scattered, mutually inconsistent legends are not evidence. There are no arguments from authority here except your argument from authority of the bible, and there are no appeals to popularity. You just use those as excuses to dismiss arguments based on the evidence.
It’s against a global flood as a literal event. Many Christians (like me) think the flood really happened but that it was a regional event. For example, Gavin Ortlund: Was Noah’s Flood Local (YouTube)?
Are you saying that when God said, “…every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth,” that He was lying? Or was He wrong?
Wouldn’t many people, including those seeking higher ground, have been swept away by the flood waters and buried in sediment in the same layers with dinosaurs?
Here you’re rejecting the scientific method itself. It isn’t about mere post hoc answers. Your explanation of one aspect provides a useful hypothesis to apply to other aspects. Even hypotheses that turn out to be false have been and can be useful tools.
So why are the flood geologists trying to answer ANY questions with post hoc hypotheses that they, and you, clearly have zero interest in testing? If you truly believe this, why aren’t you eagerly gathering evidence?
Scientists try to answer the unanswered questions.
There was a global flood, therefore the evidence will show there was a global flood, therefore the evidence strongly supports the conclusion that there was a global flood.
There’s no need to actually examine the evidence when you already know what conclusion it will lead to.
This is an argument from self appointed sanctimony, and the arguments you are unable to counter are not based on authority and appeals to popularity, but on solid data and evidence. You are deflecting because you have no reply.
Why are you equivocating between “buried in sediment” and “killed” here?
Apparently not, no. It looks like the people and the dinosaurs were living in different places at the time (shocker!).
Nope, for the 100,000th time, the scientific method pertains to operational science (things that are testable and repeatable), not to historical science which we are now discussing.
That’s exactly why the scientific method doesn’t apply here. It’s not repeatable. We cannot distinguish between a false hypothesis that is useful in some sense and a true hypothesis. You could happen to have an entirely wrong story about the past, but using that wrong story you could successfully predict things nonetheless.
They do what they can. They take what we already know to be true about the past (that there was a global flood), and they see what else they can figure out from there. It’s an exercise in intellectual humility combined with legitimate curiosity.
YEC is hostile to operational science as well, as I discussed in my earlier post.
So in your world, it makes total sense that dinosaurs, large and small, carnivorous and herbivorous, could read “No Dinosaurs Allowed” signs, and had no interest in humans or their crops and livestock.
But we don’t know that. That’s just a sectarian religious dogma at odds at the evidence
Declaring yourself right and the vast majority of experts wrong is hardly “intellectual humility”. Indeed it seems to be a mark of the pride and arrogance typical of cranks.
the scientific method pertains to operational science (things that are testable and repeatable)
This feels like a dodge of common sense. If your story about the past is “it didn’t rain last night”, but you go out in the morning to find the ground covered in puddles, you need to either change your story or explain the puddles some other way. To me, that sounds like testing a hypothesis. But whether you call it the “scientific method” or not is beside the point. The stories we tell about the past are not credible if they contradict the evidence we find in the present.
That is possible. But you would expect that eventually, some of your predictions would fail. And you’d have to adjust your story to account for the new data points. Which leads us back to the topic of this conversation.
I started this conversation to invite YECs to explain the “pollen problem.” I am looking for an answer that fits some of the known data points.
Data points from Scripture:
In Gen 1:11 God created “plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed”.
In Gen 7 the flood covered all the “earth”, which YECs understand to mean “globe”
YECs believe this flood deposited many of the geologic strata.
My inference: this yields the YEC prediction that those strata will contain plants with seeds and fruit and the pollen of those plants.
Data points from observation: around the world, no such plants or pollen are found in the bottom “flood” strata, and they appear in higher strata in a very carefully sorted sequence, plants and pollen together.
The prediction doesn’t fit the data. So one of the following must be true: 1) flood geology is wrong 2) flood geology doesn’t predict what I say it does - there is some way it could have created the stratification observed 3) the “data” is wrong - the global pattern asserted by mainstream science does not in fact exist in the rocks (a single disputed counterexample isn’t persuasive).
Can YEC explain why the described data are invalid or else how flood geology can explain them?
I started this topic to elicit YEC attempts to answer this question. I hoped that suggestions would be made and discussed, and that future readers could benefit. But we are now above 130 replies and no such attempt has been made. I am disappointed that the topic has not been more productive.
Again, @UncensoredPilgrimsif you can’t propose a way for YEC to answer this question, that’s fine - but please don’t derail the topic with non-answers. Leave room for another YEC to try. Otherwise every single topic devolves into rehashing every topic under the sun.
If they were living in entirely different areas then I do think that’s entirely credible. Ultimately you’re putting the cart before the horse. The only two sources of info we have about the antediluvian world are 1) the Bible and 2) the flood layers. The Bible doesn’t tell us very much about the distribution of people over the planet, other than enabling us to infer they were likely all gathered in one large area, as this seems to be human nature. Why can we infer this? Because the first thing they did after the flood was over was to again gather in one area, contrary to God’s command. God had to curse us again with language division to stop us from gathering in one single area.
The flood layers enable us to infer that the ecological zone we are associating with dinosaur fossils in the record was not inhabited by people. This is evidenced by our not finding human artifacts comingled with dinosaur fossils.
Yes, it’s religious dogma, but it’s also history.
Good scientists (like Isaac Newton for example) show intellectual humility toward God, not men.
False. On the contrary, you’ve been shown (and refused to accept) that it is by no means a creationist invention. If you are going to keep repeating a known falsehood like this, then I’ll just keep showing people you’re being dishonest.
You just uncovered the problem yourself. If your hypothesis is that “it didn’t rain last night” and you find puddles, that would be something that you would not have predicted, yet it still doesn’t disconfirm your hypothesis–because you can always explain the puddles in another way. The technical term for this is underdetermination, and it’s a problem with all historical science. The further back in time you attempt to go, the more of a problem this becomes.
I gave a talk some years back delving in detail into this topic of historical science, which is at the heart of this pollen problem.
A failed prediction is not a disconfirmation of your hypothesis, as we just noted. And contrariwise, a successful prediction is not a confirmation, either. You’re applying terms to historical science that are only actually applicable to operational science. Historical science operates on abductive reasoning, not simple inductive reasoning.
For this to be a solid prediction we would need to know far more than we actually do about the pre-Flood world. We would need to know the shape of the continent(s), if there were any. We would need to know how the ecological zones lined up, and where in relation to those the Flood started. It is simply not the case that we should necessarily expect to find pollen equally distributed in all the flood layers.
And then there’s this elephant in the room you’ve been ignoring up to this point:
