Sorry, but I will not waste my time. Looking at the outlines under these YouTube videos, it is just the same old same old bare faced lies, such as lack of bioturbation, that has been aired repeatedly before. As least with YEC papers and articles, you can get directly to the point of interest and can respond without having to dictatype.
Have you read or even skimmed any of the actual geology papers and summaries I linked that deal specifically with Kangaroo Island? There is little point in responding to what are essentially sermons.
I do fully accept the most straightforward reading. That is to say, I accept that it is a motley collection of human writings that reflect the cultural beliefs at the times of those writing.
@jeffb, I should explain that in this forum—as with so many other forums—it is fine to post links to videos and long articles but always with the courtesy of a concise summary (if even just a sentence or two about the point your wish to make.) Few people have the time to watch long videos, especially if there is the perception of a PRATT (i.e., Point Refuted a Thousand Times.) Keep in mind that if your argument is a traditional one, few people will have the motivation to spend a lot of time reviewing it. If you truly believe that your argument has some new and novel element, you will need to explain that carefully if you want people to recognize it as something new.
For long linked papers, key excerpts are helpful—and with a video one can usually add a timestamp to take the viewer to an important segment. Moreover, like it or not, with some speaker or author who has earned a reputation for poorly supported and/or illogical arguments, people are going to be even more hesitant to investing time on them. (I know for me I am much more likely to be curious about an argument posed by Todd Wood than Ken Ham.)
Meanwhile, if you believe that there is an abundance of great evidence for a young earth, leaving the Kangaroo Island plateau behind in favor of new fish to fry would probably be a better use of your time.
Which is the immediate impulse, of course, but it’s also wrong. A better response is to question the claim itself. Bad claims fall apart until careful examination.
This is my occasional ranting criticism about my own side in these debates: we do a terrible job of asking questions. Everyone wants to jump in with the first rebuttal. No one wants to examine the flaws in the original claim. It’s not our job to respond with endless knowledge, but that’s exactly what everyone tries to do. Even if one person tries to question the premise, it quickly gets lost (or ignored) amid all the people scrambling to answer the wrong question.
So let me attempt to reboot this: HOW do plateaus support the claim of a global flood?
Valid point. I was actually considering posting individual sections of the videos for discussion here (that’s been my intent). Maybe…at some point. But please, give me some more time here. As I mentioned previously, there’re a few other things I’d like to discuss.
Well I obviously can’t stop you. But personally I’ll want more time before jumping back into that one.
As expected, the dialog shifted to biblical hermeneutics from my response to the question “What matters to you?”.
That’s a topic for another thread, so I’m going to try and shift back to ones more-or-less related to this thread. I still want to go back to one of your previous posts from yesterday. It’s SO hard for me to keep up here.
Certainly. However, and I know this is bad form to make a statement like that and not follow it up, I just don’t have the time and energy to formulate and polish that paper for submission to the friendly review board here. I’ll see if I can commit some brain-cells to that effort.
But even before I do so, there’s an important question I have for you below.
Correct, I do disagree. Especially on the phrase “demolished.”
“I do hope you will explain” - Yes, I too wish I had the time and energy to.
As above, I’ll try to formulate a polished response. With this being larger in scope, it would really need to be broken down. Plus, as I eluded to before (many posts ago), I’m considering a different approach here. Also, there’s at least one issue I’d like to discuss first. AND also as above, I want to ask a question first.
Yes, I do agree with Wood (btw I suspect “avalanche” was your word not his), partially on evidence, but I’d say more scientists like Ron. HOWEVER I also believe it will be slow coming; not “just around the corner”. I’ve followed this for 30 years, and it’s been slow coming. And thankfully based on my age, I estimate being able to watch it over the next 20-30 years. I don’t doubt there’s encouraging things to come. It will be good knowing that many years from now I joined the young-earth movement early on. Scientific shifts can be slow in coming (as history has shown us). Especially in this case where this model does include God’s intervention (“miracles” as you refer to).
Speaking of:
[Emphasis mine]
Although I wanted to focus on the highlighted part here, I wanted to include most of the paragraph for context.
I re-read this a few times to ensure I wasn’t mis-representing you here, because I’m curious about something. Two comments: First, regarding the “isn’t a scientific discussion,” I wrote up a reply, but decided to delete it, only because others would respond to it, adding more noise to the thread. So that’s a topic for later.
But more importantly, when you used the phrase “The moment…”, it indicates to me that you are 100% committed to naturalism. That is: God’s initial one-time intervention, but after that no intervention from God (in regards to origins). Is that true of your stance?
There’s obviously more to reply to from your post. But honestly, I want to stop there at that question if you don’t mind.
That wasn’t really intended for you, but for everybody else.
They could (and IMO should) be asking questions about the claim itself (plateaus support the Flood?) rather than hitting you from all sides with geology. It’s perfectly good geology, but it argues against what appears to be a flawed premise.
Unrelated, but I wanted to point out that FE tends to lean heavily on conspiracy theory (“those NASA photos are faked”, etc..), where YEC generally does not. That doesn’t get us any closer to evidence, but it is a difference.
No. My stance has nothing to do with what some people would call a strict deism. (“God created the universe and then stepped back and watched, never to be involved again.”) I’m NOT “100% committed to naturalism” if you mean naturalism in the philosophical stance of the belief that the natural world and its laws are the only reality. [And I’m glad to you asked for clarification here. This is important.] As a theist, I certainly assume a broader reality than the natural realm alone.
To clarify my stance in the words you quoted from me, I am referring to the definitions of philosophy and of science (whereby science is a subfield of philosophy, evolved from what was/is known as natural philosophy.)
Consider this: Science, based upon the methodologies commonly called “the Scientific Method” is restricted to the natural realm because that is the limitation of its tools and procedures. Those tools and procedures which work well in the study of the matter-energy universe are not useful in studying God, angels, or anything thing else that is “supernatural.” How does one subject God to an experiment? (Has anyone invented a “deity detector” that one can use in an experiment?) How can one use tools and procedures of the matter-energy world to study a timeless deity or anyone/anything outside of the universe?
To state it another way, the moment one adds supernatural interventions—such as “Biblical miracles”----one has left the domain of science and entered the broader domains of philosophy/theology. (And that is fine. I’m all for good philosophy and theology. But don’t confuse them with science.) And in those broader domains, the tools of science don’t apply. They CANNOT apply.
Consider this analogy: Classical geometry required all constructions to be performed using only a straightedge and compass. But that doesn’t mean that that is “all there is to geometry” and fields like topology. Classical geometry is simply a defined field of study where particular tools (just two) and procedures apply. The moment I add tic-marks to that straightedge so that I can quantify the sizes of things, I have left the realm of classical geometry and stepped into a “bigger” domain of study. Nothing about that would DENY classical geometry. It would simply admit to the defined domains so that we know what tools to use.
Likewise, when one starts “solving” scientific questions by resorting to non-scientific answers (such as divine intervention miracles), one has left scientific methodologies behind and entered the realm of theology.
By the way, it is usually at this point in these kinds of discussions I remind readers of a popular comedy handout back in the 1950’s and 1960’s with a title something like, “Powerful Mathematical Rules You’ve Never Heard Of.” And one of those was “Goldschmitt’s Universal Equation Solver.” It was very briefly stated: “To solve any equation, simply multiply both sides of the equation by zero.” Of course, that does immediately “solve” most any equation. But it is not all that useful because in the process all the variables and other values disappear—and one is left with nothing. (Both literally and in terms of practical solutions.) Introducing miracles is similar. Is there ANY problem in “creation science”—or flat-earthism—which can’t be solved by saying, “At this point God intervened and resolved the contradiction or removed the excess heat or changed the fundamental constants of physics?” No. And there is no way to rebut the “a miracle happened at that point” argument because there is no tool of science which can establish that that supernatural intervention did or didn’t happen.
Yes, as a Bible-affirming theist who considers God the creator of everything, I’m certainly not a strict naturalist. (Nor do I assert that God created the universe and then just sat back and watched—but that is a topic for another time.) But as someone who values science and its definition, I recognize that various Christian philosophers who worked to establish natural philosophy and the modern science which evolved from it saw that its methodologies didn’t address every philosophical question (to say the least) but that it was pretty darn valuable at investigating natural phenomena within God’s creation.
So perhaps now it is easier to see why I don’t consider “creation science” to be science at all. It is not restricted to the tools and procedures of the Scientific Method. And when it leaves that realm and resorts to theological explanations (e.g, “God intervened and changed the decay constant”), it becomes a philosophy/theology which happens to engage science-related topics.
Indeed, because “creation science” inevitably must DEFY the scientific evidence when it investigates things like the age of the earth, it MUST resort to supernatural solutions (e.g., “God intervened and drained away the excess heat.”)
Hey, I thought it was a very important and timely question to ask. I hope my clarification has been productive. Again, I have no problems with considering God’s interventions as a Biblical reality. But as with the many Christians who helped pioneer the development of modern science, I don’t resort to supernatural intervention to explain what can best be explained by the natural processes God created.
Another example: Unlike many Young Earth Creationists I’ve known, I don’t believe God created a planet with “the appearance of age”, suddenly having rock-strewn mountains and valleys of rich soils from eroded rocks. Instead, the laws of chemistry and physics acted over time to give us the earth that we see. God didn’t “plant” deceptive evidence of many millions of years of earth history. No, I see natural processes as his will for how the universe would develop. (Did God “intervene” at times? Perhaps. But that’s a theological question, not a scientific one that can’t be tested.)
Worth defining at this point: Ultimate Causation versus Proximate Causation. I consider God the Ultimate Cause. And he created a universe where proximate causes routinely explain what we see. When I see a newborn infant, I can regard him/her as a creation of God but also a creation of two parents and a creation of complex cellular processes, etc. Ultimate Causation and Proximate Causation are not in any conflict.
[By the way, in the the study of comparative religions, it is interesting that western religions tended to look for proximate causes while some eastern religions weren’t so prone to look for orderly processes which could be studied and understood. Many scholars have claimed that that was one of the many reasons why Western civilization had some natural advantages in pioneering the scientific method. If one expect to find orderly, proximate causes, it is much easier to find them—as opposed to a worldview which expects chaos in everything and only a supernatural intervention brings order. Again, a big topic for another time.]
I’ve known lots of Christians who get caught up in unnecessary false dichotomies over their confusion of Ultimate and Proximate causes. Some will say, “Evolution didn’t create the endless variety of animals. God did.” I happen to think that God created a universe of physics and chemistry such that evolutionary processes did what they do: diversified biological life. Nothing about evolutionary processes “contradicts” God, just as gravitational forces don’t stand in opposition to God. Indeed, I read the first chapters of Genesis describing the earth bringing forth life and I consider that that is exactly what abiogenesis is—and the diversification of life which evolutionary biology explains. [By the way, I’ve written extensively on ABIOGENESIS here on PS so the SEARCH function will find many posts where I describe the compatibility of the Biblical texts with these biology topics.]
Hope that helps.
@Dan_Eastwood, I will certainly understand if you decide to divert my fielding of Jeff’s question to its own explanatory thread.
I would disagree. Science can investigate supernatural hypotheses as long as they have observable consequences that are different from the expected consequences of non-supernatural alternatives. The problem with most creationist miracles is that they are proposed to have the same consequences as their natural alternatives, or are proposed as ways to disguise the results of other miracles. Another problem with supernatural hypotheses is that they’re seldom specific enough to produce clear expectations of observations. But not always.
This thread seems to have gone wildly off topic (seemingly more because of the intervention of moderators than in spite of it, I would note).
I think it is therefore worth while to try to pull it back on topic.
What is evidence?
In this context, the definition would appear to be “facts tending to prove or disprove any conclusion.” (OED)
So, to count as evidence, it needs to be both (i) factual, and (ii) relevant to the conclusion.
The claim has been made that “Plateaus”, due to their “great extent, their flatness, and their lack of erosion” constitute evidence of a global flood.
We were then presented Kangaroo Island and western Arnham Land as examples of this.
The problem being that we have authoritative evidence, in the form of topographical maps and detailed published, peer-reviewed descriptions, showing that the uplands of these areas are neither flat nor lack erosion (and I’m sorry @jeffb, but a brief, superficial and ambiguous Encyclopedia Britannica article does not serve to counter this).
This claim is therefore not evidence, because it is neither factual, nor relevant to the claim being made.
We are now told that the Southern African Plateau is a “better” example. Given that this geographic feature is, at first glance, at least reasonably flat and uneroded, this wouldn’t seem to be an unreasonable claim.
But this is still not evidence (as its relevance to the original claim has still not been established). There is still a gapping hole in the argument:
The Southern African Plateau is large, flat and lacks erosion.
???
Therefore global flood.
At this stage the argument is still “not properly filled out or developed” (i.e. it is vacuous).
To fill it out, we would require a detailed description of:
The rates of uplift and subsidence, and how they varied over time, and thus the time periods at which the area was (i) an exposed highland, (ii) flood plain (or similar), (iii) under water, etc.
The rates of erosion and depositation, and how they varied over time. Noting that the former, per @RonSewell, “widely varies by the material of the rock and by the environment it is exposed to, such as pH of precipitation, profile, freeze/thaw cycling, mechanical abrasion of waves and ice, biological activity, and more.”
Only then would we be in a position to answer the question of whether the Southern African Plateau is explicable by mainstream geology.
This @jeffb is the task you have ahead of you, before you can reasonably claim that “plateaus” constitute any “evidence” (let alone “good evidence”) of a global flood.
Are plateaus presented as evidence for a global flood, or as evidence for a Young Earth? I understood it as the latter claim, with the idea being that erosion would have carved plateaus into oblivion in a much shorter time frame than the purported age of the plateau.
So about this age of the plateau, what is the claim here? There could be several, and it is important to distinguish them. Is the ‘age of the plateau’
the time when the current geomorphological / topographical expression was formed
the time when the rocks underlying the plateau surface were peneplained
the time when the underlying rocks themselves were formed
These are not at all the same, and have very different implications. Can anyone clarify for me? @jeffb ?
Let’s not pretend these things about religion and politics don’t bleed into and overlap each other quite a lot.
So let’s put this aside, agree that of course it matters and that the two are connected very deeply in how people see the world and that it has consequences for their rights and lives, and look at the science itself. Does it support your reading of the Bible? Nope. It does not.
You don’t have a model that explains the data. Your model leads to physically impossible absurdities, such as the heat problem.
So either you have to appeal to arbitrary miracles to save your model, making it not science, or your interpretation of the Bible is wrong (maybe it isn’t as straightforward). You have picked arbitrary miracles, right? Then we are done. You can stop pretending you have science on your side.
If some individual happens to believe the earth is a few thousand years but that has little impact on their engagement with a scientific world (such as not making them skeptical of ALL science to where they reject vaccinations and fight against climate change mitigation), the harm may be minimal. But when a lot of people reject scientific evidence and show contempt for the science academy as “just a bunch of opinions no better than mine”, there is great societal harm because of the decisions they make—such as how they vote—and can even develop into a mob rule in public policy that is driven by ignorance, such as what we often saw in the Middle Ages.
That is two ends of a spectrum. And I am willing to say that in recent months this science-denialism mentality helps explain why we have a U.S. cabinet secretary who has claimed vaccines cause autism, and that vitamin A is “the cure”, and a host of other pseudoscience nonsense. (He also thinks swapping out seed oils in favor of beef tallow “makes french fries healthy again.” Yes, that is harmful and even deadly for some people.) This is what can happen in a society where a lot of people not only ignore evidence and scientific investigation, they actually despise it.
That’s my concern. I usually don’t—and probably can’t know specifically—where any given individual may fall on that science-denial spectrum. But I do know that when there are millions of them, it harms a society, just as the USA is being harmed right now.
So, I have to agree with @Dan_Eastwood on the societal harm. Science denialism is already causing great suffering and several deaths in a growing and unnecessary measles outbreak in west Texas. I am basically immune to that particular danger because of when I was born (when everybody got the measles) but my unvaccinated friends and neighbors are not. And if the measles strains mutate in dangerous ways, we may have yet another disastrous pandemic on our hands—and this time without the intact medical agencies and institutions full staffed to deal with it. That’s another example of societal harm.
Perhaps @Dan_Eastwood or @misterme987 will want to make this “societal harm” subthread its own thread. (I realize some wish to simplify/focus this YEC vs FE Part 1 thread and I’m fine with—even as I also want to address Jeff’s sincere and important question. I consider this “societal harm” question a very important question.
Yes, it is from the second video that @jeffb posted, Flood Expert Gives 5 Evidences For a Global Flood, which has “Their great extent, their flatness, and their lack of erosion” as a subsection-title. Here is an AI-generated transcript of the “Plateau” section:
So you mentioned plateaus to start with. Now, can you tell us what is a plateau? - Well, a plateau is a sort of an elevated, fairly uniform surface. It’s often called a tableland by people, and it’s often dissected by steep gorges or steep cliffs, so on, around them, or through them and so on. Plateaus can be thousands of square kilometers in size, actually. - Okay, and so, how do plateaus indicate a flood occurred in the past? - I guess there’s three points I’d like to make on that. Firstly, plateaus are very common. 70% at least, possibly even up to 75% of the planet, is covered in sedimentary rock, of which 40% of all of that is a plateau. Even in places like Africa, it’s 60% of the entire continent is a plateau. That’s the first point that I’d like to make. Secondly, the elevated plateaus seem to lack the evidence of erosion that would’ve occurred over millions of years. You’d expect to find a far more undulating terrain. And yes, there are some small undulations, but over hundreds of millions of years, these plateaus at times retain an incredible consistency in all of that. The third point is that’s despite the fact that in sometimes the sedimentary layers are not horizontal, they’re are actually tilted, so they’ll actually tilt upwards or in different angles and so on. And so sometimes there’s hard rocks tilted up and next to 'em are soft rocks tilted up, yet the erosion across the top or the plateauing is uniform, or equivalent. In other words, you would expect over millions of years that the softer rocks would’ve eroded out, leaving the harder ones as cliff faces and all sorts of things. So I think those three lines of evidence point to fact they’re quite young. - Got you. So you’re saying that there’s a large extent of plateaus, so there’s a lot of them, we need to explain them. And then you should have undulations. - Absolutely. - But you’re saying because they’re flat, it’s showing you that the millions of years is not necessarily true. - That those plateaus are recent features, recently created. - So you said, “Okay, this flood occurred recently.” So why do they tell us that a flood’s happened? Like, what forms the plateau? - Well, it’s sedimentary rock. In other words, it’s actually primarily made up of flood sediments. In other words, you can have landslide sediments and medial sediments and all those, but plateaus around the world are made up of flood sediments. And the fact that a plateau might occupy 10,000 square kilometers says (laughs) that’s a pretty large flood. - And the way they’d form is by planation, right? It’ll be like a planation surface, they’re sometimes called, is that right? - That’s correct, yes. Although planation has a slightly broader meaning than that, but yes, you are correct that plateaus are part of planation surfaces. - So speaking of a big flood, that the runoff in the flood has caused it to be eroded flat. - Yes, that’s why you’ll often see one plateau sitting on another plateau where the one on top is slightly more dissected than the one underneath. It’s rather fascinating when you look at those plateau on plateaus.
Neller would seem to fail to even mentionany of these issues (or the issues I raised in the post you are replying to).
This of course leaves his claims “not properly filled out or developed” – i.e. vacuous, and so of zero evidentiary value.
It is possible that Neller has developed this claim elsewhere, but that Jeff has simply failed to bring it to our attention. Jeff does however seem to be fairly insistent that we should be basing our understanding on these videos:
It is also possible that as a fluvial geomorphologist and “flood expert”, these issues simply lie outside Neller’s field of expertise.
As the saying goes:
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail
And Neller may simply lack the tools to properly analyse if things-that’re-not-a-flood could cause the features under discussion.
Thank you Tim. Personally, I can’t stand watching such videos of talking heads so I appreciate the excerpt.
It is difficult to respond to what is being said there because of the extremely sweeping nature of the statements, the lack of actual data and references, and the train of thought that at times I find hard to follow. Some statements are very sweeping, such as that ‘plateaus aroud the world are made up of flood sediments’. Which plateaus? What sediments? What makes these specifically flood sediments? Without concrete examples it is impossible to look into this at all.
One thing I really struggle with is this idea that ‘flood run-off’ can form plateaus by erosion. How exactly does that work? A world wide flood means that all land surfaces are under water, right? So why and how would the water level go down? Where does the run-off go to? Where does all that water collect? How does any of this even work?
Yes, they’re so broad and vague that there’s really nothing verifiable. All you can do is either accept Neller’s claims blindly (as Jeff does), or “squint, furrow one’s brows, and then shrug.”
I hadn’t noticed that. I wonder how volcanic plateaus, such as the North Island Volcanic Plateau fit into that claim. Do they simply cease to exist in a puff of YEC industrial-strength denial? Are the meant to have been produced after the Flood? If so, that would require a lot of volcanic eruptions in very rapid succession.
I did a quick search to see if I could turn up a more detailed version of Neller’s claims, but came up empty.
