Posted: Dec 21, 2019 9:00 am
Coral reefs present a problem for creationists, since we know that coral reefs only grow by several millimeters per year, and that for something like the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Northern Australia, a minimum age of several hundred *thousand* years is necessary to accommodate for that incredibly slow depositional rate per year.
The age of Funafuti Atoll goes back to before the LGM at the very least, as attested by this article:
[url]
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ro ... 35dd79.pdf[/url]
With such incredibly slow depositional rates in mind, and how a global flood would surely be a wrecking ball of geology, how do creationists expect us to believe that these coral reefs, which need not so turbulent waters to grow in (and if we know anything about floods, they're anything *but* turbulent), formed in the Great Noachian Deluge of yore?
Creationists may get around this by saying that God would have coral reefs grow several growth rings in a year, but that would be needlessly deceptive, and Occam's Razor helps dispatch that claim easily, since it's more parsimonious to assume a minimum age of thousands of years for any given coral reef given incredibly slow depositional rates than it is to assume that God put coral reef growth rates on turbo driver, so that we somehow have *several* growth rings per year.
Funnily enough we have actually put this claim to the test, and as usual it was easily falsified, since for some unfathomable reason any actual predictions creationists make always get disproven for some reason or another. One coral reef grew by an entire *foot* for one year alone, and according to creationist predictions this coral reef would have at least several growth rings, instead what we find is that this coral reef had one *giant* growth ring to account for that foot of growth in a single year, rather than being divvied up into multiple different growth rings, as seen in this paper:
https://peerj.com/articles/1313.pdf?utm_source=Mote+Marine+Laboratory+and+Aquarium+News+for+Media+Only&utm_campaign=e1f25321a2-2015+End-of-year+press+release&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_82d7546332-e1f25321a2-278735865
The age of Funafuti Atoll goes back to before the LGM at the very least, as attested by this article:
[url]
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ro ... 35dd79.pdf[/url]
With such incredibly slow depositional rates in mind, and how a global flood would surely be a wrecking ball of geology, how do creationists expect us to believe that these coral reefs, which need not so turbulent waters to grow in (and if we know anything about floods, they're anything *but* turbulent), formed in the Great Noachian Deluge of yore?
Creationists may get around this by saying that God would have coral reefs grow several growth rings in a year, but that would be needlessly deceptive, and Occam's Razor helps dispatch that claim easily, since it's more parsimonious to assume a minimum age of thousands of years for any given coral reef given incredibly slow depositional rates than it is to assume that God put coral reef growth rates on turbo driver, so that we somehow have *several* growth rings per year.
Funnily enough we have actually put this claim to the test, and as usual it was easily falsified, since for some unfathomable reason any actual predictions creationists make always get disproven for some reason or another. One coral reef grew by an entire *foot* for one year alone, and according to creationist predictions this coral reef would have at least several growth rings, instead what we find is that this coral reef had one *giant* growth ring to account for that foot of growth in a single year, rather than being divvied up into multiple different growth rings, as seen in this paper:
https://peerj.com/articles/1313.pdf?utm_source=Mote+Marine+Laboratory+and+Aquarium+News+for+Media+Only&utm_campaign=e1f25321a2-2015+End-of-year+press+release&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_82d7546332-e1f25321a2-278735865