Atheistoclast wrote:Speaking of which, I may this week get an acceptance on my paper which shows that the artiodactyl order undoes the theory of common descent.

I would be very interested to read that.

...and here we have AiG again, using the false logic of the charlatan Snelling (http://www.answersingenesis.org/article ... atastrophe), desperately trying to use the results of the Mt St Helens eruption - rapid deposition of layered sediment, rapid erosion of said sediment to form 'canyons', rapid formation of peat, polystrate fossils, ( ) - to debunk the idea of long-term geological process.

Geologists were staggered that such coarse and fine sediment layers could be separated into distinct strata by such a catastrophic flow process from a slurry moving at freeway speed.

Sadly, most geologists still conventionally think that such sedimentary layering has to represent long seasonal variations, or annual changes, as layers accumulate very slowly.

The small creeks which flow through the headwaters of the Toutle River today might seem, by present appearances, to have carved out these canyons very slowly over a very long time period, except for the fact that the erosion was observed to have occurred extremely rapidly! Geologists should thus have learned that the long timescales they have been trained to assign to the erosion of deep canyons are obviously erroneous, and that deep canyons found elsewhere must likewise have formed very rapidly, including the Grand Canyon of Arizona.

thousands of upright, fully submerged logs were subsequently observed sitting on the floor of the lake, looking as though they were a forest of trees. Investigations showed many had become buried by more than 3 feet of sediment, while others were still resting on the floor of the lake.
Geologists could easily have misinterpreted these upright buried logs as representing multiple forests that had grown on different levels over periods of many thousands of years. This is in fact how the petrified upright logs at Specimen Ridge in Yellowstone National Park had been interpreted, as successive forests growing over many thousands of years. However, the lesson from Mount St. Helens is that fossilized upright logs had to be buried rapidly.

Geologists suppose that coal beds formed by the accumulation of organic material in vast swamps where the plants grew in place. By slow growth and accumulation, they estimate about 1,000 years was required to form each inch of coal. However, typical swamp peat deposits are very fine, with a texture looking like coffee grounds or mashed potatoes. They are homogeneous because of the intense penetration of the roots which dominate swamps. Thus root material is the dominant coarse component of modern swamp peats, while sheets of bark are extremely rare. This is the exact opposite of what was found in the “Spirit Lake peat.” Yet the Spirit Lake peat is texturally and compositionally similar to coal.

Like persistent verrucas, no matter how often these notions are debunked they just grow back.

It now seems that AiG have decided that the reason why Flood geology is not more widely accepted is because Genesis has not been translated properly :

http://www.answersingenesis.org/article ... chronology

The blame for an incorrect analysis of the chronology of the Flood cannot be laid at the feet of any one person; rather, it can be traced to linguistic naïveté (quite understandable, centuries before the rise of modern linguistics!).
...
Only then, with the chronology of the Flood firmly established, and a better understanding of the Hebrew description of the Flood and its processes, will geologists committed to the authority of Scripture be able to reclaim geology, returning it to its original Biblical foundations. Thus, they will be able to better construct and constrain their comprehensive model of the Flood event, and the strata and structures it produced. In so doing the millions-of-years geologic timescale will be defeated, and the foundation of Darwinian evolution destroyed.

You have been warned - your days are numbered!

Calilasseia wrote:

AiG Apologetic Faeces wrote:and the strata and structures it produced.

Oh, you mean like the Deccan Traps? Care to tell me how your fantasy "global flood" could produce this? Here's a clue: basalt isn't a sedimentary rock.

Neither is pumice.
Pumice floats, right?
http://www.hoax-slayer.com/new-pacific-island.shtml

From this site http://www.geology.sdsu.edu/how_volcanoes_work/Tephra.html I have this pictue:-
(Pumice is the thick beige coloured layer.)

How on earth does a floating rock get buried below the other rock layers?

Bathynomus Giganteus wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:

AiG Apologetic Faeces wrote:and the strata and structures it produced.

Oh, you mean like the Deccan Traps? Care to tell me how your fantasy "global flood" could produce this? Here's a clue: basalt isn't a sedimentary rock.

Neither is pumice.
Pumice floats, right?
http://www.hoax-slayer.com/new-pacific-island.shtml

From this site http://www.geology.sdsu.edu/how_volcanoes_work/Tephra.html I have this pictue:-
(Pumice is the thick beige coloured layer.)

How on earth does a floating rock get buried below the other rock layers?

I'm still waiting for a creationist to explain how a global flood could produce salt deposits

It would be nice if instead of all the trolling a heckling if we could discuss if the end of the last ice age and following glacial melt could have been the origin for global flood stories.

"Global flood stories" is itself a misnomer. Other than being (a) about a widespread, but not necessarily "global," flood and (b) being stories, the points of similarity between these stories (other than those fairly obviously introduced by early missionary influence) are few and far between.

I once analyzed several of these "flood" stories in a thread involving creationist apologist Dave ("AF Dave") Hawkins at TalkRational, including Inuit/Eskimo and Plains Native American versions. They were not much like each other and different in independent ways from the Biblical Noah-flood stories. In some of these stories, the animals rescued the humans. In some, the rescue was made by Beaver, for example, who used his paddle-like tail to plaster together an island-refugia, something like the islands BP is being required to dredge up to safeguard the Gulf coast wetlands from the oil spill. ...Or who used his teeth to gnaw down trees to form a raft.

In others, the local or regional flood was caused by an evil shaman, or twin evil shamans, or a female shaman. In some, most of the populace drowned. In others, most of the populace was saved. In some, the stories were clearly intended to explain the presence of fossils in formations at altitude, a feature not mentioned in the Bible.

Again, not all the stories involve the salvation of one given family, or the rescue of animals by humans, or humans by animals, or even a rescue by water vehicle -- a fairly obvious device, given that a boat is a pretty handy device to have during a period of rising water. The stories that do involve "boats" include rafts, logjams, canoes, kayaks, fleets of canoes and kayaks, and all manner of stranger cobbled-together watercraft, including floating balls of dung...!

And so forth. Floods and tsunamis are dramatic events, prime fodder for story-telling. People live in close association with water on lakes, in river valleys, on river deltas, and on seacoasts. Flood stories will therefore be told, over and over again. Particularly good versions may well have spread, in much the same manner as flint and obsidian and cool-looking seashells and copper nuggets and technological innovations were spread along ancient trade routes. Others may have stayed near home. Some may be ancient; others relatively recent...

Folklorists like Stith Thompson have collected folktales which appear to be variations on a whole variety of themes, all over the world. It's easy, therefore, to compare and contrast such stories from different regions, and containing or lacking certain "standard" tropes or themes. Again, some elements are confined to certain restricted regions, others have wider, continental or circumpolar or areal extent (see Levi-Strauss's multivolume Mythologiques, which compares and contrasts "structural" themes of various stories across wide swaths of the Americas or Eliade's works on shamanism, which traces similar elements with an Asian-American and circumpolar distribution) .

Significantly, there is no particular pattern which unites all such "themed" stories as having spread in all directions from the Ancient MidEast several thousand years ago, or as having spread in some distribution along a "retreating ice" wavefront at the end of the last Ice Age, roughly ten to twelve thousand years ago. Instead we see a pattern of many overlapping centers or networks of distribution of different sorts of themes and elements at different times.

Further, to the very limited extent that certain myth or folktale themes do seem to have a quasi-global distribution, the shared themes go well beyond the flood story of the Bible, contain many themes and elements not found in the Bible at all, and are far better explained as survivals of the spread of anatomically modern humanity Out of Africa, across Eurasia/australasia and into the Americas and across Oceanea than by resort to a "global flood" dispersal (or even by resort to some sort of common "ice age flood" experience, though at least the latter has some vestige of plausibility and might conceivably explain certain regional distributions of flood stories, though this has by no means been demonstrated).

"Global flood stories" is itself a misnomer

I see you did not notice I used the plural form of the word "story". Then you falsely assume that all of them would find their roots in the singular popular Biblical Noah flood.

or as having spread in some distribution along a "retreating ice" wavefront at the end of the last Ice Age, roughly ten to twelve thousand years ago. Instead we see a pattern of many overlapping centers or networks of distribution of different sorts of themes and elements at different times.

OK, now here you make an interesting point. I'd answer that with melt water pulses, which is when an ice damn breaks releasing a torrent of water. Humans love to live near rivers for many reasons. A river is also a natural path for a catastrophic torrent of water.

Theists think their holy books are true and divinely inspired. Atheists think they are false.
What makes Atheists the bigger idiot of the two is that they always fail to acknowledge the obvious. If not inspired by God, it was written by man. And if written by man, it may have been inspired by historical fact. It is a historical fact that there was a global melting of glaciers ~12k years ago.

Tyrannical wrote:

"Global flood stories" is itself a misnomer

I see you did not notice I used the plural form of the word "story". Then you falsely assume that all of them would find their roots in the singular popular Biblical Noah flood.

or as having spread in some distribution along a "retreating ice" wavefront at the end of the last Ice Age, roughly ten to twelve thousand years ago. Instead we see a pattern of many overlapping centers or networks of distribution of different sorts of themes and elements at different times.

OK, now here you make an interesting point. I'd answer that with melt water pulses, which is when an ice damn breaks releasing a torrent of water. Humans love to live near rivers for many reasons. A river is also a natural path for a catastrophic torrent of water.

Theists think their holy books are true and divinely inspired. Atheists think they are false.
What makes Atheists the bigger idiot of the two is that they always fail to acknowledge the obvious. If not inspired by God, it was written by man. And if written by man, it may have been inspired by historical fact. It is a historical fact that there was a global melting of glaciers ~12k years ago.

But there was no global flood 12.000 years ago.

How many local floods do you estimate there have been in the past 12.000 years? Isn't it more likely that flood stories are a result of the countless floods that have occured since the end of the last ice age?

Isn't it more likely that flood stories are a result of the countless floods that have occured since the end of the last ice age?

My God, I think someone finally is starting to figure out my point.

Umm... So... you are now agreeing with atheists? If your point is such that debunk is correct, this is what the non-believers have been saying for longer than you have been living

Tyrannical wrote:

Isn't it more likely that flood stories are a result of the countless floods that have occured since the end of the last ice age?

My God, I think someone finally is starting to figure out my point.

I thought your point was that the flood stories might have been inspired by the melting of glaciers at the end of the last ice age? Again, isn't it more likely that all those different flood stories from all those different cultures are the result of all those other completely unrelated floods that occured in the 12.000 years since the last ice age?

Tyrannical wrote:

"Global flood stories" is itself a misnomer

I see you did not notice I used the plural form of the word "story". Then you falsely assume that all of them would find their roots in the singular popular Biblical Noah flood.

It's not your use of the plural which makes the phrase a misnomer, but the implied claim either that "similar" stories have a global distribution or that multiple stories from multiple sources all similarly implicate a "global" flood.

I make -- and made -- no assumption about your particular allegiance to the Biblical story.

or as having spread in some distribution along a "retreating ice" wavefront at the end of the last Ice Age, roughly ten to twelve thousand years ago. Instead we see a pattern of many overlapping centers or networks of distribution of different sorts of themes and elements at different times.

OK, now here you make an interesting point.

For which I'm well-known, globally!

I'd answer that with melt water pulses, which is when an ice damn breaks releasing a torrent of water. Humans love to live near rivers for many reasons. A river is also a natural path for a catastrophic torrent of water.

Well, yes, higher water will tend to run in pre-existing troughs, for any of the number of reasons that water may run high. Though, actually, the classic Scablands megafloods were identified in part by the manner in which they breached divides between existing drainages...

So you've now identified a class of phenomena, megafloods, which is associated with the Ice Age (though not necessarily with the END of the last glacial maximum, as for example the Glacial Lake Missoula megafloods that produced the Washington scablands, which recurred repeatedly over a roughly ten thousand year period preceding the end of the Cordilleran glacier). It's not clear how this is an "answer" to my contention that no pattern of association of stories containing multiple similar elements or themes has been correlated either by date or location with any of the known sites of the end-glacial meltwater lakes/water-level rises or with the megafloods themselves.

For example, in the Scablands situation, local native flood traditions implicate disputes between entities associated with the local chain of stratavolcanoes (Mt. Rainier and Mt. St. Helens were conceived of as rival siblings who regularly "blew their tops" at each other, causing storm-associated displays of thunder and lightning, and possibly generating ashfalls and lavaflows which might temporarily impound local rivers), disputes between supernatural entities (Thunderbird and Whale, scaled up from eagles and ospreys flying off with salmon in their talons, and which personalized the forces of regular meterological thunderstorms, which were in turn associated with voluminous downpours), and -- it has been argued with respect to some specific traditions-- the natives may then have extended the "thunderclaps" associated with these disputatious entities to the vibrations and sea/earth disruptions associated with tsunamis (for which there is independent geological and historical evidence).

No local Washington, Idaho, or Montana native flood tradition associates rising or torrential water with glaciers (Washington's Cascades remains the most heavily-glaciated range in the continental U.S., so the natives were not unfamiliar with ice or glaciers) or with a period in which large parts of the terrain were locked up in ice.

Indeed, by the very nature of things, people only moved into the regions that had been covered by the icecaps well after the latter had retreated, and after the faunal and floral succession restored a human-useable ecology in the wake of the icecaps, a process which took hundreds of years...

Theists think their holy books are true and divinely inspired. Atheists think they are false.

Now who's making assumptions? I'm not an atheist and I don't hold either of these extreme positions with regard to "holy books," many of which are replete with keen moral and pyschological depictions and insights, but few of which seem to have been intended to convey anything like a strictly factual account of the physical forces that have shaped the planet and its biosphere.

What makes Atheists the bigger idiot of the two is that they always fail to acknowledge the obvious. If not inspired by God, it was written by man. And if written by man, it may have been inspired by historical fact. It is a historical fact that there was a global melting of glaciers ~12k years ago.

Yep. But that's not the end of demonstrating that the global melting gave rise to any particular flood stories of any particular ethnic group, but would instead be the sketchiest outline of a scenario which might give rise to a hypothesis which would then need to make falsifiable predictions which would then need to be tested against the mythological and physical evidence.

The resources are out there to do that, in the form of information which has already been collected by the disciplines of archaeology, ethnology, folkloristics, dating science, geology, etc.

One way to begin to do that would be to show the sort of patterns of spread from the loci of glacial meltwater lakes, or the loci of megafloods, or whatever, via a combination of archaeological dating, mythology/folkloristics and cluster analysis of key features (tropes, elements, themes) of the stories themselves.

As I suggested above.

Rather than show myself hostile to your scenario, I've already suggested a research program to test it. Rather than make any such demonstration, however (or counterdemonstration, as I've just done for Coast and Interior Salish/Flathead and WestCoast/Makah flood myths), you've merely repeated your assertion and thrown in a whine.

Cheese with that?

I thought your point was that the flood stories might have been inspired by the melting of glaciers at the end of the last ice age?

Yes

Again, isn't it more likely that all those different flood stories from all those different cultures are the result of all those other completely unrelated floods that occured in the 12.000 years since the last ice age?

There would have been a period, maybe over a thousand years or more, of repeated and heavy flooding in various parts of the world due to glacial melt. While the actual melting could have been over a long period, periodic failures of ice damns could have released the melt water in a series of catastrophes across the globe.

Coulda, woulda, shoulda...

You've got a concept, here.

Now TEST it.

Steviepinhead, I'm, not convinced that native american flood stories are contemporary with glacial melts ~12k years ago. I'm also fairly malleable with the theory I present. An awful of of ice melted that caused significant sea level rise, and modern humans were alive during that period. I would consider it possible that various myths and oral legends survived to this day describing that period.

Tyrannical wrote:

I thought your point was that the flood stories might have been inspired by the melting of glaciers at the end of the last ice age?

Yes

Again, isn't it more likely that all those different flood stories from all those different cultures are the result of all those other completely unrelated floods that occured in the 12.000 years since the last ice age?

There would have been a period, maybe over a thousand years or more, of repeated and heavy flooding in various parts of the world due to glacial melt. While the actual melting could have been over a long period, periodic failures of ice damns could have released the melt water in a series of catastrophes across the globe.

The thing is, your ice age hypothesis can't explain deluge myths from equatorial regions, most pacific islands, or most of the southern hemisphere (since there wasn't much glaciation there to begin with).

Tyrannical wrote:Steviepinhead, I'm, not convinced that native american flood stories are contemporary with glacial melts ~12k years ago. I'm also fairly malleable with the theory I present. An awful of of ice melted that caused significant sea level rise, and modern humans were alive during that period. I would consider it possible that various myths and oral legends survived to this day describing that period.

"Possible," sure, though you're requiring the essential elements of oral traditions to last longer than the turnover time for entire language families.

Again, you've got a hand on one end of a slippery concept.

But to demonstrate that the concept is plausible, much less the best explanation for the data, you've got a little more work to do.

Steviepinhead wrote:

Tyrannical wrote:Steviepinhead, I'm, not convinced that native american flood stories are contemporary with glacial melts ~12k years ago. I'm also fairly malleable with the theory I present. An awful of of ice melted that caused significant sea level rise, and modern humans were alive during that period. I would consider it possible that various myths and oral legends survived to this day describing that period.

"Possible," sure, though you're requiring the essential elements of oral traditions to last longer than the turnover time for entire language families.

Again, you've got a hand on one end of a slippery concept.

But to demonstrate that the concept is plausible, much less the best explanation for the data, you've got a little more work to do.

Still younger then some cave art