Biblical Flood? Fish, squid, and shrimp fossils in the mountains of Lebanon and Peru

[MikeG]

What does unproven evolution theory and opinions have to do with my post about volcanoes in Lebanon?

.......and you expect to be taken seriously?

 

[joobz]

What does unproven evolution theory and opinions have to do with my post about volcanoes in Lebanon?

But since you put it up I'll respond to the evolution opinions with this:

http://creation.com/refuting-evolution-index

http://creation.com/refuting-evolution-study-guide-lesson-6

the same geological and archaeological approaches used to date and categorize the migration of human and protohuman species is the same approaches used to date the fossils and volcanic activity that you are referring to.

 

[catsmate]

Does Bart Ehrman have an opinion on the flood narrative?

He mentions it in God's Porblem (a book DOC has probably never read of course):

It gets so bad that God decides to destroy the world and start over.
And so we have the account of Noah’s ark and the flood: “The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that the inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually” (6:5). And so he decides to judge the lot of them, and to “blot out from the earth the human beings I have created” (6:6), along with all the animals, “for I am sorry that I have made them.”
It’s not clear what the animals have done to deserve death, but human beings at least are being punished for their wickedness.

Strawman because I responded to a non-global flood question.

You still don't now what 'strawman' actually means do you?

What does unproven evolution theory and opinions have to do with my post about volcanoes in Lebanon?

Still parroting the same debunked lies eh DOC? Pathetic.

 

[aggle-rithm]

What does unproven evolution theory and opinions have to do with my post about volcanoes in Lebanon?

What does "unproven" have to do with...well, anything?

Proof isn't the goal of science (as I'm sure you know by now). Finding the best possible explanation is.

 

[pakeha]

Well, it'll be of no help regarding YEC scammers and their blind followers, but since there's always a chance that it will help cure or ease the symptoms of someone's religion-induced ignorance...

Follow the linkie thingie below to the geological time scale.
http://www.geosociety.org/science/timescale/timescl.pdf
Before we move on, please note its not in scale. Precambrian is the largest division (~4Gy) but is relegated to a single collumn, same space used by the pesky Cenozoic, a mere 65My (0.065Gy) time span.

Now, note the number of "-ians" each larger unit ("Eon") is divided and how many "-ians" subdivide the Periods and Epochs.

It all begun back in the XVII century, when people realized that not only (sedimentary) rock beds could be followed along large horizontal distances, but also that as you move upwards or downwards across a cliff, the fossil contents of rocks change and in some cases, quite fast and dramatically. Some fossils had widespread vertical span while others had very short ones, say, like restricted to a single thin bed. Then they noticed parts of a given fossil assemblage say, from a limestone in England could be present at a sandstone in Portugal, across a large horizontal distance and that at these two assemblages, some of those fossils with a small vertical span were included. This meant the limestone from England and the sandstone from Portugal were deposited at the same time, when that particular species of critters lived. That species had a large habitat area but lived for a short (in human terms) time. Good for correlation. Tiny critters such as foramnifera, dinoflagelates, ostracods and diatoms are excellent for such purpose, allowing very narrow definitions of time intervals.

So, most of those "whateverthefwordians" divisions and subdivisions actually represent fossil assemblages of different sizes distributed through time. No wonder some of those dividions will correspond to mass extinction events. Now, Mr. Rockhound found a given fossil assemblage at a given rock layer at a given site. Among them, a number are from unknown species, but since the assemblage includes other known critters, wich we know are restricted to the Cenomanian time division, then Mr. Rockhound can conclude the unknown fossils and the rocks hosting them are from that particular time.

Cool, aint it? But wait, this is simply a relative dating, we still don't know how many years ago those critters lived. So how can Mr. Rockhound know when those sediments were deposited?

Mr. Rockhound can do this because before him, other people working at several other parts of the world located volcanic rocks interbedded within sediments containing fossils wich are restricted to the geologic time division called Cenomanian. They not only found them - they also assayed minerals which compose those volcanic rocks, looking for unstable isotopes and the products of their decay. Based on the relative concentrations of parent and daughter isotopes and the decay constant, they managed to calculate the absolute ages of crystallization of those voclanic rocks. This allowed Mr. Rockhound to conclude the unknown fossils date back from the Cenomanian, a time slice ranging from 100 to 93.9My ago. This will allow geologists and paleontologists to establish absolute dates for a sedimentary rock based on their fossil contents.

Suck it up, creationist scammers.

Thanks, CN.
Reality beats mythology every time.

the same geological and archaeological approaches used to date and categorize the migration of human and protohuman species is the same approaches used to date the fossils and volcanic activity that you are referring to.

DOC, do you know what fossils are?
Why do you think dating human fossils different than dating octopus fossils?

 

[Resume]

What does unproven evolution theory and opinions have to do with my post about volcanoes in Lebanon?

What does an unevidenced world-consuming flood have to do with reality?

 

[Slowvehicle]

"Current thinking" -- that can mean anything. If I'm currently thinking that Moses wrote Genesis around 1400 BC. I can truthfully say "Current thinking places Genesis around 1400 BC."

I suppose you could say that, if you do not mind being demonstrated to be bearing false witness, or simply lying...

To be honest, you would say, in your scenario, "My current thinking..."

Precision matters, DOC, which is why pretending that prehistoric fossils in Peru are evidence for a historically recent fludde in Mesopotamia is not only unlettered, but dishonest.

 

[Dinwar]

What does unproven evolution theory and opinions have to do with my post about volcanoes in Lebanon?

I recently got my hands on a book titled "Man, Time, and Fossils" by Ruth Moore. It outlines the history of evolutionary theory. Suffice to say, it has more evidence than you imagine. For example, de Vrise saw it in action in primroses, both in the wild and in controlled conditions. There were also guinea pig experiments that demonstrated the power of evolution. Then there's the fossil record itself. Basically, we have so much evidence for evolution that to say it's unproven is simply irrational--we have as much evidence for evolution as we do for gravity.

 

[Craig B]

Basically, we have so much evidence for evolution that to say it's unproven is simply irrational--we have as much evidence for evolution as we do for gravity.

That is, no evidence at all. For all you know, there is no such thing as "gravity", and it's just God shoving things downwards. He can do that to everything at once, because he's omnipotent and omnipresent.

 

[Hellbound]

That is, no evidence at all. For all you know, there is no such thing as "gravity", and it's just God shoving things downwards. He can do that to everything at once, you know, because he's omnipotent and omnipresent.

"Intelligent falling".

Just because gravity has worked like, forever, you can't prove it'll still work tomorrow!

Take that!



ETA: I almost typo'ed that as "Intelligent Failing", which is only half correct...

 

[Dinwar]

That is, no evidence at all. For all you know, there is no such thing as "gravity", and it's just God shoving things downwards.

"Mom!!! God's touching me and won't stop!!!"

 

[Shalamar]

That is, no evidence at all. For all you know, there is no such thing as "gravity", and it's just God shoving things downwards. He can do that to everything at once, because he's omnipotent and omnipresent.

It's 'intelligent holding things down'. God uses his hands to keep things from flying off.

Except for birds, because they are evil little buggers who keep squeezing between his fingers. And airplanes, because he likes to hold them in the air while he runs around making WHOOSH noises.

 

[Correa Neto]

"Intelligent falling".

Just because gravity has worked like, forever, you can't prove it'll still work tomorrow!

Take that!



ETA: I almost typo'ed that as "Intelligent Failing", which is only half correct...

OMFG!!!
Can't prove it worked in the past too! Neither the other aspects of Newtonian mechanics!
Just like radioactive decay constants! They might have been different in the past, so goddidit 6Ky ago!
Yes, that's how god stopped the Sun in the sky!

Amen to that Brother.
Send money.

 

[Akhenaten]

Are you arguing for

• a local flood,
  
  
• a worldwide flood,
  
  
• a flood that only affected South America and Asia Minor, or
  
  
• something even more bizarre?

My money is on "d."

To be fair, there is plenty of evidence for a 'worldwide' flood.

No, there is not. Inverted commas notwithstanding.


Please don't try to redefine for those here assembled the meaning of 'worldwide'.

I absolutely guarantee it won't end well.

But we're not talking about a flood that covered all trace of land all over the world, as the Biblical version states. . .

Yes we are.

. . . we are talking about worldwide sea levels rising at the end of the last ice age causing coastal flooding all over the world.

We fracking what????

Still, it's easy to imagine such events as being exaggerated and embelished over a few thousand years of the story being told and retold (what we call the 'Chinese Whispers' effect) until it becomes more mythology than fact.

Yeah. Whatevs.


Care to address the topic?

 

[Dinwar]

. . . we are talking about worldwide sea levels rising at the end of the last ice age causing coastal flooding all over the world.

"A massive flood is coming! RUN AWAY!!! Or walk. Walking works too. In fact, I'm gonna do some fishing for a bit, you guys cool with that?"

At the end of the last glacial period sea levels rose fairly slowly. OIS 11 had a sea level rise of 10 cm/year, and is widely considered a good analog for today's climate conditions because it's more extreme than the other interglacials. On a geologic timescale yeah, it's a pretty good rise--but in human terms it simply cannot be called a flood.

 

[Akhenaten]

"A massive flood is coming! RUN AWAY!!! Or walk. Walking works too. In fact, I'm gonna do some fishing for a bit, you guys cool with that?"

At the end of the last glacial period sea levels rose fairly slowly. OIS 11 had a sea level rise of 10 cm/year, and is widely considered a good analog for today's climate conditions because it's more extreme than the other interglacials. On a geologic timescale yeah, it's a pretty good rise--but in human terms it simply cannot be called a flood.

Yes. This.

Despite your misspelling of analogue.

 

[Tricky]

To be fair, there is plenty of evidence for a 'worldwide' flood. But we're not talking about a flood that covered all trace of land all over the world, as the Biblical version states, we are talking about worldwide sea levels rising at the end of the last ice age causing coastal flooding all over the world.

Pooh! That little thing? Why back in my day (the Cretaceous) we had ocean all the way up into Missouri. Worldwide too! We see deposits in the Austin Chalk that are exactly the same as those in the famous White Cliffs of Dover. Then that damn comet hit.

 

[Akhenaten]

Do you expect the writers of the Bible not to use the norms of language used in their own time?

 

[Christian Klippel]

... evolution ... gravity ...

Pff, those are just theories....

Greetings,

Chris

 

[Hokulele]

THE GEOLOGY OF LEBANON
A SUMMARY

C. D. Walley

"We know very little about what lies off the coast of Lebanon and the area has not been mapped in detail..."

I find it somewhat amusing that you cut out the sentence immediately after the one you quoted here.

We know very little about what lies off the coast of Lebanon and the area has not been mapped in detail. Beyond this shelf break, which is cut by deep canyons, lies what must be ancient ocean crust.

Ancient ocean crust? Well then, that would be a definite "No" to massive underwater volcanoes spewing fossils willy-nilly. Got it.