l-bow

So you guys thought that Sean was defeated? Well, he's struck back at Glenn Morton's feeble arguments. How about that?

<a href="http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=fd67d42a.0209251520.2756efba%40posting.goog le.com" target="_blank">http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=fd67d42a.0209251520.2756efba%40post ing.google.com</a>

[ September 26, 2002: Message edited by: l-bow ]</p>

l-bow

No response? I guess you're all too stunned by Sean's excellent arguments that you all are unable to make a reply.

Daggah

"Excellent arguments"?

Hahahahahaha.....hah....ha.

Seems his so-called "excellent arguments" have already been dismantled on the t.o newsgroup. Interesting that you intentionally link to a page that doesn't show the responses, eh?

Skydancer

&lt;snort&gt; Actually, we're stunned by the idea that you can consider Pitman's arguments to be excellent. A brief look at that response shows a vast ignorance of the evidence available, a vaster ignorance of materials science (he argues against hard-rock deformation on the basis of rock behavior at surface temperatures and pressures, forex), a basic misunderstanding of the concepts of gradualism vs. catastrophic events, and he's still completely vague on the idea that the time required to erode a standing mountain doesn't tell you how long it took to erode it to its present height.

He's admitted that he's ignorant in the field, he makes basic mistakes that a freshman in a Rocks for Jocks introductory course could see through, and he still persists in believing that all the professionals are missing the evidence that somehow matches his musty old bronze-age goatherder's handbook. Give it a rest already.

ps418

What sort of blithering idiot posts a link at 2:25AM, and then concludes, from a lack of response a mere 31 minutes later, that we are all unable to reply? I guess one should expect this sort of muddleheadedness from someone who believes that the universe is only a few thousand years old.

L-bow, why don't you tell me which of "Sean's excellent arguments," you find most "excellent," and we can discuss it at length. Or better yet, maybe you could explain to me how any person with even a pretense of rationality could beleive flood geology in the light of <a href="http://www.geocities.com/earthhistory/" target="_blank">the overwhelming evidence demonstrating that it is false?</a>

ps418

Pitman is of course flatly incorrect that "If you try to bend a solid rock, it simply won't bend. It will break and crumble first." The way a rock --- and other solid materials-- responds to deforming pressure is dependent on, amongst other things, the confining pressure.

Let's consider an example that even your typical YEC can understand -- ice. If you squeeze an ice cube in a vise, it will "break and crumble." This is brittle deformation. However, under high confining pressure, ice will deform like a very viscous fluid, or a plastic. For instance, I've seen photos of ice cores which have clearly-developed Z-folds, with no fracture at all. Its precisely the same with rocks. They can deform plastically under pressure.

I've also seen photos of meta-conglomerates which contain blocks of igneous rocks, the blocks having been flattened like putty under pressure, without fracturing. Obviously the igneous rocks were not soft when they were deformed.


Now that I've cleared that up, I'll point out that the very same features cited by Pitman are very good evidence against flood geology. If the sediments had been deposited rapidly and were not lithified prior to tectonic deformation, then the layers would be characterized by abundant evidence of soft-sediment deformation, such as flame structures, "ball and pillow" structures, and so on.
<a href="http://course1.winona.msus.edu/csumma/images/sedstrux/flame3.jpg" target="_blank">Click here</a> to see an example of this type of soft-sediment deformation. Note the deformation caused by the
'injection' of the darker mud into the sand above. In <a href="http://course1.winona.msus.edu/csumma/images/sedstrx2/load.jpg" target="_blank">this example, </a> you can see a more extreme example of such deformation features. The absence of such features directly contradicts Pitmans 'hypothesis':

[ September 26, 2002: Message edited by: ps418 ]</p>

Kosh

Skydancer, I trademarked that phrase. You owe me a quarter.

Skydancer

Okay! A quarter of what?

MortalWombat

Well, I know of at least one sort of blithering idiot who would do this. Or was that a rhetorical question?

ps418

From Pitman, discussing the idea that burrows are escape traces:


Duh! There are escape traces. They are vertical tubes associated with downwarped laminae. Lots of different marine invertebrates produce them when they are blanketed by a thin layer of sediment (e.g. a storm in a shallow marine environment that puts alot of sediment in suspension).

The point is that not all or even most of the burrows and other trace fossils are in fact escape traces! For instance, the example I gave above, the U-shaped burrows known as Diplocraterion, shows evidence of burrowing downward from the sediment surface, which is not at all consistent with a sedimentation escape response.

Furthermore, borings created by marine organisms are common in hardgrounds, and borings are not only not escape traces, they take along time to produce. For instance, it would take months to produce a single layer of large bivalve borings, e.g. the ichongenus Gastrochaenolites (Kleeman, 1996). It is certain that these features are borings, because the cleanly cross-cut both the sediment (e.g. ooids) and other fossils too.


Pitman's "excellent argument" in this case is apparently nothing but the fact that escape burrows exist.

Also, if I remember correctly, most motile shallow marine organisms cannot survive anything like burial by even a hundred centimeters of sediment. Given the sedimentation rates required by the flood, though, there'd a whole lot of burial and not much escaping going on!

[ September 26, 2002: Message edited by: ps418 ]</p>