Re: Coal and theYEC position

Bill Payne (bpayne@voyageronline.net)
Fri, 03 Apr 1998 23:15:53 -0600

Hi Glenn,

Looks like you're back into full swing. Hope you had a nice break and
are ready to get drilled. :-))

02 Apr 1998 20:26:01 -0600, Glenn Morton wrote:

> Nowhere does Woodmorappe show that in a realistic world, where about 90% or
> more of the plant matter decays before the formation of peat, that it is
> possible to accumulate this amount of peat.

Yeah, Glenn, but in the realistic world of coal outcrops, nowhere do we
see the features expected if coal were formed from a peat bog. The coal
seams should be full of stumps, which are rare, and the stumps should
have attached root systems, which are rare among the stumps that we do
find. You continue to hammer your pet defenses and ignore the
problematic observations which upset your bogs.

> There is also the problem that if one is to account for the coal beds in a
> global flood, one must be able to account for how the peat was transported
> in the flood and ONLY the peat was deposited to form coal. Coal is around
> 70%+ carbon and this requires that the pre-flood peats NOT be mixed with
> sand and shale. Yet Creationists require that the global flood be violent.

No, Glenn, I see you requiring more violence from the flood than YECs
do, but only so you can use the violence to corner the YECs.

> The global flood is incompatible with the purity of the coals (speaking of
> the carbon content). If coals were deposited in the flood they should have
> much more sand and shale content.

If coals were formed in peat bogs, they should have many more stumps.
Since the stumps are generally absent, and since coals commonly display
thin-bedded structure typical of sedimentary rocks, then in order to
maintain a rational interlock of the data and our inferences, we must
conclude that the organics found in coals were transported by water and
settled out on the bottom. I would say that most of the violence from
the flood occurred early in the flood, and things settled down a bit by
the time the organics from floating mats of vegetation (which had been
ripped off the continents) began to form.

I'll admit that I can't explain your fossil fish series within a YEC
framework (yet); how about you admitting that you can't explain the
features of coal seams rather than relying on indirect evidence like
"There wasn't enough preflood biomass" or "The coals are too clean to
have been deposited in a global flood?" (Rough quotes)

Bill