Creation: Essential for a Healthy Christian Worldview

[OldEnglishSheepdog]

Thank you OldEnglishsheepdog for actually providing evidence instead of telling me to 'look at the sky or a tree'. A lot of this information suffices as evidence to support the biblical claim of the flood and disproof for evolution. If you are trying to convince me that the Story of Noah's ark is in fact true, than all of this information is extremely relevant. However I do not accept the assertion that if we can prove the Bible to be true on one account, then it must be true on all accounts. The need for specific and relevant evidence for Creation still remains.

Fair enough.

I agree with that approach, but what the flood would account for is the earth's sedimentary layers being laid down quickly and recently, and would invalidate evolution because we couldn't account for the diversity of life we see today as a progression given the essentially single point in time in which the fossil record was captured.

That the layers are not closed systems allows the passage of isotopes (stable or otherwise) and that water flows right through sedimetary deposits allows for contamination and leeching at rates that haven't been explored in any detail as far as I've encountered.

Basically then, if the flood is the explaination for the sedimentary layers it would invalidate all of the calculations that are used to support the old earth interpretation, and the rest of the young earth dating methods (both by volume and validity) would stand as the consistent empirical suggestion.

[LLC]

Ok. This is off-topic, but take it as comedic relief. Wouldn't a wooden vessel of the size mentioned in the bible have collapsed under its own weight when floating on water?

[OldEnglishSheepdog]

Ok. This is off-topic, but take it as comedic relief. Wouldn't a wooden vessel of the size mentioned in the bible have collapsed under its own weight when floating on water?

Actually, someone was mentioning how they use the plans as listed in the Bible to design modern vessels (it may have been Luftwaffle, but I can't remember for sure) and ironwoods are very strong.

[LuftWaffle]

Ok. This is off-topic, but take it as comedic relief. Wouldn't a wooden vessel of the size mentioned in the bible have collapsed under its own weight when floating on water?

This is from a post I did on another forums regarding this:

There are many false claims that enormous wooden ships cannot be built, and unfortunately modern sceptics in general rely on the misconception that ancient man was less intelligent and less capable than us. This couldn't be further from the truth and there are quite a number of historical accounts of wooden ships nearly as big as the Ark.

Here are some excerpts from a article on CMI's website www.creation.com describing some of these unfathomably large vessels.

The Leontifera

There was a naval battle in the Aegean Sea in 280 bc. The following is Ussher

[OldEnglishSheepdog]

Actually, now that I think about it, they built the ark to scale according to the Biblical specifications in Japan, too:

[LLC]

Very interesting . Now, back to the flood. In order for your assertions to be true OldEnglishsheepdog, the flood must have been world-wide. To me, this seems improbable, especially because there is only a certain quantity of water on Earth.

Where did the Flood water come from, and where did it go?

How do you explain the relative ages of mountains? For example, why weren't the Sierra Nevadas eroded as much as the Appalachians during the Flood?

Why is there no evidence of a flood in ice core series? Ice cores from Greenland have been dated back more than 40,000 years by counting annual layers. A worldwide flood would be expected to leave a layer of sediments, noticeable changes in salinity and oxygen isotope ratios, fractures from buoyancy and thermal stresses, a hiatus in trapped air bubbles, and probably other evidence. Why doesn't such evidence show up?

How are the polar ice caps even possible? Such a mass of water as the Flood would have provided sufficient buoyancy to float the polar caps off their beds and break them up. They wouldn't regrow quickly. In fact, the Greenland ice cap would not regrow under modern (last 10 ky) climatic conditions.

Why did the Flood not leave traces on the sea floors? A year long flood should be recognizable in sea bottom cores by (1) an uncharacteristic amount of terrestrial detritus, (2) different grain size distributions in the sediment, (3) a shift in oxygen isotope ratios (rain has a different isotopic composition from seawater), (4) a massive extinction, and (n) other characters. Why do none of these show up?

How were limestone deposits formed? Much limestone is made of the skeletons of zillions of microscopic sea animals. Some deposits are thousands of meters thick. Were all those animals alive when the Flood started? If not, how do you explain the well-ordered sequence of fossils in the deposits? Roughly 1.5 x 1015 grams of calcium carbonate are deposited on the ocean floor each year. A deposition rate ten times as high for 5000 years before the Flood would still only account for less than 0.02% of limestone deposits.

How could a flood have deposited chalk? Chalk is largely made up of the bodies of plankton 700 to 1000 angstroms in diameter. Objects this small settle at a rate of .0000154 mm/sec. In a year of the Flood, they could have settled about half a meter.

How does a global flood explain angular unconformities? These are where one set of layers of sediments have been extensively modified and eroded before a second set of layers were deposited on top. They thus seem to require at least two periods of deposition (more, where there is more than one unconformity) with long periods of time in between to account for the deformation, erosion, and weathering observed.

Edited April 27, 2011 by LLC

[OldEnglishSheepdog]

Very interesting . Now, back to the flood. In order for your assertions to be true OldEnglishsheepdog, the flood must have been world-wide. To me, this seems improbable, especially because there is only a certain quantity of water on Earth.

It was worldwide, not only because that’s what the Bible says, but it’s also what the physical evidence shows.

Where did the Flood water come from, and where did it go?

Both from the atmosphere and from the fountains of the deep as described in Genesis, and a lot of it returned to those sources.

If the polar ice caps were melted much of our land would be swallowed up under water. Draw up whatever water's in the earth and drop all of the condesation from the clouds and that might be enough right there, but I think the mountains were probably a result of the global catastrophe, so the waters mightn't have needed to be as high in the first while to cover the whole earth.

How do you explain the relative ages of mountains? For example, why weren't the Sierra Nevadas eroded as much as the Appalachians during the Flood?

It would depend both on the currents/source of the water pressure, as well as the formation of the mountains, which again could have been in response to the shifting tectonic activity accompanying the global catastrophe due to the fountains of the deep bursting forth.

Why is there no evidence of a flood in ice core series? Ice cores from Greenland have been dated back more than 40,000 years by counting annual layers. A worldwide flood would be expected to leave a layer of sediments, noticeable changes in salinity and oxygen isotope ratios, fractures from buoyancy and thermal stresses, a hiatus in trapped air bubbles, and probably other evidence. Why doesn't such evidence show up?

How are the polar ice caps even possible? Such a mass of water as the Flood would have provided sufficient buoyancy to float the polar caps off their beds and break them up. They wouldn't regrow quickly. In fact, the Greenland ice cap would not regrow under modern (last 10 ky) climatic conditions.

I’m not familiar with how they date those, but the dating of layers tends to interpret according to uniformitarian principles (though less and less strictly now than in previous years, which I attribute to naturalism no longer being able to assert things that are pointing closer and closer to the truth).

What I do know is that the work that Vardiman and Oard have done around the ice age suggests that it followed directly as a result of the flood, and rapidly so, so the ice cores may have come directly afterwards but in time enough for the sediment to settle.

Why did the Flood not leave traces on the sea floors? A year long flood should be recognizable in sea bottom cores by (1) an uncharacteristic amount of terrestrial detritus, (2) different grain size distributions in the sediment, (3) a shift in oxygen isotope ratios (rain has a different isotopic composition from seawater), (4) a massive extinction, and (n) other characters. Why do none of these show up?

The oceans and seas are powerful things and a lot of mixing would have occurred. Remember, the fountains of the deep were responsible for water levels too, so the mixing and pressure was coming right from bottom up.

We don’t know what kind of sediment would have existed on the earth before the flood, nor in the ocean. Remember, we can’t be assuming the world looked the same way directly after the fall and before a catastrophic global event as it does to us now.

As for the salt, I don’t know how salty the water was back then, but salt is currently poured into the sea from the land. How today’s rate of salt pouring into the ocean stacks up with historical rates I don’t know, but Dr. Andrew Snelling (whom I mentioned to you earlier) considers this particular issue a “deal a death blow to evolutionary ideas. Holding to the well-attested biblical text gives us the true age of the world's oceans--measured in just thousands of years” (Full article here: http://www.icr.org/article/oceans-salt-clock-shows-young-world/).

How were limestone deposits formed? Much limestone is made of the skeletons of zillions of microscopic sea animals. Some deposits are thousands of meters thick. Were all those animals alive when the Flood started?

Yes.

How could a flood have deposited chalk? Chalk is largely made up of the bodies of plankton 700 to 1000 angstroms in diameter. Objects this small settle at a rate of .0000154 mm/sec. In a year of the Flood, they could have settled about half a meter.

These are exactly the kinds of case studies that I don’t know about. Some sort of filtering or channeling as a result of some condition created by the event to accelerate currently observed rates.

That may sound like a cop-out, but many, many such items on the YEC wish list have paned out just as expected, from the rapid layering observed at Mt. St. Helens, to the freezing of rapid reversals of the earth's magnetic field found in lava (as proposed by Prof. Humphreys years before it was discovered and confirmed), and it’s been my observation that Luftwaffle and I have provided more stumpers to evolutionists than they’ve returned (and we’ve spoken to experts in the a number of fields including geology, genetics and computer programming), so like I said before, none of us know it all and we all have case studies that are difficult to reconcile, but the explanation with the powerful explanatory scope and in my opinion the most empirical relevance is the Biblical one.

How does a global flood explain angular unconformities? These are where one set of layers of sediments have been extensively modified and eroded before a second set of layers were deposited on top. They thus seem to require at least two periods of deposition (more, where there is more than one unconformity) with long periods of time in between to account for the deformation, erosion, and weathering observed.

The long periods of time part is the assumption that I think Mt. St. Helens demonstrated is unnecessary. Surely if the world splits open and bursts forth enough water to cover itself over (with the rains) it’s going to cause some serious tectonic trauma, the repercussions of which I would image would take some time to settle. Natural disasters wouldn’t necessarily have ceased outright, and we’ve now observed the layering deformation, and erosion process happening very rapidly under extreme conditions.

[Guest shiloh357]

You have convinced me that evolution is false and the approximated age of the earth (4.558 billion years) is far from the truth. If everything that has been said about the means by which evidence for these theories have been collected, plotted, and interpreted, there should be no reason for me, or anyone in the scientific community, to believe in them.

Now that we got that out of the way, show me your empirically verifiable evidence for both creationism and the real age of the earth (about 6000-10000 years). Don't show me Bible verses (I know what the Bible says), show me the same type of evidence that you demanded from me for my previous assertions.

I haven't demanded any evidence from you. The Bible is my source for faith that God is the Creator of the universe. That is where I start and that is where I end. I look throughout the world and I see God's imprint upon it. I observe God in all that He has made.

I don't know how the old the earth is. That, for me, is a non-issue.

[Guest shiloh357]

Ok. This is off-topic, but take it as comedic relief. Wouldn't a wooden vessel of the size mentioned in the bible have collapsed under its own weight when floating on water?

No, it wouldn't. In fact, the US navy uses the proportions of the ark mentioned in the Bible when they build their ships. A wave pool experiment about 25 years ago demonsrated that a vessel made to the ark's dimensions would not capsize in rough seas.

The entire structure would have been laminated together to make for a very sturdy structure. Furthermore, the process by which the ark was made (gophering) was method that provided an extremely durable, sea-worthy vessel.

[LLC]

Sorry for my lack of clarification Shiloh;not from you. That was in response to some earlier discussion with OldEnglishsheepdog.