Plate tectonics. I know you like to try to ignore it, because it is a serious problem for young Earth apologetics, but it is a fact. Plate tectonics created the mountains. You can imagine anything. Doesn't change reality, however. Hans
The Bible says that the circumference of a circle is three times its diameter. So you don't trust geometry? Why don't you trust isotope decay? The Bible says nothing about isotopes, and nothing about the geological age of the earth. Modern medicine uses isotopes, so you don't trust modern medicine, or just its use of isotopes? But how do you know whats genuine? Do you check the Bible to see if it says dishwashers are ok? Science has not "come to a grinding halt". If you really believe that, then you're inventing things to prop up a misconception, or a delusion. Of course we're still playing with old technology. The combustion engine, for example, is more than a century old. We still use that technology because its still useful, when its no longer useful we'll find an alternative (if there is one). The reasons we use "yesteryears tech" have nothing to do with atheism or religion, but rather usefulness. What does the Bible have to say about the use of fossil fuels and combustion engines? Your problem then is explaining why, if the Bible is being contradicted, the technology is still useful. A quick way out seems to be your rationalisation: atheists invented it!
Hans, Despite not agreeing on a number of points YOU ARE THE FIRST PERSON to verify and agree to several points I have made. On one hand though you have kept in check what I have said by saying that it is all natural law, because you don't want to know about supernatural ideas. That's good and fair enough, and I use the term supernatural, not as magic, but as unusual natural circumstances which I believe the flood was. The way I use the term mass, is to describe its volume and weight, nothing else. You have shown YOU ARE CAPABLE of getting what I am saying, the larger "amount of water will slosh around much slower" Now I want you to start with a swimming pool and slosh it around in your imagination, when you can do that accurately, then move up to the size of a beach, then an island size, size of the US, then a body of water the size of the pacific ocean. If you do this scientifically, you will run out of slosh or time, or imaginary power. In which case you can use a computer. The correct computer model will behave exactly as I have posted, if your earth model is also correct. It will make your hair stand up.
There's a lot in what you have posted, atheists are people, and all people are gifted by God in some way, to use their talents in whatever way they want to. Atheists produce marvels. Christians also. But progress, so far as the basics of nature are concerned, slowed down in the 1860's. A lot of science is based on theory, especially in regards to history etc. There are many reasons to accept it, because of research and reasoning, but the world of nature is broad enough to accommodate a few opinions. My first step is faith, followed by reasoning, not the otherway around.
Yes, they have a lot to do with the placement and forms of our continents/whole world. But the actual formation of most mountains, valleys etc, came from the flood. By the way, water was not the only factor. Science has calculated the movement of these plates as they are today, and worked out how long it has taken to move them, which is squillions of years. The plates are not so platey as science has made out. A correct understanding of what and how they work, shows that the continents can be moved much quicker than calculated. The separation of continents could have taken as little as 300 years with out a hitch. But I do not want to elaborate about plates here. I have touched on that subject before in another thread and it did not go down well at all.
That's ridiculous. Besides the fact that there never was a global flood, and there never was a mass extinction in the human era, or that substantial mountains have been formed in only the past 6000 years, mountain building is a fundamental principle of geology. For the same reason that the oceans have no causal connection to the formations of geologic structures undersea, even if there were a global flood, it would have no bearing (literally!) on mountain building. The trench seen in the mid-Atlantic is caused by the lateral East-West separation between Africa and the Americas. Refer to the topographical map I posted. Mountains are formed in the opposite manner of the rending of terrain such as the ridges. Besides vulcanism, which is also the product of tectonics, the collision of the plates has a central cause to building mountains: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Science has calculated the movement of these plates as they are today, and worked out how long it has taken to move them, which is squillions of years. The earth is over 4 billion years old. It is an oblate spheroid with many anomalous geological features such the Tibetan plateau and the Andes. The cookie cutter shape between Africa and the Americas, and the trench between them, demonstrate that the plates are in motion. And that motion can be traced back to the earliest age when the crust was just beginning to solidify. Science has not made anything out. Science is the field of study that analyzes and explains natural phenomena. Plate tectonics is one of many such phenomena. Gravity is another, so are the principles of thermodynamics, chemistry and physics, and all of these principles and phenomena are observed in geology. You can not reverse them because they arise from nature. The laws of nature can not be repealed for the same reason you can not not levitate yourself or magically acquire the powers of Superman. No, the continents are still moving. The San Franciscan peninsula creeps away from the mainland at a rate of about 3-6" per year. To say any different is dishonest. Because it's dishonest. The plates are in motion all the time, "as it was in the beginning".
Incorrect. How would you imagine a flood could create a mountain? - Not that it matters, since your idea is provably wrong. And? Blatant nonsense. Even a superficial look at the levels of erotion in mountain ranges shows that the time-scale is vastly greater. Then, of course, we have ways to measure it even better. If you made the same silly claims as here, that is not surprising. You know what? You are entitled to your faith. In your faith, God can do anything, so fine! Leave it at that. Don't try to make it look scientific, because it makes you look silly. Hans
What is that supposed to mean? That if a geologist says this rock is olivine, and this is basalt, you don't agree with her? It's not an interpretation. It's evidence. The nature of the layers, what they contain, and their respective ages, is based on best evidence, not interpretation. This is another dishonest statement. It's not an assumption. It's a measurement of the ratio of isotopes within a layer, and calculating how long it would have taken those materials to decay to that level of radiation. It's a fact, not an assumption. To say otherwise is dishonest. Your school is teaching that radiometrics is a lie. All the while you/they are ignoring that the radioactive content varies by layer. It has no basis in the action of water. It has a basis in the action of time. Atoms that were laid down in the more distant past have had more eons to decay into the radioactive state than younger atoms. By denying the truth if this fact, your school is propagating a lie, which is why I've said it's dishonest. Traditional to the Victorian era. Today the 4.5 billion year age of the Earth is the traditional view. You're simply hundreds of years behind the curve. You are in that miniscule 12% of respondents surveyed who say the earth is 6000 years old. Presumably none of them could pass a standardized test in math, science and history. Over billions of years the lithosphere cooled, cracked separated and shifted. It's not a rubber earth bending under water just as the sea floors are not currently bending under water. It's a lateral shift causing upheaval (mountain building). Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! No, if you went for any purpose other than deception, you would discover the same facts everyone else discovers. The view of the canyon walls from the rim is breathtaking. The painted stripes are so uniform, and they extend as far as the eye can see. The view from aloft is as impressive. It fills up the entire window as you look out from 30,000 feet. The overlap between Grand, Zion and Bryce Canyons proves that the global flood idea is utterly bogus. It's impossible for a flood to lay layer after layer, with fossils of successive stages of development, and then to slice these into three canyons, and then cut them with rivers. It's ludicrous. That the topmost layer of the Bryce Canyon is not laid at the top of the Grand Canyon disproves the ridiculous notion beyond a shadow of a doubt. To say otherwise is simply dishonest. You asked about the presence of older creatures at the higher layers. If you wish to learn more about the geologic age of fossils, you should consider the diagrams that correlate the abundance of species (or genera) per era, such as the ones below. Compare the named geologic eras to the diagrammed layers of the canyons. As I said before, these are not charts to be folded up. They are the diagrams of the "big picture", taking by collating tens and hundreds of thousands of pieces of evidence from all over the world. attesting to the true natural history of the Earth. To say otherwise is dishonest. This is one kind of detail, looking only at corals. The width of the contours relates to their abundance over time: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Do you see the geologic eras represented in each of these diagrams? They are the eras found in the canyon walls from my earlier post. Here is a more general depiction of the relative abundance of dominant primitive fauna, grouped by class. (Porifera - sponges, cnidaria - jellies, etc. are known as Classes. It's a higher grouping than species.) Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! And here is a similar distribution for flora: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Lying about the facts to cover a silly myth is far from seeing through rose colored lenses. It's simply dishonest. The only way to treat this subject honestly is to be confronted by the facts and evidence, and to study and comprehend them. If you believe in a sacred scripture, then it can never be anything written by any man on clay or vellum. It's the infallible words of nature itself, inscribed in the canyon walls, and strewn along the alluvial fans and poking out over the clouds. What is more sacred than the truth? And then when we turn to the writings of people, if we are to stay honest, we must take care to repudiate the writings that commit heresy against nature's scripture, and we must embrace the ones that treat nature with reverence. For thus it is written: we are only recent arrivals in an extensive history of living forms on a set of shifting plates. And they are not the legs of a table that God shakes when He gets mad at us. Nor does rain fall for that reason. It never has, and it never will. Read the true scriptures, and find out for yourself how silly your myths are.
Probably won't matter to our young earther, but just wanted to add that while the shape match was an initial clue a long time ago, there's a lot of other independent evidence to also link those two continents in the past. There's the continuing growth of the trench, the fact that we can date the segments and they match other dating methods, and that we find geological features on both continents that were once one, created at the same time, before the breakup. And all of this just couldn't be done in thousands of years...not even in a few million years. You tell us we can't grasp the scope of the flood and its power and size, but I don't think you realize the scope of TIME and what can happen in millions of years. You want to believe in some huge event that made what we see today, but it's the small stuff, over EONS, that shapes our world. And that's something that is really hard to picture in our brief lifespan's scale. It's actually sad that some people like to dumb down the incredible world we live in and use gods, miracles, and supernatural events to try and explain it, when it's more awesome when you realize that it happens naturally, over time, one small event after another.
There was no worldwide flood, there would be sediments found in all the seabeds and continents of the world (to say nothing of the fact that there isn't enough water on the planet).
That's where I live!!! (It's the force of our collected karma that's moving us out to sea.) Actually, the way I heard it, is that the west side of the San Andreas fault is moving northwards at some slow rate. (It's kind of jerky and spasmodic, since earthquakes are when it shifts.) The fault doesn't travel under the bay, but rather up the spine of the SF peninsula and out to sea south of San Francisco (in Daly City). The fault zone is just two or three miles west of my Silicon Valley house. (If the fault shifts again soon, my former-house.) So San Francisco at the tip of the peninsula is actually to the east of the San Andreas. And way down there to the south, by Mexico somewhere, Los Angeles is on the west side. Which means that LA is slowly creeping up in this direction. In a few million years or something, it's gonna be up here! The thought of that has every proper San Franciscan scared to death.
Who knows when this would have occurred. There's a giant underground ocean beneath Asia I believe. There can be underground bodies of water can be all over the globe, the amount of water on earth is unknown.
The tube that carries the BART tracks into Oakland sits on the floor of the Bay. It was intentionally designed with an S-shape so that it can gently stretch as The Embarcadero, well . . . disembarks . . . It could be worse. Suppose you were being advanced upon by Alabama.
Just a little science - I'm thinking maybe 8th grade level Earth Science - goes a long, long way to curing the Fundies of their dishonesty. No wonder they are up in arms in the school boards and textbook committees, trying desperately to silence the truth. These facts you mention are typical of what we mean when we say science correlates across disciplines. The oceanographic surveys, now assisted by folks like NASA and NOAA, clearly depict lateral striations riddled with stress fractures indicating that the mid-Atlantic ridge has been moving apart very slowly for millions of years. In the Pacific, the Ring of Fire demonstrates the result of slow collisions over millions of years. And obviously these movements span billions of years, with the most recent continental configuration reaching back to the tens to hundreds of millions of years. The distorted sense of time no doubt stems from the blind insistence in the inerrance of the literal interpretation of the Bible, particularly as influenced by Ussher. For the same reason that they can't comprehend a plate moving 3" per year, they can't comprehend the rise of dinosaurs 160 MYA followed by their extinction 65 MYA. It's the mindset of a child, who has no sense of scale with respect to time. If I were Supreme Commander of the Universe for a day, I would require a first grade coloring book that presents the age of the earth and evolution with a section on the fallacy of the creation and flood myths. Something as simple as this might relieve the next generation of the war on science.
Gerhard Kemmerer is trying to avoid that reality by fabricating a wave that ran across the earth, and at the same time an unprecedented rainfall, and at the same time a rubber earth in which the landmasses collapsed under the weight of the water. All of the excess water needed is conveniently stored in underground oceans that spewed forth during his flood and then when it was over the holes closed up and disappeared. His wave action carved out the features of the earth and created all the sedimentary layers.
He used the recent tsunami that hit Japan to explain this, except his tsunami would be 500 m high. It would supposedly rip the rock apart and carve sharp summits like Everest and McKinley. All of his volcanoes erupted in the past 6000 years, although I'm not sure if they were all under water too or not. His school may have had to revise this idea in light of Mt St Helens, Pinatubo, Mauna Kea, etc. I haven't figured out yet how glaciation figures into their scheme. Presumably they think it's frozen brine. Sand was either created by God or else it formed in only 6000 years of wave action. To support literal interpretation of the myth, they just claim radiometric dating is invalid. Apparently any science to do with calibration and validation procedures is all deemed invalid as well.
I am fairly certain that I did not say that a single wave rolled around the earth. It may have been implied because I used the tidal wave as an illustration of what water can do on a very small scale. Apart from that wave detail, and it forming world features, you have pretty much summed it up. Thankyou.
There wasn't a single wave, but the water would rise in depth and fall with waves as large as 200km wide and 500m high at most. This would not be a steep wave, but rather unnoticable on the boundless ocean. However this constant shift of weight on the earth below, broke it down and redistributed it.
