>> A flood cannot sort them out
>>into a regular order, no matter what it does.
>Again, you are making a big assumption that you can decide what could or
>could not have hppened based on your own unpublished presuppositions about
>what did or did not happen. I do not mean this as a criticism. We all
>assume we can imagine what went on. But you are still kicking a straw man.
True, I should have said that I cannot see how the geologic column can be
explained by a single flood (or a series of events within a short period of
time). However, the model is not entirely straw, as popular accounts of
flood geology do make specific claims about how it happened. Such
mechanisms as I have seen cannot account for the sequence of fossils.
Interestingly, Scott Huse (The Collapse of Evolution) spend a few pages
claiming that the geologic column was built up based on evolutionism and
then claims that flood geology can explain the column. Apart from the fact
that the column was constructed before Darwin published The Origin of
Species [Steno makes the list of "Bible-believing creationists], if the
column is a fraud, it doesn't need explained. He uses the claim that
small, marine organisms were wiped out first and large, agile land
organisms last. This claim can only be made out of gross ignorance of the
fossil record. Major extinctions occur among microscopic bottom-dwelling
foraminifera about 10 million years after the extinction of dinosaurs and
pterosaurs, and some marine microfossils go extinct near the very top of
the stratigraphic column.
Tuomey (1848, Report on the Geology of South Carolina), in his
section on "Consistency of Modern Geology with the Mosaic account of the
Creation", wrote "It is acknowledged on all hands that the deposition of
strata of rocks six or seven miles in thickness, containing organic
remains, must have occupied, according to all the laws governimg matter, an
immensely great period of time. It was usual, at one time, to refer the
phenomenon of the distribution of organic remains in these rocks to the
Deluge; but no one, who has ever examined a fossiliferous deposit for five
minutes, can hold such an opinion." The last line is an exaggeration, but
certainly the total evidence of the geologic column has not been
satisfactorily explained as the product of a geologiclly brief flood event
over the past 150 years.
David Campbell
"Old Seashells"
Department of Geology
CB 3315 Mitchell Hall
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill NC 27599-3315
919-962-0685
FAX 919-966-4519
"He had discovered an unknown bivalve, forming a new genus"-E. A. Poe, The
Gold Bug