How old is the earth?

[Mallon]

The GC is a great example of rapid erosion of the then fairly soft sediments laid down right after the flood. The GC was most likely formed very rapidly by a huge rush of water from a huge lake north of it's location. The fact that there are essentially no signs of erosional cuts in the sediments tells us this is true. Slow formation would show massive signs of erosion in the lateral layering but very little or no erosion is apparent. Ignoring this evidence is a prime example of the mainstream paradigms perspective.

This is patently false. Of course there are signs of erosional cuts in the walls of the canyon.

Besides, great torrents of water don't cut meanders into soft sediment like this one:

Can you please elaborate on what you mean? What features would indicate to you that the canyon was formed over a long period of time?

You also ignored the issue of mammillary coatings, which argues strongly against the canyon being formed in less than millions of years.

 

[Jim Larmore]

I'm not ignoring them, I just don't know enough about them to intelligently discuss them right now. I'll read up on them and get back with you. I suggest those interested in the rapid erosion of the grand canyone do a google on "rapid erosion of the grand canyone" and read some of the articles that pop up.


God Bless
Jim Larmore

 

[Jim Larmore]

Great torrents of water do indeed cut meanders. Consider the Amazon river or the Mississippi , both of which are meanders.

God Bless
Jim Larmore

 

[Mallon]

Great torrents of water do indeed cut meanders. Consider the Amazon river or the Mississippi , both of which are meanders.

They're also not moving anywhere near as fast as neocreationists advocate the Flood waters did, nor are they carving canyons more than a mile deep in but a few days. Bad analogy.

Looking forward to your response about the mammillary coatings. I hope you won't continue to argue that the Grand Canyon was deposited and eroded in just a few days when you know there's outstanding evidence that must be accounted for.

 

[Assyrian]

Here's the way the original language reads from the hebrew. I'll let the reader's decide:

" Behold please behemoth which I made with you grass as an ox he is eating, behold please vigor of him in waists of him and virility of him in navel/muscle of him belly of him he is inclining TAIL OF HIM LIKE A CEDAR sinews of him awesome part of him."

To say the least there is some things lost in translation wouldn't you agree?

God Bless
Jim Larmore

Sorry still can't find the bit where it says his tail is as big as a tree.

Sound to me like it is saying his tail is inclined like a cedar not that it is as big as a cedar. That is an interesting translation you use. It sounds like the Concordant Interlinear, except that says

Behold please behemoth which I made with you grass as the ox he is eating,
behold please vigor of him in waists of him and virility of him in navel/muscle of him belly of him
he is inclining TAIL OF HIM LIKE CEDAR sinews of awesome part of him.
​

It says 'the ox' rather than 'an ox' and 'sinews of awesome' rather than 'sinews of him awesome' But those are not important. What is interesting is it translates bit about his tail as 'like cedar' not 'like a cedar'. That is a frequent use of the word throughout the OT, cedar meaning the type of wood rather than a whole tree. So perhaps the verse means his tails bends like cedar wood. It certainly goes with the more raunchy interpretations I have come across.

Personally I lean toward the idea that his tail looks a bit like a tree, which hippo tails do, a tree drawn by a toddler anyway.

It certainly looks more like a tree than a diplodocus tail


And of course it has the advantage that Job could easily have come across hippos which lived not that far from where
he did, and during the same period, as opposed to an animal that was extinct 150 million years.

 

[juvenissun]

Looking forward to your response about the mammillary coatings. I hope you won't continue to argue that the Grand Canyon was deposited and eroded in just a few days when you know there's outstanding evidence that must be accounted for.

Give me an intentional walk does not mean you will win the game. Good luck.

 

[Mallon]

Give me an intentional walk does not mean you will win the game. Good luck.

I don't know what that baseball analogy is supposed to mean in this context.

 

[busterdog]

Sorry still can't find the bit where it says his tail is as big as a tree.

The rather obvious parallel in this verse is a comparison of awesome power. Jewish verse is usually parallel or "rhyming" in meaning.

 

[busterdog]

Besides, great torrents of water don't cut meanders into soft sediment like this one:

That is my biggest problem with the idea -- the meanders.

 

[beamishboy]

Another confusing dilemma in the Bible (there sure are a lot of them, or maybe I'm just being dumb).

I know of a lot of Christians who actually believe the world is 12,000 years old. I know most Christians do not believe this. Evidence of this of course? Dinosaurs. Never mentioned in the Bible for some reason. But some Christians believe that the dinosaur bones were put on earth to "test us". I find this ludicrous. I dont think God is a practical joker.

On the other hand, I know Christians who DO believe in the theory of evolution. And that the planet is roughly 4,000,000,000 years old. They have used their common sense and used science in CONJUNCION with the bible. This is feel is not wrong. Please remember that the Bible was written by people who still thought the world was flat and that an eclipse was an act of God.

Where do most Christians stand on this? Is the planet a lot younger than we beleive and everything was put here and we were created as humans that did not evolve from chimps? Or are we maybe starting to understand that a lot of Genesis was metaphorical?

Of course the earth is a few billion years old. I don't think Genesis is metaphorical only. I believe the writer of Genesis probably believed the creation story in Genesis 1 because it's the folklore of his culture. But God does not bother about that bit of error because His purpose is only to point us to Jesus. Whether Christians believe in evolution or a young earth is immaterial to him as much as it's immaterial to him whether we understand scientific concepts.

 

[Assyrian]

Sorry still can't find the bit where it says his tail is as big as a tree.

The rather obvious parallel in this verse is a comparison of awesome power. Jewish verse is usually parallel or "rhyming" in meaning.

Good point BD. The parallelism may indicate he is talking about power and strength. Not the same thing as size though.

Job 40:16 Behold, his strength in his loins,
and his power in the muscles of his belly.
17 He makes his tail stiff like (a) cedar;
the sinews of his thighs are knit together.
18 His bones are tubes of bronze,
his limbs like bars of iron.

Not as big as a tube of bronze or as long as a bar of iron. How long is a bar of iron anyway? It is their strength and power he is talking about. The parallel is talking about construction materials when God made behemoth, woven sinews, bars of iron tubes of bronze... and a tree? Nah it sound more like cedar wood.

 

[busterdog]

That is my biggest problem with the idea -- the meanders.

But, with patience, a sufficient answer usually emerges.

Evidence for Rapid Washout

Kanab Creek, Rapid Recent Washout The Catastrophic model would further predict that there would be an abundance of evidence for catastrophic washouts. This is indeed the case. The vast canyons, valleys, and hill relics of the world favor Diluvial rather than Uniformitarian formation, as do the remnants of vast inland water systems in the recent past.

Bryce Canyon, rapid washout
during deluge Geologists have been forced to admit to catastrophic formation of some of the great landscape scars that occur on every continent. The great "Dry Falls" of the Columbia River have only recently been accepted as being of catastrophic origin, as have the Goosenecks of the Colorado River. Fast erosion is known to give a V-shaped channel, whereas slow erosion in a meandering riverbed tends to have undercutting on the outer circumference of a bend, but deposition on the inner circumference. This feature is distinctly visible in the "goose necks" showing that two different mechanisms have contributed to the formation of the channel. The objection that meandering rivers are slow moving is not substantiated. There is the example of a huge canyon formed at Kanab Creek in a few hours during a recent flood. This river is also a meander.

http://amazingdiscoveries.org/evidence-of-the-flood.html

 

[busterdog]

Good point BD. The parallelism may indicate he is talking about power and strength. Not the same thing as size though.

Job 40:16 Behold, his strength in his loins,
and his power in the muscles of his belly.
17 He makes his tail stiff like (a) cedar;
the sinews of his thighs are knit together.
18 His bones are tubes of bronze,
his limbs like bars of iron.

Not as big as a tube of bronze or as long as a bar of iron. How long is a bar of iron anyway? It is their strength and power he is talking about. The parallel is talking about construction materials when God made behemoth, woven sinews, bars of iron tubes of bronze... and a tree? Nah it sound more like cedar wood.

.... and thou dost behold his wimpy tail, like a tree in shape,
but not as strong as the rest of him ....

 

[Mallon]

But, with patience, a sufficient answer usually emerges.

http://amazingdiscoveries.org/evidence-of-the-flood.html

Unfortunately, I'm not not so easily convinced by unreferenced hearsay from zoologists (especially on the subject of geology).
Credible arguments in favour or against the rapid formation of the Grand Canyon should cite the appropriate geological literature, like so:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CH/CH581.html

Regardless, for the sake of argument, I'll accept the hearsay you quoted as true. You still have not accounted for the sequential mammillary coatings found up and down the canyon walls. These cannot be ignored since they cannot form overnight in turbid waters.

 

[Assyrian]

.... and thou dost behold his wimpy tail, like a tree in shape,
but not as strong as the rest of him ....

It is not as if there isn't any room for irony in God's description of the hippo...

But behold the enthusiasm and pride with which he waggeth his little tail,
in appearance like unto a cedar tree swaying in the cleft of his thighs.

If you want to get the meaning from parallelism rather than the text, it only says the tail is as strong as cedar, not as big as a cedar tree, if you look at the text itself, that does not say as big as a a cedar tree either. It may say the tail is somehow like a cedar, which a hippo's tail is, or that it bends like cedar.

Sorry Buster the bible simply does not say behemoth's tail is as big as a Cedar. And yet this statement, that the bible does not make, is taken by YECs as proof that dinosaurs and man coexisted. Don't YECs ever get embarrassed the way they have to change the bible to to make it fit? It is as bad as 'The Bible says plants and animals reproduce after their kind'.

 

[Mallon]

It may say the tail is somehow like a cedar, which a hippo's tail is, or that it bends like cedar.

I always read the passage in question to mean the tail sways as a cedar does in the breeze. It's the movement of the tail that is compared to a cedar; not the size.

It is as bad as 'The Bible says plants and animals reproduce after their kind'.

If certain "original kinds" of plants and animals are only capable of interbreeding with each other, it's weird that God would have to warn us NOT to interbreed them (as though it were somehow possible) in Lev 19:19. I think that passage does away with neocreationism's concept of "kinds" altogether.

 

[rebelEnigma]

Don't YECs ever get embarrassed the way they have to change the bible to to make it fit? It is as bad as 'The Bible says plants and animals reproduce after their kind'.

So wait...plants don't reproduce? When did this happen?

 

[Assyrian]

So wait...plants don't reproduce? When did this happen?

Where do you get that from? If the bible doesn't say plants and animals reproduce according to their kind,
that means plants don't reproduce?

 

[Jim Larmore]

They're also not moving anywhere near as fast as neocreationists advocate the Flood waters did, nor are they carving canyons more than a mile deep in but a few days. Bad analogy.

Looking forward to your response about the mammillary coatings. I hope you won't continue to argue that the Grand Canyon was deposited and eroded in just a few days when you know there's outstanding evidence that must be accounted for.

A few days may be a stretch but the evidence points towards a pretty rapid formation from a huge body of water called "Grand Lake" just north of there. If this all happened fairly soon after the flood then the sediments that were there wouldn't have had time to solidify into rock yet and could have been easily eroded quickly.

Steven Austin and Scott Rugg wrote an article on the internet on this. Their contention is that lava dams deposited during and right after the flood trapped the water in grand lake which failed catastrophically eroding much of what we now call the grand canyon.

The truth of the matter is there is a lot of evidence there that has not been fully considered without using the mainstream paradigm to biased the interpretations.

Now to the "mamillary coatings" you mentioned. It appears these are uranium/lead isotope based and they measure this by the standard radiometric dating methods and ratios. The only thing new is these particular mamillary crystals and their uniqueness. I have already mentioned the questionability of radiometric dating in the past. There are just too many assumptions that have to be made for radiometric dating to be valid. When I first started to question these modalities in a serious way I was reading up on some dating samples taken from fresh magma just extruded from a volcano. They dated this stuff at several billions of years old. Anyway, to me the fact that there are little or no erosional features in the lateral stratas is much more indicative of very rapid deposition.

God Bless
Jim Larmore

 

[Jim Larmore]

That is my biggest problem with the idea -- the meanders.

Meanders follow a very precise pattern that physics predicts and hydrology demonstrates. Since we cannot reproduce the exact forces that occurred during the global flood we cannot from this vantage point say whether or not meanders support or refute the global flood. We can reproduce models in computers that say meanders would occurr later in the flood stage when the currents were less forceful. What needs to be remembered is a globe wide catastrophe of this magnitude would do and produce things we surely will never see again.

God Bless
Jim Larmore