Question:
Can you correct this particular creationist's misconceptions, ES&G?
?
2015-08-26 09:24:55 UTC
T'other day, I asked a question about a character in a project I'm working on (basically, whether it's plausible to have a Pentacostal who basically accepts evolution--here: https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20150720115409AAkmzUj , if you want to see the rest of the answer I'm referring to)

One of the creationists who answered said, among other things, "Why do geologists need millions/billions of years? They don't; it's because the biologists need it for their biological timeline."

I skept, heavily, but I don't know enough geology to back up my suspicions. Can y'all please help me school this particular...splendid example of the American school system?
Nine answers:
sci enthusiast
2015-08-26 11:02:01 UTC
Let's ignore this person's use of biology as an explanation for why geologists "need" billions of years. It really has little to do with fossils we find in rocks. Our planet is dynamic. It's the only one in the solar system with active tectonics. Finding fossils in rocks often corroborates that geologic processes take a long time to unfold. They do not, however, inform geologists about tectonic processes and that's what geology is dedicated to understanding - NOT how life evolved, but how our planet has changed since it formed and what processes drive those changes. Geology doesn't happen overnight (most of the time). Within this science, the millions and billions have much more to do with physics and tectonic processes rather than evolution.



Regarding the grand canyon: based on this guy's logic, all of New Orleans should look like the grand canyon now. This city gets flooded several times a year. Many, many other parts of the planet experience regular flooding too. So if the grand canyon was created in mere years, then why aren't there tons of mini grand canyons everywhere on the planet where there is regular flooding today? Why aren't we seeing floods make things like canyons in human lifetimes?



Here's why: floods suck at sustained erosion. Flood waters dissipate quickly because the waters lose momentum and velocity quickly. This is because flood waters do not have anything confining the flow of water. Rivers, on the other hand, do - the channel bed. The gradient of this bed - how steep it is - influences how fast water rushes through it. The Colorado River has a steep gradient, which is one reason why it was able to erode the canyon. Rivers also carry a sediment load. It isn't just water in there. Depending on the velocity, rivers can be capable of moving boulders.



The Colorado River is a meandering river system. The largest rivers on our planet are all meandering rivers. These types of rivers often have headwaters in mountain ranges (the Colorado's is in the rockies) which is one source of the sediment load they carry. When that sediment and water continually rush past the rocks that line the channel bed, it produces friction. This causes erosion, and the erosion adds more sediment to the water. These rivers carry A LOT of sediment and that's why we find large fertile deltas at their ends.



We would not see the rocks we do in the Grand Canyon if the Colorado River had not eroded some of them away. They would still be buried. What's more: the canyon is not the only evidence of this river's ability to erode. There are several other gorgeous vistas, such as Goosenecks and Horseshoe Bend. Rivers are also dynamic - they migrate and switch positions over time, swiping back and forth across the landscape. See the image of Rio ***** in Argentina below.
busterwasmycat
2015-08-29 21:13:13 UTC
One of the earliest ideas to come from "geology" (back before it was even called geology) was the idea of deep time. That is, the early naturalists who studied the earth were 18th century generally religious folks who set out to find signs of the biblical history of the earth (recent creation, the great flood, and all that). It became very obvious, very early on, that the earth did not much provide that evidence. A major problem was that there are immense accumulations of sediments (as sedimentary rocks) that could not possibly have formed except if millions of years of sedimentation had occurred. That idea was relatively reluctantly accepted after a lot of discussion and ideas of how that could be.



The more that people looked around and tried to fit things together, time-wise, the more time was needed to account for all the things that could be seen. The idea of a few million years turned into hundreds of millions of years very quickly.



So the idea was not actually that lots of time was REQUIRED for the biological evolution that became evident by that very same examination of the earth, but that evolution had hundreds of millions of years AVAILABLE.



Darwin was friends with Charles Lyell, and was quite aware of this time issue. Having that much time available for life to change was a major aspect of Darwin's thinking, If the animal life of the Galapagos could fracture so clearly into different species in the few million years available, then it really is not a big stretch to imagine major changes over hundreds and hundreds of millions of years, and that was precisely what the fossil record was showing.



It is the geology that "requires" the time. The earth has to be as old as it is or it could not look the way it does.
G C
2015-08-26 09:31:21 UTC
The situation he is discussing is the process that would produce a whole warm blooded being such as a human from the single celled creature through the water creatures, to land creatures, to cold blooded to warm blooded. The more they learn of the process it has to take to accomplish that, the more time for 'random' change to take place. At first, it was just a couple of millions of years, but now it is billions and billions of years. Because it simply cannot be.



The real problem they have with evolution is when did God revisit the creature that was to become man and place within him a soul? However, if you allow nature to validate itself, it is always kind after kind and all mutations are harmful to the host. God created mankind in two phases----male and female---and they reproduce, but all life in the womb comes from God, not accident, not natural selection, not evolution.
Brigalow Bloke
2015-08-31 14:29:09 UTC
"Take a sample rock to be dated and they'll ask where you found it and how deep. Without that, they can't fit it into their millions/billions of years timeline." (From David's answer)



About 16 years ago, Australian and other geologists dated zircons in gneiss specimens from the Jack Hills in Western Australia. These specimens were not buried but exposed and the zircons returned dates of 4,4 billion years. I have held one of the specimen rocks and seen a Sensitive High Resolution Ion MicroProbe (SHRIMP) instrument used, it's a glorified Mass Spec. adapted for heavy ions like uranium, thorium, lead etc. A primary oxygen ion beam is used to bombard and remove parts of the zircons which are accelerated, sorted and counted much as in in any MS.



http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~rcoe/eart206/Wilde%20et%2001%20Nature%20409-175.pdf



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_high-resolution_ion_microprobe



However the central problem with the reply you got is this, the cart is before the horse, a common ploy used by YECs. They claim that geologists provide millions or billions of years to comply with the biologists demands. This is the reverse of the facts, as long ago as 1830 Charles Lyell published the first volume of his "Principles of Geology" in which he stated that geologic change was due to the small or uniform effects over enormous length of time.



Until then, the only well considered theory of evolution had been proposed by the French natural philosopher Lamarck in publications up to about 1810. This was the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Crudely put, if you cut the tails from generations of mice, the mice would soon lose tails. If true, this could provide rapid biological evolution, though probably not rapid enough to fit into the 5,500 - 7,000 period claimed by Bible scholars. Though well considered, it has been shown to be almost entirely mistaken.



Charles Darwin was given the first volume of Lyell by Capt. Fitzroy at the start of the voyage of the Beagle. In South America he obtained the second volume in which Lyell denied evolution and proposed centres of creation. The first volume made Darwin realise that since very long periods were available from geologists, biological evolution could progress in a much slower manner. Lyell's ideas of centres of creation were negated by the occurrence of similar species of plants and animals on more than one continent, eg big cats and monkeys in Africa and the Americas.



Nothing substantial has changed in the past 180 years. Geology provides the time scale without reference to the "needs" of biologists.
Joseph hola
2015-08-29 17:48:19 UTC
They do need billions of years for mainstream geology, they don't do it just for biologists.
?
2015-08-26 09:26:18 UTC
Take a look at the Grand Canyon and tell me that the Colorado river carved that in an afternoon.
anonymous
2015-08-26 09:26:47 UTC
>Why do geologists need millions/billions of years?



They don't. They only need 7,000 to obliterate any creationist. Which they do.



With ease.
anonymous
2015-08-26 09:31:15 UTC
carbon 14 in coal and diamonds proves thousands of years, not billions
David
2015-08-26 13:34:28 UTC
I am the Creationist that this question refers to, that answered the original question.



Like most people, I have a revered respect for operational science, also called observational science. Experiments and observational science can be repeated in every laboratory in the world, confirmed, proven, observed over and over. This is how we develop facts of foundational importance, when multiple scientists get the same result through rigorous testing and the Scientific Method.



But nobody can observe evolution or Noah's Flood. Nobody can repeat an experiment called "The Grand Canyon." So there is a rather NEW branch of science called "historical science" that attempts to recreate the past without the involvement of God or scripture, in fact, historical scientists MUST find an alternative answer to scripture. This is the beginning of a new historical scientist, not Scientific Method, zero, that began the theory of evolution and rewrote history to their liking, whatever they want. Since nobody can prove or disprove it, it continues. Of course, there is a seed of truth in every lie, or nobody would listen. But it takes pages and pages of material to even show and explain their deeply buried presumptions, and uncover and disprove their many failed attempts at obfuscation. Darwinian Evolution is a lie, clear and simple. These are the "scientists" that creationists deplore, but then we deplore any liar, unlike your average secular person that tends to live comfortably with a mess of lies their entire lives w/o questioning their "facts" learned in school, repeated over and over in the media and print, perpetuating a life of lies.



Evolution needs millions/billions of years in order to be "possible." Nobody else needs millions/billions of years. But a probability is always based on “priors. Before you can find a probability that’s an actual number, you need to know something about the priors. You may have a tiny, non-zero probability, but if it’s based on priors that are themselves impossible, then the event itself may also be impossible. You can generalize the priors a lot, but you can never quite get rid of all of them, even though the evolutionist tries and hides them and refuses to make them foundational and open. This is not an irrational request; necessary for truth.



Given an infinitely large universe that’s more or less homogeneous (not empty but lots of stuff), then pretty much anything that’s remotely possible, that could conceivably be the result of a string of remotely possible causes (e.g., life), will happen somewhere. So, we can sit back and say things like, “well, there are X many possible arrangements of atoms, or quantum states, or whatever, and this is one of them…” and can then calculate a ball-park estimate of the probability of life occurring by chance; an incredibly small number of probability, but possible, at least according to what you're taught in school and over and over in the media according to the humanist curriculum.



Unfortunately, the answer we’d get would be incorrect, because the priors are messed up. While it could exist, it could NOT be "formed." So simply knowing that something is “possible” doesn’t mean that the universe can ever be in a state that would eventually lead to that thing happening. It's in these small omissions that makes Evolution a lie.



Radiometric Dating is useful for comparison of dates, but not for absolute dates. There is no accurate method for measuring millions/billions of years, period. It doesn't work. Take a sample rock to be dated and they'll ask where you found it and how deep. Without that, they can't fit it into their millions/billions of years timeline. They will refuse, can't be done.



The radioisotope methods, long touted as irrefutably dating the earth as countless millions of years old, have repeatedly failed to give reliable and meaningful absolute ages for Grand Canyon rocks.



Radioisotope Dating of Rocks in the Grand Canyon

https://answersingenesis.org/geology/radiometric-dating/radioisotope-dating-of-rocks-in-the-grand-canyon/



ICR's Grand Canyon Dating Project

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/icr-science.html



The data using Helium to date rocks actually confirms the young earth theory, if you care to look at the facts instead of holding fast to what you've been told (without the significance of the presumptions). The priors are messed up, but nobody can see that without a lot of work.



#6 Helium in Radioactive Rocks

https://answersingenesis.org/age-of-the-earth/6-helium-in-radioactive-rocks/



Helium Diffusion Rates Support Accelerated Nuclear Decay

https://answersingenesis.org/geology/radiometric-dating/helium-diffusion-rates-support-accelerated-nuclear-decay/



Absolute dating of rocks never works where/when tested for accuracy. Never. Not once. Not even close when we know the answer in advance. Yet when we don't know the age of the rocks, we are asked to believe that it does work. The priors are messed up, but nobody mentions those pesky presumptions.



The foundational Solar Nebular Theory of evolution doesn't work on any planet in our solar system; many of the planets shouldn't even exist according to this Theory. The priors are messed up (but they don't tell you that). Yet it is taken as fact when applied to Earth and everywhere else. Not anymore. It's a lie; eradicate it.



So now we come to the Grand Canyon. Because its northern rim, which includes the Kaibab Plateau through which the canyon is cut, is at a high elevation, the Colorado River as we know it today could not have carved the Grand Canyon. (After all, water doesn’t flow uphill, not even if allowed to try it for millions of years!). Look at a relief map; we all have the same evidences.



Geologists who accept the biblical history of the global Flood—maintain the Grand Canyon was carved by a sudden release of water dammed up behind the Kaibab uplift (aka Kaibab Upwarp). Creationist geologists believe this water was trapped in the aftermath of the global Flood.



In our observed past, just thirty years ago at the Mt. St. Helens eruption in 1980, it was a rather small event compared to the Grand Canyon



The events associated with the volcano’s explosion accomplished in hours, or just a few days, geologic work that normally would be interpreted as having taken hundreds or even millions of years. One particular canyon was formed, which has since been named the “Little Grand Canyon.” About 100 feet deep and somewhat wider, it is about 1/40th the scale of the mighty Grand Canyon. This canyon was formed in one day from a mudflow. A newly formed river then flowed through the Canyon formed by the mudflow.



I remember being taught in school that when you saw a canyon with a river running through it, you assumed that the river took a long time to erode the canyon. My teachers—not having known what happened at Mount St. Helens—would have concluded the same thing about the small river cutting through the Little Grand Canyon.



The evidence here shows that one can logically accept that the Flood of Noah’s day—and its after-effects—could have accomplished extraordinary geologic work, carving out canyons and the laying down of sediments in massive quantities all across the globe—just as we see today!

Increasingly, most geologists—evolutionist or creationist—who have been to the Grand Canyon will now acknowledge that the Canyon was carved by a lot of water over a little period of time, not over millions of years.



Grand Canyon Facts

https://answersingenesis.org/geology/grand-canyon-facts/



Edit:

Steve Austin, that did his Phd dissertation on coal formation coming from tree bark and not peat moss; proved it doesn't require 50,000 years to get coal from peat moss. What he saw as a grad student under a microscope was tree bark in these central US coal formations, with evidence of volcanic activity. He defended his thesis and predicted the entire aftermath of Mt. St. Helens; prior to the eruption. Steve found similar composition of stratigraphy in the Peat Moss (Tapeat?) layers of the Sauk rock unit of the Grand Canyon, laid down rapidly, not millions of years, by similar volcanic activity in evidence (to St. Helen). As you know, the Sauk covers at least half of the entire earth, a global event like Noah's Flood. Steve is a world renowned geologist that also happens to be a creationist.



Has anyone seen geologic layers forming over hundreds of thousands of years? No.



But isn't it powerful that the same features we've seen to form in hours? I have observation to back up my theory, evolution has nothing. Why would you believe nothing, a made-up story, over observational science? Because of a deep-seated investment/belief in a myth: millions/billions of years portrayed by the evolutionist/humanist/atheist curriculum/culture/cult.



Evolution is the biggest lie in the world today, taught as fact in our schools and universities; what a grave error and huge mistake; some sort of bad joke. I've been through it too. Difficult to about-face and realize what you were taught, paid $50,000 for the education/diploma, only to find out decades later that half of it was hocus-pocus myth; made-up bed-time stories. Like 40 yrs ago, it was Global Cooling. By 2030, all plant life was supposed to cease to exist. But now it's Global Warming, err, Climate Change, whatever. Without God and the Bible, we're pretty silly people. Nor can you believe in the Bible and Evolution both. You cannot fit millions of years in the Bible, nor in the true Geologic timeline for that matter. Where would you put them? You should re-study that presumption (prior); ridiculous, revealing.



So it all depends on your worldview. This isn't a debate about science vs. religion or the Bible, it's worldview vs. worldview.


This content was originally posted on Y! Answers, a Q&A website that shut down in 2021.
Loading...