Six Flood Arguments Creationists Can't Answer!!!

A good article that I found on my hard drive. I would really like to get into the overturned and reverse strata argument against young-earth creationism.




Six Flood Arguments Creationists Can't Answer
© 1982 by Robert J. Schadewald
Reprinted from Creation/Evolution IX (1982)


Fossils and Animals-

Scientific creationists interpret the fossils found in the earth's rocks as the
remains of animals which perished in the Noachian Deluge. Ironically, they often cite the sheer number of fossils in “fossil graveyards” as evidence for the Flood. In particular, creationists seem enamored of the Karroo Formation in Africa, which is estimated to contain the remains of 800 billion vertebrate animals (see Whitcomb and Morris, p. 160; Gish, p. 61). As pseudoscientists, creationists dare not test this major hypothesis that all of the fossilized animals died in the Flood.

Robert E. Sloan, a paleontologist at the University of Minnesota, has studied the Karroo Formation. He told me that the animals fossilized there range from the size of a small lizard to the size of a cow, with the average animal perhaps the size of a fox. A minute's work with a calculator shows that, if the 800 billion animals in the Karroo Formation could be resurrected, there would be 21 of them for every acre of land on earth. Suppose we assume (conservatively, I think) that the Karroo Formation contains 1% of the vertebrate fossils on earth.

Then when the Flood began there must have been at least 2100 living animals per acre, ranging from tiny shrews to immense dinosaurs. To a noncreationist mind, that seems a bit crowded. I sprang this argument on Duane Gish during a joint appearance on WHO Radio in Des Moines, Iowa, on October 21st, 1980. Gish did the only thing he could: he stonewalled by challenging my figures, in essence calling me a liar. I didn't have a calculator with me, but I duplicated the calculation with pencil and paper and hit him with it again. His reply? Creationists can't answer everything.

It's been estimated that there are 100 billion billion herring in the sea. How did I account for that?! Later, I tried this number on a calculator and discovered that it amounts to about 27,000 herring per square foot of ocean surface. I concluded (a) that all of the herring are red, and (b) that they were created ex nihilo by Duane Gish on the evening of October 21st, 1980.

Marine Fossils-

The continents are, on average, covered with sedimentary rock to a depth of about one mile. Some of the rock (chalk, for instance) is essentially 100% fossils and many limestones also contain high percentages of marine fossils. On the other hand, some rock is barren. Suppose that, on average, marine fossils comprise .1% of the volume of the rock. If all of the fossilized marine animals could be resurrected, they would cover the entire planet to a depth of at least 1.5 feet. What did they eat?

Creationists can't appeal to the tropical paradise they imagine existed below the pre- Flood canopy because the laws of thermodynamics prohibit the earth from supporting that much animal biomass. The first law says that energy can't be created, so the animals would have to get their energy from the sun. The second law limits the efficiency with which solar energy can be converted to food. The amount of solar energy available is not nearly sufficient.

Varves-

The famous Green River formation covers tens of thousands of square miles. In places, it contains about 20 million varves, each varve consisting of a thin layer of fine light sediment and an even thinner layer of finer dark sediment. According to the conventional geologic interpretation, the layers are sediments laid down in a complex of ancient freshwater lakes. The coarser light sediments were laid down during the summer, when streams poured run-off water into the lake. The fine dark sediments were laid down in the winter, when there was less run-off. (The process can be observed in modern freshwater lakes.) If this interpretation is correct, the varves of the Green River formation must have formed over a period of 20 million years.

Creationists insist that the earth is no more than 10,000 years old, and that the geologic strata were laid down by the Flood. Whitcomb and Morris (p. 427) therefore attempt to attribute the Green River varves to “a complex of shallow turbidity currents ...” Turbidity currents, flows of mud-laden water, generally occur in the ocean, resulting from underwater landslides. If the Green River shales were laid down during the Flood, there must have been 40 million turbidity currents, alternately light and dark, over about 300 days. A simple calculation (which creationists have avoided for 20 years) shows that the layers must have formed at the rate of about three layers every two seconds. A sequence of 40 million turbidity currents covering tens of thousands of square miles every two-thirds of a second seems a bit unlikely.

Henry Morris apparently can't deal with these simple numbers. Biologist Kenneth Miller of Brown University dropped this bombshell on him during a debate in Tampa, Florida, on September 19th, 1981, and Morris didn't attempt a reply. Fred Edwords used essentially the same argument against Duane Gish in a debate on February 2, 1982. In rebuttal, Gish claimed that some of the fossilized fishes project through several layers of sediment, and therefore the layers can't be semiannual. As usual, Gish's argument ignores the main issue, which is the alleged formation of millions of distinct layers of sediment in less than a year. Furthermore, Gish's argument is false, according to American Museum of Natural History paleontologist R. Lance Grande, an authority on the Green River Formation. Grande says that while bones or fins of an individual fish may cut
several layers, in general each fish is blanketed by a single layer of sediment.

Disease Germs-

For numerous communicable diseases, the only known “reservoir” is man. That is, the germs or viruses which cause these diseases can survive only in living human bodies or well-equipped laboratories. Well-known examples include measles, pneumococcal pneumonia, leprosy, typhus, typhoid fever, small pox, poliomyelitis, syphilis and gonorrhea. Was it Adam or Eve who was created with gonorrhea? How about syphilis? The scientific creationists insist on a completed creation, where the creator worked but six days and has been resting ever since.

Thus, between them, Adam and Eve had to have been created with every one of these diseases. Later, somebody must have carried them onto Noah's Ark. Note that the argument covers every disease germ or virus which can survive only in a specific host. But even if the Ark was a floating pesthouse, few of these diseases could have survived. In most cases, only two animals of each “kind” are supposed to have been on the Ark.

Suppose the male of such a pair came down with such a disease shortly after the Ark embarked. He recovered, but passed the disease to his mate. She recovered, too, but had no other animal to pass the disease to, for the male was now immune. Every disease for which this cycle lasts less than a year should therefore have become extinct!

Creationists can't pin the blame for germs on Satan. If they do, the immediate question is: How do we know Satan didn't create the rest of the universe? That has frequently been proposed, and if Satan can create one thing, he can create another. If a creationist tries to claim germs are mutations of otherwise benign organisms (degenerate forms, of course), he will actually be arguing for evolution. Such hypothetical mutations could only be considered favorable, since only the mutated forms survived.

Fossil Sequence-

At all costs, creationists avoid discussing how fossils came to be stratified as they are. Out of perhaps thousands of pages Henry Morris has written on creationism, only a dozen or so are devoted to this critical subject, and he achieves that page count only by recycling three simple apologetics in several books. The mechanisms he offers might be called victim habitat, victim mobility, and hydraulic sorting. In practise, the victim habitat and mobility apologetics are generally combined. Creationists argue that the Flood would first engulf marine animals, then slow lowland creatures like reptiles, etc., while wily and speedy man escaped to the hilltops. To a creationist, this adequately explains the order in which fossils occur in the geologic column. A scientist might test
these hypotheses by examining how well they explain the fact that flowering plants don't occur in the fossil record until early in the Cretaceous era. A scenario with magnolias (a primitive plant) heading for the hills, only to be overwhelmed along with early mammals, is unconvincing.

If explanations based on victim habitat and mobility are absurd, the hydraulic sorting apologetic is flatly contradicted by the fossil record. An object's hydrodynamic drag is directly proportional to its cross sectional area and its drag coefficient. Therefore when objects with the same density and the same drag coefficient move through a fluid, they are sorted according to size. (Mining engineers exploit this phenomena in some ore separation processes.) This means that all small trilobites should be found higher in the fossil record than large
ones.

That is not what we find, however, so the hydraulic sorting argument is immediately falsified. Indeed, one wonders how Henry Morris, a hydraulic
engineer, could ever have offered it with a straight face.

Overturned Strata-

Ever since George McCready Price, many creationists have pointed to overturned strata as evidence against conventional geology. Actually, geologists have a good explanation for overturned strata, where the normal order of fossils is precisely reversed. The evidence for folding is usually obvious, and where it's not, it can be inferred from the reversed fossil order. But creationists have no explanation for such strata. Could the Flood suddenly reverse the laws of hydrodynamics (or whatever)?

All of the phenomena which characterize overturned strata are impossible for creationists to explain. Well-preserved trilobites, for instance, are usually found belly down in the rock. If rock strata containing trilobites are overturned, we would expect to find most of the trilobites belly up. Indeed, that is what we do find in overturned strata. Other things which show a geologist or paleontologist which way is up include worm and brachiopod burrows, footprints, fossilized mud cracks, raindrop craters, graded
bedding, etc.

Actually, it's not surprising that creationists can't explain these features when they're upside down; they can't explain them when they're right side up, either.

Each of the six preceding arguments subjects a well-known creationist hypothesis to an elementary and obvious test. In each case, the hypothesis fails miserably. In each case, the failure is obvious to anyone not protected from reality by a special kind of blindness.

Studying science doesn't make one a scientist any more than studying ethics makes one honest. The studies must be applied. Forming and testing hypotheses is the foundation of science, and those who refuse to test their hypotheses cannot be called scientists, no matter what their credentials. Most people who call themselves creationists have no scientific training, and they cannot be expected to know and apply the scientific method. But the professional creationists who flog the public with their doctorates (earned, honorary, or bogus) have no excuse. Because they fail to submit their hypotheses to the most elementary
tests, they fully deserve the appellation of pseudoscientist.

References-
Gardner, Martin. 1957. Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. New York: Dover, pp. 127-133.

Gish, Duane T. 1978. Evolution: The Fossils Say No! San Diego: Creation Life Publishers.

Whitcomb, John C., and Henry M. Morris. 1961. The Genesis Flood. Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co.

Apparently the creationists have attempted a rebuttle to the Karroo formation.

Are There 800 Billion Vertebrate Fossils Buried in the Karoo Formation?
http://www.rae.org/800Billion.htm

Well, let me reach for some random geology book on my shelf and we will see if we can answer that.

"The Genesis Flood offers a large-scale mechanism in which to do this for the Karoo Basin."

Well lets see if that works, shall we?

Here nomarine formations of great thickness (upper Karroo) are overlain by volcanics and shot through with basic intrusions of extraordinary magnitude (Drakensberg Volcanics). The lower part of the series includes grey sandstone, siltstones and shales with thin beds of coal and abundent plant remains, but the middle part consists of thick rebeds with mudcracks and very interesting reptilian fauna.

Overlying the redbeds comes purer, windblown sands varying in thickness up to 800 feet. The succession of formations is interpreted to imply a growing aridity that resulted in desert conditions over a considerable area in South Africa before the close of the Triassic.

The basic igneous intruded into this series have a present area fully 220,000 square miles, and before their erosion covered at least 330,000 square miles in a great belt between latitudes 26 degrees and 33 degrees south, extending from the east coast probably to the atlantic.

With a volume estimated as between 50,000 and 100,000 cubic miles, this constitutes one of the greatest known masses of basic intrusives. The time of its intrusion is either late Triassic or more probably early Jurassic.

Historical Geology third edition by Dunbar & Waage, 1969 pg 332

So in short, the answer is NO!!!

Karoo System.

It consist of continental sediments from Late Permian to Jurassic. The Karroo sediments consists predominantly of coarse sandstones, shales and siltstones with coal. The Karroo lies unconformably upon Precambrian basement and is well known for its coal resources.

Did you hear that? "UNCONFROMABLY"!!!

How did the planet buckle and erode then buckle and erode again while deserts and mudcracks were busily forming withing a catastrophic flood that left no marine fossils whatsoever? If the global flood did this, then it must have been magic.

i think christians that try to deny fossils are foolish, however i still believe god created the earth and all the creatures including dinosaurs.

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Well, you belong within the majority of christianity.

dosent even the theory of evolution support this verse of the bible, life originated in the oceans, as well did birds. this was on gods fourth day, on the fith day , god made todays animals such as cows and horses and stuff, and on the sixth day he created man.

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If you care to interpret that, but mind you, the muslims do the same with the Koran.

I know a great many christians that accept the genesis account as compatible with evolutionary theory.

there probably wouldn't be very many marine fossils as you would think - because you are not considering the fact that the creation/flood theory proposes the earth had a small sea and hardly no ocean, since it was mostly underground. This would mean relatively a smaller amount of sea creatures to be "spread" out over the earth with the fresh flood waters. right? could it be a possible explanation? why didn't you come up with one if you rationally decided to take the creation/flood model seriously? If you don't take it seriously, I suggest you start doing so - and perhaps you'll finaly begin to answer your own questions.

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A "possible explaination"? Unless you can back this nonesense with data and evidence this will be nothing more than inane rambling. If you have the evidence for it, may I suggest you dare do something that creationists never do and "test" your claims?

Or is that asking too much?

Here is what the "true.origin" website had to say on varves.

"A common argument against the Bible involves varves—rock formations with alternating layers of fine dark, and coarse light sediment. Annual changes are assumed to deposit bands with light layers in summer and dark layers in winter. It is reported that some rock formations contain hundreds of thousands of varves, thereby ‘proving’ the earth is much older than the Bible says. But the assumption that each couplet always takes a year to form is wrong. Recent catastrophes show that violent events like the Flood described in Genesis can deposit banded rock formations very quickly. The Mount St. Helens eruption in Washington State produced eight metres (25 feet) of finely layered sediment in a single afternoon! And a rapidly pumped sand slurry was observed to deposit about a metre (3–4 feet) of fine layers on a beach over an area the size of a football field (cross-section shown on the right: normal silica sand grains are separated by darker layers of denser mineral grains like rutile).

When sedimentation was studied in the laboratory, it was discovered that fine bands form automatically as the moving water transports the different sized particles sideways into position (right). Surprisingly, the thickness of each band was found to depend on the relative particle sizes rather than on the flow conditions. A layered rock (diatomite) was separated into its particles, and when redeposited in flowing fluid, identical layers formed.

Much is often made of the Green River varves, in Wyoming, USA. But these bands cannot possibly be annual deposits because well-preserved fish and birds are found all through the sediments.

It is unthinkable that these dead animals could have rested on the bottom of the lake for decades, being slowly covered by sediment. Their presence indicates catastrophic burial. It is often claimed that the fish and birds remained in prime condition at the bottom of the lake because the water was highly alkaline and this preserved their carcasses. Yet highly alkaline water causes organic material to disintegrate, and that is why alkaline powder is used in dishwashers! Another problem for the varve explanation is that the number of bands is not consistent across the formation as it should be if they were annual deposits."

Here are some other topics that website talks about too-

"Another claim of bibliosceptics is that there are ‘too many fossils’. If all those animals could be resurrected, it is said, they would cover the entire planet to a depth of at least 0.5 metres (1.5 feet). So they could not have come from a single generation of living creatures buried by the Flood.

Not surprisingly, the substance disappears when the detail is examined. The number of fossils is calculated from an abnormal situation—the Karroo formation in South Africa. In this formation the fossils comprise a ‘fossil graveyard’—the accumulation of animal remains in a local ‘sedimentary basin’. It is certainly improper to apply this abnormally high population density to the whole earth. The calculation also uses incorrect information on today’s animal population densities and takes no account of the different conditions that likely applied before the Flood."

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This is rediculous. No one claims there "are too many fossils". We claim there are "too many fossils" in certain geologic formations that could co-exist. You cannot ressurect all animals in the Karroo formation within thier surrounding habitats and let them all exist at the same time in the same area. Fossils arn't the only things that exist 'written in stone'. Ecosystems and their biological representatives are there too. You cannot tell me they all lived at the same time and yet managed to leave behind thier remains which are trapped in their own environments. Desert dwellers and forest dwellers all stacked atop one another in different layers many feet apart without mixing and managing to intermingle as some catastrophic flood magically sorted them out, is preposertous.

Throw in unconformities and layer folding (which I might add, anual layers exist below and above general unconformities which do exist upside down and have folded ignious layer intrusions extending between and through certain sedimentary deposits) and tilite left by glaciation, and I would have to ask? How could a single event leave such fine traces behind without a single animal to be dropped or deposited in the 'wrong' formation? I have yet to hear of any coyotes or bison left in the formation at Dinosaur National Monument in Utah or any Mammoths deposited in desert regions or undersea animals left on the floor of a continental flood plain. The earth and its systems just dosn't work that way.

Their is only a few percent of all animals ever leaving their traces on the planet earth. You CANNOT expect every single organism to have died and left its remains. There are too many factors involved. For instance, the acidity of temperate and tropical forest floors would disintigrate all animals that died on the ground, throw in predators and lack of chemicals to permineralize the remains and you have to rely on luck and nature to deposit corpses in the right areas that are perfect for a fossil to form.

The coasts, rivers and flood plains, deserts and tundra and cave areas are all great for factoring in the permineralzation process. Geology is perfectly happy that disposition is occasionally rapid or extremely slow. Either way, evidence for both exist.

Here is more-

"The petrified forests of Yellowstone National Park have often been used to argue against Bible chronology. These were once interpreted as buried and petrified in place—as many as 50 successive times, with a brand new forest growing upon the debris of the previous one. Naturally, such an interpretation would require hundreds of thousands of years to deposit the whole sequence and is inconsistent with the Bible time-scale. But this interpretation is also inconsistent with the fact that the tree trunks and stumps have been broken off at their base and do not have proper root systems. Furthermore, trees from different layers have the same ‘signature’ ring pattern, demonstrating that they all grew at the same time.

Rather than 50 successive forests, the geological evidence is more consistent with the trees having been uprooted from another place, and carried into position by catastrophic volcanic mudflows—similar to what happened during the Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980, where waterlogged trees were also seen to float and sink with the root end pointing downwards."

Uprooted? I DARE them to back this claim. Besides, upright trees exist in over turned layers.

And how do they explain the forests WITH root systems?

All these "polystrate" fossils are made from is the disposition when rivers overflow thier bounderies when the water changes direction.

From there, the forests are being slowly buried so that only parts of them extend through the layering in which they still exist. Certain waterlogged trees can live in those areas for many decades while further accumulation buries them more.

Heck, a single overflowing can account for a buried forest also. Such forests exist today, and will exist tomorrow.

But they cannot all be caused in a single incident. Forests like this can stack atop one another with roots and soil intact. Thats is the fabulous thing about chemical weathering. While one forest has been mineralized under the earth, a new forest can form above it if the soil is just right. And you can tell this by the evidence of a mineral called serpentine and lime which form underneath top soil. And guess what is in the rock under the "upright and layered forests"? Serpentine...

"Chalk deposits need millions of years to accumulate. Chalk accumulation is not steady state but highly episodic. Under cataclysmic Flood conditions, explosive blooms of tiny organisms like coccolithophores could produce the chalk beds in a short space of time."

Have those at the 'true.origin' website lost their minds? Diatomatious earth is evidence for shallow seas. No one doubts that they could form rather quickly as in, say, and underwater avalanche. Its that fact that they are represented in layering and exist inside mountainious rock outcroppings and hogbacks that exist far from any shallow sea.

Let me refraise that. The places where they are found are evident for a shallow sea. Using a few correlation methods and the index fossil that is representative within the 'chalk' deposits. You can map out the entire area where the shallow sea rested.

I guess they have forgotten that fossils can form as pyrite and marble as well.

I might add that creationists must account for the anual layers and standard geological systems that exist on other planets. Oh, you guys forgot about other planets? Well they contain the same effects that cause all the same things here on earth.

When people start planting their feet on mars and start delving into other planetary systems, what will you say then? Will you still bring in your arguments? What if they find fossils on mars? The same processes that left fossils here on earth will be the same that leave the remains of carbon based life on other planets too.

Turbidity currents, flows of mud-laden water, generally occur in the ocean, resulting from underwater landslides. If the Green River shales were laid down during the Flood, there must have been 40 million turbidity currents, alternately light and dark, over about 300 days. A simple calculation (which creationists have avoided for 20 years) shows that the layers must have formed at the rate of about three layers every two seconds. A sequence of 40 million turbidity currents covering tens of thousands of square miles every two-thirds of a second seems a bit unlikely.

And still, assuming the varve rebuttle is wrong, how could nothing get intermingled in the midsts of a catastropihc flood? Amazing. Its simply amazing how nothing ever gets mixed up.

How do you purpose that these claims be tested? And how do you test your claims to the opposite? I am new to this board and just wanted to pose a question that has probably been answered before but, If the text books say that the world was created 4 billion years ago and "Big Banged " and the earth began to have some sort of rainfall and then somehow all this evolved, Where did the matter come from in the first place. How can evolution claim to have proof of these things. Isn't there quite a bit of extrapolation here?

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Ok first off, I can't type down everything you want, because thats all textbook. I take it you must either be a) home or christian schooled and b) not attending a public school, or c) no education at all? Thats not trying to be condenscending but those who attended a public school would have easy access to your questions.

The burden should not be on us 'evolutionists' to explain EVERYTHING on this forum because you can just as easily look up the information yourself. That is, if you really care what science has to say about things.