Re: 2nd Law of Thermodynamics

Glenn Morton (grmorton@waymark.net)
Mon, 19 Jan 1998 21:13:41 -0600

At 09:09 AM 1/19/98 -0800, Arthur V. Chadwick wrote:
>At 07:18 PM 1/18/98 -0600, Glenn wrote:
>
>>I dispute the suggestion that the geologic column is cobbled together from
>>various continents. That is absolutely false because if the entire column
>>exists at just ONE point on the surface of the earth, it exists and is not
>>pieced together.
>
>I am not one who questions the validity of the geologic column, but I think
>you press too hard when you attempt to assert that the whole column
>(whatever that means) is present anywhere. In the first place I don't see
>that it makes any difference. Cobbling the column together certainly has
>been a pragmatically effective technique. But at what level are you
>trying to establish completeness? At the level of periods? epochs?
>stages? substages? I don't know anyone who would assert that the
>completeness of the geologic column is even a meaningful concept. Was
>there a single hiatus in any of your "complete columns" during which
>nondeposition [say nothing of (shudder) erosion] took place? If so it is
>incomplete. That whole argument makes no sense philosophically. Thus I do
>not understand why you persist in using it??? The whole point of
>stratigraphy is that there is sense in the cobbling together of the column.
> Thus this is not a weakness, but a strength.

The thing that I am fighting is the concepts among young-earth creationists
that 1. there is no place on earth that the entire geologic column exists.
and
2. The geologic column is a fiction.

Both views are widespread. What do I meand by the Geologic column? I mean
periods because that is the most usual claim by young-earth creationists.
Notice Henry's usage here which is clearly an eroneous claim:

"Now the geologic column is an idea, not an actual series of rock
layers. Nowhere do we find the complete sequence. Even the walls
of the Grand Canyon included only five of the twelve major systems
(one, five, six and seven, with small portions here and there of
the fourth system, the Devonian."~Henry M. Morris and Gary E.
Parker, What is Creation Science?, (El Cajon: Master Books, 1987),
p. 163

and Woodmorappe writes it this way:

"There apparently are regions on earth where all ten
geologic periods can be found superposd."~John Woodmorappe, "The
Essential Non-existence of the Evolutionary-Uniformitarian
Geologic Column: A Quantitative Assessment" Creation Research
Society Quarterly, (18:1) June 1981, p. 67.

Since Henry and Woody are using periods then I will use periods and all
periods exist in 26 basins around the world. When it comes to epochs, the
most complete basin is the Niigata-Akita basin of Japan which lacks proof of
the Cambrian. It has apparently a nearly continuous record from the
Ordovician up. Many basins around the world are only lacking one epoch. The
Carpathian basin lacks only the Paleocene according to the Robertson Groups
work. The Tarim only lacks the Lower Triassic. So the claim that the
Geologic Column is essentially non-existent or cobbled together from all
over the place is wrong.

I will agree of course that no where on earth received sedimentation every
single day of the 4.5 billion year history of earth. In that sense the
geologic column doesn't exist.

references

~Stratigraphic Database of Major Sedimentary Basins of the World,
(Llandudno Gwynedd, England: The Robertson Group, 1989)

glenn

Adam, Apes, and Anthropology: Finding the Soul of Fossil Man

and

Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm