From: isaak@aurora.com (Mark Isaak)
Subject: A Response to the Flood FAQ
Reply-To: isaak@aurora.com (Mark Isaak)
Organization: The Aurora Group, Palo Alto, CA
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 92 19:11:42 GMT


Wayne Folta has responded to my flood FAQ by email, raising many points--
some valid, some not, and some which I can't evaluate myself.  He has given
me permission to post the email, but the whole thing is too long and diverse
to post at once, so I'm excerpting parts.  This posting deals with arguments
from Whitcomb and Morris.  I hope those who are familiar with those specific
arguments will comment on them.

I'll forego responding myself.  The quoted parts are from the flood FAQ.
All of the non-quoted material which follows is from Wayne.
----------------------

>   How were mountains formed?  Many very tall mountains are composed of
> 	sedimentary rocks.  If these were laid down during the flood, how
> 	did they reach their present height, and when were the valleys
> 	between them eroded away?

As the land was raised up and the flood waters settled down into the ocean
basins, mountains would be raised and great erosion would occur. (This
reminds me of the Mt. St. Helens video that Gish and company have. It shows
a valley with a little stream running through it. The valley's walls show
millions of fine layers of deposits. Three hundred years from now, people
might assume that the layers had been deposited over millions of years and
that the stream had taken hundreds of thousands of years to carve out the
valley. In fact, the deposits occured in three days, and the valley was
blown out by a huge steam/mud flood in half a day.)

In Whitcomb and Morris, they speculate that the water level fell, on average,
at 15 feet per day.

>   How does a global flood explain angular unconformities, where one set of
> 	layers of sediments have been extensively modified (e.g., tilted)
> 	and eroded before a second set of layers were deposited on top?
> 	They thus seem to require at least two periods of deposition (more,
> 	where there is more than one unconformity) with long periods of time
> 	in between.

Why long periods in between? Does this assume that deposits made during the
Flood would be from settling silt? Surely deposits could be made by moving
vast amounts of land much more quickly than that?

And how about the Colorado Plateau (Whitcomb & Morris, pg. 160), which
occupies 250,000 square miles, and which has been uplifted multiple times
(this believed because of disconformities in the stratigraphic sequences)
and yet is nearly perfectly flat? This causes a problem for non-Flood
geologies.


>[fossil sorting]

This section of questions does raise difficulties. But no more difficulties
than that spores and wood are found in Cambrian rocks (from Morris & Parker,
quoting Weier, Stocking, and Barbour's textbook). Also, Morris claims that
fossils are found out of order, with the terminology "stratigraphic leak"
applied to them. Then there is the difficulty (for evolution) where tens or
hundreds of millions of years of rocks are missing with no trace of
weathering or other possible removal mechanism. The terminology for such
occurences is "paraconformity", that is, something that an unbiased observer
would call conforming, but which an evolutionist "knows" cannot be
conforming because of the fossil contents.


>   How do you explain the formation of varves?  The Green River formation
> 	in Wyoming contains 20,000,000 annual layers, or varves,
> 	identical to those being laid down today in certain lakes.
> 	[From: bill@bessel.as.utexas.edu (William H. Jefferys)]

In Whitcomb & Morris, ("The Genesis Flood"), pages 424-428 talk about the
Green River formation. The book was written in 1961, so things may have
changed, but it says that the only real study of the formation was made more
than thirty years before that by Bradley, with all other papers pointing
back to this one.

They say that the 6 million years (to deposit) figure was based on Bradley's
estimates of an ancient drainage basin's size, slope, character,
erosibility, drainage characteristics, and the amount of water available.
They also say that the Green River formation has layers that are too thin
and too uniform over too wide an area to have been deposited in a normal
lake bed. That is, there are no signs of any stirring up of the sediments or
of any deposits that reflect flooding conditions where large amounts of
sediment would have been dumped into the lake and would have sorted out in
graded series.

They have pictures of true lake deposits and of the Green River shales, and
the difference in appearance is dramatic. From this, it seems to me that the
Green River deposits are not what they claim... That a lake sould not have
been so still and undisturbed form six million years that there is no sign
in the formations.


>   How could the flood deposit layers of solid salt --- sometimes meters in
> 	width.  This apparently occurs when a body of salt water has its
> 	fresh-water intake cut off, and then evaporates.  These layers can
> 	occur more or less at random times in the geological history, and
> 	have characteristic fossils on either side.  Therefore, if the
> 	fossils were themselves laid down during a catastrophic flood, there
> 	are, it seems, only two choices:
> 	(1) the salt layers were themselves laid down at the same time,
> 	during the heavy rains that began the flooding, or
> 	(2) the salt is a later intrusion.
> 	I suspect that both will prove insuperable difficulties for a theory
> 	of flood deposition of the geologic column and its fossils.
> 	[From: marlowe@paul.rutgers.edu (Thomas Marlowe)]

Whitcomb & Morris, pg 412-417. Two simplified explanations: 1) the deposits
were moved from elsewhere, where they had been since the creation; or 2)
they were created by a lot of heat in a short time rather than a little
heat over a long time (volcanic versus solar).

Also, salt domes are so large that a non-Flood explanation has problems,
too.  They claim that there are salt domes 3000 feet deep and deeper, and
Europe has domes that may be 15,000 feet deep. To have evaporated in place
would create enormous difficulties.

They claim that such large deposits are only explainable in terms of non-
sedimentary mechanisms. The later intrusion mechanism above, sounds like
this.


>   How could a one-year flood deposit the following: "In Yellowstone Park
> 	there is a stratigraphic section of 2000 feet exposed which shows 18
> 	successive petrified forests.  Each forest grew to maturity before
> 	it was wiped out with a lava flow." [J. Laurence Kulp, quoted in
> 	Strahler, _Science and Earth History_, pp 221-224.]

This is an easy one. These are not 18 separate petrified forests, but the
repeated, rapid, cataclysmic deposits of trees from elsewhere. The "trees"
found are in fact tree stumps, without extensive roots or branches. It is
well-known that tree stumps that are ripped up in floods often are deposited
roots-down. (For example, this month;s Science magazine shows such an effect
from a huge flood in Washington. Gish and company have also found the same
sort of event at Mt. St. Helens.)

Thus, what looks like "forest killed by volcano, tens of thousands of years
until new forest, which is killed by volcano, ..." could have actually been
entirely been deposited in rapid succession from a forest at another
location. In fact, I think they presented (at their seminar) information
that one of their group had gotten a Master's Thesis out of looking into the
different forest's tree rings and finding that the many layers were from the
same forest (tree rings corresponded).
-- 
Mark Isaak           "Every generation thinks it has the answers, and every
isaak@aurora.com      generation is humbled by nature." - Philip Lubin
Newsgroups: talk.origins