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It doesn't take a PhD in geology to "know" that one can fold layers of soft, wet, mud, sand and silt. You can't fold a solid rock. Even if you could, how would you maintain the fairly uniform layers? Over millions of years, wouldn't you expect to find thicker deposits of newer layers at the bottom of the folds? Those sedimentary layers I mentioned are uniform in thickness were folded while they were wet and soft. I said nothing that violates physics.

I probably did get a little testy last night. My apologies. I shouldn't post to other people while I'm posting to AndrewC.

Yes, you can fold solid rock. You don't need catastrophism (and catastrophism produces wrong results anyway) because we can observe and measure the very tectonic forces that moved the continents around still moving and warping them today. The Himalayas are still measurably rising right now, just as fast as they ever were. The sea floors are measurably spreading, right now. Over geologic time scales, the rates of change we have now are enough to produce the history of continental drift and collision you see on pages like this one. The links on the left of the page give you a map series from the late Precambrian.

Well, are you able to look at a piece of evidence without viewing it through the eyes of an evolutionist? When you see a fossil, what to you see? Is your view of the existance of the fossil not affected by your presupposion of the truth of evolution?

I assume the fossil is the surviving physical trace of some ancient life form.

I've already said that I see the fossil differently. I do not deny it's existance. For me, I believe the fossil got that way differently than you say it did.

This seems rather cagily phrased. Are you saying the fossil was created in the ground--faked?--as opposed to being what it looks like? I've heard of the Omphalos hypothesis, frequently satirized as Last Thursdayism. You can go there if you want. It can't be disproven, but they'll teach it in science classes over my dead body.

"I probably did get a little testy last night. My apologies."

No problem. I understand completely. Today's my day for not having a good day.

I spent the past four or so hours, working on a post which would have better explained what I was talking about concerning the rocks and fossils, when my browser exploded, taking all my work to wherever dead posts go :-).

So, I'm just going to post this little bit now, and then see if I can reconstruct what I was working on before. Maybe, because it was quite long, I got very detailed and had some images also, I'll just write it up and stick it on the web server I put the images on, and just link to it.

A lot of what I was going to talk about can be found in the work of Dr. Walt Brown. I know a lot of people don't care for him, but his thesis and on-line book are something I find interesting. By linking to his site doesn't imply that I accept everything he writes, lock, stock and barrel. The book can be had from amazon.com for a lot less than Nature wants to see McGinnis' paper on genetics.

Let me just quickly clear up this one point.

"I've heard of the Omphalos hypothesis, frequently satirized as Last Thursdayism."

Oh no. Those ideas represent the vain efforts of biblicists (I think I just invented a new word there), to reconcile one of many misunderstood creation accounts with evolution. No, I had no intention of going there.