Originally Posted by IrishRockhound Ah, we have a taker! I will be waiting in earnest for a reply. I said before on other boards that creationism must work in specific cases for it to have any hope of being taken seriously. Hopefully napajohn will be able to come up with something.
I've heard the 'appearance of age' idea before - doesn't make all that much sense. If you're willing to admit that a god might have created the Earth and made it appear old, then you must also admit that its possible we were all created five minutes ago with our memories intact.
The Rock Hound
(P.S. Why does everyone always end up calling me Rocky?
It looks really dumb.)
Irish Rockhound
here is 1 response I received from a geologist at creationresearch from Glen Worfrom who you can contact at
glen@creationresearch.org..this is a response from a geologist on site...
I sent you the link to contact him:
heres the response to your points:
I did a field study a while ago in the west of Ireland, and I think my findings completely falsify the idea of a young Earth, i.e. the 6000 year figure that creationists are apparently so fond of. I'd like to present it here, and let you look over it - it's a bit hairy but I can explain the nastier bits if you want.
During the study, I had the fortune to examine a wonderfully complex geological area called Ballyferriter.
In this area I saw at least five different environmental changes in a few square miles, as represented by the relevent geological formations.
response:
1.the interpretation of environmental changes depends on the interpretation of environments, which in turn relies on the assumption that modern depositional environments can provide an analog for ancient ones. Although popular in the late 20th C, many uniformitarians are turning away from that assumption.
2.Rapidly changing depositional conditions would be expected in a Flood, not expected in a uniformitarian setting.
One formation caught my interest in particular - the central part of this formation consisted of about 30m of bright green mudstone, very soft and extensively layered, that contained hundreds of fossil beds, ripple marks and a type of cross-stratification that indicated a stormy environment.
It obviously represents a shallow marine shelf environment.
Response:
1.If the mudstone is millions of years old, why is it still soft?
2.Layering in fine-grained sediments can occur very rapidly from hydraulic conditions, rather than slow layer cake deposition. This was demonstrated at Mt. St. Helens. The presence of fossil beds indicates that there was a source of fossils and a current powerful enough to transport them and variable enough to deposit them. Ripple marks and cross stratification are bed forms that depend on the hydraulic regime, not on long ages of time.
3.I assume from stormy environment that he means herringbone cross bedding or hummocky cross bedding. See comment 2.
4.Accepting for the sake of argument that the deposit represents a shallow marine setting, how is that inconsistent with the Flood?
The fossil layers alternated with the ripple marks and stratification, in a pattern that repeated itself throughout the formation.
Response:
Patterned bedding represents patterned hydraulic conditions, and may also be influenced by the source of the sediment, fossils, etc. Only the assumption that ancient rocks must be the same as modern depositional environments requires significant time.
The fossils indicated a relatively still water setting, while the stratification indicated a storm setting. By conventional geology, this is nothing more than a changing environment pattern - but creationists interpret it as a result of the Flood.
Response:
In the absence of specification of the types of fossils present, it is difficult to understand why they must represent “relatively still water setting.” There is nothing inconsistent with either the Flood or uniformitarianism in changing environment patterns.
So, during the Flood year (or whatever length of time it was), the environment changed several hundred times in this tiny, tiny section of Ballyferriter.
Response:
There is nothing inconsistent with the Flood creating conditions in which the depositional environment changed frequently and rapidly. In fact, a little thought would show that both would be expected.
The lateral extent of the changes has nothing to do with whether a Flood or uniformitarian interpretation is valid. Conditions of localized environments would be predicted by both sets of conditions.
Not only that, but the still water setting persisted long enough to allow vast networks of the trace fossil Chondrites to appear, which conventional geology considers to have happened slowly.
Response:
Chondrites would take long periods of time to develop networks only if the assumption of modern conditions is made. Trace fossils may also represent networks created by animals buried rapidly and continuing to make traces until they exhausted their nutrients or were crushed by overburden pressures.
The last sentence again reveals a dependence on the assumptions of conventional geology, which are not applicable in Flood geology.
As well as this, the formations above and below this indicate a terrestrial volcanic environment, with desert conditions appearing briefly as well as rivers of various types. So, in the time of the Flood, the changes were absolutely radical in this area!
Response:
Once again, the assumption of modern environment templates overlays an interpretation on the rocks that is not physically there.
How does he know the volcanism was terrestrial? New work has indicated that submarine volcanism exhibits the same features as subariel volcanism. Desert conditions? Sounds like a sand deposit, which could also be marine. Geologists have often switched from desert to marine interpretations before for various sand bodies. Rivers? I assume that the rocks show evidence of channeling, a feature that does not need rivers to be produced. And even if there was a transition from terrestrial to marine deposition, many Flood geologists believe that tectonic motions temporarily exposed areas of the continents during the Flood.
Radical changes in depositional environment sounds more like catastrophism than uniformitarianism.
As if this wasn't enough, the area around Ballyferriter displays a completely different profile.
Response:
1. As noted before, lateral variation in deposition is a non sequitur argument.
Amazing, isn't it? Not to mention the incredibly complex faulting and deformational history of the area that shows a high level of displacement, overthrusting, and other features of an intense tectonic regime (It lies close to the Iapetus Suture; google for more info).
Response:
Structural deformation and tectonics are not the exclusive domain of uniformitarianism. In fact, Flood geology provides a higher level of geologic energy than anything envisioned by uniformitarians, so structural deformation might be expected more readily in a global Flood than in a quiescent modern setting.
The field evidence is very powerfully against the Flood. I'm not talking about research done by someone else; I studied this area from scratch, and this is what I found. It indicates millions of years, with no mention of a Flood - unless creationists suggest that god fast-forwarded every geological process during the time of the Flood.
response:
It is not the field evidence that is against the Flood. It is the a priori assumptions that the Flood never happened and that the rock record is the tale of billions of years of modern processes operating much as they do today. And so, like so many other disagreements between people, this one boils down to a difference in belief systems, not to “science.” As with any area of the rock record, the data deserve far more investigation than this cursory exchange. But until uniformitarians can begin to distinguish between data and interpretation, this type of misplaced confidence will remain with us.
posts need to be really long and complicated like frumious bandersnatches in order to not get replies. 
Linear Mode
