Posted on 06/20/2013 6:51:51 AM PDT by fishtank
I try to keep the following words or concepts separate; Theory, fact, truth. Truth can be arrived at without theories or facts. Facts can be arrived at without theory or truth. Facts and/or truth can yield theory. Theory can yield truth. Theory and facts may not be true. ETC.
When arguing with someone it is important to understand what basis the person is arguing from. Many lazy thinkers assume that all three are the same. They can be the same, they at times can appear to be the same but they are not always the same.
I think one of the problems is that everyone throws around the word ‘evolution’, yet if questioned, no two people have the same ‘definition’ of it. And most of them are ‘wrong’ about the original meaning, and go by the speeches of lawyers in the SCOPES MONKEY TRIAL.
Not all muck is equal. The Green River Shale is pretty interesting muck. All indications are that, at least along the lake bottom, there wasn't a lot of oxygen, which would limit both scavengers and microbes. Most anaerobic organisms require sulfur to respire, and the absence of pyrite in the shale indicates there wasn't much of that about, either.
I have collected fossilized insects from it in Colorado, and even a feather that was preserved, along with a few twigs and leaves. All of those were preserved as carbon.
BTW, the Green River is an oil shale; some of it (the Mahogany Beds) will burn in a campfire as the oil is cooked out of it. A lot of money has been spent trying to find a practical (read: profitable) way to extract that oil.
There are a lot of unoxidized organic compounds in there.
It would have to be suddenly buried under great amounts of pressure. A catastrophe.
Exactly.
ONLY the Great Flood could have possibly provided such calamity, catastrophe and crushing pressure that transcends our imagination.
The earth-shattering force of moving water that carved out of the Grand Canyon made any tsunami or hurricane seem like a tiny ripple. The Great Flood was truly a titanic event.
If you took all the surface water and sucked it all up into a ball, it would look like this.
Now... there is more water UNDER the ground than there is ABOVE.
If you represented Earth with an APPLE, the skin of the apple is thicker than the CRUST of the Earth. The same amount off water on the surface would be represented by washing the apple of under the faucet, just before wiping it off.
that everyone throws around the word ‘evolution’,...”
There is two accepted definitions that clarify;
macro-
micro-
how it is used is by context.
I remember it being "proved" that neutrninos can travel faster than light.
Wow!
The only "pseudoscience" perpetuated upon the rest of us has been the fake, fraudulent "science-industry" with their disprovable, absurd notion of "evolution" which is still a gazillion facts away from being proven even .0001%.
Crucially, the dating methods upon which the very age of the earth is presumed are notoriously inaccurate; mutations can NOT produce cross-species change and the species barrier has NEVER been broken; the fossils of extinct much older animals which are supposedly millions of years old are found in strata ABOVE much "younger" extinct animals; The best cases of "evolution" are not only lame, but useless or hoaxes. Even evolutionist scientists are finally admitting they've been duped into a Fairy Tale.
>> “What is a creation geologist?” <<
.
An honest geologist.
.. Theory, fact, truth. Truth c...”
I like your reply, but words have several meanings (even if slight)
problem: (depending on your definition) Truth cannot be false..
What is a false fact? a fact cannot be false but it’s interpretation (understanding) can be.
Noah tossed him off the ark for disobeying the “no horseplay” rule.
He warned him first, “Quit horseing around!”
“...appeal to authority works in an argument when all agree on the authority....”
outstanding reply!!!!
(especially the example)
Man is a poor authority, it can be argued, since he is fallible and limited in knowledge.
We're all cynical given our past education and indoctrination -- I understand and had to move beyond it myself. But our "education" was extremely limited as result of an incestual, self-serving scientific community who ostracize their own as their institutional dogma has essentially become a religion of sorts and un-challengable. In this sense they're like Democrats and 0dinga-worshippers.
IF you're truly interested in an honest assessment of dating methods and the entire subject of Evolution vs. Creationism -- and the dramatic effects the Great Flood had upon the planet -- please peruse:
evolution-facts.org
BINGO
Been there. They posit some mysterious force being responsible for increased decay rates of uranium during the flood. The amount of heat released by compressing an apparent 4.5 billion years of decay into one year would produce enough heat to vaporize the Earth’s crust, but they never explain what happened to all that heat, or identify this mysterious force.
As the new seas and basins sank (pre-flood seas were mostly shallow) from the monumental upheaval and shift of the planet, the continents rose and mountains uplifted and folded.
From “Red Earth, White Lies” by Vine Deloria
In even the most prejudiced murder trial there is one essential element: there has to have been a killing. Fancy legal terminology generally requires a body the corpus delictus as the TV detec- tive shows are fond of telling us. It would seem reasonable, if one was to promulgate a theory of blitzkrieg slaughter as have Martin and Diamond, to identiiy where the bodies are buried and then take the reader on a gut-wrenching tour through a graveyard of waste and butchery. We are deprived of this vicarious thrill because the evidence of the destruction of the megafiuna suggests a scenario well outside the orthodox interpretation of benign natural processes. Therefore mere mention of the reality of the situation is anathema to most scholars. So let us see what the actual situation is.
The first explorers of the northern shores of Siberia and its offshore northern islands and of the interior of Alaska, and some of its northern islands, were stunned to discover an astro- nomical number of bones of prehistoric animals piled indis- criminately in hills and buried in the ground. The graveyards of these animals were classified as “antediluvian” (prior to Noah’s flood) by the majority of scientists and laypeople alike who still believed the stories of the Old Testament. Near these grave- yards, incidentally, but located in riverbanks on the northern shore of Siberia, are found the famous Siberian mammoths whose flesh was supposedly edible when thawed.
Reading an extensive set of quotations is always tedious to readers but I hope you will bear with me in this chapter be- cause it is only in the repetition of the reports of the discoveries of these areas that the entire picture of the demise of the mam- moths and other creatures really becomes clear. These Siberian remains are not the thousands of mammoth bones which Jared Diamond thinks are searched frantically by archaeologists seek- ing signs of human butchering. It is doubtful that any archaeol- ogists or paleontologists have made extensive studies of the skeletons in these locations or we would certainly have a far different view of megafauna extinction than is presently ac- ceptable to orthodox scholars.
Russian expeditions to Siberia and the northern islands of the Arctic Ocean began in the latter half of the eighteenth cen- tury, and with the discovery of these large mounds of animal bones, most prominently the tusks of mammoths and other herbivores, franchises were given to enterprising people who could harvest the ivory for the world market. Liakoff seems to have been the first iniportant ivory trader and explorer in the late eighteenth century. After his death the Russian govern- ment gave a monopo~ to a businessman in Yakutsk who sent his agent, Sannikofi, to explore the islands and locate additional sources of ivory. Sannikoff’s discoveries of more islands and his reports on the animal remains found there are the best firsthand accounts of the Siberian animal graveyards.
Hedenstrom explored the area in 1809 and reported back on the richness of the ivory tusks. Sannikoff discovered the island of Kotelnoi, which is apparently the richest single location, in 1811. Finally, the czar decided to send an official expedition and from 1820 to 1823, Admiral Ferdinand Wrangell, then a young naval lieutenant, did a reasonably complete survey of the area. Since these expeditions and explorations were inspired by commercial interests and not scientific curiosity; the reports are entirely objective with no ideological or doctrinal bias to slant the interpretation of the finds.
Around the turn of the century interest in the Siberian is- lands seems to have increased, whether as a result of the few Christian fundamentalists who were not reconciled to evolu- tion frantically searching for tangible proof of Noah’s flood, or as part of the leisure activities of the English gendemen of the time, we can’t be sure. The definitive article on the Siberian prehistoric animal remains was written by the Reverend D. Gath Whitley and published by the Philosophical Society of Great Britain under the title “The Ivory Islands in the Arctic Ocean.” It drew on older sources, primarily reports of expedi- tions of the ivory traders, and captured the spectacular nature of the discoveries well.
Liakoff discovered, on an island that now bears his name, rather substantial cliffs composed primarily of frozen sand and hundreds of elephant tusks. Later, when the Russian govern- ment sent a surveyor, Chwoinoff, to the island he reported that, with the exception of son~e high mountains, the island seemed to be composed of ice and sand and bones and tusks of ele- phants (or mammoths) which were simply cemented together by the cold.Whitley reported:
Sannikoff explored Kotelnoi, and found that this large
island was full of the bones and teeth of elephants, rhi-
noceroses, and musk-oxen. Having explored the coasts,
Sannikoff determined, as there was nothing but bar-
renness along the shore, to cross the island. He drove in
reindeer sledges up the Czarina River, over the hills,
and down the Sannikoff River, and completed the cir-
cuit of the island.All over the hills in the interior of the
island Sannikoff found the bones and tusks of ele-
phants, rhinoceroses, buffaloes, and horses in such vast
numbers, that he concluded that these animals must
have lived in the island in enormous herds, when the
climate was milder.5
Hedenstrom explored Liakoff’s island in 1809 and discov- ered that”. .. the quantity of fossil ivory . . . was so enormous, that, although the ivory diggers had been engaged in collecting ivory from it for forty years, the supply seemed to be quite undiminished. On an expanse of sand little more than half a mile in extent, Hedenstrom saw ten tusks of mammoths stick- ing up, and as the ivory hunters had left these tusks because there were still other places where the remains of mammoths were still more abundant, the enormous quantities of elephants’ tusks and bones in the island may be imagined?’ Indeed, a number of explorers reported that after each ocean storm the beaches were littered with bones and tusks which had been ly- ing on the sea bottom and brought to shore by wave action.
The elephant or mammoth bones and tusks were the most spectacular finds primarily because they were so plentiful and consequently they attracted public attention the most. The is- lands contained an incredible mixture of bones of many extinct and some living species of mammals. Mixed with the animal bones were trees in all kinds of conditions. Whitley quoted some of the Russian explorers as reporting “it is only in the lower strata of the New Siberian wood-hills that the trunks have that position which they would assume in swimming or sinking undisturbed. On the summit of the hills they lie flung upon another in the wildest disorder, forced upright in spite of gravitation, and with their tops broken off or crushed, as if they had been thrown with great violence from the south on a bank, and there heaped up?’7
A few conclusions can be drawn from the reports of the Russian ivory traders. First, it appeared that several reasonably large islands were built primarily of animal bones, heaped in massive hills and held together by frozen sand. To indicate the scope of the debris, we should note that all of these islands are found on modern maps of the area, indicating that we are not talking about little tracts of land of limited area. Second, the sea floor north of Siberia and surrounding the islands was covered with so many additional bones that it was worthwhile for the ivory traders to check the beaches after every storm to gather up tusks and other bones.
Third, and very important for estimating the scope of the disaster, the ivory was of outstanding quality, so much so that the area provided most of the world’s ivory for over a century. Estimates of the number of tusks taken from the islands range in the neighborhood of 100,000 pairs taken between the 1770s and the 1900s. Whitley noted that Sannikoff himself had brought away 10,000 pounds of fossil ivory from New Siberia Island alone in 1809.9- In reality; however, only about a quarter of the ivory was of commercial grade, so the true figure must approach half a million pairs of tusks.
Fourth, an amazing variety of animals, many extinct, were mixed with the mammoth and rhinoceros bones, although these two animals have become symbolic of the whole menagerie. Fifth, trees, plants, and other floral materials were in- discriminately mixed with the animal remains, sometimes lead- ing the Russians to suppose that the islands represented a sunken isthmus or broad stretch of land where these animals and the companion plants lived in a warmer climate. The chaotic na- ture of stratification of the remains soon abused that notion.
Finally, it is important to note that none of the bones of any of the species had carving or butchering marks made by human beings. N. K.Vereshchagin wrote: “The accumulations of mam- moth bones and carcasses of mammoth, rhinoceros, and bison found in frozen ground in Indigirka, Kolyma, and Novosibirsk lands bear no trace of hunting or activity of primitive man. Here large herbivorous animals perished and became extinct because of climatic and geomorphic changes, especially changes in the regime of winter snow and increase in depth of snow cover.”9 The “climatic and geomorphic changes” must have been very sudden indeed and exceedingly violent, consid- ering the fact that these bones are always described as “heaps” of material deposited as if they had been thrown into a pile by an incredibly strong force.
The testimony regarding the richness of the animal remains in the Arctic north of the continental masses is not restricted to Russian sources. Stephen Taber, writing in his report “Perenni- ally Frozen Ground in Alaska: Its Origins and History,” had this to say about the Siberian islands:
Pfizenmayer [citation omittedj states that in the New Siberia island collectors have “found inexhaustible sup- plies of mammoth bones and tusks as well as bones and horns of rhinoceros and other diluvial mammals”; and Dr. Bunge, during expeditions in the summers of 1882-1884, “gathered almost two thousand five hun- dred first class mammoth tusks on the new Siberian is- lands of Lyakhov; Kotelnyi, and Fadeyev;” although many collectors had previously obtained ivory from the islands since their discovery in 1770 by Lyakhov.~~
It would seem obvious to anyone seriously pursuing the question of the demise of the mammoth and the other mega- herbivores that a good place to locate the bodies to determine the cause of their demise would be the islands north of the Siberian peninsula. Yet we hear not a word about them in sci- entific articles and books concerning the overkill hypothesis.
When we inquire if the Alaskan area has similar deposits, we learn that the situation is the same. Early gold miners in Alaska discovered that in many cases they had to strip off a strange de- posit popularly called “muck” in order to get to the gold-bearing gravels.The muck was simply a frozen conglomerate of trees and plants, sand and gravels, some volcanic ash, and thousands if not milhons of bits of broken bones representing a wide variety of late Pleistocene and modern animals and plants.
Two scholars describe the scenes of destruction and chaos which the muck represents. Frank Hibben, in an article survey- ing the evidence of early man in Alaska, said that while the for- mation of muck was not clear,”. . . there is ample evidence that at least portions of this material were deposited under cata- strophic conditions. Mammal remains are for the most part dis- membered and disarticulated, even though some fragments yet retain in this frozen state, portions of llgaments, skin, hair, and flesh. Twisted and torn trees are piled in splintered masses con- centrated in what must be regarded as ephemeral canyons or arroyo cuts.”’1
Stephen Taber’s report echoes the same conditions. He says: “Fossil bones are astonishingly abundant in frozen ground of Alaska, but articulated bones are scarce, and complete skeletons, except for rodents that died in their burrows, are almost un- known.”’2 Many laypeople will be confused by this technical language and fail to grasp what Taber is saying, allowing him to imply a benign orthodox interpretation when the situation re- quires that a clearer picture be drawn.
When a scholar says “articulation” of bones he means an arrangement of bones that a person observing them would identify as a complete skeleton and from which an experienced observer could identify the species.To say that articulated bones are scarce, then, means that the bones are scattered and mixed so badly that expert examination is needed to idemify even the bone itself, let alone the species from which it comes. Remem- ber this problem of articulation, for we shall meet it again in another context. Taber concludes with the observation that “the dispersal of the bones is as striking as their abundance and indicates general destruction of soft parts prior to burial.”13 In other words,Alaskan muck is a gigantic pile of bones represent- ing a bewildering number of species, a good number of them the megafauna I have been discussing.
We find the missing megafauna of the late Pleistocene in the Siberian islands, in the islands north ofAlaska, and in the muck in the Alaskan interior. Obviously we have here victims of an immense catastrophe which swept continents and left the de- bris in the far northern latitudes piled in jumbled masses that now form decent-sized islands. Most anthropologists and ar- chaeologists avoid discussing these deposits because the ortho- dox uniformitarian interpretation of the natural processes precludes sudden unpredictable actions.
Paul Martin, in private correspondence with me in June 1993, stated flatly that the mammoths could not have been de- stroyed by any such force or event.14 The sole basis he gave for that conclusion was radiocarbon dating of mammoth remains in the Siberian and Alaskan muck. I will have more to say about the reliability of radiocarbon dating below but if we were to accept his argument, then we would have to create a scenario where Paleo-Indians kill all these animals without leaving a trace of a spear point or hatchet blade, drag the carcasses out to sea some 150 miles north ofAlaska, and dispose of the evidence of their misdeeds. Here friendly wolves would not be much help.
Although Martin maintains that his thesis explains the disap- pearance of the megafauna, his argument really centers on the loss of three species: mammoths, mastodons, and ground sloths, with an occasional reference to horses and camels that makes it appear as if the important species have been covered. But overkill avoids asking about the possibly half-million mammoth skeletons lying frozen in the Arctic regions because that would completely negate the theory.
Ever seen the Bonneville Salt Flats? How did all that hot, turbulent water manage to not dissolve all that salt and take it back out to see when the flood waters receeded?
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