Posted on 02/16/2005 4:43:26 PM PST by DannyTN
Yeah, but did you read the rest of the article? There are a lot of similarities to the Genesis account. Wonder where that came from?
A couple of Geomorphologists wrote book that discuss numerous findings that don't match traditional theories of mountain formations. The article's author uses that book as a springboard to discuss his own models of flood based geology.
If the great flood theory proved more useful in finding oil or mineral deposits than the geologic time scale worked out by more than a century of geologists, I'd be happy to take it up. Somehow these creation "scientists" think that geology is like ideology - a matter of indocrination. No. It's a matter of selecting interpretations of evidence that WORK.
It starts out with a lie and goes downhill from there.
Would you care to elaborate on how forces for mountain building have assumed to have changed over the past several hundred million years?
"There have been plenty of really big glacier-burst floods, and transgressions of oceans on continental shelves and such...I agree that some of these may contribute to the flood myths of the various societies that have them."
True, but it's easy to see how the legends of primitive societies can morph the second idea into the first.
"About 80 million years ago, India was located roughly 6,400 km south of the Asian continent, moving northward at a rate of about 9 m a century. When India rammed into Asia about 40 to 50 million years ago, its northward advance slowed by about half. The collision and associated decrease in the rate of plate movement are interpreted to mark the beginning of the rapid uplift of the Himalayas.
The Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau to the north have risen very rapidly. In just 50 million years, peaks such as Mt. Everest have risen to heights of more than 9 km. The impinging of the two landmasses has yet to end. The Himalayas continue to rise more than 1 cm a year -- a growth rate of 10 km in a million years! If that is so, why aren't the Himalayas even higher? Scientists believe that the Eurasian Plate may now be stretching out rather than thrusting up, and such stretching would result in some subsidence due to gravity."
"We can measure how fast tectonic plates are moving today, but how do scientists know what the rates of plate movement have been over geologic time? The oceans hold one of the key pieces to the puzzle. Because the ocean-floor magnetic striping records the flip-flops in the Earth's magnetic field, scientists, knowing the approximate duration of the reversal, can calculate the average rate of plate movement during a given time span. These average rates of plate separations can range widely. The Arctic Ridge has the slowest rate (less than 2.5 cm/yr), and the East Pacific Rise near Easter Island, in the South Pacific about 3,400 km west of Chile, has the fastest rate (more than 15 cm/yr).
Evidence of past rates of plate movement also can be obtained from geologic mapping studies. If a rock formation of known age -- with distinctive composition, structure, or fossils -- mapped on one side of a plate boundary can be matched with the same formation on the other side of the boundary, then measuring the distance that the formation has been offset can give an estimate of the average rate of plate motion. This simple but effective technique has been used to determine the rates of plate motion at divergent boundaries, for example the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and transform boundaries, such as the San Andreas Fault."
The concept of the Earth's crust in gravitational balance or equilibrium is called isostasy.
Consider low density crust floating on a denser mantle that flows.
When weight is applied to the crust, it subsides. When weight is removed, it rebounds (uplifts).
What are some ways in which weight could be applied to (or removed from) the crust? The continental glaciers which once covered much of the northern part of North America were on the order of several thousand meters thick (judging by the thicknesses of modern glaciers). (See diagrams in glacier chapter.) A 3000 meter thick ice sheet is about 2 miles thick. If we consider an ice sheet a mile or two thick, we realize that the added weight would have caused the Earth's crust to subside (or downwarp). The continental glaciers melted about 10,000 years ago. In this amount of time, the land has been steadily uplifting due to the removal of the weight. In the Hudson Bay region of Canada, as much as 330 m (about 1000 ft) of uplift has occurred. This is a rate of uplift of roughly 3 - 4 cm/year."
"Subduction zones are not totally efficient in removing the subducting plate. Some fraction of the plate gets left behind as accretionary complexes that accumulate at the leading edge of the overriding plate (Figure 22.2.1). In some cases, this accretion might be episodic, involving the collision of large lithospheric blocks, called tectonostratigraphic terranes. More commonly, only the sedimentary cover of the downgoing plate is accreted, while the underlying crust and mantle lithosphere are fully subducted. The thickness of this sedimentary cover varies considerably, from hundreds of meters at oceanic subduction zones, like the Mariana system, to as much as 7 km at oceancontinent subduction zones, such as the Makran margin of southwest Pakistan.""
"It starts out with a lie and goes downhill from there."- dread78645
The information you posted in response though, talks about the same slow forces operating on the Himalayas over 50 million years. While that's shorter than several hundred million years, it's only because the continents hadn't collided yet.
Your post seems to be confirming the articles comment, not showing it to be a lie.
Why ME???
</pitiful_whine>
I was the last person to visit some mines before the contractors sealed and disquised the openings in Utah (Temple Mt. area - south of I-70 about 20 miles south on UT24) a couple of years ago.
(Big Brother has to protect us, again, from rotting timbers and radon gas.)
Overinterpretation of Scripture leads to error, such as the sun going around the earth. Your mind is not big enough to derive an entire cosmology from what are clearly selected events described in a few hundred words. It is pride to think you can.
He has the DVD's to back up his claims ...
I agree overinterpretation of scripture can lead to error. I agree that the Bible intentionally leaves many things unanswered.
But the Bible specifically describes the flood as a global flood. What's more it specifically warns in 2 Peter 3 that there will come a time in the last days where people will assume that things have always continued from the beginning just as they are now, and thereby forget the creation and the flood.
The article posted wasn't just about a Young Earth, it was also very much about the flood. And most of the posters against it, including some compromised Christians, very much want to be able to say that the flood is not real and was just a nice story.
There is evidence to support the flood and a young earth if people will look at it.
The Bible specifically says the earth has "four corners" and is supported by "four pillars".
"four corners" is a reference to the four directions which we still use today.
I'm not aware of a reference in the Bible to "four pillars" except in the reference to constructing the Arc of the Covenant. However, the Bible does refer to "pillars of the earth" but in context that is obviously talking about great men.
The Bible does says the earth was hung over nothing. (Not bad science considering when it was written.)
That, however, does not significantly change the age or sweep of the fossil record or the geological column. Just because geology is making changes to theories in light of new evidence, that does not mean that those changes support your creationist point of view - just as the change from a geosynclinal mechanism to a plate tectonic mechanism for mountain building did not change the rough age of the Appalachians - just the manner in which geologists believed they were formed. And that techtonic model has undergone further modifications with the discovery of microplates as agents of mountain building - a process we see going on now on the Australian Plate as New Guinea is being uplifted in that manner.
I've looked at the evidence presented on FR for years. A lot is misapplication, a lot is conjecture and a lot is, quite frankly, pure BS - such as the claim that the Mississippi Delta is only a few thousand years old. The current delta is not very old - but there are plenty of traces of older deltas across Louisiana, and the Atchafalaya would have formed a new delta by now if the Army Corps of Engineers hadn't delayed that process. And the deposits from the Mississippi go all the way back to around Cairo - and that was from the river filling up the Mississippi Embayment, where a large chunk of North America split off - which is why the Applalachians disappear in Alabama and re-appear in SW Arkansas. And they found that missing chunk - down in Southern South America.
But you would have us believe that a young earth model could lift up the Appalachians, split off a chunk, move that chunk halfway across the world and fill in the embayment in the timeframes you are proposing. Yeah, sure.
The acceptance of catastophism may not be direct support, but it's certainly closer than it's been.
That a model has been proposed for geological changes during the flood, does not invalidate that plate tectonics occur today.
And the same can be said of the uniformist and evolutionist speculations.
Both sides have used models that are too complicated to draw the conclusions advanced. Both sides have advanced arguments based on faulty assumptions.
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