The Pollen Problem

Conversation
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Aside from your long ad hominem against Barr, you have not attempted to answer any of the questions I posed you. RE: Barr’s statement, I take it you’re basically calling him a liar. This was never about what he himself believed, but what he was testifying as to what most other scholars believed at the time.

It’s also worth stating repeatedly that this whole concept of a local flood only ever arose in history much later on, in the 1600s and 1700s and 1800s, in reponse to external pressures. Never as a genuine response to the text alone. That’s why you won’t find any early church writers saying that the flood was local.

Within a context of ancient Hebrew (and without introducing anachronistic scientific knowledge the original readers would not have understood), God said all that needed to be said in Genesis 6-7 to convey that the flood was universal (global), not local. Your “all doesn’t have to mean all” and “earth doesn’t have to mean globe” sidesteps miss out on this central point entirely. It’s not about what the text has to mean, taking each phrase out of context and considering them apart from one another. It’s about what the overall context clearly communicates to the reader. Until the 1600s, there was no debate about what the text communicated to the reader. Everybody agreed it was a universal, global flood.

I will also point out something that I have pointed out many times before: your scoffing about the flood only serves to further fulfill biblical prophecy given in 2 Peter 3. Even the most hardened atheist will be hard-pressed to scoff at the idea of a local flood in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago. That concept is not going to be a stumbling block for anybody. Nobody is offended at that idea. But tell people there was a global flood and watch the scoffing begin (as you see here in this very thread!). That’s exactly what Peter warned would happen in 2 Peter 3. You can gnash your teeth at this all you want, it doesn’t change anything.

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I’m not. Genesis says that every living substance will be destroyed, while you handwave with:

So, once again, if every living substance will be destroyed, how could any people have been “able to successfully seek higher ground until the end of the flood”? This isn’t complicated, just survival vs. death.

Also, as others have noted, the description attributed to Jesus Himself doesn’t allow for your handwaving:

You sure seem to be mighty selective in your alleged literalism. How could anyone have possibly been seeking higher ground if right there in the Bible, Jesus says “they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away”?

Seems a lot clearer than anything you’ve ever claimed about evolution conflicting with Biblical truth, no?

You might want to look at that beam in your eye.

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History tells us that the pyramids were built prior to the time of the flood, and there is significant history prior to that, as well as much civilization outside of Egypt. History is in agreement with science in falsifying a global deluge.

Are you seriously contending that an entire formation has to be excavated before anything definitive can be said? Industrial geologists know better. Cores are good enough for billions of dollars of resource capitalization; they are representative.

In any event, further exploration unearths discoveries such as new dinosaur species and stratigraphic data is added every year, presenting more headaches for creationists to explain away. More sampling does not alleviate your problems, it compounds them.

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It’s also worth stating repeatedly that this whole concept of kinds meaning different species only ever arose in history much later on, in the mid 1900’s, in response to external pressures. Never as a genuine response to the text alone. That’s why you won’t find any early church writers saying that familiar animals were not the ones Adam named.

The original audience did not think global, for the simple reason they had no concept of the Earth as a globe.

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Still now, you are equating death with fossilization. They are two different concepts. Not everything that died in the flood had to be fossilized in the flood.

Jesus said they were unaware until Noah entered the Ark. That was the beginning of the 40-day period of rain and rising floodwaters. After that, they were obviously aware, especially after the 7th or the 10th straight day of rain and rising water. That still gives some time to seek higher ground before eventually drowning (being swept away). There is no conflict here where you are trying to contrive one.

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So what? The idea that biblical kinds are higher up on the classification chart than species is certainly compatible with the text, even though it may not be specified by the text.

That’s apples and oranges compared to the global/local flood situation, where the text does specify global (without naming the shape of the earth) and a local interpretation is not compatible with the text.

This is a red herring as usual. The question of the shape of the earth is entirely separate from the question of whether the extent of the flood covered the entire earth (regardless of shape). I don’t know what exactly the ancient hebrews themselves believed about the shape of the earth, and it’s not relevant here. What’s relevant is what the Bible says. What it definitely says is that the scope of the Flood was universal, not local.

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You are correct that only a tiny fraction of a percent of earth’s sedimentary rock has been studied. But from what I understand, that doesn’t have any bearing on statistical significance. The formula for statistical significance depends on the amount of variance in the population and the number of samples, not on the overall population size. And we have lots of samples from all over the world. Pollen is ubiquitous in Cretacous samples and entirely absent in Cambrian samples. That needs an explanation.

You say everyone affirmed a worldwide flood prior to the 1600s. Surely most did, but Gavin Ortlund has documented exceptions and nuances. For example, IIRC Josephus wrote about survivors of the flood not wanting to come down from the hills afterward. And those who affirmed “worldwide” may not have meant “global” (if they even had that concept): Philo of Alexandria said “it was not a trifling outpouring of water, but a limitless and immense one, which almost flowed out beyond the Pillars of Heracles [Straits of Gibraltar] and the Great Sea; therefore the whole earth and the mountainous regions were flooded.” So a flood covering the “whole earth” in his words “almost” extended beyond the Mediterranean Sea. Clearly the “whole earth” in that usage meant something like “the known world.”

(Of course, Josephus and Philo aren’t Scripture. I’m just answering your point about the history of interpretation.)

Finally, you seem to imply that YECs don’t need to deal with the evidence of the pollen. “I’m not looking to the rock layers to build out my whole story of the past. I have something far better to go on, which is the history in the Bible.”

Let me be clear that I also believe the Bible. I do not join with those here who ridicule it. I just want to interpret it correctly. Luther believed that Scripture requires us to believe in a solid firmament. I assume that you don’t believe in that, and that you don’t believe it because scientific evidence has forced a different Biblical interpretation.

If you’re free to ignore the testimony of the rocks, you don’t need baraminology, you don’t need catastrophic plate tectonics, you don’t need any of the YEC theories or research. You can tell a very simple story: “Noah’s family and every species on the planet boarded the ark. The existing land was flooded and then dried up without any other changes. The people and animals dispersed and repopulated the globe.” The only reason YECs tell a more complicated story is because they recognize that this story is hard to square with the large number of species alive today, the evidence (“historical science”) for plate movements, etc.

Dealing with none of the historic evidence is an intellectual option - maybe God simply erased all signs of the flood. Dealing with all of it that you can is an option. But dealing with it very selectively doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

So why ignore the pollen?

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Jesus said they were unaware until Noah entered the Ark. That was the beginning of the 40-day period of rain and rising floodwaters. After that, they were obviously aware, especially after the 7th or the 10th straight day of rain and rising water. That still gives some time to seek higher ground before eventually drowning (being swept away). There is no conflict here where you are trying to contrive one.

No. He said "they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away”. And even if you were correct, they certainly didn’t move their houses or graves , or stop to sweep up every grain of pollen from the landscape and carry them to the tops of the mountains so that they would appear in the higher flood layers.

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Blatant lie.

The text was quoted above: “unaware until the flood came and swept them all away”.

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Of course it matters. Let’s say I have a bag of 100,000 beans. Let’s say you take a sample of 5 beans, and you note they are all red. How confident can you be on that basis that all of the beans in the entire bag are also red? How confident could you be that the bag is 80% red?

Now let’s say the bag contained only 7 beans and you sampled 5. How does that change your answer? The sample size relative to the overall “population size” certainly matters.

Now here is a factor making this problem worse. Our samples are not random. The majority of our samples come from the same oft-revisited excavation sites. They aren’t randomly picked from the entire world. As you pointed out, there is the issue of feasibility to consider. That means our finds are going to be biased by whatever areas happen to be accessible to us as scientists. We cannot get in a submarine and go do a fossil dig at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, for example.

We may have “lots of samples” but they are miniscule in comparison to the overall volume of material. See the beans example.

This claim loses a lot of credibility because of 1) possibility of sampling error and 2) the tendency of the mainstream scientific community to underreport or dismiss anything they deem anomalous.

Even if we assume the claim you’re making is 100% true, it is not a defeater for YEC because we may simply not have enough information about the circumstances of the flood to understand why we see this result. This is what I have tried to explain to you about historical science. We cannot repeat or observe the flood.

No, Josephus did not write anything about there being survivors of the flood other than those on the Ark.

What is your citation for this quote? You’re making the word “almost” do a whole lot of work here (all the work, actually), so I would need to be able to figure out if that’s even an accurate quote or an accurate translation. In general, Philo was interested in allegorizing things from scripture. He was not as interested in the literal meanings, even though he would not have denied they were literal history as well as allegory.

We learn what the Bible says through the historical grammatical hermeneutic, which is basically discovering the author’s intended meaning. The Bible confirms the flood was universal in scope in both testaments. That’s why this was simply not debated until modern times, as a response to Peter’s scoffers mentioned in 2 Peter 3.

If so, Luther was wrong about scripture there. It does not require us to believe in a solid firmament, as the Hebrew word raqiya just means something stretched out.

That’s a strawman of my position. Overall, the strong testimony of the rocks is that there was a global flood. What we cannot do is make definitive statements about exactly why each and every thing is (or is not) found in each layer.

That “simple story” doesn’t match what the Bible says at all (if I am to understand this simple story to be referencing a local flood). The Bible says, specifically, that the highest mountains were covered to a depth of 15 cubits, and that all land-based life died in the flood (7:20-22). That cannot be reconciled with a local interpretation.

To do that, God would need to have erased the world’s oceans, the entire fossil record, and all the massive evidence of catastrophic erosion all over the planet.

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Incorrect. This is what he said:

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“…until the day when Noah entered the ark”. When Jesus said “…until the flood came and swept them all away”, this was a condensed reference to the full series of events in Genesis. Obviously Jesus was not intending to contradict himself in the space of a single sentence (did they stop eating and drinking when Noah entered the ark, even though they wouldn’t find out about the flood for many days afterward)? The whole process of the flood coming and sweeping them away happened over 40 days, not instantly. This has been hammered to death.

I have already stated that our not finding human artifacts comingled with dinosaurs is at least limited evidence that they didn’t coexist in the same places (the dinosaurs must have been inhabiting lowlands and the humans higher up and further inland). However this could turn out to be a deceptive picture being painted by sampling error. And the same is true about the pollen. We don’t need to know why everything looks exactly as it does to simply acknowledge the overwhelming scriptural and geological evidence for a global flood.

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I mostly agree on this point, with universal in the sense of the entire world as understood in the ANE. Geology, paleontology, history, and anthropology, though, tell a different story. The efforts of creation scientists to bridge that gap are so incoherent and flawed that there would be more integrity in just refusing to accept any science, committing to the flood as doctrine, and calling it a day.

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Why can’t you? If there is “strong testimony of the rocks” suggesting a global flood, why can’t creationists produce a coherent flood model that actually explains anything about what we find in said rocks?

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Are you seriously contending that an entire formation has to be excavated before anything definitive can be said? Industrial geologists know better.

I’m one of these pesky geologists too. In my home state - New Mexico- approximately 140,000 oil/gas wells have been drilled, and about 70,000 of them are still active. Drilling samples, cores, and geophysical logs have been collected and curated for well over a century.

This immense data base allows us to predict very precise locations and depths to hit a specific target. I’ll go out on a very solid limb and call this a representative sample.

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But if God intended Genesis 1 to be a literally accurate account of the creation then the solid firmament should be there (it’s implicit in the Flood story, too).

It doesn’t make sense to say that God was right about the timing and wrong about what was created - and the firmament is not the only problem.

So it seems to me that saying that Paul Price is right means saying that God made mistakes in the Creation story. It seems rather more likely to me that Paul Price is wrong.

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So he did say "they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away.” It’s not incorrect.

I have no idea who Paul Price thinks he’s fooling (apart from himself).

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Citation: It came to Paul in a dream.

In reality it’s the diametrically opposite. Everyone is tripping over each other to be the next big paradigm shifter.

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This is a nice, impressive sounding paragraph. Are you actually disputing that we have sampled less than 1% of the total available sedimentary material on the crust of the earth? If not, this is all irrelevant bluster.

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You missed an important bit …

140,000 wells is a very large sample size, easily enough to make reliable inference*. What, do you suppose, are the odds of drilling all those wells (plus far more exploratory wells) yet somehow missing the evidence for a global Flood every time?

And this is just NM.

* I’ve never worked with geostatistics, but I recall serious arguments over the best methods to use (Kriging vs Linear models) among people in that rather specialized field back in the 1990’s, What no one doubts is that these methods work well enough to make reliable estimates, enabling big money for the minerals extraction industry. It is consilience of data, again.

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Given that the bottom of the Atlantic is dominated by igneous rock, we would only expect a skim layer of fossiliferous sediment. But you have big problems there as well. The outflow of basalt from the mid-Atlantic ridges preserves a geomagnetic record of the earth’s field stretching back millions of years, showing the history of magnetic strength and reversals.

Of course, creationists have cooked up a cockamamie response to this, and it is kinda a doozy. Freely decaying electric currents, a sort of white hot superconductivity in a resistive medium, is supposed to be responsible for the earth’s magnetic field, in violation of pretty much every formulation of electromagnetic law possible from ohm’s law up. The point of that is to then finangle rapid magnetic reversals, just like Moses said, particularly during the flood. What - an inertial current reverses??? How? Why? Apperently, in YEC two nonsenses make a sense. And to what purpose or reason? To deceive people into thinking the earth is old? Because there is no other reason offered. For anyone foolish enough to buy into this, please know that I’m a time traveler from the future, because that has more credibility.

I’m going with the geologist over the apologist on this one. Most states have their own public core repository. Instead of us itemizing the tens of thousands of cores available, why don’t you tell us some specific formations you think have been missed? Oh yeah, more apologetic hand waving.

While you are at it, how much of the antediluvian world do you think was devoid of pollinating plants, no coned or flowering trees, no shrubs, no grass, no wildflowers?

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