Re: [asa] yec clain

You're right; I made the mistake of beating dead horses again.

Mind you, I'm not averse to a few miracles here and there, especially when they can be seen to be connected in some way with God's "plan of salvation." The problem with trying to account for the world's sedimentary deposits in terms of a single massive flood, however, is that the mechanism is so astoundingly preposterous that it would require very large numbers of divine miracles, none of which would have an obvious connection to that plan of salvation.

In my spare time I started estimating the number of miracles required to get a single massive flood to account for the geologic column. I was getting into large multiples of Avogadro's number when I realized that several kinds of my miracles should be lumped together as single miracles. Even so, millions of miracles would still be required. For example, it's not enough to get trilobite fossils into Paleozoic formations; one must also arrange to have the earlier trilobites in the earliest rocks and the later ones in the later rocks. Same for crinoids, brachiopods, etc., etc. Then it's not enough to do this for one sedimentary basin; it's got to be done for all relevant basins of the world. Since we're not talking about natural processes here, sorting these fossils would have to be done independently for each basin, leading to designation as separate miracles.

But enough time wasted on dead horses. If millions of miracles are what it takes to keep God from telling lies in Scripture, then millions of miracles we will have.

: )

Don

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: D. F. Siemens, Jr.
  To: dfwinterstein@msn.com
  Cc: asa@calvin.edu ; hossradbourne@gmail.com
  Sent: Saturday, November 24, 2007 8:50 PM
  Subject: Re: [asa] yec clain

  Don,
  You've been reasoning, like the disciples before the feeding of the 5000 and 4000. All you need is a miracle.
  Dave

  On Sat, 24 Nov 2007 16:50:02 -0800 "Don Winterstein" <dfwinterstein@msn.com> writes:
    What we do know is that nature destroys (leaks to the surface, etc.) far more of the oil it creates than it preserves. It's extremely inefficient. We also know that most of the world's oil comes from marine organisms such as phytoplankton.

    So how can the bulk of all organic material that exists at a single moment (Flood time) give us the huge volumes of preserved oil _and_ the huge volumes of preserved coal that we know exist/have existed? To replace 14% of the annual US gasoline consumption would require converting all of the corn produced annually in the US into ethanol in the most efficient way humans know. Every year.

    See how great a miracle the Flood was: it converted Flood biomass into such huge preserved volumes of coal and oil! If we were to do the numbers, that would make the multiplication implied in the loaves and fishes miracle look puny by comparison. God by destroying life off the face of the earth actually did us all a huge favor and gave nations great wealth.

    : )

    Don

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Received on Tue Nov 27 09:51:53 2007