Scientific Evidence for a Global Flood

[marke]

If you were even the slightest bit interested in actually discussing these topics in any sort of serious way, marke, you might find out whether others are just blowing smoke. Here's a chance to start making good on your pledge to turn a new leaf and actually start debating in good faith.
In this case, it's enough to note that you proposed the entire Colorado Plateau was higher than the surrounding area by a global flood.

You misunderstood. I was saying the entire geologic column of sedimentary rock of the Grand Canyon was laid down by water-borne sediments and that such evidence with such huge volume of sediment material was carried there from flood waters moving that soft material from the sea and other land surfaces stirred up by the churning waters. All that material came from somewhere and I don't think it washed down from the Rockies, for example. In fact, just how exactly did huge volumes of sedimentary rock world wide form? From the erosion of mountains which once stood on the same land where we find huge depths of sedimentary rock today? No, the sediments were stirred up by raging flood waters of Noah's flood and redeposited during the flood and as the waters receded. There is no other logical explanation.

Evolutionists would have us think that fossils of sea creatures worldwide were buried by rising seas (thousands of feet in many places) or by flat sea floors being forced up out of the sea by tectonic plate shifts. Of course these tectonoic plate shifts moving sea creatures upward does not explain layers upon layers of sea creatures mixed with land animal and bird fossils, but who among them really cares? They simply are incapable of seeing the ridiculousness of the big picture when all the contradictory claims are laid out side by side, proving them to be self-contradictory. Such is evolution science.

The article I cited demonstrates why this was not the case; the uplift is caused by interaction between the asthenosphere and the lithosphere.
Moreover, no one argues that there aren't marine fossils in the Grand Canyon. What's fatal to your idea of a global Flood depositing them all is that there are numerous layers that contain marine fossils and those layers are interspersed among numerous layers that have terrestrial fossils. So if you want to claim that a global flood deposited the Colorado Plateau and created the Grand Canyon, you have to explain how that flood could lay down marine organisms in one layer, followed by layers of coastal and terrestrial organisms, followed by more marine fossils, and so on. And you have to explain why this sorting occurred in a manner that imitates evolutionary progress. For instance, you'll find no fossils of dinosaurs or any other species that existed more recently than 250 million years ago. This makes sense if the strata were laid down over eons of time but no sense at all if all organisms were being washed around in the same flood waters.

The very fact of different layers of different sedimentary materials speaks of a solution of different dirts being sorted by weight in water. The sands from the sea and their creatures were separated out in solution from dirts from other land areas, for example, carrying different plant and animal life. What kind of sense would it make to assume that the ancient oceans brought in basalt one time millions of years ago and laid it down in a layer, and the next time the sea rose and flooded the area it laid down some limestone, and later it was just sandstone followed millions of years later by shale, etc.? What mechanism was it which sorted these materials out, if not sorted by solution in one huge flood? Why would one layer only have one type of fossil and another another type? Was the mountain made of basalt one time and a new mountain of limestone arose next to be eroded into the next layer? Do evolutionists even try to tie up these unexplained loose ends to their flawed theories?

We know that seas and oceans have been created and destroyed by the action of plate tectonics. Geologists, therefore, understand how there can be marine fossils on mountaintops and in the Grand Canyon. But the intricate layering of those fossils completely flummoxes creationists. If you want to sincerely discuss this topic, you'll have to start there.

I have begun. Sea above.

[Tiggy]

What kind of sense would it make to assume that the ancient oceans brought in basalt one time millions of years ago and laid it down in a layer, and the next time the sea rose and flooded the area it laid down some limestone, and later it was just sandstone followed millions of years later by shale, etc.? What mechanism was it which sorted these materials out, if not sorted by solution in one huge flood? Why would one layer only have one type of fossil and another another type? Was the mountain made of basalt one time and a new mountain of limestone arose next to be eroded into the next layer?

Holy-Facepalm.jpg

You can't make up ignorance this entertaining folks. You just can't.

- T

[marke]

Reptile tracks, Tiggy means.

Maybe you are right. You could offer some proof but maybe that point doesn't matter anyway. There are literally millions of fossilized dinosaur tracks visible at ground level worldwide, which does present a sedimentation/erosion problem for evolutionists, and we can get more into that issue as well if anyone is interested.

[Tiggy]

Maybe you are right. You could offer some proof but maybe that point doesn't matter anyway. There are literally millions of fossilized dinosaur tracks visible at ground level worldwide, which does present a sedimentation/erosion problem for evolutionists, and we can get more into that issue as well if anyone is interested.

Still waiting for your explanation for those vertical sauropod tracks in Bolivia I showed you, remember?

DinoTracks.jpg

You sure ran from that bit of evidence quickly.

- T

[marke]

And these "undulating and repeated huge waves" somehow preserved a great many organisms in detail, even the most delicate. And it somehow sorted them all by age, without a single exception. And it somehow left NONE of the evidences of large floods, which are all well known.

No, the quality of preservation speaks to the rapidity of its burial, protecting it from scavengers and decay. This is especially important for fossils like whales for example, which had to have been completely buried by sediment shortly after death or at death in order for the remains to have been preserved. The same is true for fossils like sharks and huge dinosaurs and mammoths, for example. No little yearly dusting of dirts piling up had anything to do with the fossilization of these large creatures. The same is also true of fossilized bone beds which have the remains of several huge sea creatures mixed with the remains of large numbers of big land animals and birds. These were not buried by slow sedimentation by any stretch of the imagination.

Marke, your previous "it was all cobbled up by god to create the appearance of a very long and intricate history, to fool those who pay attention" was at least coherent. You should stick with it. Otherwise anyone who has ever collected shells on the beach knows what waves to to delicate things.

If the rising flood waters carried huge volumes of sea floor sediments with them as they washed over lands below, those sea creatures were likely protected by the dirt around them from the time they were picked up by the moving water until they were deposited in their final resting place. Have you ever seen any pictures of the Titanic at the bottom of the sea? After a tremendously violent breaking up and scattering of the ship into debris on the ocean floor, some delicate items somehow survived remarkably intact.

[Ansgar Seraph]

You misunderstood. I was saying the entire geologic column of sedimentary rock of the Grand Canyon was laid down by water-borne sediments and that such evidence with such huge volume of sediment material was carried there from flood waters moving that soft material from the sea and other land surfaces stirred up by the churning waters.

The sedimentary rock in the Grand Canyon is part of the Colorado Plateau; as the graphic of the Grand Staircase that Tiggy posted shows, the strata exposed in the Grand Canyon are visible because of the plateau's uplift, not because it was all dumped there in a global flood. I'm not misunderstanding your point, as far as I can tell, and, for the numerous reasons I've detailed, it's a demonstrably wrong point.

Evolutionists would have us think that fossils of sea creatures worldwide were buried by rising seas (thousands of feet in many places) or by flat sea floors being forced up out of the sea by tectonic plate shifts. Of course these tectonoic plate shifts moving sea creatures upward does not explain layers upon layers of sea creatures mixed with land animal and bird fossils, but who among them really cares. They simply are incapable of seeing the ridiculousness of the big picture when all the contradictory claims are laid out side by side, proving to be self-contradictory. Such is evolutionist science.

By all means, provide evidence of "layers upon layers" of sea creatures mixed with terrestrial fossils. Where they exist, you'll find that they are coastal areas.

The very fact of different layers of different sedimentary materials speaks of a solution of different dirts being sorted by weight in water. The sands from the sea and their creatures were separated out in solution from dirts from other land areas, for example, carrying different plant and animal life.

Sorted by weight? Then how do explain the same type of formations at different strata? For example:

grand33.jpg

The Bass Formation second to the bottom in the Canyon is composed primarily of limestone. Above it is the Hakatai Shale, mostly shale with some sandstone. Above that is the Shinumo Quartzite, composed primarily of sandstone. Two strata above that is the Cardenas Basalt — lava rock. The Nankoweap Formation is higher, once again containing sandstone.

And on and on; interspersed layers of the same kinds of rock at different layers. So how is one limestone or sandstone layer heavier than basalt while other of the same types of layers are lighter?

And again, it's not just that we find different species at different layers but that we find species that appear to progress along evolutionary pathways. We find reptiles on in the higher layers; we find no reptiles below the Supai group. And, if memory serves, we find no fossilized pollen, either. That makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, since pollinating plants had not yet evolved but cannot be reconciled with a global flood that mixes all organisms and deposits the layers at the same time.

What kind of sense would it make to assume that the ancient oceans brought in basalt one time millions of years ago and laid it down in a layer, and the next time the sea rose and flooded the area it laid down some limestone, and later it was just sandstone followed millions of years later by shale, etc.?

What? That isn't remotely how it works. Basalt is volcanic material and spreads by volcanic actoin. Limestone is primarily deposited by marine organic material and sandstone is lithified sand. Those strata were all deposited in very different environments, only some of which had any direct interaction with seas.

What mechanism was it which sorted these materials out, if not sorted by solution in one huge flood? Why would one layer only have one type of fossil and another another type?

Because the organisms that lived in the time period a given strata was exposed to the surface also died in that strata. After millions of years, when the environment was different and a new layer was being deposited, different organisms lived and died.

Take a bucket and pour sand into the bottom. Now put a few pennies on top of the sand. Put down a layer of dirt and put some dimes on top of that. Now heap some gravel a few inches thick into the bucket and throw some quarters in between the rocks. Finally, put some more sand on to fill the bucket and put some nickels on the top. What mechanism sorted the change? Are you going to find pennies at the top of the bucket? Are you going to find nickels in the layer of dirt? Now pour the contents of the bucket into a barrel, add a few gallons of water and shake the whole thing for five minutes. Pour the resulting slurry into the bucket again. How's your change sorted?

That's the sorting difference between organisms being fossilized within the strata that was their environment and being deposited in the Flood.

Was the mountain made of basalt one time and a new mountain of limestone arose next to be eroded into the next layer? Do evolutionists even try to tie up these unexplained loose ends to their flawed theories?

You need to work on your geology.

—Sam

[Ansgar Seraph]

Maybe you are right. You could offer some proof but maybe that point doesn't matter anyway. There are literally millions of fossilized dinosaur tracks visible at ground level worldwide, which does present a sedimentation/erosion problem for evolutionists, and we can get more into that issue as well if anyone is interested.

The clade that separates dinosaurs from other reptilia doesn't appear in the fossil record until the Triassic Period, ~230 million years ago. The uppermost layer of the Grand Canyon dates to 250 million years ago and no dinosaur fossils are present in the strata. The fossilized tracks in the Coconino Sandstone could be from 255 million years old to 264 million years old. Reptile fossils are found below the Coconino Sandstone in the Supai Formation so we know that reptiles existed during the period that the Coconino Sandstone was being formed.

Dinosaur tracks don't present any problems for evolutionists because erosion doesn't present problems for evolutionists. We have lots of time with which to allow Nature to work. Creationists, on the other hand, are rather pressed for enough time to A) allow organisms to create tracks (e.g., footprints, burrows) in a given layer, B) allow for that layer to lithify and C) have that layer shift from horizontal, creating angular non-conformities. Tiggy has reposted an example of this for you.

—Sam

[Tiggy]

The sands from the sea and their creatures were separated out in solution from dirts from other land areas, for example, carrying different plant and animal life.

If your FLUD sorting is true, why then do we find fossil trilobites only in the lowest layers of the geologic column from the early Cambrian to the late Permian

TRILOBITE-fossil.jpg

...while we find fossil brachiopods of the same size, shape, and mass in layers from the early Cambrian all the way up to the late Pleistocene?

syringothyris-brachiopod-fossil-spickert-knob-formation-washington-county-indiana-mississippian-.jpg

How did the FLUD manage to sort the layers like that?

The question you won't address are piling up might fast here marke.

- T

[marke]

Marke, how did Da FLUD manage to create the Great Unconformity in the Grand Canyon?
Attachment 77945
There are lots of similar (if smaller) unconformities all over the planet.
Attachment 77947
Attachment 77948
I'd love to hear your YEC FLUD explanation. Do you have one?
- T

I'm a little offended at some of the mocking things that have been said on this site about creationism and creationists. So, to answer you in that light, I am listing some historical facts that anyone can check out for themselves to refute or not, as they please. After laying the historical groundwork I should be able to begin to offer other evidences in this huge subject. The following is taken from http://www.creationscience.com/onlin...ndCanyon4.html

"In 1861, John Strong Newberry proposed an explanation for the relatively tiny canyons and basins along the Colorade River far south and west of the Grand Canyon. He wrote:
"Doubtless in earlier times [the Colorado River] filled these basins to the brim, thus irrigating and enriching all its course. In the lapse of ages, however, its accumulated waters, pouring over the lowest points in the barriers which opposed their progress towards the sea, have cut them down from summit to base forming that remarkable series of deep and narrow canyons through which its turbid waters now flow, with rapid and almost unobstructed current, from source to mouth."
Newberry also wrote that the Grand Canyon, which he called The Great Canon, was "wholly due to the action of water. Probably nowhere in the world has the action of this agent [water] produced results so surprising, both as regards their magnitude and their peculiar character."

"In 1923, another geologist, J Harlen Bretz, proposed that a network of canyons had been carved in Washington State by the breaching of a natural dam. He said that an ice dam impounded a lake in Montana and northern Idaho. The lake, which Bretz called Lake Missoula, was about half the size of Lake Michigan. When lake Missoula breached, canyons and other terrain, called the Channeled Scablands, were carved. Because Bretz's explanation was too catastrophic, geologists rejected his views for more than 40 years.

Today, his views are widely accepted. (Invoking catastrophes violated a "sacred" rule in geology; i.e., explanations should involve only processes that we see today. Evolutionary geologists believe that eons of time were available. Unfortunately, this assumption, called uniformitarianism, still underlies much of geology.)"

Here are more historical proposals for the origin of the Grand Canyon listed in this book:
John Wesley Powell (1869). Over geologic time, thousands of feet of limestone, shale, and sandstone layers were deposited. The earth, cooling from its earlier molten state, was contracting and shriveling, like a dried-up, wrinkled apple. As the Colorado River flowed along its present course 65,000,000 years ago, surface rocks began folding, uplifting, and tilting. the Colorado Plateau rose so slowly that the river was never blocked. As it did, the river cut through the rising land, leaving the Grand Canyon.

"Grove Karl Gilbert (1875). Faults developed in the Colorado Plateau as it rose over long periods of time. These cracks allowed the Colorado River to flow through the Kaibab Plateau and carve the Grand Canyon.

"Samuel Franklin Emmons (1897). To form the Grand Canyon, either the Colorado River cut down through the land below, or the land below rose up and was cut by the river. Powell maintained the latter, but he misread specific geologic features. [Emmons provided valid but complex details.] Therefore, the river settled down through the land and carved the Grand Canyon by superposition.

"Eliot Blackwelder (1934). Up until 1.8 million years ago, the Colorado River did not exist. Then, as the Rocky Mountains rose their nlast mile or so, they intercepted much more moisture from the westerly winds. Rivers flowing down the western slopes of the Rockies became longer and more powerful. River drainage into basins west of the Rockies increased, while the cold, ice age climate reduced evaporation. Therefore, western lakes grew and sometimes breached their banks, carving canyons down to the next lower lake. Eventually, the Grand Canyon was carved and the Colorado River flowed as it does today.

"Edwin D. McKee (1964). The early Colorado River flowed into the Gulf of mexico along a path that began east of the Kaibab Plateau, then continued along the valley of the Little Colorado River, and finally flowed into the Rio grande. During the next 8,000,000 years, the Colorado Plateau rose and some streams flowed westward off the Colorado Plateau. One stream eroded headward (upstream) 300 miles northward from the Gulf of California, then 130 miles eastward through the Kaibab Plateau. The stream eventually captured the waters of the Colorado River, which then changed course and began flowing to the west, where it eroded the Grand Canyon.

"Charles B. Hunt (1976). The Grand Canyon was carved in segments. First, the eastern part was partially carved by superposition and by the land rising as the river cut down through it. The river ponded in a large basin north of Kingman, Arizona. Later, that lake tunneled northwards through caverns and limestone deposits, exiting as a spring feeding another lake just beyond today's western end of the Grand Canyon. This is how and where the Hualapai Limestone accumulated. When the flow from east of today's Grand Canyon increased, lakes overflowed, cutting the western Grand Canyon. Over the next few million years, the Colorado River cut the canyon to its present depth.

"Ivo Lucchitta (1988). The early Colorado River flowed southwest across a flatter Kaibab Plateau, cutting down throug it by superposition. West of that plateau, the river flowed to the northwest. Faulting and volcanism have since erased that path.

About 5 million years ago, a stream began to flow south into the newly opened Gulf of California. That stream eroded headward along what is now the Colorado River's path after it leaves the Grand Canyon. Further headward erosion to the east allowed the stream to intersect and capture, west of the Kaibab Plateau, the Colorado River, which then carved the Grand Canyon.

"Norman Meek and John Douglass (2000). About 6,000,000 years ago, the Colorado River drained into Hopi Lake. Eventually the lake breached, spilling over the Kaibab Plateau to the west. The released water filled other basins downstream, forming lakes that breached successively. The region west of today's Grand Canyon may have subsided by almost one mile and the Colorado Plateau may have tipped to the southwest, giving the waters from the upper Colorado River enough energy to carve the Grand Canyon."

So we can see there are many ideas about what carved the Grand Canyon and when it was done. I also have a theory which I hope to ghet into next time with some explanations for different phenomena, including the 'Great Unconformity'. The book I quoted has a huge amount of material on the Grand Canyon as well as many other subjects.

[marke]

Still waiting for your explanation for those vertical sauropod tracks in Bolivia I showed you, remember?
DinoTracks.jpg
You sure ran from that bit of evidence quickly.
- T

No, I don't remember, but what about them?

[marke]

A problem with looking for "evidence for" a theory is that there is "evidence for" every theory, no matter how wrong. There is "evidence for" a flat earth. There is "evidence for" proteins being the heriditary material (a theory popular in 1900), etc. If you go back to the mid 1700s you will find books and monographs by scientists citing "evidence for" a world-wide flood and that was the accepted scientific theory of the day.

This is why evidence against a theory is really what matters. "evidence against" is evidence that cannot possibly exist if the theory were true. And that is what was found in terms of a world-wide flood. The second quote in my signature came about because any possibility of a world-wide flood was falsified by 1831 by the massive amounts of evidence against.

You make this unsupported claim in spite of your admission that other contrary theories abound. Perhaps you should post your evidence for this 'fact' and let us review it (peer review process).

You seem to have the mistaken idea that all Christians think a world-wide flood happened and only non-Christians are against it. Historically, it was Christians who falsified a world-wide flood. I am a Christian and I am going to respond, because I accept that there was no world-wide flood.

A common misconception. We sometimes refer to 'Christians' as only encompassing the select group of those who believe the Bible.

What happens is that YECers (who are all Flood geologist) pose the following examples as "evidence for" a Flood. What presumably want to know is why YECers do this. I go with Phrank and suggest either www.answersingenesis.org or www.icr.org. What I will do is explain why the examples are not good 'evidence for" a Flood.

I go with the obvious that all evolutionists have been brainwashed by propagandists from early childhood in institutions which have banned the truth of God's Word. Devout evolutionists only quote from 'approved' sources and rarely stray from one of the 'official' conflicting evolutionist stories about the evidence.

What happens is that much of this "data" is false. The rest is explained by other hypotheses, such as local floods. Much of the Grand Canyon is due to local floods as upstream volcanic dams were eroded and released the lakes behind them. But overall, the Grand Canyon cannot be explained by a single world-wide flood for the simple reason that the present land tilts such that the Colorado River should flow east and not west.

I actually believe the GC was not formed exclusively by the flood, but do not and cannot agree with all the various conflicting theories that are out there.

Fish that were in the process of eating another fish can be explained by the predator fish dying in the process. There could be several reasons for this: the prey fish was toxic, the prey fish was too big and caused internal injuries during swallowing. What would not happen is a fish being killed by a world-wide flood! So it's more water, fish live in water.

The flood theory is certainly not contradicted by this evidence.

There are no examples of trees being uprooted by a flood and implanted somewhere else. This sounds like Flood geologists trying to explain the fossilized forests of Yellowstone National Park. Instead, the forest grew there, was killed and buried by a volcanic eruption, and then a new forest growing in the same place. This happened more than 14 times. No way a world-wide flood could have done this.

Fossil trees in Yellowstone can be explained by appropriate theories which also agree with the Flood, although not necessarily having to do with uprooted trees. For those evidences you might take a look at Joggins, Nova Scotia, for example, which are also better explained by the Flood than by any other theory. There are striated fossil trees, for example, which are found in various parts of the world extending through several different seams of coal, which evolutionists claim were separated by many thousands of years, and yet the trees survived the extended burial somehow. The Flood is by far the most suitable explanation for such evidence.

The "upright whale fossil" is simply false and has been shown to be that many times over. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/polystrate.html I don't understand why creationists keep repeating this.

There is at least one whale fossil that I know of which has been found buried at a slope through several layers of sediment, which is best explained by the Flood. Wiki's "Polystrate Fossils" has an extensive article on these types of evidences, and there are a huge number of other resources. Care should be taken, however, to examine the opinions and reports from several or many sources before settling on one conclusion about a piece of evidence (In other words, don't believe everything people say). Here is an excellent resource which is filled with details: http://www.earthage.org/polystrate/F...ova_Scotia.htm

[Tiggy]

I'm a little offended at some of the mocking things that have been said on this site about creationism and creationists.

Tough. As long as Creationists continue their pattern of willful dishonesty, they'll be mocked. Deal with it or leave.

So, to answer you in that light, I am listing some historical facts that anyone can check out for themselves to refute or not, as they please. After laying the historical groundwork I should be able to begin to offer other evidences in this huge subject. The following is taken from http://www.creationscience.com/onlin...ndCanyon4.html

(snip)

So we can see there are many ideas about what carved the Grand Canyon and when it was done.

No, there WERE many ideas about the GC, most of which have been discarded due to the continued introduction of new geologic evidence.

I also have a theory which I hope to ghet into next time with some explanations for different phenomena, including the 'Great Unconformity'. The book I quoted has a huge amount of material on the Grand Canyon as well as many other subjects.

Hand waving quotes won't cut it. You need to come up with a plausible physical explanation that is supported by the evidence. Science already has one; you need a better one.

- T

[Tiggy]

No, I don't remember, but what about them?

You need to explain how they got that way in your FLUD scenario.

Funny how you keep conveniently "forgetting" to deal with evidence you can't explain.

- T

[marke]

The idea in the "polystrate whale" is that whales should be buried horizontally and be within a single "bedding plane". And actually, the example is that the whale did die horizontally but that the strata was tilted by plate tectonics.

That is quite probable. It is also quite probable that the entire whale carcass was completely buried in one single event in a very short period of time, given that it was not scavenged or greatly decayed from exposure.

And yes, much of the Grand Canyon as we see it today was cut by a series of floods. LOCAL floods.

This is also quite possible, given the evidence. Theories of dam breaches and massive water geyser eruptions from underground water conduits, as well as earthquakes and volcanic activity are also valid considerations. No matter what theories are involved, however, there seems to be no doubt that massive amounts of water and pressures were involved, which are easily provided by the flood theory (receding waters, dammed lake bodies, underground flows, etc., are all quite likely in a major flood event.

[Tiggy]

Oh and marke, here's a huge hint:

If you start using Creationist wackaloon Walt Brown as a source for your information, you're going to get your butt handed to you on a plate. More so than you already are that is.

All professional Creationists are liars and frauds, but Brown is in a class by himself. His online book you quote from is filled with the dumbest unsupported claims imaginable, most of which Brown pulled straight from his rectum.

But go right ahead and cite him if you really want us to make you look like an idiot.

- T