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Hello and welcome to my channel Vice Rhino. Here today I decided to
head back to my roots and cover some classic answers in genesis creationism content.
They've gotten a lot more clickbaity in recent months, and it seems to be
working for them. Instead of having a bunch of videos with about five hundred
views each, they're now getting tens of thousands of views, apparently by using
the aero pointing to a random part of the thumbnail and sensationalized titles that are
only slightly related to the video content at best. Case in point, the
video I'm responding to today is called this One Thing will make You Believe in
Noah's Flawed, and the thumbnail has an arrow pointing to an upright fossil tree
and the word undeniable. But in the video itself, he talks about more
than just one thing, and the upright fossil tree is only very briefly mentioned.
So I guess being dishonest about what your video is okay as long as
it gets more views. How morally relativistic of the organization that literally has an
article on their web page about how lying is always wrong, even if it's
the classic example of lying to a Nazi to save a Jew. From the
article, if we love God, we should obey him. To love God
first means to obey him first before looking at our neighbor. So is the
greater good, trusting God when he says not to lie, or trusting in
our fallible, sinful minds about the uncertain future. Consider this carefully. In
the situation of a Nazi beating on the door, we have assumed a lie
would save a life, but really we don't know, So one would be
opting to lie and disobey God without the certainty of saving a life. Keeping
in mind that all are ultimately condemned to die physically, sides whether one lied
or not may not have stopped the Nazi soldier from searching the house anyway.
But given that Bodie also explains in that article that even lying for Jesus is
sinful. I'm left wondering why aig feels free to play Lucy goosey with the
truth here anyway, onto the video. There's no physical evidence for a worldwide
flood. This is a commonly heard objection to belief in the account of the
great deluge described in Genesis six to nine. Yeah, but it's more than
that. It's not just that there's no evidence for a worldwide flood as described
in Genesis. It's that there's a plethora of evidence against such a flood,
and this evidence comes from multiple independent scientific fields like geology, paleontology, anthropology,
and more. The fact that we have historical records of cultures living through
the time period that the flood is supposed to have happened in all without seeming
to have noticed it is enough on its own to put the flood myth to
rest. In fact, the evidence from any one of these fields is enough
to put the flood myth to rest. But the combination of all this evidence
completely eviscerates any chance the story has of being literally true, and many skeptics
believe this claim invalidates the Bible and Christianity. Well, it certainly does invalidate
the particular version of Christianity that you advocate for, but plenty of people have
made it work for them without insisting on taking the story literally. In fact,
as has been pointed out by behavioral psychologist Joel Firch's or Firks, I'm
not sure I'm sorry from mispronouncing that insisting on a literal interpretation of these Bible
stories is one of the primary factors in what he calls the setting conditions for
deconversion, the conditions in the church that prime people to lose their faith.
Other setting conditions are also found within AIG. Performance control, which is the
expectation that members of your religious community will act a certain way, with any
deviation being frowned upon, so, for instance, don't be LGBTQ. Isolationism,
which is when the community discourages members from associating without groups, like when
AIG talks about how it's Christianity versus the world, even going so far as
to encourage homeschooling with their materials so that kids don't ever get exposed to any
ideas that they disapprove of. Another is compulsive certainty, where doubts are frowned
upon. The Bible is true, end of story. Don't question that.
Begin with that as your presupposition. These setting conditions that can all be found
within answers in Genesis hit four out of five of the setting conditions for deconversion.
In other words, AIG's desperate attempt to control the narrative and keep believers
believing is actually accomplishing the exact opposite of their goal. And they have a
point. After all, if someone can't trust the beginning of the Bible,
why should they believe the rest of it? Yeah, that's the next step
in deconversion, the stressor. If your faith hangs on the idea that the
Bible is completely inerrant and perfect in every way, then when you notice an
imperfection in it, it causes you to question your faith. But if you
just come to grips with the fact that the Bible is a collection of documents
written by people who sometimes made stakes, exaggerated or even outright lied, well,
I actually side with AIG on this one. Why trust the Bible when
it says God exists if it is known to have such issues. But if
you are raised without the inerrancy of scripture being a necessary part of your faith.
It'll be easier to hold onto your belief when you start to notice that
scripture is not in fact inerrant. That's the stressor that comes with textualism,
and that's the main one that did it in for me. For isolationism and
encounter with new people and new ideas can be the stressor. That's where the
trope of the good Christian kid going off to college and ending up deconverting,
well there comes from. Performance control is kind of its own stressor. The
constant stress of behaving in the expected manner rather than being true to yourself puts
a strain on your relationship with that community, especially if it turns out that
your LGBTQ in an anti LGBTQ group. Compulsive certainty works together with the other
stressors to become a sort of stressor of voltron. The Bible is completely true
and inerrant. Well, I found an error here, and that causes me
to doubt the inerrancy of scripture, which I'm supposed to be certain about,
so I'm not allowed to doubt it. However, the scooters themselves not only
predict this denial happening, but also contend with this declaration, stating, for
this willingly forget that, by the word of God, the heavens were of
old and the earth standing out of water and in the water, by which
the world that then existed perished being flooded with water. A couple things here.
First, it's not really that amazing that a book written hundreds of years
after the initial flood account was able to predict that some people would doubt the
flood account. People have been doubting it that whole time, and we're still
doubting it in the time that second Peter was written to predict that this trend
would continue amounts to nothing. If I say in the future that there will
be people who doubt that ancient Jaradites built wooden submarines to get from Israel to
North America, that's not an impressive prophecy. That's just the default expectation.
Second, this first seems to be describing a flat earth scenario, with the
Earth standing out of the waters of the deep on its foundational pillars that are
described elsewhere in the Bible. Third, it's interesting to me that they use
the New King James translation for this verse. Usually AIG favors the ESV.
The ESV translation for this verse says that the Earth was formed out of water
and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these
the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. I feel like
they used the new King James to avoid the implication that God didn't create the
world from nothing, as apologists like to claim. As we saw last week,
the whole God created the universe from nothing is an essential part of the
apologetic urge to show that the Bible got something scientific right. So if it
turns out that the creation story in Genesis doesn't actually say that the universe had
a beginning and that God used pre existing material to create it, then that
takes away that one instance of scientific accuracy that seems impressive as long as you
don't think about it too hard and come to realize that any creation narrative has
a coins flip chance of getting it right. This verse supports the idea that
the Bible's coin flip actually got it wrong. And just to recap that bit
from last week, the opening line of Genesis has some ambiguity in the original
Hebrew that could be interpreted as they're God creating the world out of nothing or
God imposing order on the formless waste that the world was at the time,
with the formless waste being primarily a cosmic ocean with a great turbulent wind sweeping
over it. Everyone accepts that fossil laid rock labors cover the continents, and
most of these were laid down by water. The word most in that sentence
is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Even if I grant the ridiculous premise
that there is no difference between the layers laid down by different types of water
environments, everything from deep marine to lake to to river delta to alluvial fan
and more. But ignore those differences and just assume that water means the same
thing for all of them. The word most indicates that Calvin is aware that
there are fossil bearing layers that exist that were not laid down by water,
And the problem for Calvin here is that these dry layers are often sandwiched in
between wet layers that he claims are the result of the flood. Now,
how would Noah's flood accomplish putting a layer of dry, wind blown desert between
two flood layers. Calvin doesn't answer that question, at least not in this
video. Could that be evidence for a global flood. No, it couldn't
because even ignoring the dry layers that are found sandwich between wet layers, there
are different kinds of wet layers. If all the wet layers were laid down
by a worldwide flood, then we would expect them all to be deep water
marine environments. But laid down by water includes things like lagoons, lakes,
beaches, shallow marine fluvial which is rivers, deltaic river deltas where a river
meets a large body of water, alluvial fans, which are like river deltas
that run into a dry basin instead of another body of water, and hell,
even evaporate and glacier deposits could be considered to have been laid down by
water. The majority of these environments would not exist in a global flood scenario
despite being laid down by water, and yet we find them scattered all throughout
the geologic strata, not just on either side of a bunch of deep marine
environments. Perhaps the problem is not lack of evidence. The evidence is right
there in front of us. The problem is that many scientists see it because
they've accepted different history of the Earth Now in this case, it's that the
evidence quite definitively renders a literal interpretation of Noah's Flood impossible. I mean,
God is supposed to be omnipotent, so I suppose you could say that he
planted the evidence against Noah's Flood as a test of our faith or something.
But as far as I can tell, that has never been AIG's position,
and if it were, this discussion would be completely irrelevant. They say,
the fossils are the record of death over hundreds of millions of years, record
of life, not record of death. I mean, yeah, everything that
was fossilized did die, obviously, but for the most part, it's not
their deaths that we're looking at, it's their life. Yes, we can
learn about the ecology of the time that they lived in by examining their death,
Like, was this fossil killed by a predator? Did scavenger's pick at
its carcass before it was buried? What kind of event did it die in?
Was there a volcanic eruption? Mudslide? Hell The Tannis fossil site that
is part of the Hell Creek formation has a bunch of fossils that died as
a direct result of the asteroid impact that killed the non avian dinosaurs. The
site was discovered in two thousand and eight, and since science moves slowly as
they want to collect as much data as possible to make sure they are accurate
before drawing any conclusions, their findings weren't presented until about twenty seventeen, with
the media taking another couple of years to latch onto the story in twenty nineteen.
The Tennis event deposit, the actual deposition that resulted from the asteroid impact,
is in between Cretaceous and Paleogene strata, and it's very clearly not laid
down by water. In fact, one of the key features is that most
of the fish fossils from the event deposit have a body posture that is consistent
with suffocation. So if Noah's flood actually happened, and the fossils are the
record of these things being laid down by water, then you have to somehow
explain how a bunch of fish in the middle of a worldwide flood that covered
all of the land somehow suffocated on dry land. There are more layers above
this one that you would attribute to the flood, so it can't be fish
dying in the post flood recession of water. So how did that happen?
Answer? Noah's flood didn't happen. They died when the asteroid hit the Earth,
Earth, creating massive earthquakes that caused hundred meter tall waves to form in
the Western Interior Seaway, which flung a bunch of plants, animals, and
debris far inland, where they were buried pretty quickly by sediment, both from
the waves themselves and from debris thrown into the atmosphere by the asteroid impact.
Side note. When I was trying to find a graphic that shows where the
event deposit was in the larger stratigraphy of the Hell Creek Formation, I came
across this image, which was part of a peer review paper in the area.
I was tempted to use it despite not having the event deposit clearly labeled,
so I could just make a joke about them going out of their way
to label pretty butte. And since I decided not to use it for that
purpose, I don't really have a reason to show it to you now other
than just to say heat pretty. Even though that popular view is rife with
problems. The problems that creationists point out are literally nothing, especially when you
compare them to the problems that the creation is view has. Perhaps it's simply
a matter of swapping world juice, like taking off a pair of glasses and
putting on a different pair that lets you see through a different lance. No,
it definitely isn't, and creationist geologist John Baumgartner agrees. As he pointed
out in his paper from nineteen ninety, the only way for Noah's flood to
work as an historic event is for God to have changed the laws of physics
to make it work, saying it is the author's suspicion that God modified some
single fundamental aspect of the natural order, which in turn affected all the fundamental
forces, including the gravitational force, the electrostatic force, and the nuclear forces,
in a manner that did not fatally disrupt the delicate balances that exist in
living systems and whose signature in the astronomical data may be subtle. The author
believes that the sooner the community of scientists who are aware of the integrity of
the Bible is convinced the system of natural law that normally describes the orderly behavior
of the cosmos cannot have been time invariant, the sooner genuine progress will be
made and establishing the framework that accounts for Noah's flood and the geological history of
our planet in a robust and satisfying way, to paraphrase, God with physics
to make it work. And the sooner y'all stop trying to make the flood
story fit with how laws of physics work. The sooner we can work out
how God with them. That's not a look at the evidence from a different
worldview sort of thing. That is very much the evidence doesn't work for my
position unless we alter the fundamentals of how the universe operates sort of thing.
And once you do, evidence of Noah's flood can be seen all over the
from seabeds to mounttops. Interesting that the evidence for the flood only shows up
if you start with the assumption that there was a flood, because here's the
thing. Despite the creation as protestations to the contrary. The evidence against No's
flood was discovered and interpreted largely by Bible believing Christians who saw science as the
pursuit of understanding more about God's creation. Charles Lyle, who basically formulated the
idea of uniformitarianism that gave us long geologic ages published several editions of his book
Principles in Geology, which spoke out against the idea of evolution as presented before
Darwin's theory, namely Lamarckian evolution. He came to accept Darwin's theory when presented
with the evidence, and removed the anti evolution portion of his book from later
editions when he died. His obituary in The New York Times noted, but
though an evolutionist, Lyle was not a skeptic. He lived and died a
Christian believer. In fact, Lyle even used the fact that in the story
an olive tree survive Noah's flood as evidence to argue for the historicity of Noah's
flood, not as a local flood still worldwide, but as a so called
tranquil flood which was so gentle that it left little to no impact in the
geologic record. The man demonized by Young Earth creationists as seeking to create more
time where there was none in order to discredit the creation and flood stories of
Genesis, was in fact a believer in a literal worldwide flood, and he
had to contend with the fact that his work showed no evidence of such a
flood ever occurring from Volume four of Principles of Geology. For my own part,
I have always considered the flood when it's universality in the strictest sense of
the term, is insisted upon, as a preternatural event, far beyond the
reach of philosophical inquiry, whether as to the causes employed to produce it or
the effects most likely to result from it. At the same time, it
is clear that they who are desirous of pointing out the coincidence of geological phenomena
with the occurrence of such a general catastrophe must neglect no one of the circumstances
enumerated in the Mosaic History, least of all so remarkable effect as that the
olive remains standing while the waters were abating. So, the father of our
modern understanding of geology, who is happy to believe in a literal worldwide flood,
pointed out that there is no evidence for the flood in the geologic record.
This makes it seem like it's a bit more than just a worldview issue.
Think about it. Whether you travel by car, train, or playing,
the fiscal features of the Earth's terrain clearly indicate a catastrophic past, from
canyons at craters to coal beds and caverns. Aside from craters, none of
those inherently indicates a catastrophic past, and you don't like the evidence that comes
from craters. Some places of strata extend across continents, revealing the effects of
a huge catastrophe, or hear me out on this one. They stretch across
continents revealing huge environments that existed in the past. I've talked about this before,
and god damn it, what the fucking shit. Okay, I am
back, I'm calm. I've got my stress relief puppy here to keep me
company. So answers in Genesis has successfully fooled me. I went back into
my catalog to find the video where I've talked about that before, what I
was about to reference, and damned if this isn't the exact video. I
didn't check to see if I had already covered it because it was just uploaded
a month ago, and I haven't covered anything from AIG Canada in that time.
But I guess they're recycling their material because this is a video that I
covered way back in twenty twenty one. But it's got a new title now
and the original is also unlisted at this time, and I lied. The
videos aren't exactly the same. They seem to have darkened the new one for
some reason. Maybe Calvin's wardrobe was too bright for them. This does confirm
what I was saying earlier though, about them going for a clickbait rather than
substance. This one used to be called where is the physical evidence for Noah's
Flood? Not this one thing will make you believe in Noah's Flood. At
this point, I'm deep enough in that it would be a massive setback for
me to pick a different video. And I have covered some stuff that I
know I haven't brought up in previous videos, at least not in this much,
details such as Lyle's Christianity and the tennis event deposit. So I'm going
to keep powering through. But if you've been feeling a sense of deja vous,
that's why. Anyway. What I was getting at here is that one
of the main examples of multicontinent deposition are the chalk beds that can be found
throughout parts of Europe. Notably, in order to form there need to have
been large, calm, fairly shallow seas where plankton, mostly coccolithophores, could
thrive. As they live and die, they shed their skeletal caucospheres, which
float down to the ocean floor to accumulate in a muddy mixture known as calcerous
ooze, which lithified under pressure that was building up on top of it as
more ooze formed. This is an incredibly slow process that took around thirty five
million years, and if the amount of plankton required to form these chalk beds
were live at one time and so could all die in the flood, there
wouldn't have been room for anything else in the ocean. They would have formed
a suffocating lay at the top, soaking up all of the sunlight needed for
other life to exist, choking out even themselves. The Earth's crust has massive
amounts of layered sedimentary rock, sometimes miles deep. Indeed it does, and
given how the layers formed, it is impossible for them to all have been
the result of one worldwide flood. There wasn't time during the flood for the
different layers to lithify, a process that can be quick for certain types of
layers, but for others, like the aforementioned chalk is a process that takes
millions of years. Also, when I say quick here, the quickest layers
are igneous ones, volcano erupts, lava cools boom new layer. Aside from
that quick is still on the order of decades to centuries, far longer than
the flood is supposed to have lasted. These layers of sand, soil,
and material mostly laid down by water were once soft like mud. That depends
on the type of layer. And once again I'd like to bring attention to
just how much heavy lifting the mostly is doing in the statement mostly laid down
by water, because it's rather difficult to explain from a global flood perspective how
the logic record can show environmental transitions that go from marine to beach to desert
back to marine all in one location. Never mind the fact that we can
also follow the geologic strata laterally and see the environment's change going from deep marine
to shallow marine to deltaic to fluvial all in the same layer. That is
quite a trick if the entire layer was laid down by one single flood event.
You know, this is where the creation's double speak kind of works against
itself. They will often complain that the geologic column doesn't actually exist anywhere except
for in the textbooks, using the fact that different environments existed in different locations
to say that the layers aren't perfectly represented worldwide. But the thing is,
we'd only expect that to be true if the layers were actually laid down by
some worldwide event like a flood. There should be one big global stratigraphic layer,
which would be a conglomeration of sediment generally sorted, with the larger grain
heavier sediment found lower down in the layer, and the smaller grain layer sediment
towards the top, not a bunch of different layers with all sorts of different
properties, not even slightly organized by grain size, showing a multitude of different
environments, both as you look through time in one location and as you look
at different locations in the same time. But they're now hard, solid stone,
that's what she said. And in case, in these sedimentary layers are
billions of dead things. Fossils of plants and animals breed very quickly. The
evidence all over the earth is staring everyone in the face very quickly, in
this case meaning buried in the event that killed them in some cases, and
buried after the carcass had been exposed and picked over by scavengers for at least
a few days. In other cases, the burial doesn't need to be instantaneous.
It just needs to happen before the remains completely decomposed. And I wonder
how scavengers were able to gnawn the bones of animals who died in the flood,
given that they were also supposed to have died in the flood. It's
no wonder The Bible contains such warnings against disbelieving the account of Noah's flood as
rejecting it has important theological implications. Yeah, the book that is motivated to
make you believe it warns against not believing it. Amazing. In Matthew twenty
four, thirty six, and thirty nine, Jesus used the flood as a
picture of the coming judgment. Yeah, he did, And amusingly, in
the part of that passage that you replaced with an ellipse, he describes what
he means by that. For as in those days before the flood, they
were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage until the day when Noah
entered the Ark, and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them
all away, So we'll be the coming of the Son of Man. What
a prediction people would be, eating, drinking, and getting married. Shockingly
specific that could only possibly be referring to the way people behave today. Also,
two verses before this one is where we get Jesus saying that the generation
that he is speaking to will not pass away until all these things take place.
The author of Matthew was convinced that he was living in the end times,
and every generation of Christians since then has likewise believed that they were in
the end times, and all of them have been wrong. So why should
I believe the ones who are saying, oh, this time will be right?
Likewise? Second Peter three also associates the flood with the coming judgment by
fire, and once again, if you read that whole chapter from Second Peter,
the author clearly believes that the day of judgment is imminent and that they
are the ones who will see it. Also, this is the chapter that
tells us that to God, one day is as a thousand years, and
a thousand years are as one day, a metaphorical way of saying that time
doesn't matter to God. That's the verse that Christians who accept evolution in old
ages will use to say that the Genesis creation account is not literal. Yeah,
it says six days, but that could mean any amount of time to
God, He's not tied to literal days. There's still the issue with the
order of creation and whatnot. But if you don't start with the assumption that
has to be literally true, then that's not really that big of a deal.
If the Genesis flood were merely a myth, then we could assume and
dismiss the coming judgment as mythological as well. Yes, no, that's all
I have there, But many people, of course want what they feel is
rock solid evidence for their beliefs. I mean, really, given who God
is supposed to be, that should be the minimum expectation here. So let's
look at some fossils. For example. Consider the fact that it takes special
conditions to make a fossil, and the world is covered with billions of them
in mass graves. In contrast to the slow standard evolutionary story of deposition of
sediments making fossils slowly over hundreds of years, In reality, creatures must be
buried rapidly before they brought or get eaten by scavengers. You say that as
though rapid burial isn't the first thing you'll learn about the fossilization process. Nobody
is out there saying that it takes millions of years to bury a dead animal.
We all know that burial has to happen rapidly, but the actual permimeralization
process, the process by which organic material is replaced with minerals, can take
millions of years, sometimes tens of millions of years. Though on the flip
side, if the conditions are right, some animals can become nearly completely permimeralized
within hours to days of their death, and in fact, vast numbers animals
were buried and lie so quickly that some couldn't even finish swallowing their meal or
giving birth. No, that's buried and died so quickly that they couldn't finish
their meal or finish giving birth, not buried and fossilized. So here's the
thing about fossils. Our categorization of something as a fossil is somewhat arbitrary.
The preserved remains of an organism are considered a fossil if it died more than
ten thousand years ago, regardless of the state of permineralization, but most people
when they hear fossilized are actually thinking of permineralization. For the most part,
this is a distinction that won't matter to your average everyday viewer, but when
dealing with creationists, it does become relevant because permineralization is a process whose speed
is determined entirely by the conditions in which it is occurring. If the groundwater
in an area is extraordinarily hard that has a very high concentration of dissolved minerals,
then permineralization will happen faster to an organism buried in that area than to
one buried where the water is relatively soft. Remains in a dry environment will
take longer than those in a wet one to permineralize. If they're bacteria present
that speed up the process, the process will be sped up. It varies
wildly from case to case. But creationists don't like to talk about that.
They just want you to remember back to your high school days when you probably
learn that it takes millions of years to form a fossil and realize that that
was not an accurate statement, and so question the rest of what you learn
in high school science class. But if you actually learn about what researchers who
work with fossils regularly are saying, you'll soon come to realize that creationists are
painting a very limited picture of fossilization that lacks nuance that is crucial for having
a complete understanding of the process. And we also have multiple examples of soft
bodied creatures like squid, octopus, and even jellyfish which turn to goo in
a matter of days once they die being perfectly preserved. Yeah, it's pretty
much universally accepted that that's why such fossils are comparatively rare. But again,
you're not saying anything that is actually a problem for actual paleontology. The American
Geosciences Institute has a page on fossilization and says right out in the open,
as if they aren't even trying to hide anything, that for a soft bodied
animal to be fossilized, its body must be protected from decomposition. The body
is usually exposed to air and water with a lot of oxygen, so it
decomposes rapidly. The animal is likely to be fossilized only if it is buried
soon after it dies, or when it is buried alive. Certainly not the
result of some slow geological process but rather evidence of rapid breal and fossilization.
Indeed, why would it not be the result of slow geologic processes. You
haven't said anything that contradicts the fact that slow geologic processes are responsible for the
stratigraphic layers and they're corresponding fossils. You've just stated a couple basic facts about
how quickly something has to be buried, acted as though that meant buried and
permimeralized, and now you are apparently saying, aha, that means it can't
have happened slowly, all while ignoring the fact that we know that permineralization can
happen extremely rapidly in some conditions, which is something that I know Answers in
Genesis is aware of, as they have articles that try to claim that such
processes are evidence for a young Earth. Another obvious evidence that makes sense in
a global flood is fossils of tree trunks, some of them thirty feet tall,
standing upright or upside down through one or more layers. Again, this
is actually excellent evidence against a young Earth. You see, if younger creation
is more correct, in the vast majority of geologic features of the Earth,
including the fossils where the result of the flood, then we would expect fossils
that span multiple strata to be the norm rather than the exception, And yet
there are none, none except for trees. Well, strictly speaking, tree
like lycopods, but that's splitting hairs. My point is the only fossils that
exist which span multiple strata are plants that are capable of remaining upright for sometimes
hundreds of years after they die. Tellingly, these trees always show up in
environments where rapid deposition is possible. Most are found in river floodplains, meaning
that the sedimentary layers could build up quite rapidly Geologically speaking, around the tree.
There are also several examples of the layers surrounding the tree, each showing
its own signs of life, going on business as usual without seeming to notice
any worldwide flood. There are paleo soils with root formations indicating that there were
plants growing in the sediment that was surrounding the older buried trees. For that
to happen in Noah's flood, the tree would have to have been partially buried
and then had an entire ecosystem of plants grow in the sediment that it got
buried in before the new ecosystem also got buried all well underwater, but still
showing signs of terrestrial animals, including dinosaurs in some cases, going about their
normal lives. This doesn't make sense with the slow accumulation of layers over millions
of years, no, but it does make sense in light of the different
types of environments having different rates of deposition, and with these trees always occurring
in areas that have environments suited to rapid deposition, but instead it's a sign
that these poly straight fossils were breed rapidly, geologically rapidly. Yes, but
we're still talking in terms of hundreds of years here, far too long for
your one year long flood. Another example which tourists can visit around the world
rock layers that were deposited around the globe at the same time. Again,
you've got this one backward. This is evidence for plate tectonics, not a
young Earth. These layers were not spread out when they were deposited. They
moved as the tectonic plates moved. I thought even creationists recognize that plate tectonics
are a thing. They just assume that they move faster than is physically possible
during the flood. This is consistent with the Genesis account of a worldwide versus
a regional catastrophe. No, like I said, if the Genesis flood were
actually the reason for the majority of the rock layers, it wouldn't be rock
layers. It would be one big rock layer with the coarse heavy sediment being
mostly on the bottom and find green light sediment on the top. Since that's
not what we see even a little bit, we can rule out a global
flood as the reason for the rock layers. For example, the beat sandstone,
which sits on the basement rocks of Grand Canyon in Arizona, also appears
far away in Wisconsin and across the ocean in Israel and Libya under different names.
Well, I can't find much information on the T. Pete sandstone extending
all the way to Israel. The only thing I did find was a paper
published by Andrew Snelling, the creationist geologist who is most notable to me as
being the guy who copies his work from the other creations geologists, Steve Austin,
right down to copying his mistakes. So when Austin copied data from the
wrong column of a table for one of his papers that resulted in Snelling copying
Austin's incorrectly copied data for one of his papers, thus demonstrating the fact that
creationists don't rigorously check their work. There were at least three sites available online,
two papers and one AIG article that relied on this incorrectly copied data in
order to make their point, with the most recent one being published in two
thousand and one. So it's been over thirty years and all three of those
pages are still up and remain uncorrected, though amusingly, the original nineteen ninety
six paper by Austin was altered since I originally covered this back in twenty twenty.
They changed from saying that the age of the sunset creater Basaltan Arizona is
a range going from zero point two seven million years ago to zero point zero
nine million years ago to saying that it is zero point two seven million years
old plus or zero point zero nine million years So they've made a correction to
this paper since I last visited it, but the data remains copied from the
wrong column of the table. Anyway, back to the Sandstone, the only
information I could find. Linking the sandstone in Israel to the Tepete Sandstone was
in the form of a paper published in the Answers Research Journal by noted sloppy
geologist Andrew Snelling, where he just straight up asserts that the Tepete sandstone is
remarkably similar to the Ammouday Shalomo Formation sandstone, saying that there is no question
that they correlate as direct equivalents, both in stratigraphic position and in their makeup.
Well, I couldn't find a lot of information on the Ammouday Shalomo Formation,
which I'm probably saying wrong because that's going to be a theme in this
video. But what I did find was that it is likely the result of
a relatively short period of sedimentation in the lower Middle Cambrian, with the difficulty
in dating coming from the fact that it has zero fossils, or rather that
we have discovered zero fossils in it. The Tapete Sandstone, on the other
hand, is from the Middle Cambrian, so somewhat close in time geologically speaking,
but the Tepete Sandstone has an abundance of fossils, particularly trace fossils,
which are completely absence from the Omuda Shalomo formation. Aside from being sandstone and
having been deposited in approximately the same geologic period, there doesn't seem to be
much that is similar, and there's no real reason to assume that they were
part of the same depositional event. How could a local flood deposit the same
rock layer across multiple continents. I know you're speaking to other Christians now,
but the answer is it didn't. These were deposited in separate events, and
when I say events, I just mean depositional environments, because neither appears to
be the result of any singular catastrophic event. With the Tepete sandstone actually being
a great example of the type of layer I talked about earlier where you can
trace it latterly and you see the environment change as you go. The Grand
Canon also contains multiple flat layers that are sitting on top of one another without
any evidence of erosion in between. This is one of those claims that I
have never fully understood. Isn't the result of erosion a flattened smooth surface.
My understanding is that the great unconformity of the Grand Canyon is actually an erosional
surface. That is, there were physical features that were eroded away and have
resulted in the so called missing layers. With regards to missing layers, they
aren't really a problem at its most basic A missing layer could easily just be
due to a lack of deposition at that particular site. There is deposition happening
all over the earth today, but it's not uniform. My house is in
no danger of being buried in sediment anytime soon because there's not much in the
way of deposition happening where I am. So future geologists will not see a
layer of rock where my house is for this time period, where there might
be a layer that they would see that dates to our time period in another
location. So the area that my house is in would be a missing layer
just by virtue of the fact that a layer never formed there to begin with.
And we're ignoring human activity here. I recognize that the foundation of my
house, in the building of my house itself, would show up in the
geologic record, as well as the roads and everything that are around it.
We're just pretending that that doesn't happen right now. But it is also the
case that layers that are exposed on the surface erode away, and in particular
the Great unconformity happens to represent a period of missing layers that corresponds to a
time when most of North America was covered by glaciers, which are some of
the most efficient erodors in existence, and that would account for the nearly flat
contact point between the older layers and the younger layers in the Grand Canyon.
At any rate, this is where we get to say, follow the money
when it comes to geology, as scientists working for oil companies use old ages
and uniformitarianism as their basis for deciding where the oil should be, and unconformities
are an important part of that equation. If younger creationism worked better at predicting
where the oil would be, you can bet that they'd use it. But
it doesn't, so they don't. Evolutionary in clients scientists believe these were deposited
millions of years apart, and in fact other deposits relate in the interim in
other places. Yes, and for example, the Coconino Sandstone sits directly on
top of the Hermit Formation, but there's no indication of any layer deposited between
these two layers seen elsewhere. Well, I'm once again having trouble finding information
on that specific unconformity, but there is definite evidence of erosion in between the
Coconino Formation and the Torawheep formation that sits above it. There are planer surfaces
that is pretty much perfectly flat areas that cut off the tops of the cross
bedded dunes of the Coconino Formation. Also, I would be remissed to not
mention the fact that the Coconino Sandstone is an excellent example of Aeolian deposition,
that is, it was formed by sand that was blown around in the wind.
Creationists like to claim that the Coconino Sandstone was formed under water, because
if it wasn't, then it couldn't have formed in the flood, but there
are numerous issues with that. First, the cross bedding angle is consistent with
dry sand dunes, not with sand collecting underwater. Cross Bedding is when the
layering within a stratum is at an angle to the main bedding plane and indicates
deposition by either wind or water current. And as the grains of sand behave
differently in water than they do in air, the angle of the cross bedding
will be different. Typically, crossbeds deposited by water reach a maximum angle of
ten degrees. The crossbeds in the Coconino Formation range from eleven to thirty four
degrees, with an average of about twenty five to twenty eight degrees, which
creationists will claim is too low for dry sand dunes, which would usually be
between thirty and thirty four degrees. There are a few reasons why the Coconino
average is lower than thirty to thirty four degrees, with one of the main
reasons being that there are different processes that create cross bedding ineolien environments, many
of which are impossible in water, and some of which can have widely ranging
angles from zero to forty degrees. In some cases, like grainfall processes,
if you include the cross bedding that results from grainfall, that brings the average
crossbed angle down in the case of the Coconino Formation. At the end of
the day, what this comes down to is that despite having a low average
angle four wind deposition, it is an impossibly high angle for water deposition.
Second, there have been fossilized terrestrial vertebrate footprints, millipedd spider tracks, and
rain drops found within the Coconino Formation. Given how high up in the sequence
the Coconino Formation is, it would have to have formed long after all,
the ground had been covered in water in the flood model, and that is
indeed what creation is claim. But how does a rain drop hit dry sand
and fossilize on the bottom of a worldwide ocean. How does a spider crawl
down there or a reptile walk, Especially given that the whole formation is believed
by creations to have formed in a matter of days, the rate of deposition
required for that rapid a formation of such a vast area basically guarantees that any
trace fossils would be completely obliterated. Even if the terrestrial reptile made it down
to the seafloor during the violently tumultuous flood and somehow managed to walk in a
fairly normal looking track, the track would literally be sand blasted out of existence.
Supposedly five to ten million years passed before the Coconino sandstone was deposited on
top of the Hermit formation, without evidence of any erosion, the Coconino looks
like it was in fact deposited immediately on top of the Hermit Well. I've
done some more digging pun intended, and I still can't find specific details about
an unconformity between the Coconino and hermit layers. Pretty much all anyone wants to
talk about is the great unconformity down at the bottom of the canyon. But
really, I'm left wondering, what does it even matter? Do you think
that non creationist geologists are just randomly decided that they're missing layers in places for
the sole purpose of making the Earth look older than it is. Why would
that even be necessary? Without unconformities, we still have hundreds of millions of
years of rock layers at least, and if we bring radiometric dating into the
mix, we have rocks that were formed on the Earth that are over four
billion years old. There is no need to add missing layers in order to
add time. And even if the missing time were completely made up, the
geologic records still conclusively disproves a literal flood. So why do you guys even
care that there's unconformities? Wouldn't you call this evidence for a global flood?
No, the fun guy would not. Why would the lack of an unconformity
mean a worldwide flood? As mentioned earlier, if the rock layers were the
result of a flood, there wouldn't be distinct delineations between geologic layers, so
the that there are places where you can obviously tell that different types of deposition
happen in the same location but separated by time, demonstrates that the deposition did
not happen in one single event. Or how about this one. You can
go to many places on the planet and see row upon row of consecutively deposited
rock layers that were soft when deposited and then bent, sometimes drastically. Rocks
don't normally bent, they break because they're hard and brittle, But in many
places we find whole sequences of strata that were bent without fracturing, indicating that
all of the rock layers were rapidly deposited and folded while that you're still wet
and pliable before final hardening without fracturing. Come on, man, fractures are
clearly visible in every single picture you showed places where the bending rocks broke because
they're hard and brittle. One of the pictures wasn't even a picture, it
was a painting or a drawing, but there are still fractures clearly visible.
If you were going to hire an artist to draw bent rock for you,
you could have at least had them leave out the part of the formation that
they were drawing. That disproves your point. But again, the clear delineation
of the rock layers is your enemy here. If you claim that these rocks
are bent because the bending happened before they fully lithified, then we would expect
them to be muddled up together, with grain mixing happening more often than not
at the contact points, you know, since they weren't lithified and the grains
would have been free to move around. The fact that this is not the
case demonstrates that they were in fact lithified when they bent. So how does
this happen? Aren't rocks brittle? Well? Different rocks, unsurprisingly have different
properties. Some are more ductile or bendy than others, but also through the
rock cycle, rocks get buried deep underground, where they are subjected to high
pressures and temperatures, often not enough to melt them, but enough to make
them more ductile. To demonstrate this point, I took a crayon and attempted
to bend it cold. It did not bend, it just snapped in two.
I then took a second crayon and put it in a water bath that
was kept between forty and fifty degrees celsius for about fifteen minutes or so,
and when I tried to bend that one, it bent nearly in half and
then solidified in that new position after it was allowed to cool. But also
ignoring that demonstration about how temperature and pressure can change the ductility of a brittle
object, and returning to the no fractures claim, even if you find a
bent rock with no obvious fractures, which for the record, you did not,
one of the processes of bending some of the more brittle rocks involves repeated
fracturing under strain, the dissolving of some of the rock's own grains, followed
by the recrystallization of these same grains in a way that quote unquote heals the
rock, making it appear unfractured to the naked eye, but leaving behind microcrystalline
veins that are only visible under a microscope. So to recap here, they
do fracture when they bend, and even if they didn't, things get more
bendy when they get close to their melting temperature. So it's possible to bend
a brittle object without breaking it under the right conditions, which happen to be
the conditions that you find deep down in the crust of the earth where these
rocks were when they bent, And there's so much more. We find fossils
of sea creatures in a rock layers that cover all of the continents. Yeah,
fun facts that you seem to be overlooking. But environments have changed over
time. We're talking hundreds of millions of years here. There have been inland
seas that have come and gone, sea levels rising and falling, rivers forming
and drying up, and yes, even flooding. It would be weirder to
not find sea creatures on every continent, given old ages and evolution. For
example, most of the rock layers in the walls of the Grand Canon more
than a mile above sea level contain marine fossils in the layers that are indicative
of marine environments. Yes, but there are places like the Coconino Formation where
we have literal deserts sandwich between marine layers, which is not possible if they
all formed in the flood. Fossils, shellfish or even found in the Himalays.
Yeah they are, but guess what the Himalays used to be seafloor.
The Himalay is formed when the Indian Plate met the Eurasian plate and began the
process of subduction. This process basically scraped the sediment off the seafloor and piled
it up into the mountains that we know as the Himalayas today. And guess
what types of fossils you'd expect to find on a sea floor. The ones
we find on the Himalayas. We find extensive fossil graveyards and exquisitely preserved fossils.
For example, billions of nodeloid fossils are found in a layer within the
Red Wall Limestone of Grand Canyon. This layer was deposited catastrophically by a massive
flow of sediment, mostly limesan. To continue my trend in this video of
mispronunciation of words that I can't find anyone actually pronouncing online anywhere, I'm going
to quote Timothy Hellwool. Sorry Timothy. He's a hydrologist who put together a
view of literature that is relevant to flood geology as it relates to the Grand
Canyon. And he's also a devout Christian who contributes to Biologos, the Christian
organization dedicated to harmonizing science and the Bible. Quote. The Red Wall Limestone
consists of nearly pure carbonate rock with structure, composition, and fossil content,
contradicting the idea that it originated as pure calcium carbonate sediments introduced over the canyon
at the same time as the floodwaters became hot from the fountains of the Great
Deep. The Thundersprings member of the Red Wall is famous for its alternating light
and dark bands of fossil rich chirt and carbonate rock. Such numerous, long
and continuous beds of alternating composition are inconsistent with a single catastrophic flood event.
So the evidence for the flood is everywhere. Nope, not even a little
bit evidence against it. On the other hand, if your assumptions don't blind
you to it, literally the only way you could conclude that Noah's flood caused
the rock layers, Or if you start with that assumption and are blinded to
the evidence against that assumption, why would Charles Lyle have argued against that conclusion
when he admitted to a belief in a literal worldwide flood. If the evidence
actually supported all these rock layers forming in the flood, I'm sure he would
have been perfectly happy to find scientific confirmation of his religious beliefs, but he
did not. But ironically, in changing the clear meaning of God's word to
accommodate claims by fallible humans, many who don't believe the scripture and deny the
God of some Christians have actually done away with some of the best scientific evidence
to confirm the Bible's claims. Well, given how wrong the Bible is about
nearly every topic it discusses, that's probably for the best. That's it for
this one. Today's Common to the Day comes to us from Ajax Willis three
nine six two, who says, the thing that struck me was that in
order to find out what her husband truly wanted her to be, after explicitly
being told that she was perfect, the way she was was to go to
other men to find out what they wanted. This was on my live stream
with my partner, which is a new thing that we're doing. She's reading
me chapters of a Christian relationship book called Becoming the Woman of His Dreams,
and then we roast it together. That's on Tuesday's at one pm Eastern.
This is in response to the fact that the woman who wrote the book seems
determined to ignore what her husband tells her and then decides that she knows better
than him about what he wants in a woman. As she said in the
first chapter, he said that she is the woman of his dreams, as
she is now. Her response to that was to survey a bunch of men
about what they want in a woman so that she could compile their answers into
her book. But amusingly, she even ignored their answers, sometimes insisting that
she knows that even though men don't say it, they really want a woman
who praise all the time. Anyway, I chose this comment mainly as an
excuse to promote it. I set it up as a YouTube podcast, which
is a new thing that I don't fully understand. Apparently there's no RSS link
or a way to add the podcast to any normal podcast player, but you'll
be able to find the episodes on YouTube music if you live in the US.
I don't know. It seems weird, but I'm trying it out.
First three episodes should be up by the time this comes out, so I'll
leave a card to the playlist. Thanks for watching. I'll be back next
Friday with more, but if you need to get your Rhino fix in before
then, I live stream with service every Wednesday dight thirty Eastern on my other
channel, The Watering Hole, and I stream with my partner now every Tuesday
at one pm Eastern. Here thanks to Tim Robertson for being my Patreon and
sponsorship's manager, and special thanks as always to my patrons, Sarah Peasley and
all the rest who are the re uploads for click pait purposes that trick my
channel. If you'd like to make me redo old videos, you can join
us on Patreon for as little as a dollar per week over at Patreon dot
com, slash vice Rhino, or by supporting the channel and one of the
other methods that can be found at links doot vice rhino dot com, which
is also where you'll find links from other projects. If for whatever reason,
you want to send me stuff, my pelbox addresses in the description. See
you next time.