Bait

Kosh,
Taking me a bit out of context are we??? I said that about the corn to show we are NOT related...not that we are. Evidence indicates we do NOT have a common ancestor with plants, no matter how long ago, or how primitive.

MrDarwin said (and I agree):
1) the phyla do not appear all at once

(2) the phyla are not "separate but equal"; it is quite clear, from both morphological and molecular evidence, that certain phyla are closely related to each other, and others are more distantly related.


That much has been defended...it's the other stuff I'm being clobbered with I'm trying to figure out.

Bests,
Ron

John Solum

I wasn't trying to set you up by starting this thread. I'm a geologist, so discussions about geology grab my attention. I jump at the chance to talk about flood geology.


Sounds good to me.


I just remembered a couple of article written by Tim Thompson that deal with Brown's claims about subduction.

<a href="http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/8851/subduction.html" target="_blank">http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/8851/subduction.html</a>

<a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/tim_thompson/brown.html" target="_blank">http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/tim_thompson/brown.html</a>

faded_Glory

Bait,

I apologise if I come across as arrogant and dismissive towards you. It is not my intention to be arrogant and dismissive towards you, but I don't actually mind being perceived as such towards Walt Brown and his nonsense theory.

I don't particularly like to debate Flood Geology, just as I wouldn't particularly like to discuss Flat Earthism, Astrology, Homeopathy and other pseudoscience. It is just that I can't stand the deliberate spreading of mis-information to a gullible audience.

And Walt Brown has to be deliberate - it is utterly inconceivable that he could have written about Chalk, managed to dig out a reference from 1925, God forbid, and not has come across the piles and piles of references from the last 40 years or so demonstrating without a shadow of doubt that Chalk is the accumulation of gazillions of microscopic organic particles secreted by algae.

When I see a con-trick like that I get all arrogant and dismissive.

Now, you ask me if there is anything in his 'theory' worth considering. This would be an easier task than showing where he goes wrong, because there are a lot more places where he goes wrong than where he has a point !

I am not really willing to trawl through his book, because my main reservation still stands: his theory is pointless because there are no facts in need to be explained. There is no evidence for a worldwide flood, so we don't have to consider the pro's and con's of a theory that tries to explain one.

Having said that, is there anything in particular in his ramblings that you would like to discuss in more depth? I'll see if I know enough about it to make it worth our while.

fG

Bait

Thanks John,
Well, I guess "setting me up" is a bit too strong...sorry. I think you know from where I'm coming from. I'm interested in hearing your side, and don't mind asking dumb questions.

I'll look at those url's...thanks.
Ron

Bait

Faded,
No problem...I've come off that way too at times. And I agree with you...someone who falsifies evidence to defend Christian faith, doesn't defend it at all...they hurt it by making us all appear as charlatans. I prefer to see where "the other side" is coming from, and try to look at it from another angle...whether right or wrong. Most of the time I may get shot down, but I get some in sometimes. I'll even at times (don't tell the wife)admit I'm wrong, and will often say I don't know. We'll go from there.

As a matter of fact, there is something perhaps the geologists here can help me with. I've seen several "theories" (including Browns)that propose that "a world flood" could have occurred by the sudden shifting of continental or teutonic plates, which could have caused not only the flood, but many of the earth's physical features. There are other things often pointed out as to "evidences" that there was a "flood"...but I need to look them up again so I can come off a little less "farm boy". But setting aside for the moment, any debate involving religion/God/Bible accounts..is the sudden shifting of plates something that COULD have happened thousands of years ago?
Ron

faded_Glory

Teutonic plates .... are you referring to German tableware?

Seriously, the way to look at this is to consider the physics of the system. The (tectonic) plates have surface areas of many thousands of square kilometers, and thicknesses of 5 -70 km. The mass of such slabs of rock is immense. To accelerate such masses takes energy, lots and lots of energy. The way I understand the claim is that the plates were essentially at rest before the flood, accelerated very quickly during the flood, and then decelerated and came to (almost) rest again at the end of the flood.

The energy required for such a scenario is mind boggling. Where would that come from? And worse, if the plates came to a sudden standstill in a matter of weeks, or months, or even years, most of that energy would be dissipated as heat - a massive amount of heat. So much that the oceans would boil away, leaving Mr. Noah & Sons stranded on a hot plate.

Current thinking explains the movement of plates by convection currents in the upper mantle. Now, 'currents' is a big word for movements of at most centimeters per year. The upper mantle is plastic (as a function of mineralogy, pressure and temperature) but not molten. Plastic deformation of high-viscous materials is a slooooow process. The upper mantle cannot possibly flow at rates of kilometers per day - not unless you fundamentally change the laws of physics as we know it. You are 5 - 6 orders of magnitude out here - roughly similar to saying you found one million dollar when in fact you only found one....

fG

ps418

That's a little too vague to discuss (What is 'sudden'? How much 'shifting'?). If what you mean is something similar to what Walt Brown or John Baumgardner mean, which is something like the rifting and fragmentation of a preflood supercontinent and displacement of the fragments to more or less their present positions within a few thousand years or less, then the answer clearly is that this did not happen, and the evidence is totally incompatible with this having happened.

To quote from my web page:


There are a variety of methods which can be used to estimate rates of plate movement for given times in the past. For instance, Vine and Matthews' correlation of oceanic magnetic anamolies with the geomagnetic timescale automatically predicted average rates of plate movement over time. For instance, if a given magnetic anamoly is identified with a 10mya reversed chron, and is presently 500km from a spreading ridge, then spreading at that ridge must have averaged about 5cm per year over the past 10my. The rates of plate motion suggested by Vine and Matthews' correlation of oceanic magnetic anamolies with the terrestrial polarity reversal timescale ranged from about 2cm per year for the North Atlantic to about 15cm per year for the central South Pacific (Van Andel, New Views on an Old Planet, p. 118).

Today, the movement of tectonic plates can be directly measured by a variety of geodetic techniques, including satellite laser ranging (SLR), Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), and Global Positioning Systems (GPS). The rates of plate motion directly measured by these methods, on the order of 15cm or less per year, are in good agreement with rates of plate motion predicted by radiometric dates, by correlation with the geomagnetic timescale, and pelagic sediment biostratigraphy.

Such an agreement between prediction and observation is in itself strong evidence that plate motions have not changed radically over time. It is certainly not to be expected on catastrophist models in which modern tectonic processes, if they are not denied altogether, are necessarily viewed as much reduced afteraffects of the flood catastrophe, for in that case we should expect profound disagreement between direct measurements of current plate motions and estimates of past plate motions based on radiometric/biostratigraphic data. Wise (1998) notes:

"Detailed plate motion directions and velocities with their passenger continents (DeMets et al., 1990) have been derived from combinations of geophysics, deep sea drilling, seafloor magnetic anomalies, and land based structural, geophysical, and sedimentological studies, the whole cemented by a time framework based on stratigraphic, paleontologic, and radiometric time scales. Recent satellite-based global positioning system measurements for 38 sites on the different plates show a 95% correlation with the plate tectonic model predictions (Larson et al., 1997). Only the Pacific and Nazca plates needed some readjustment to fit the model. Similar conclusions, using slightly different very long baseline precision measurements from satellite and space geodesy, were reached by Robaudo et al. (1993) . . . To argue that the early runaway subduction processes (Baumgardner, 1994; Austin et al., 1994) have ceased and that measured present day plate motions represent relaxation phenomena which just happen by chance to be a near perfect match with the rates derived from the supposedly invalid and rejected traditional geologic time scale requires complete abandonment of Occam's razor."

Wise, D. U. (1998). Creationist Geologic Time Scale: an attack strategy for the sciences. American Scientist, March/April, vol. 86, n. 2, p. 160-173.

Not only does this observation rule out Brown and Baumgardner's tectonic 'models,' it provides an outstanding, independent verification of the accuracy of radiometric dating methods.

Kosh

Ron, here's something for ya, a much more likely
source of of the "flood"

<a href="http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_noah.htm" target="_blank">http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_noah.htm</a>

BTW, why do you keep quoting "words" so much?
&lt;raises pinky to the corner of his mouth...&gt;

John Solum

faded_glory's comments about the physics of plate motion are very good, and the suggestion of rapid plate motion (with plates moving km/h) becomes even more difficult to support when you realize that tectonic plates are part of convection cells that likely include the entire mantle (a depth of ~3,000km) (at least in places), and at least include the upper mantle (a depth of ~600km)(as faded_glory points out). The physics problems that faded_glory mentioned become even larger in that case.

As Patrick has pointed out, the idea of km/h motion of the plates isn't valid becuase we can measure how fast plates have moved in the past as well as how fast they're moving today.

You did make a good point Ron, when you implied that plate tectonics is responsible for a lot of earth's physical features. Physical features like mountain belts are directly related to plate tectonics (mountain belts are the result of the collision of tectonic plates), and since mountain belts are associated with plate tectonics then the material that's eroded from mountain belts, and the rocks that are formed from that material, is too. That's one example of how rocks in the geologic record are related to plate tectonics. Since those deposits are related to plate tectonics the rate at which those deposits formed says something about the rate of tectonic motion. Therefore, since the geologic record isn't the product of a single flood, but is the result of deposition over very long periods of time, tectonic motion wasn't rapid (i.e., km/h).

Berzerker

When the Bible says the fountains of the "deep" were let loose to help unleash the Flood, what exactly does it mean? The "deep" in Gen 1:2 and other verses refers to the oceans, not subterranean caverns filled with water. Before God revealed the dry land called "Earth", the "deep" meant the all encompassing ocean. The "proto-Earth" was covered with water and God revealed the dry land afterwords. The vast majority of creation stories, including virtually all N American Indian stories also claim the proto-earth was covered with water.

One more point, the Tlingit of Alaska believe the "Flood" occured ~14,000 years ago. This times well with the end of the last ice advance when we know there was massive flooding with a rise of ~400 feet in sea levels. Where the Tlingit were at that time is unknown, but the vast Bering land bridge became submerged around this time along with the massive Sunda Shelf in Indonesia. Considering most peoples probably lived near the various oceans as they do now, it's easy to see why this event would have remained in the memories of so many peoples. It's also quite likely the flooding of the Black Sea region ~7,500 years ago created flood stories.