>Therefore, some (most all) of the coal had to be formed at some time NOT
>during the flood of Noah's time.
>
>How is this answered? I know of only one rational answer -- the earth is
>a lot older than a few thousand years.
>
>I understand a similar argument can be made for coral reefs. I like the
>coal argument, for I can look up te raw data in an almanac, and that raw
>data comes from industry records.
A literal fiat creation may have a lot of baggage that is not immediately
apparent. For example, did God create a coral polyp, or a whole stable
ecologically functional reef system? I think the latter is the only
rational answer, but it is not much to the liking of positivists, but then,
oh, well.
Likewise, there is no reason to suspect that if the Paleozic forests were
floating mats of vegetation, as seems likely to me from a lot of different
angles, then God may have created the mass of vegetation on which the
forests floated (quaking bogs are a good modern analog). Thus there could
have been considerably more "biomass" on the preflood earth than on the
present earth, and in fact there indeed was, if one subscribes to a fiat
creation of life (as I do). A factor contributing to our ignorance may be
that crucial experiments have never been done on the effects of, for
example, higher CO2 levels on growth of plants. Preliminary experiments we
have done indicate growth is accelerated by much higher atmospheric CO2
concentrations. We are still working on this.
Art
http://chadwicka.swau.edu