Not So Polite Dinner Conversation – Part 7 – more geology and creationist “credentials”

If you’ve haven’t been reading along in the original post, you won’t know that the name of the book “_” is verbatim from his text of part 16. One would hope the poster would correct that but it is unintentionally funny and demonstrative on how much real evidence bible literalists and young earth creationists have.  

 Our TrueChristian^tm tries to claim that the biblical literalist and young earth creationist does not depend on the claim that every geologist must believe in uniformitarianism.  That’s unfortunately nonsense that is shown to be false throughout the original post. He tries to say that those like him only mean “the evidence is merely in opposition to such a belief” (a belief that is a strawman argument since our Christian has no idea what uniformitarianism is).  That’s hilarious, trying to claim that you are only taking a stand against a belief that you don’t think that geologists hold. Soooo, why are you basing your whole claim on this? Evidence for the flood has yet to be demonstrated by our poster so it is very hard to critically evaluate anything that hasn’t been presented.  I have seen plenty of hypotheses of how the flood happened but no evidence to support these at all.  I may as well be critically evaluating claims of the Tooth Fairy and coming up with an economic model to explain her nightly flights and exchange rate.  

He does finally admit that “modern” geologists do accept that catastrophes do occur.  He wants me to find two geologists (two again? are we filling the ark?) in the 1800s that believed that volcanoes never erupted and earthquakes didn’t happen because he doesn’t think I can find his strawmen.  This is due to his ignorance of what uniformitarianism and catastrophism entail.  Always good to get the willful ignorance once again.   Especially in the 1800s, those interested in geology thought that we knew every mechanism of geology. And that included volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunami, etc. Uniformitarians assumed that everything was uniform in those mechanisms, from past to present. Catastrophists thought that there had to be huge intense events like the Flood since they were using a presuppositional argument that said the Flood *had* to happen.  They could not conceive of otherwise.   

We end up back again at this mysterious “Father of Geology” but as I stated before, if this is James Hutton, he didn’t believe in the bible flood nor in a young earth.  The TrueChristian does go on to mention a “magical uniform lake” in a swipe at abiogenesis but that’s for another time.  Curious about it though? Here and here should get you started.

Number 17 is largely incomprehensible and contains such a nice little attempt at telling a lie about me whilst keeping deniablity. So we’ll go on to 18.

Our creationist invokes the name of Dr. Donald Paton (sic) (It is Donald Patton).  This man is rather notorious in the debates between creationists and reality.  There is no evidence that Mr. Patton has any kind of degrees at all except perhaps in theology.  One can see the whole sordid mess here and here.  One might think that this would bother our TrueChristian^tm, but he’s already told me that it simply doesn’t matter if a school is unaccredited (this time in the case of Ken Hovind).  I asked him if he was going to an unaccredited school since he has claimed he’s a college student.  I have not heard back from him on that. 

What Don Patton has to say about geology is about as interesting as what my gynecologist has to say about my washing machine. The average thickness of sedimentary rocks on the continents *is* around 1.1 miles though the thickness varies a lot. Up on the craton (the “core” of a continent) of North American in Canada, it’s pretty thin, mostly right to granite. In the American Midwest and south coast, around 12 miles. That’s why they can mine things, like salt, limestone, coal, etc there so well. 

Our TrueChristian is sure it’s a shocking revelation that the geologic column isn’t intact anywhere. Yawn, yep, another bit of willful ignorance of what the geologic column is. There are places where layers from all geological eras are in one spot (the record is continuous for a certain area, but that does not mean all layers from everywhere appear there.  If we would demand all layers, then we would have to declare that there are no different types of climate on earth. It’s easy to make mistakes when one doesn’t even know the correct terminology. Straw man arguments are easily built from ignorance. 

A world wide flood still needs one distinctive layer in most if not all parts of the earth. We have not found this. He wants everyone to picture a world covered in clay. Why, I have no real idea.  I think he thinks floods only deposit clay. He claims that in floods “Usually all kinds of similar layers are formed.”  No, in floods one type of layer is formed, as we again saw in Potholer54’s videos.  It also seems that he thinks sedimentary rock is only one kind of sediment.  

He asks for graded layers and is quite sure they don’t exist.  Of course, he’s wrong. 

• http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169555X11000869 about half way down the page. 
• http://portal.ncdenr.org/web/lr/hurricanes-frances-and-ivan very near the bottom 
• http://www.indiana.edu/~geol105/images/gaia_chapter_5/sedimentary_structures.htm about dead center

  

He also asks “Then how come there are zero erosion marks between the layers of the great rock layer.”  On that last page, we have marks that could only be on a surface, like desiccation cracks (a great way to tell “up” in bedding). Rather hard to have those form during a flood.

And erosional surfaces? Here they are: 

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutton%27s_Unconformity  
• http://epod.usra.edu/blog/2003/06/geological-unconformity.html 
• http://www.geology.sfasu.edu/FC09Pics.html 
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/greenriver/7404739014/ 
• http://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~cfjps/1300/sed_rxs.html

One only needs to ask questions and look to cure one’s ignorance.  This is something that most, if not all, TrueChristians^tm cannot do.  It’s far too dangerous.   

Next, 19 is the longest part of the mess of the original post. It’ll likely be split into two halves so I don’t burn your eyes out.     

Postscript:  if you can afford it, donate to Wikipedia. I give a monthly donation since I use them so very much 🙂