Originally posted by Jerry Smith In another thread, Nick claimed:
Also, even in the 1% of the globe (0.4% if you count the oceans) where you can find all the supposed layers of the geological column, the total depth of the OBSERVED geologic column is 16% of the depth of the THEORIZED geologic column. What happened to the other 84%? Special pleading, of course.
I have repeatedly asked for his calculations. I suspect he, or John Woodmorappe, either made them up, or based their calculations on faulty ASSUMPTIONS. I am determined to keep this thread on top until Nick comes back and provides the calculations he or JW used to reach this conclusion, complete with any ASSUMPTIONS that he (or JW) used to make the calculations.
I am surprised you don't explicately mention what their assumption is. When it is explicately stated, no fair minded person could possibly agree with it.
What Woodmorappe, Nick, and the rest have assumed is that mainstream geologists expect there to exist areas on the planet that for the
entire history of the planet which strata got laid down. And that this area experienced
no erosion at any time but rather was
always accumulating sediment.
This assumption is, of course, very silly. And that is being charitable. No one with an onze of common sense is going to accept this.
The problems are many. For one thing the odds that any spot on Earth will never experience uplift; never experience erosion, and will never have times which sediments do are not laid is so small as to be dismissed.
Then there is the mechanical problems with all of this. If only 16% of the strata is present, then for for 100% of it to be present would require a depth of strata over six times as large as is being observed. That strata miles thick is commonally with it at places being nearly ten miles thick. The creationist are clearly asking for
an impossibly thick sequence of strata. And bear in mind that this impossibly thick sequence of strata
must be underwater even today or the sequence will be incomplete.
Simply put, if the Earth is 4.55 billion years old, one would
expect not to find any place on Earth with a complete sequence of strata representing all of geologic time. So to rant that it is not present somehow "shows" that the Earth is young is strange reasoning indeed.
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