Re: [asa] yec clain (flood and oil)

No way can I speak for YECs, but I'm sure they would not claim that a divine miracle, apart from the encompassing miracle of the Flood, had any role in generating oil deposits. Given the Flood miracle, they seem to favor some kind of "natural" explanation for everything else. It's just that as a rule I find their "natural explanations" to be incompatible with real world observations. (However, I seldom read their literature, so I'm not familiar with many of their details. But I know beyond doubt that a chaotic event like a massive flood could not generate more than a tiny fraction of the features geologists and paleontologists have found in sedimentary rock.)

Even if there is evidence of a worldwide Flood, I'm not sure we'd recognize it for what it is. The biblical account says the waters stayed only a short (geologically negligible) time, so features like shorelines and beaches would have been indistinct or absent. Most of the time water levels would have been either rising or falling. What we know from studies of geology is that a great many areas on continents that are now dry land were once shallow seas. For geologically long periods of time.

Don

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Dehler, Bernie
  To: asa
  Sent: Thursday, November 29, 2007 1:11 PM
  Subject: RE: [asa] yec clain (flood and oil)

  Don said:
  "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. "

  Wait a minute. What exactly is the YEC claim? Is it that the oil deposits were formed by the flood (natural outcome of the flood), by miracle, or by both? If miracle had a part to play, for what purpose. just so we could have fuel? If so, God should have told someone, so they could have discovered it sooner. But maybe God wanted to see how long it would take for us to figure it out. after all, he doesn't have TV shows to watch, so we are his entertainment.

  It seems to me that if there was really a worldwide flood, there would be evidence. Apparently, there's no significant evidence for the flood (but evidence against it)... unless you figure in the actual ark that is on Mt. Ararat but forbidden for people to see.

  .Bernie

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  From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On Behalf Of Don Winterstein
  Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2007 6:49 AM
  To: D. F. Siemens, Jr.
  Cc: asa
  Subject: 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

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Received on Fri Nov 30 13:35:38 2007