From: Don Winterstein (dfwinterstein@msn.com)
Date: Mon Apr 28 2003 - 05:24:57 EDT
Bill Payne wrote in part:
>I am simply asking that we address this one feature..
A problem I've had with YEC literature time and again is that the authors' focus is too narrow. They look only at this or that isolated problem and ignore the big picture. Every competent geologist will acknowledge that some isolated observations are very hard to explain, but the overwhelming message from the vast bulk of the data is that rocks are almost always very much older than a few thousand years. I continue to be dumbfounded that anyone who's looked at a wide swath of geologic data can still believe that the Earth is only a few thousand years old.
Some YEC proponent may have addressed the following set of observations, but if so I'm not aware of it. (I don't stay current with YEC literature because I rarely learn anything useful from it.):
Geologists worldwide use fossils to date rocks. Oil wells penetrate sedimentary sections often to depths of miles below the surface. Geologists and paleontologists look at samples throughout the geologic sections and date the various layers from fossils in the samples. Often the fossils are microscopic.
The fact that geologists can date rock from fossils means that certain fossils or combinations of fossils serve as indices for the different geologic periods. Devonian index fossils don't appear in Cambrian rocks, for example, nor Miocene index fossils in the Paleocene.
Problem: Under what realistic scenario could Noah's flood have distributed these index fossils in such ordered fashion that they consistently (in the absence of the rare overthrust) appear in the same sequences throughout a basin or even worldwide? Keep in mind that some of these fossils are microscopic.
If you've got a good answer for this one, I've got about a dozen more similar problems for you to solve. Real geologists would have even more.
Don
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