:: The point is that Rutherford made dogmatic pronouncements about things of which he knew nothing. Same as he did in the religious arena.
: There is no question about that. The Society still is burdened with some of his mis-interpretations of prophecy. Some of his ideas are totally indefensible.
That's right. In fact, most of his ideas are indefensible. Like renaming the Bible Students with the completely misrepresentative generic term "Jehovah's witnesses", which allowed subsequent Watchtowerites to make ridiculous arguments like, "Jesus was Jehovah's greatest witness, and because we're also Jehovah's witnesses, we must be worshipping truly, just like Jesus."
:: The only mammoth remains in tar pits that I know of are some bones and nearly complete skeletons dug out of the La Brea Tar Pits near Hollywood in Los Angeles….The only reason I mentioned this is that it shows that until I mentioned it explicitly, you did not seem to understand that there is a dramatic difference between the frozen carcasses of animals of Siberia and Alaska, and the tar preserved bones of animals from places like the Rancho La Brea tar pits. These tar pits, by the way, are found in a number of places in the world, but the La Brea ones are by far the most famous.
: Okay, having already read your entire post I see why I remembered you as having ascribed all the mammoth remains to clumsy beasts tumbling into pits of tar. In actuality, essentially, you do believe that the preserved beasts all randomly fell in pits and holes and crevices and some were over taking by “mud flows.” That is an absurdity. Obviously tar pits took their toll, but that cannot explain the hundreds of thousands of animals that have been entombed in various stages of preservation.
It's not the least bit absurd. During the last 3 million years, which comprise the latest series of ice ages that occurred on average once every hundred thousand years, huge numbers of animals had all sorts of opportunities to get themselves into deathtrap situations. During parts of the last cold part of the last section of the series, from roughly 100,000 to 10,000 years ago, the climate in Siberia and Alaska varied dramatically from what it is today. For parts of this period, the "northern boreal forest" area of present day Siberia extended hundreds of miles farther north than today. It was a wetter, somewhat warmer climate than today, as shown by the remains of plants and animals found all over. The plant populations are fairly easy to determine these days from studies of pollen found in areas of accumulation, such as peat bogs and the sediments of large lake bottoms. Such studies show that the boundary between tundra and northern boreal forest shifted many times during this last 100,000 years. The stomach contents of various frozen animals, including that of mammoths, consisted entirely of such northern plant species, including sedges, northern grasses and twigs and cones from trees that make up the forests of Siberia today, such as fir and pine. Thus, the actual evidence including that taken from the frozen mammals themselves indicates that they lived not in a tropical climate, but a far-northern temperature to Arctic climate.
As for entombing animals in creeping mudflows, this is not speculation. The process has been observed:
It is recorded that, in 1947, about 25 of 150 reindeer that went to the beach at Nicholson Peninsula, Northwest Territories, Canada, became mired in a gelifluction [solifluction] flow. Herders managed to pull out 18, but the other seven were swallowed up in a short time. Probably they are still frozen in the permafrost today, potential frozen fossils of the future. [Antony J. Sutcliffe, On The Track Of Ice Age Mammals, p. 49, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1985]
While the process may not happen every day, over a period of nearly 100,000 years there is ample opportunity for it to happen to hundreds of thousands of animals.
Furthermore, the number of frozen animals actually found is actually quite small. Until gold mining in the far north became common in the 1940s, only about two frozen mammoths per century were found. That's why the Russian scientists took about a year from 1901 to 1902, trekking over about 16,000 miles of Siberia largely on foot, to recover the Berezovka mammoth -- it was incredibly rare and valuable to science. Plenty of mammoth tusks have been found, but that's only to be expected of huge hunks of ivory preserved in permafrost. When mammoths died, their tusks naturally would last far longer than anything else.
:: The Flood explanation is impossible, and as we will see, this is not a mere "theory". It is very hard to prove that some historical phenomenon occurred due to one specific cause, but it is fairly easy to prove that the phenomenon did not occur due to some proposed cause.
: The flood is quite possible. When all the evidence is taken together, a pattern emerges that points to the inescapable conclusion that there was an unforgettable flood.
Not at all. The speculations that you present are almost entirely the product of what you've read in Watchtower literature. Some of what you're saying was abandoned by the Society around 1980, but you just don't know it. They used to teach what they borrowed from the young-earth creationists, who teach what they call "flood geology", which claims that virtually all of the sedimentary rock on earth was laid down during Noah's Flood. From the mid-1960s until about 1980 this teaching was central to Watchtower teachings about evidence for the Flood, but they no longer teach it. Get with the program, Bobby.
These days, there are two lines of evidence that the Society uses to 'prove' the Flood: frozen animals in the Arctic, and legends. Both have been completely debunked as credible lines of evidence.
:: For example, suppose a team of forensic pathologists is given a corpse to figure out how the person died. One pathologist proposes, "I think that he died by fire." But when the team examines the corpse, they find no burned or cooked flesh, and no smoke particles or other fire-related evidence in the lungs or on the corpse. That mindset They can properly conclude that the man did not die by fire, even though they might never establish the actual cause of death.
: But let’s suppose that our forsenic pathologists have a particular bias and that their very training as pathologists instilled in them a predisposition to interpret things a certain way and overlook certain possibilities? That’s really what we are up against.
Not at all. Evidence for death by fire is simple: burnt or cooked flesh, smoke damage, and so forth. Evidence for a massive flood is also simple: characteristic gouging features that show a massive flow of water, characteristic deposits of sediments, and so forth.
For example, in the Channeled Scablands of Washington, there is a place about half way between Grand Coulee Dam and Ephrata called Dry Falls. The area is thoroughly scoured by massive flooding. The "dry falls" are actually an area cut deeply into the basalt bedrock, where massive water flow cut back the rock in a giant waterfall that was once five miles across. The cliffs today are about 450 feet high. The area is so huge that it's difficult to understand the scale of the flooding, but it's extremely clear from the air.
Massive floods also leave massive gravel deposits. These tend to accumulate in backwaters where the flow is lessened. In Washington and the Columbia Gorge you can find giant gravel bars 800 feet high and many miles long. There are places in the Snake River valley where such gravel bars have been found from the Missoula floods, where the water flow was upstream as shown by the layers in the gravel beds slanting upstream. In some places these are interbedded with other gravel slanting downstream.
Massive floods also leave features called "giant ripple ridges". These are ridges formed from gravel, where the spines of the ridges are perpendicular to the flow of water, much like what you see in sand at the beach. In parts of Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon where the water was flowing over fairly wide areas, you find ridges up to 30 feet high, 500 feet crest to crest and many miles long. Again their nature can best be seen from the air. And I've seen them from the air.
So, Bobby, for your generalized criticisms to work, you would have to get down into specifics and show how the lack of such evidence worldwide is consistent with the most massive flood of all time.
: Since the time of Charles Lyell geologists have been indoctrinated with an evolutionary mindset and a deeply set bias against the Biblical flood.
You're so wrong, Bobby. Lyell was a devout Christian, and a creationist, and he opposed evolution. While his ideas on "uniformitarianism" certainly were a foundation for Darwin and later evolutionists, he certainly did not develop them because of an evolutionary bias, because Lyell was a creationist. What Lyell taught was there were long, steady eras of stasis that were ended by massive catastrophes, after which God would start anew and create a whole new mix of life, but that in the meantime some species went extinct and that God replaced them when needed. The famous evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr wrote:
Since Charles Lyell was the great champion of uniformitarianism, it was concluded that Darwin's evolutionary thought was directly derived from Lyell. How dubious this claim is becomes evident when we realize how strongly the uniformitarian Lyell was opposed to evolution. It is only in recent years that the weakness of Huxley's argument has been pointed out by Hooykaas, Cannon, Rudwick, Mayr, Simpson, and others. Nevertheless, the geological arguments of the 1820s and 30s were of fundamental importance for the shaping of the mind of those biologists for whom the history of life on earth posed a problem... The terms "uniformitarianism" and "catastrophism" were coined by the Brithis philosopher William Whewell in 1832 in a review of Lyell's Principles of Geology. The terms referred to two opposing schools of geologists. Actually they were quite misleading because the principal issue was not the occurence (or not) of catastrophes but rather the question whether the findings of geology support the steady-state world theory of Hutton and Lyell or the directionalist theory of most other geologists including progressionists and catastrophists. The major thesis of the directionalists was that life on earth had been changing through geological time... Without exception, all the participants in the controversy were devout Christians, and the only issue of disagreement was the extent to which they envisioned God to intervene in the workings of His world... Obviously, all creations, whether a single original one or multiple creations after each catastrophe, were the direct work of the creator. For Lyell, all geological processes in the world were the results of secondary causes, not requiring the invoking of supernatural interventions. Lyell's critics reproached him for not consistently applying this principle to the introduction of new species, a process which, Lyell's denials notwithstanding, had all the earmarks of ad hoc special creation...What Does Darwin Owe to Uniformitarianism?
The various recent analyses indicate that, no matter how great Darwin's intellectual indebtedness to Lyell was, uniformitarianism (sensu Lyell) was actually more of a hindrance in the development of his evolutionism than a help. Gradualism, naturalism, and actualism were the prevailing concepts from Buffon to Kant and Lamarck. The most distinctive part of Lyell's specific uniformitarianism was his steady-state (and cyclical) theory, and this was definitely quite irreconcilable with a theory of evolution... Lyell's writings have long been completely misinterpreted owing to T. H. Huxley's erroneous claim that his uniformitarianism would inexorably lead to Darwinism and owing to Whewell's misleading labels "uniformitarianism" and "catastrophism." Lyell's steady-state world was not a completely static world, but one undergoing eternal cycles, correlated with the movements and climatic changes of the continents. Extinction was a necessary consequence of the changing world becoming unsuitable for certain species. And, of course, in a steady-state world the lost species had to be replaced through the "introduction" of new species. Since the loss of species by extinction and their replacement by new introductions occurred at a steady rate, Lyell insisted that he was following strict uniformitarian principles... This Lyell-Darwin relationship illustrates in an almost textbook-like fashion a frequently occurring relationship among scientists. it is the counterpart of "forerunner." ... One can hardly call Lyell a forerunner of Darwin's, because he was adamantly apposed to evolution, he was an essentialist [one who believes that ideas have existence in and of themselves, apart from and independent of any physical manifestation
],
he was a creationist, and his whole conceptual framework was incompatible with that of Darwin. And yet he was the first who clearly focused on the crucial role of species in evolution and stimulated Darwin to choose that way to solve the problem of evolution, even though this was done by showing that Lyell's proposed solutions were wrong... There are literally scores of cases in the history of science where a pioneer in posing a problem arrived at the wrong solution but where opposition to this solution led to the right solution.
I have analyzed at an earlier occasion (Mayr, 1972) the set of ideas and beliefs that had prevented an earlier acceptance of evolution. It consisted of natural theology and a very literal creationism together with essentialism. Paradoxically, within this framework the advance of scientific knowledge necessitated an ever-increasing recourse to the supernatural for explanation. For instance, the succession of faunas discovered by the stratigraphers necessitated abandoning the idea of a single creation. Agassiz [father of modern glaciology and another devout Christian] was not afraid to postulate 50-80 total extinctions of life on earth, and an equal number of new creations.
Even such a sober and cautious person as Charles Lyell frequently explained natural phenomena as due to creation. And this removed the facts of evolution from the realm of scientific analysis. Nothing, of course, is impossible in creation.
"Creation," said Lyell, "seems to require omnipotence, therefore we can not estimate it." [ Ernst Mayr,
The Growth of Biological Thought, Harvard Univ. Press, 1982, pp. 375-381 ]
Like Lyell, most of the geologists of the early 19th century who first systematized the classification of European rock strata were devout Christians who at first thought that Noah's Flood produced all of it. But by 1831, six years before Louis Agassiz presented his ideas on ice ages, these geologists had been forced by the evidence to abandon their ideas that the deposits they had called "drift" had been formed by an earthwide flood. Because almost to a man these geologists were deeply committed Christians, they had called the deposits 'drift' specifically because of their belief that they had drifted to their final resting places in the Flood. One book explains this in more detail (Ashley Montagu, ed., Science and Creationism, pp. 134-135, Oxford University Press, New York, 1984):
Flood geology was considered and tested by early-nineteenth-century geologists. They never believed that a single flood had produced all fossil-bearing strata, but they did accept and then disprove a claim that the uppermost strata contained evidence for a single, catastrophic, worldwide inundation. The science of geology arose in nations that were glaciated during the great ice ages, and glacial deposits are similar to the products of floods. During the 1820s, British geologists carried out an extensive empirical program to test whether these deposits represented the action of a single flood. The work was led by two ministers, the Reverend Adam Sedgwick (who taught Darwin his geology) and the Reverend William Buckland. Buckland initially decided that all the "superficial gravels" (as these deposits were called) represented a single event, and he published his Reliquiae diluvianae (Relics of the Flood) in 1824. However, Buckland's subsequent field work proved that the superficial gravels were not contemporaneous but represented several different events (multiple ice ages, as we now know). Geology proclaimed no worldwide flood but rather a long sequence of local events. In one of the great statements in the history of science, Sedgwick, who was Buckland's close colleague in both science and theology, publicly abandoned flood geology -- and upheld empirical science -- in his presidential address to the Geological Society of London in 1831.`Having been myself a believer, and, to the best of my power, a propagator of what I now regard as a philosophic heresy, and having more than once been quoted for opinions I do not now maintain, I think it right, as one of my last acts before I quit this Chair, thus publicly to read my recantation...`There is, I think, one great negative conclusion now incontestably established -- that the vast masses of diluvial gravel, scattered almost over the surface of the earth, do not belong to one violent and transitory period...
`We ought, indeed, to have paused before we first adopted the diluvian theory, and referred all our old superficial gravel to the action of the Mosaic flood... In classing together distant unknown formations under one name; in giving them a simultaneous origin, and in determining their date, not by the organic remains we had discovered, but by those we expected hypothetically hereafter to discover, in them; we have given one more example of the passion with which the mind fastens upon general conclusions, and of the readiness with which it leaves the consideration of unconnected truths.'
If a committed Christian 'father of geology' like Adam Sedgwick could manage to abandon 170 years ago his initial, and self-admittedly biased, expectations about what he would find in "the record of the rocks" explicitly because of his subsequent examination of that record, then it is remarkable that today so many supposed Christians cannot see what this honest scientist did. Indeed, it is only the bias due to thoroughly ignorant religious leaders that prevents so many Christians from understanding the true "record of the rocks". We find a good example of this, Bobby, in your own views:
: This so-called Lyllian view is the flip side of Darwinism and pervades all science to the extent that all geologic phenomenon are interpreted according to certain unproven theories about the past.
As the above quotations show, your ideas are completely out to lunch. You are unread in geology except for the nonsense you've read in Watchtower publications, and perhaps some of those of young-earth creationists. But the fact that you don't understand that the very first geologists were Christians and were specifically trying to uphold their religious views show that you have much to learn.
: Of course, Bible believers, so-called, have a mindset too, I am not saying that we don’t. But, we start from the premise that the Bible is right and work from there to interpret what the rocks are telling us. Generally, scientists work from the opposite bias. It’s important to establish that factor from the beginning because we are talking about how each interprets the facts at hand. There is a definite human factor.
There is far less of a human factor than you and other "flood-geologists" (which do not include the Society's present writers) claim. Indeed, your claim is made precisely because you cannot argue from the facts, but have to ignore huge numbers of facts and focus only on anomalies. Indeed, YEC literature tends to be about 90% focused on anomalies and ignores everything that can't be fit into their pre-determined worldview.
The fact is that you, Bobby, have failed to keep up even with the Society in jettisoning the old YEC "flood geology" view. Today they accept that there were ice ages that produced the superficial geology of many northern areas. Until the early 1990s YECs didn't accept this, and neither did the Society until about 1980. Now they all seem to accept a fuzzy notion that some sort of ice ages existed, but they're not clear about the details.
What so many supposed Bible believers fail to do is to separate their interpretation of what the Bible says from what it actually says. Thus, YECs interpret the creative days of Genesis literally. Why? "Because the Bible says so," they say. What is their evidence beyond that mere claim? They marshal all sorts of supposed anomalies and claim that these are not explained by science and that thus, by default, YECism must be right. Jehovah's Witnesses have long done the same thing, except that instead of 24-hour-day creative days they've used 7,000-year days. This was essentially abandoned in the 1980s, but the writers are still not prepared to publicly accept scientific dating because they know perfectly well that to do so would be to admit that scientists were right all along, and that much of their ad hoc flood and creation ideas simply don't stand up to critical analysis.
These days, many committed Christians hold that both Genesis and geology are correct, but in view of solidly established science they have to modify their interpretation of Genesis. This is no different from the Christian world's having had to modify its teaching that the sun orbited the earth when Copernicus and Galileo proved otherwise, and it became accepted due to unarguable scientific observations.
So really, the Society's teachings and your beliefs, Bobby, have not nearly as much to do with the Bible as they do with your interpretations of the Bible.
:: It is similar with Noah's Flood. A cataclysmic, worldwide flood, covering mountains up to some thirty thousand feet high, would necessarily leave tremendous gouges and scourings over the entire surface of the earth. What would these gigantic scourings look like?
: Indeed, there are numerous scourings and gouges. The Grand Canyon is the most notable and famous “gouge.” It stands as a magnificent monument to the deluge. The fact that this canyon is some five miles wide, and more in places, and a mile deep, stands as a testament to the fact that there was a tremendous amount of water that moved rapidly through a sedimentary rock. After all, what river on earth is five miles wide? That’s how wide that tiny little Colorado River would have had to have been however long ago you assume that the river began cutting its way through the underlying rock. To have that volume of water, the interior of the continent would have had to have been an ocean, which of course it was during the deluge.
Your words bespeak only of massive ignorance of geology in general, and the Canyon in particular. The Grand Canyon is actually a premier example of what relatively slow erosion does to rock over long periods of time. Fast-flowing, extremely deep water produces characteristic traces in the landscape, such as are found in Washington's Channeled Scablands. Slow erosion produces quite a different set of traces. The traces in the Grand Canyon are entirely of the slow-erosion type. Of course, from time to time good-sized floods occur in the Grand Canyon, and it is these that actually produce 99% of the deepening. Much slower erosion due to weathering produces the widening of the canyon. All of these things are observed to be at work today. But these big floods are a very normal part of "slow erosion", i.e., erosion not due to a single, gigantic release of water that produced all of the erosion in one fell swoop.
Actually the Grand Canyon is not five miles wide, but up to twelve miles wide in some spots. The deepest part of the Canyon, though, ranges from perhaps 100 feet wide to perhaps half a mile. Most of the canyon's width shows the features of gradual erosion of the type that widens valleys.
Now, "flood geologists" like present-day YECs and like the Society's writers used to be claim that all of the sedimentary rock in the Grand Canyon was laid down during Noah's Flood, and that afterwards, the draining of the Flood cut easily through the soft sediments and formed the Grand Canyon. But this explanation completely ignores basic rock physics. The Canyon contains thick layers of limestone, sandstone and other hard rocks. The surface of the Colorado Plateau through which the Canyon is cut consists of this hard rock overlain by a thin skin of dirt. There is no way that such a huge pile of soft sediment could turn to rock when it has been that close to the surface during the past few thousand years. There is no scientific evidence that sediments turn to rock that fast, and so even YECs don't try to present it. All they do is say that "somehow it happened". Watchtower writers simply have ignored the problem altogether, but again around 1980, they gave up on it.
The sedimentary layers themselves prove that they were not laid down in a single flood, but underwent long periods of normal erosion, and then the land sank and was covered by seas, or climate changed and the surface was buried under wind-blown sand or other materials. For example, a number of the boundaries between two sedimentary layers contain eroded streambeds complete with stream-smoothed cobbles eroded out of the bedrock. It is impossible for this to occur if the mile-thick pile of sediments consolidated after the Flood, and after the Grand Canyon were cut.
Only a reading of a good book on the actual geology of the Grand Canyon can give one a decent picture of the actual geology. Reading JW or YEC literature is useless because the material is so biased, and JW writers in particular have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. Another good source of reading material is Christian writers who try to reconcile Genesis and geology, and try to avoid the errors of the YECs. Good examples of these are: God's Time-Records in Ancient Sediments and Neglect of Geologic Data: Sedimentary Strata Compared With Young-Earth Creationist Writings (Daniel E. Wonderly, available from Interdisciplinary Biblical Research Institute, POB 423, Hatfield PA, 19440-0423; http://www.ibri.org/2000ibricat.htm ). One who criticizes standard geology without being aware of the material in these sources is simply ignorant.
:: Geologists have a pretty good idea from the impressive landscapes of eastern Washington and Oregon, the Columbia Gorge, and the Willamette Valley of Oregon. Here one finds lava bedrock stripped bare of everything, and massive areas where the bedrock itself was stripped away to depths up to 400 meters. This was caused by a series of huge, but local floods some 12-15,000 years ago, called the Missoula or Bretz floods. The source of the water was an ice-damned lake called Glacial Lake Missoula, which formed behind a dam of ice caused by the Cordilleran Ice Sheet plugging the mouth of the Clark Fork River of Idaho and Montana. When the lake reached a depth of some 2,000 feet, and held about the same amount of water as Lake Ontario, the ice dam broke and the water spilled out at a rate 10 times greater than the combined flow of all of today's rivers.
: That’s interesting.
I hope you took a look at the URL's I provided.
: I have heard that ice jam theory too. It may well have occurred after the big flood as the ice sheets receded.
No way. There is simply too big a pile of rock and other deposits of various sorts in the area for so many events to have happened in a short time. Deep down, you have granite bedrock of the sort that has been uplifted in the Cascades just north of the Grand Coulee. Exposures of this bedrock can be seen all around Grand Coulee Dam. On top of that is sedimentary rock laid down between roughly 60 and 30 million years ago. On top of that, in the lower-lying areas, are the massive flood-basalt layers that occurred around 15 million years ago. On top of that, in the highest basalt areas, are soils weathered out of the basalt. On top of that are wind-blown soils called "loess" that accumulated during the dusty conditions of the long cold period of the last ice age. The Missoula floods swept away the loess in all but the highest places, leaving large "islands" that today are the fertile wheat-growing regions east and west of the Grand Coulee. The basalt bedrock was cut down in between these loess island to depths up to 1200 feet or so.
The sedimentary rock that underlies the basalt flows was there for a long, long time before the basalt covered them. That is shown by the fact that the mountains of eastern Washington and Oregon are eroded out of these earlier sedimentary rocks, so that large low-lying areas were able to be flooded. Indeed, the basalt floods covered the roots of these mountains so that they're like islands sticking up out of an ocean of basalt. The mountains around and through which Hells Canyon was cut are of this sort. Because Missoula flood gravel deposits are found in the lower reaches of Hell's Canyon, it's obvious that the Canyon existed before the Missoula Floods. And it had to exist long enough for its 7,000 foot depth to be carved in solid sedimentary rock.
Hundreds more examples like these could be given to prove that your vague notions of geology are wrong, Bobby. And as I've long suggested, you should spend a lot of time in good library to find out the facts.
: But what is also interesting is that there are the numerous LOCAL flood theories.
Of course. Plenty of LOCAL floods have been found. Geologists know that they were local because they found the boundaries of the flooded areas.
: I am sure you are familiar with the latest local flood theory about how the Straits of Gibraltar was once a solid landmass and that it supposedly gave way and flooded what became known as the Mediterranean Sea.
Right. A very interesting account of the discovery of the evidence that proved this idea can be found in the book by Kenneth J. Hsu, The Mediterranean Was a Desert (Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1983. A Voyage of the Glomar Challenger). Hsu was one of the principle scientists on board the 1970 voyage. The scientists were amazed to find that something like 200 meters of deep-sea oozes on the floor of the Mediterranean, some 1 to 3 kilometers deep, were overlaying thick layers of terrestrial and other sediments. To make a long story short, as Africa and Spain slowly bump up against each other (Africa is slowly moving north, and with respect to the rest of Europe Spain has been slowly moving south) the Strait of Gibraltar sometimes closes. Between about 5 and 3 million years ago, for unknown reasons, the Strait closed off completely from time to time, and the entire Mediterranean basin dried up. When the Atlantic broke through again, for whatever reason, it quickly filled the basin, and the cycle repeated.
Evidence for the drying was straightforward: Salt and mineral deposits that only form in hot, desert conditions where seawater is rapidly evaporating in the hot sun, various terrestrial animal and plant remains, remains of a marine environment interbedded among the terrestrial/semi-terrestrial. These were found in a repeating sequence: marine, salt deposits, terrestrial; repeat. Also there were found deep bedrock canyons at the mouths of some of today's rivers like the Nile and Rhone, which went all the way down to bottom of the Mediterranean but are today filled with thick river sediments. The bedrock bottom of the Nile at Aswan, some 1200 kilometers upstream from the coast, is cut about 200 meters below sea level into hard granite.
So the evidence of repeated flooding and many other details show that this cycle of drying and flooding was not related to any Noah's Flood.
: Also, I believe there is a similar theory that has the Black Sea busting through the Bosporrus Straits and flooding that region.
That's right. A couple of geologists named Ryan and Pittman wrote a book several years ago about it. Robert Ballard, who discovered the wreck of the Titanic, has recently been exploring in the Black Sea. The evidence is that the Black Sea was a fresh water lake about 500 feet below present sea level until about 7000 years ago, when the Mediterranean rose sufficiently to overtop the Bosporus and cut it down deeply, flooding the Sea with salt water. This is shown by an abrupt transition from fresh to marine shell fossils below the 500-foot level, and much other data. But again, it was local because the same methods of dating when the flooding occurred also allow archaeologists to date the cultures surrounding the Black Sea at the time. These show a disruption, but not a cessation.
: And I think it demonstrates the predisposition to dismiss a global flood by all these local flood conjectures.
Not at all. Just as with Adam Sedgwick and his fellow Christian geologists, it demonstrates a loyalty to facts rather than to religious biases.
: It seems reasonable that since there are evidences of many gigantic “local” floods, that only the aforementioned prejudice prevents some from coming to the conclusion described in the Bible of a global flood.
Again not at all. For you to be able to connect these local floods into one gigantic Noah's Flood, you would have to present a pile of evidence, not just a pile of generalized words. And of course you'd have to take into account all of the data so far discovered, and show how all of it is not only compatible with a Noah's Flood, but that it a better explanation of the data.
All of which shows that, for you to make a reasonable explanation that doesn't amount to a modern equivalent of saying "the earth is flat because the Bible says so", you'll have to do some library research.
:: Now, if a relatively tiny amount of water like the volume of Lake Ontario could do that much damage to the earth's surface, just imagine how much more damage thousands of times that volume would have to do to the entire surface of the earth. Yet we do not find such damage anywhere, except in local regions where floods from specific local sources have been identified.
: What you are overlooking is this: In a global deluge of the magnitude described in Scripture, we are going to find such extraordinary geologic phenomenon that it can’t be compared to local flood models.
Correction: we should find it, but because we don't, the Flood Hypothesis is proved wrong.
: Consider what you said about there should be evidence of gouging and scouring. If the whole earth where flooded would we reasonably expect the entire earth to be gouged and scoured. No, for the simple reason that in the places where there are scourings there must of necessity be places of disposition. The earth and soil went somewhere, right?
One would think so. However, one would also expect that obviously scoured areas like in eastern Washington would be common, would be found no matter where you looked in the world. You don't find that, and you, Bobby, have given no explanations that remotely explain this lack.
: It was washed from certain parts and deposited as sediment in other places.
Please point out these 'many' areas of washing, and especially of deposition. Give references.
: And that of course is exactly what we find.
Where?
: According to the Scriptures the waters overwhelmed the earth for a whole year. During that time, and no doubt for many years afterward, the hydrodynamic forces moved trillions of tons of earth from one place and laid them down elsewhere.
Where?
: Even some places that may have been scoured down to bedrock during the initial phase of the flood became covered again with sediment and silt as the waters receded. In other words, the damage is so massive that it is just not recognized as flood damage.
All of this is absolute nonsense. You simply built a pile of words without evidence.
:: That is of little import. A monstrous, earthwide flood must necessarily leave monstrous, earthwide evidence. The fact that such evidence is nonexistent proves that the proposed event never happened.
: On the contrary, the evidence is there of a monster flood. It is just not recognized as such for various reasons.
Where is the evidence? What is it? How can it be recognized as such? What criteria do have for recognizing it yourself?
:: Some Bible believers support the notion of a local flood, but this also has huge problems, unless you understand that the whole thing is a myth probably based on real and large floods so far back that the actual facts are lost.
: When enough local floods are put together, it establishes a pattern of something bigger.
You're right, there is pattern. All of them are products of natural forces, not perfectly understood, acting normally during the ice ages.
: You brought up the idea of the flood being based upon a myth. But many myths and legends have a foundation in fact. One of the most common legends that has persisted to this day is that of a massive flood that wiped out humanity. There are over 200 flood legends that have survived among greatly diverse peoples. A true detective sees some underlying commonality among the many evidences of huge local floods as well as the indelible impression that an ancient flood has unquestionably left on the collective minds of primitive peoples.
But it is also true that when you examine these many legends, there are far more differences than similarities. Very few have in common the basic themes of the Bible story. The Greeks had two completely different flood stories. Which is the "real" one? The Egyptians had no flood story. Why not?
A good book on this stuff is Dorothy Vitaliano's Legends of the Earth (The Citdel Press, 1973). The author shows how easy it is for old myths to travel. And these days it appears that travel in the ancient world was far more common than has been thought.
: Numerous beasts were peacefully grazing on a warm balmy day, and suddenly they were caught up in a cataclysmic event and preserved in ice down to this day.
That is a total myth, and has been debunked by the evidence I described above, such as finding no warm-climate plant remains either in the areas of discovery or in the stomachs of frozen animals, but finding only cold-climate species.
:: Wrong. This is a myth that has been constantly repeated in Watchtower literature since Russell's day. Ivan T. Sanderson wrote about this myth, as if it were fact, and expanded upon it in the January 16, 1960 Saturday Evening Post. No reputable geologist holds to it.
: "No reputable geologist holds to it" because any geologists that holds a different view is attacked, dismissed, and discredited, which is what we just admitted is done to those who don’t bend to the popular opinions of the majority of geologists.
Nonsense. All you've done is admit that you have absolutely no support outside Watchtower literature for this stuff. And Watchtower literature is based on the writing of known crackpots like Ivan Sanderson, Immanuel Velikovsky, Isaac Vail and various young-earth creationists. There is no one at Bethel who has the slightest idea what he's talking about here.
Now, Bobby, this would be a good opportunity for you to prove the entire geology community wrong and vindicate Jehovah's name. If the evidence is as clear as you claim, it should be easy to marshall it and take into account criticisms.
Of course, I don't expect you to even visit a library, any more than you've done in the past several years, despite your claim that you would.
:: There was no "heavenly ocean". Such a thing is physically impossible under present laws of physics.
: That’s not true. What is true is that no heavenly ocean could form under the present conditions. But if God originally created a water canopy then it is possible that it could have been held aloft by the presently understood laws of physics.
No way. There are two and only two physical mechanisms that could allow a massive quantity of water (or vapor or ice) to be in some sense "above" the earth: it's in orbit, or it's part of the atmosphere. That's it, they ain't no mo.
If the water were in orbit, it would have to be in the form of a thin ring -- not a canopy or shell -- much like Saturn's rings. A shell cannot stay up because almost all of it would have the wrong velocity to stay in orbit -- either it would be traveling too slowly and would fall down, or it would be traveling too fast and would fly off into space. Any shape besides a Saturn-like ring violates physical laws. You're welcome to explain how physics would allow whatever circumstance you imagine if you disagree with my statements. You should also go talk to a physics teacher (best would be a college physics professor) and run your ideas by him. He would set you straight right quick.
If enough water to flood the highest mountains, which would be an average of thousands of feet (let's say, 8,000 feet, which would be the depth of flooding if the earth's surface were completely smooth) were suspended high in the atmosphere, then the pressure of the atmosphere at the earth's surface would necessarily be equal to present-day pressure plus that due to the weight of the water in the canopy. That would be equal to that produced by 8,000 feet of liquid water, i.e., more than 240 "standard atmospheres", or more than 3,500 pounds per square inch. Do you have any idea how much pressure that is? It would also mean that the air would be some 240 times thicker than today, which would mean that humans could fly just by waving pieces of cardboard around. It would also mean that, unless God drastically changed either all animal physiology, or the composition of the atmosphere, all oxygen breathing animals would be poisoned by the great excess of oxygen pressure. There are plenty of other problems with this scenario. Thus, a "heavenly ocean" cannot have existed unless you postulate extreme changes that no one has any evidence for, and that neither the Society nor you has ever postulated, or even understands. Again, run this material by any competent physics teacher and you'll see. Or provide a plausible explanation that explicitly takes account of actual laws of physics, not some generic, fuzzy, unspecified "laws" that only you are privy to.
:: You might posit that there were different laws of physics pre-flood, or that God somehow miraculously held up this "ocean" for the entire "creative week" time prior to the Flood, but that's quite out of the realm of the evidence we are discussing. With miracles at your disposal, you can posit anything you like, but it's pointless to discuss it.
: God’s creative acts always supercede the laws of physics, but afterwards are governed by those laws. That’s what an act of creation is all about. God does something that cannot be done by ordinary means and hence cannot be duplicated except by extraordinary means. That’s why it is not possible for any sort of living thing to come into existence under the present laws of physics.
No one actually knows whether that is true or not.
: If it were possible then it would be at least demonstrable in a lab.
Not at all, at least, not at this time. The number of possibilities for chemical reactions is virtually limitless, and biochemistry is in its infancy. You can no more say that such are impossible than Lord Kelvin could properly have claimed in the 19th century that heavier-than-air flying machines were impossible.
: The fact is, that no one can explain the existence of life according to the laws of physics. Life goes against the laws of physics. So, unless you can explain how photosynthesis works, or any of the other mysterious wonders of creation, you are not in a position to say what God did or didn’t do on his 2nd day of creation when the Scriptures reveal that God caused the oceans to divide so that a water canopy came in to existence by the word of God, the same as everything else.
Actually you're comparing apples and oranges here. We know that life exists, and we know a lot about what conditions life exists under. We also know the basic laws of physics, and whether or not anyone can say how an existing phenomenon came about, it is certainly possible to say whether many different postulated but non-existent phenomena are possible. Thus, it is impossible for a vapor canopy containing an ocean's worth of water to exist, unless it massively changed the atmosphere, or it was in the form of a Saturn-like ring. You can talk about creation till you're blue in the face; it won't change these possibilities.
:: From at least as far back as 1904 the Society taught that the flood theories of one Isaac Newton Vail were correct.
: From at least as far back as the middle of the 1800’s science has taught that the theories of one Charles Darwin were correct. Many of his ideas have since been dismissed although the evolution theory remains the central doctrine of biology and geologic sciences.
Some of his ideas have certainly been dismissed. So what? Science changes, because that's in its very nature. The basics of Darwin's ideas are still there. Vail's theories have been completely debunked, and have been discarded even by the Society that once taught that they were from God. Scientists have never taught that Darwin's or any other theories came from God.
:: By roughly 1980, the Society had abandoned most of this "flood geology" nonsense but retained some of the more silly notions, such as that huge numbers of pre-flood animals were caught and frozen by Noah's Flood.
: It is not a “silly notion” that such a thing occurred.
Of course it is. You have no evidence that such a thing occurred, and you have not even attempted to provide any.
: There are estimated to be at least 5 million carcasses of frozen mammoths in the Siberian regions.
Who made this estimate? (I know who did, but it was a crackpot.) What are your references?
: The fact that it covers such a vast area of the earth and is so sparsely inhabited and inhospitable and yet has yielded many carcasses of frozen beasts is like finding a needle in a haystack, indicating that the unearthed animals are merely the tip of the iceberg. It is thought that there have been at least 50,000 ivory tusks exhumed from the frozen tundra, so much so that the ivory trade a hundred years ago was dominated by mammoth tusk traders and not elephant tusks.
Are you reading Dillow? Or is it Whitcomb & Morris?
: Not to mention the fact that there are literally trillions of fossils of all sorts of plants animals and fishes, as can be observed presently, fossils are only formed under the circumstances of floods and lava flows. To have such enormous numbers of fossils all over the earth leads thinking people to the conclusion the flood is much more than a silly notion as you would have us believe.
The problem is that most of the fossils demonstrably formed long before any possible Noah's Flood. Except for the ones that occur in demonstrably recent deposits near the surface, they are almost always turned to stone by the same process that turns buried sediments to stone. Thus, we have petrified trees, etc. Furthermore, the lower you go in strata, the more ancient the animals become, as demonstrated by both radioactive dating methods and the general condition of the surrounding area in which the fossils were buried.
It's true that most fossils are formed by burial in water-laid sediments -- but not necessarily in floods -- and that some are buried in lava flows. But there are other mechanisms of formation. For example, collapsed limestone caves are pretty good animal traps. When an animal falls in, it can't get out, so it dies and is usually gradually covered with blown dust. In dry caves fossils can be preserved for tens of thousands of years. Thus in the American southwest we can find skeletons of many extinct animals in caves. Also found are coprolites -- dried or petrified feces -- from many animals.
The notion that fossils are not forming today is yet another myth of the young-earth creationists. They say, "Have you ever seen a fossil form?" The question is ludicrous on its face.
:: How old do you think the Hawaiian Islands are? Less than 5,000 years? If so, the notion that they were created during the supposed 4400 years since the Flood creates impossible problems for such believers. The amount of volcanic activity necessary to create just the Big Island alone from 2370 B.C.E. to the earliest habitation, about 1000 C.E., would have put the entire earth into a massive "volcanic winter" for the entire time period.
: When the Scriptures mention the springs of the watery deep burst open, it likely included enormous eruptions of magma. Certain geologic formations today give evidence of super-volcanic activity. For example, the Columbia Plateau covers some 200,000 sq. miles of the Northwest and is thousands of feet thick. There is no way that a mere volcano could have spewed that amount of lava out, some of which by the way is laid over sedimentary rock, indicating that such an erpution occurred after or during a flood. So, you are laboring under the uniformitarian mindset, thinking that the rates of volcanic growth are at a constant steady rate, when the evidence proves otherwise. It is possible then that the igneous rock that form the Hawaiian Islands erupted in an enormous fountain during the deluge and that afterwards slowed to a relative trickle to this day.
Your statements are so wrong that it's hard to know where to begin to show it, but I'll try. The sources of the Columbia Plateau Flood basalts have been found. They're a series of fissures in eastern Oregon and Washingon. Many of the floods have been traced extensively, some all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Look here http://volcano.und.edu/vwdocs/volc_images/north_america/crb.html for a map and lots of information.
If the lava floods occurred underneath a global Noah's Flood, they would have formed extensive pillow lavas of the type commonly seen at the coast of Hawaii when lava from Kilauea reaches the ocean and spills out into the cold water. Since these pillow lavas are diagnostic of underwater eruptions, and they are not observed in Columbia Plateau basalts, the basalts must have erupted on land.
The lava flows, at least 300 of them, occurred over a period of more than a million years from various fissures. The time between flows was long enough for soils to form in many areas and for forests to grow to maturity and to become inhabited by animals. This shown by the fact that soil horizons and fossils of trees and sometimes animals are found at the boundaries between individual lava flows.
For example, the lower Grand Coulee extends from Dry Falls to Soap Lake, and about halfway between, along the series of recreational lakes called Sun Lakes, is Blue Lake. These are surrounded by cliffs in the gorge about 600 feet high on the east and perhaps 900 feet high on the west. On the east side of Blue Lake is a little side canyon. About 300 feet up a talus slope, which can be reached from the Blue Lake campground with about an hour's strenuous hike, is a little cave called the Blue Lake Rhino. Much of the hike is along a talus slope that takes you past a number of boundaries between lava flows. At each boundary you can find little caves in the shape of big tree stumps. In 1993 when I took this little hike, I stood in one of these "stumps" and it was about ten feet across and at least that high. Our goal was the little "rhino cave" high up on the cliff wall. The cave is just a little hole in the cliff wall, and is actually the body cast of an extinct species of rhino that had two horns in a vee shape at the tip of its nose. When we got there my friend boosted me up into the cave and I felt around and could feel the shape of the snout and the toes in the rock. A little hole in one side of the cave led to another little cave, which could be seen from outside and was clearly the cast of several fallen tree trunks. In the late 1930s, just after some local boys discovered the cave, a paleontologist from the University of Washington came out and made a plaster cast of the inside of the cave. Today the cast is on display in a museum in that university, and it shows the shape of the bloated carcass of this ancient rhinoceros. The point here is that this 'fossil' proves that trees and animals lived on the surface of hardened lava flows, which proves that there were at least many thousands of years between individual flows, which proves that the flows could not have occurred either during or after Noah's Flood.
As for the Hawaiian Islands, remember that I mentioned Islands, plural, so we're not just talking about the Big Island but about the entire chain. You can't talk about the history of the islands by focusing only on the Big Island. The Big Island is obviously relatively new, since it is not eroded too badly. But the other islands to the west are badly eroded, and are therefore much older. Obviously they've suffered erosion for far longer than the Big Island has. Therefore, their formation must be much older than that of the Big Island. And various methods of dating prove qualitatively and quantitatively that the islands get older the farther west you look. Furthermore, the chain of islands extends from the big island of Hawaii 1000 km west-northwest to Gardiner Pinnacle, through shoals, shallow banks, guyots (drowned ancient volcanic islands that were eroded down to sea level before they sank), and seamounts (drowned volcanic islands that were never eroded), past the island of Midway. It then bends into a north-northwest trending underwater chain called the Emperor Seamounts, which extends to the Kuril Trench off the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula. This chain was produced by the action of a "hotspot" over almost 200 million years. So the Big Island is only the latest production of this hotspot.
Now consider the Big Island itself. According to the Genesis account, after about a year the flood water had pretty much drained away, so sea level had to be pretty close to normal by then. Furthermore, the earth was habitable enough for Noah to go out begin to establish living arrangements, including growing crops such as grapes. Now, if the Big Island had started to grow during the Flood due to a massive outpouring of lava, it could not possibly have grown higher than the floodwaters were deep -- otherwise "all the high mountains" would not have been covered. Therefore, at the beginning of the flood, it could not have been much higher than sea level. Since the mountain is about twice as high from floor to top as the top extends above sea level, the added bulk during or after the Flood would have had to be about 7/8 that of today's island. What is the volume of today's Island? Assuming a slightly truncated cone shape, and given that it's about 30,000 feet high, floor to tip, and about 300 miles across, that works out to about 150,000 cubic miles of lava, or 700,000 cubic kilometers. Erupting lava gives off huge quantities of steam, sulphur dioxide and other noxious gases, so if that amount of lava erupted in a year or just a few years, then it would certainly poison the atmosphere and cause a massive "volcanic winter" -- of which the Genesis account gives the opposite indication. Now, Mt. St. Helens' eruption in 1980 produced about 1 cubic km of ash, and you know what it did. Mount Pinatubo's 1991 eruption ejected about 5 cubic km of ash and it produced plenty of dust in the atmosphere for the next year or so. The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa produced something like 25 cubic km of ash and lava, and produced noticeable cooling of the weather the next year, and spectacular sunsets for three years. The 1815 eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia was the biggest eruption in recorded history and produced some 150 cubic km of ash and lava. It produced the infamous "year without a summer" of 1816, where in the U.S. northeast there was not a summer month without snow, and there was widespread famine due to crop failure in much of the northern hemisphere. What kind of weather conditions would a continuous eruption thousands of times greater than that of Tambora produce? Could Noah and family just wander out and begin life anew under such severe conditions? Not bloody likely. The simple fact is that there is no evidence whatsoever for your ideas about Hawaii, and you've completely missed the point about the rest of the island chain.
There is another major geological problem for your scenario. By various means geologists have found that every once in awhile a huge chunk of the unstable lava of one of the Hawaiian Islands breaks off and falls into the ocean. These chunks can be several cubic miles in volume. The rock falls produce massive tsunamis that travel across the Pacific and do massive damage to the coastlines. The evidence for and dating of these damaging tsunamis is consistent with that for the giant Hawaiian rock falls, and these dates go back tens of thousands of years. Since these massive events are not recorded in any ancient histories from places that would have been affected, they must have been prehistoric, consistent with the geological dating.
Related to all of the above, we might consider the beautiful mountains of the Cascades, and especially the volcanos. All along the North American coast, from Mt. Shasta in California to the big volcanos of the Aleutian Islands, are found massive stratovolcanos sitting atop thick layers of lava flows. In Washington and Oregon several of these volcanos are sitting on top of Columbia Plateau flood basalts, which means that the volcanos post-date the flood basalts. Mt. Hood in Oregon is a good example. If your scenario is correct, Bobby, then Mt. Hood and Mt. Rainier and all the other Cascade volcanos would have had to form after Noah's Flood. But the evidence proves that that is just not possible. For example, about five thousand years ago Mt. Rainier lost its top in an explosion that sent a huge mudflow all the way to Puget Sound. The mudflow was 50 feet thick at the site where the town of Puyallup is built today. Are you prepared to argue that Mt. Rainier and other big volcanos all formed during the past 4000 years? And that all of the mountains of the Cascades formed during or just after Noah's Flood? And that the giant Puyallup mud flow and plenty of others happened much less than the dates assigned by geologists? If so, where is your evidence?
:: The fact that we find no such weather phenomenona recorded in any pre-1000 histories proves that the Hawaiian Islands did not form within the last few thousand years.
: It proves no such thing. You assume that the volcanoes put out at a steay rate, which of course is mere assumption.
The effects of massive volcanic eruptions are a fact of life and are well known. The fact is that such massive weather changes are not found in recorded history, not in the Bible and not anywhere else. Your postulate of a huge eruption during the Flood is pure speculation and without any empirical evidence whatsoever.
: Furthermore, if the eruption occurred during the flood it would have been underwater anyway for a good bit of the time.
Not so, as I have shown above. You simply have no feeling for physical scale or for how reality works.
:: So you then have the problems of, Where did all that water come from and where did it go? It certainly doesn't exist on the earth today, so where is it? Obviously, yet more miracles are required, which is again out of the realm of evidentiary discussion.
: And yet the evidence shows that the whole earth WAS under water,
So far you've presented no evidence whatsoever. Speculation yes, evidence no.
: which is why sea shells are found on mountain tops.
Sea shells are not found on mountain tops (with a few fully understood exceptions). Fossils of sea shells are found in rock that forms mountains, and sometimes these are exposed on mountain tops. You're merely repeating nonsense you've read in Watchtower literature.
: But yes the Bible does describe God’s miraculous intervention during the flood, in that he caused great depressions in the earth in order to deepen the sea basin and also cause up-thrusts of land so that the water would run off.
The Bible nowhere clearly says that.
: Whether this was actually caused by the weight of the water upon the earth’s crust or whether Jehovah actually caused it to occur, we don’t know. But the 104th Psalm describes that very phenomenon whereby the valleys descended and the mountain ascended.
Maybe, maybe not; it is of no import. You cannot use the Bible to prove the Bible. Do remember that we're talking about empirical evidence for the Flood, not Biblical evidence.
: in any event, it is possible that these creatures in that part of the world were initially overtaken by subterranean waters.
There never were any "subterranean waters". That is yet another product of the imagination of modern day biblical apologists. For one thing, no one actually knows what the Bible means by that term. For another, geology proves that no theories advanced by anyone advocating the existence of such "waters" have any substance, because they violate the laws of physics. To prove this, you go right ahead and tell all about your ideas of what these "waters" would have been. Then I'll go right ahead and explain what's wrong with them, using the laws of physics and materials science.
:: Not at all. Any kind of flooding massive enough to flood the interior of Siberia or Alaska would be extremely violent. Many frozen animals have been found that show no evidence whatsoever of violent burial. On the contrary, the evidence proves that they were buried quietly, in the place in which they died. They were certainly not "swept away" by a massive flood.
: In some places the frozen muck is several thousand feet deep
It had several million years in which to accumulate.
: and when thawed reeks of rotting flesh.
That is a completely subjective opinion. Rotting vegetation often smells much like rotting flesh, especially when it rots without much oxygen. No one has done any studies of the smell, so for you to invoke it (you're merely following the Society's lead) without proof that it is what you claim, it is of no value. Vegetation grows and dies on the entire surface of the tundra every year, so of course there will be large accumulations of plant matter that can take a long time to fully decompose.
:: Actually this evidence is only consistent with the various demonstrated burial mechanisms at work today: mud flows, burial in barely-thawed pockets of mud, and so on. For such mud to freeze "quickly" in the manner promoted by the Society, based on Ivan Sanderson's fantasies, requires extremely low temperatures that are not producible by present-day physical mechanisms. That blows away the Society's claims.
: The fact that you admit that mudflows even existed in the now solidly frozen Siberian tundra is evidence of an enormous flood at a time when the weather was much more moderate than now.
Not at all. You make the same mistake that Watchtower writers do in many areas: you confuse, deliberately or out of sheer ignorance, the gigantic with the microscopic. The mud flows that buried some animals are observed today. Geologists go out and do field work and study how they work, how they barely thaw and then slowly creep down a hill or gentle incline. These mud flows occur regularly, every year, all throughout the Arctic. That has nothing to do with a gigantic mud/water flow in a Noah's Flood.
What you also forget is that if you, who can't even manage to go to a library and read real books on geology and such, claim that all sorts of events happened just once, in a single giant cataclysm, and competent geologists who have actually done field work and have studied under competent geologists, claim something different, then the burden of proof is on you to prove your ideas correct and those of geologists wrong. But all you've presented is a pile of words without empirical evidence.
Your next few sentences are so ridiculous that I'm amazed that even you could write them:
: The reason the extremely low temps are not producible now is because the earth is not longer shrouded in a water canopy. When that insulating blanket was suddenly removed from the earth it would have released huge quantities of heat. It apparently has taken thousands of years for the oceans to warm back up so as to thaw the glaciers that would have quickly formed during that time and afterwards. But of course the catastrophe that produced the glaciers in the first place can’t be repeated.
Your notion of "release of heat" is totally ass-backwards. When physicists talk about "release of heat" they're not talking about a lowering of temperature, but about a transfer of "heat energy" from one form to another. Thus, when water vapor condenses on a cool surface, the physical change of state from vapor to liquid releases heat energy stored in the "physical state" of the vapor to the surface on which it condenses. The surface heats up because it absorbs the heat released from the vapor. Similarly, when the Space Shuttle re-enters the atmosphere, the energy of its motion is converted to heat by heating up air molecules, which then spreads out in the air and slightly heats up the atmosphere locally. Virtually all of the energy of motion of the shuttle is converted to heat which spreads out through the air and heats it. Now apply this to the fall of a huge quantity of water vapor suspended by whatever means you like above the earth. Any energy of motion of the vapor will be converted to heat, which will heat up the atmosphere. Any potential energy, namely, the gravitational energy that obtains by the mere fact that the vapor was higher than it will be after it falls, is also converted to heat which heats up the atmosphere. For any reasonable amount of water you pick for being in a "vapor canopy", its fall will heat the atmosphere to a lesser or greater extent. For example, if you postulate that a gigantic amount of liquid water was suspended by whatever means a few tens or hundreds of miles above the surface of the earth, then when it falls it will necessarily heat the atmosphere from well above boiling to about white heat, depending on your initial assumptions. In any case, the atmosphere becomes so hot that life is snuffed out -- unless you invoke a miracle, which you've specifically discounted.
So when an insulating blanket of water or water vapor falls to the earth, the release of heat of its fall simply heats of the atmosphere, completely opposite to what you think.
But I know what you really had in mind. You thought that the insulating blanket magically disappeared, and then that the loss of this blanket led to a "release of heat" that magically dropped the temperature of the earth's surface drastically. But things don't work that way either. Let's just suppose that the earth was once surrounded by some kind of insulating layer that produced "hothouse conditions". It doesn't matter what the insulating mechanism was, but only that some kind of insulating mechanism be present long enough for climate to stabilize. Now miraculously remove the insulating mechanism. What happens? Does the temperature drop drastically to some incredibly low value and then bounce back up? No way! The temperature would simply gradually drop to some value lower than before, and then various new climate mechanisms would begin to operate. The temperature would not drop much below its ultimate final average value because the earth's temperature control mechanisms are an example of a highly damped system, one that dissipates much of the energy that might be shoved into it all of a sudden. Again check this with a physics professor.
:: The only way to produce copious numbers of carcasses quick frozen in "muck" is for the animals to be caught in mud and then for a miraculous mechanism to freeze the entire Arctic solid in a matter of hours.
: The evidence indicates that they were quick frozen because some still had undigested food frozen in their four-inch thick gut.
No they didn't. The reports of actual scientists who actually analyzed the stomach contents showed that either some digestion had taken place, or that the food had rotted along with the stomach itself. If you disagree, then provide your references. I've already quoted from the 1903 Smithsonian report, so that's one reference I've given. I can provide more.
:: Any physically plausible mechanism for holding up massive quantities of water or ice necessarily results in a massive release of heat if for some reason the water/ice decides to plummet to the earth. That's pure physics. If you don't like it, you're back to meaningless miracles.
: That would explain the quick freeze phenomenon.
No, it explains exactly the opposite of a quick freeze. The heat released goes to heating up the atmosphere to deadly proportions.
: Depending on where the cores are drilled, this can yield ages for Arctic ice in Greenland up to about 200,000 years. In the interior of Antarctica, ice ages at the bottom are up to about 250,000 years. Up to depths of roughly 2-3000 feet, the annual layers are easily distinguishable..
: And that branch of science is also based on the assumption that the snow accumulation was constant.
No it isn't. It's based on the assumption that the physical and chemical characteristics that are demonstrated by current observation to indicate an annual layer also indicate annual layers for times before observation began, i.e., times before the International Geophysical Year in 1958. That's a pretty solid assumption. You cannot provide any evidence whatsoever to lessen its validity.
: More uniformitarian thinking.
More ignorance of science.
: Whereas, in the aftermath of a global deluge we would expect to see reverberations continue on for centuries. Likely the Polar Regions experienced near perpetual blizzard conditions until the earth established some sort of equilibrium, which it appears is still an ongoing process.
How could a region that had been plunged into a massive deep freeze experience blizzard conditions? If the air were so cold that giant mammoths could freeze solid in a few hours, then water could not evaporate out of the oceans to form the clouds that would precipitate as snow. You're again proposing an impossible ad hoc scenario that 'solves' only one problem and is completely inconsistent with other parts of your theories and with facts.
: I would like to look at that ice drilling business a little closer though.
I would start by looking up a 1993 article in Nature called "Don't Touch That Dial". It gives a nice overall picture and a good introduction to other reference material.
:: Also, if the ice cap existed before the Flood, then it certainly would have been floated on the surface of the waters that are said to have completely covered the earth. It is inconceivable that a cataclysmic, surging global flood would not have completely broken up even such a mass of floating ice, especially considering that the Flood is supposed to have lasted the better part of a year.
: I suppose that’s true.
Right, with the obvious implication that because it's impossible for the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets to form in today's climate in under tens of thousands of years, no matter what biased assumptions you use, the existence of these sheets prove that no Flood occurred -- otherwise the ice sheets would not be here.
:: So no matter which way you turn, the physical evidence disproves the notion of a global Flood.
: That’s not true. You have dismissed the evidence to the contrary.
I have dismissed it with solid proofs of why the evidence is invalid. When all of the evidence set forth to prove some claim like the Flood is shown to be invalid, that's a pretty good proof that the claim itself is invalid. And when proponents of the claim are unable to provide any solid evidence at all, and are unable to defeat the arguments of their opponents, it's a safe bet that their claim is invalid. And when the defenders cannot even manage to give a single source reference to prove their claim, but the critics can cite hundreds of references to prove theirs, where does the weight of evidence lean?
: Evidence to the fact that the earth was covered with water;
There is none, and you have not shown different. You have merely claimed it. Sea shells are not found on mountain tops, remember.
: that there was a warm climate in the Polar Regions;
There is no evidence for that, but much against it. You have not presented any source references to prove what miniscule evidence you've set forth.
: the existance of fossils in such enormous numbers.
Over a half-billion years of existence of macroscopic life, what else would you expect?
: Tremendous canyons
Already dealt with.
: and huge coal deposits all over the earth.
Ah, the old coal deposits trick! I have news for you: coal deposits are completely supportive of standard geology and are death to Noah's Flood theories. In some coal mines, one can find coalified tree stumps in the ceiling. The cool thing is that around these stumps there sometimes are found footprints of dinosaurs. If coal were laid down by catastrophic mechanisms such as proposed by YECs, then the dinosaurs could not possibly leave footprints around trees, because they would have already been drowned in the Flood. You're not actually suggesting that dinosaurs survived until Noah's Flood, are you?
:: You already conceded that frozen animals are always found in muck, not pure ice. It is also a fact that the muck is always found as massive deposits of mud/sand/gravel unaccompanied by massive deposits of pure ice. That is completely inexplicable in the Society's traditional scenario.
: No. That is the very evidence of a flood accompanied by freezing temperatures.
No it isn't. You've completely ignored all of the physical mechanisms presented in the post you responded to. It is you[/i] who claimed that carcasses are found in pure ice. Now you're backpedaling.
::: the weather patterns moderated, which incidentally explains the rise in the ocean levels that swamped the land bridges that connected the continents, which bridges apparently existed after the flood.
:: Really. Just what mechanism caused this, and what evidence do you propose to support your scenario?
: The flood waters would have been cold.
No, as I've shown, they would have been boiling hot and then some. Even YECS manage to get this one right.
: The ocean’s temperature may have taken centuries to warm back up. So, the glaciers that formed during the period immediately after the flood
Remember that glaciers don't form when the oceans are cold, because enough water can't evaporate. They form when the oceans are warm and the land is cold enough for average snow accumulation to exceed average melting. Then other climate mechanisms kick in and flip overall climate to glacial conditions.
: would have then began to thaw raising the ocean levels gradually and submerging the land bridges that once connected Australia as well as the Bering Strait, etc.
What you're describing is essentially what happened from about 12,000 to about 8,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age. But you've got one thing wrong: Australia and parts of Indonesia have not been connected with the mainland of Asia for several tens of millions of years (the actual dividing line is known as Wallace's Line). That's pure geology, with a smattering of paleobiology. It explains why Australia has such a preponderance of marsupials and a dearth of regular mammals, whereas the opposite is true of the rest of the world.
: At any rate, perhaps the ice was mountain-high in some places during the flood period, and that the reason many of these carcasses are turning up now is because over millennia the ice has now slowly retreated far enough to expose the remains.
Come on. The ice has been gone for ten thousand years. That's proved by any number of things.
:: The evidence from the report is clear: the mammoth was frozen solid when found, and therefore had rotted before it was found. There is absolutely no evidence of "quick freezing". The fact that it had rotted before being found is proved by the simple fact that solidly frozen ground cannot absorb the stench of rot that is not occurring because the associated about-to-rot meat is not yet rotting.
: Well, it could be that the carcass was subject to thaw after it was frozen, since it was partially exposed, perhaps an unusually warm summer or two had taken its toll in the beast in years past. Or, perhaps, the creature didn’t freeze instantly during the flood but some days later after it was entombed in the muck. It by no means disproves the flood if the beast didn’t instantly freeze to death.
That may be true about disproving the Flood, but it certainly proves that this bit of evidence that "Jehovah's organization" has been presenting for 50-some-odd years by "divine guidance" as "spiritual food in due season for the household of God" is just bullshit. And because this particular bit of bogus evidence has been presented in Society publications for a long time as one of the mainstays of "proof for the Flood", it illustrates that the Society's writers really have no idea what they're talking about with respect to science. They are incompetent to write about science with respect to the Bible.
AlanF
