This bok has been on my list for a while and I finally got around to listening to it. Just finished it. It's a good book, nicely written. I enjoyed it the way I enjoyed the podcast by Garner and Wood when I started listening to it. It comgrs all the ain creationist issues and I discover yet again that on my own I discovered most of th creationist angles on them. It's fun to find out that I think like a creationist. That is, I'm nnot just some lone woldf crackpot going off on my own weird tangents.
Nevertheless there are as it turns out a few issues where I'm at odds with the mainstream of creationist thinking. I still think the diversitfication problem is not that much of a problem and doesn't need any fancy solutions, that the most natural way it would have happened -- thinking now of how the animals and humans disperesed to all parts of the glob e after getting off the ark --all that needs to happen to get different versions of a creature, different varieties, different races which is the scientific term for them, is for smallish groups of them to get isolated from one another and interbreed only among their own group for many dgenerations. Depending on how large the origknal group was it swill take more or less time to get the whole group sharing a general appearance that difers from all the other groups of that Kind.
Paul in his book describes his himself bvery briefly, calling it genetic drift, in relatio to the human populations as they spread out and founded what everntually gecame tribes and nations. So we got a whole variety of Europeans, all looking sort of similar to each other but also different, a whole slew of Africans looking siilar to each other but each one group having its own characteristics that differentiate it from the others, same with the Middle Eastern groups and the Asian groups. There are in one sense lots and lots of races around the world.
It's all a function of the way the genome is costructed, the many genes that have two alleles being the main engine of variation. It's an incredibly ingenious system. Genes for many different traits having three modestwo homozygous, one dominant, one recessive, and one heterozygous. That's all it takes to produce a great variety of varietiy as it were. And some traits are governed abby more than one gene so the variations can get quite refined.
And all it takes for variations to show up in the outward appearance of the creature is sexual recombination of these genetic possibilities over some number of generations. Every population that splits off from a larger popualtion, OK call it daughter population from parent population, carries in its individual members a different percentatge of alleles for all its traits than the original population or any of the other populations. All it takes its that different percentage of possibile combinationtes to bring out different characteristics from the other populations. And it can happen veryh fast, a matter of how manhy generations are needed to get the whole range of possibilities sexually recominaed.
The Pod Mrcaru lizards started out with five male and female pairs, brought by scientists from the mainland to be isolated on a nearby island, for which they didn't retrun for thirty years. At which time they found the lizards having grown to a vwry large popuation all with the characteristics that differ from the parent population in having larger heads, stronger jaws and eating tougher kinds of food. Id discussed this in an earlier posyt. My guess is that if they'd returns after only ten years they would have found this change already characterizing the new population. Twenty anyway. IThere's no reason why it woushooluld take a long time. With only ten individuals to start the poiupulation it should ahve taken only a few years to bring out changes, esepecially since I've found out that lizard females may lay up to twenty eggs at one time and do it three times a yearr. That's fast population grown and fast sexual recombination of the genet frequencies.
But I didn't want to talk about that. Why did I/ Oh well. What I wanted to talk about was Paul Garner's chapter on Catastrophic Plate Techtonics, which is the current model of how the Flood of Noah played out. I had trouble with this idea when they presented it on their podcast, and I'm having even more trouble with it as he lays it out in this book.
I can't trust myself to get this all right but I'll do my best. He seems to be saying that it all started with subduction, the movement of sea floor under the edge of a continent and down into the mantle of the Earth. I don't get how it could ahve started with subduction because I think of subduction as what ahappens when the contiewntn has been forced into the sea floor, pushed into tiit. It's hard to think of how subjduction could have begun without the movement of the continent and that's what needs ewxplanation, how the continent got moving in the first place.
He did talk about the Foundtains of the Deep with is the scriptural description of the first thing that happened to get the Flood going, the breaking up of the fountains of the deep. But he also describes them as scattered over the surface of the Earth, which makes no sense if they are really of the deep, which means I would suppose, at the bottom of the oceans, not on the surface of the Earth. So that flummoxed me too.
He talks aboiut subduction as becoming a runaway process, speeding up due to tempaerature changes brought about by the friction of the movement and characteristics of the eart's mantle. OK, but if it's moving so fact, and he says it gets up to meters per second of subduction, then the continent ti sea floor is subducting under is also moving very cfast across the expance of the ocean. Right/ As I understand it, subduction occurs at the west edge of the Americas as they are moving into the Pacific ocean. I don't know if the eastern edge of Asia is also subducting, it seems maybe it is since the movement would be eastward for that continent, and that means the two contiennts would be moving very fast toward each other across the PaCIFIC OEAN, BEING WITHIN N HAILING DISTANCE AS IT WERE IN A COUPLE OF YEARS OR SO. aFTER THE fLOOD WAS OVER WSINCE THAT ONLY TOOK A EYYEAR BUT . ok SO AT THE END OF THE fLOOD THE SUBDUCTION WOULD AHVE STOPPED BUT STILL THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN A LOT OF DISTANCE COVEREDAT METERS PER SECOND AND WOULDN'T THAT means that the continents were much closedr to gether than they actualy are today?
Also he talks about how the Atlandtic Ridge is "replacing" ocean floor. But no, there was no ocean floor there originally, what it is doing is creating ocean floor. The Atlantic ocean was created by the breaking up of the original single supercontinent, which I thought was called Pangaea but Garner calls it in his book Rodinia. In any case that original continent was split into the Americas on the west and Earup, Africa and Asia on the East, the Atlandtic Ridge being the line where magma rises from the mantle and spreads to east and west of the ridge to form ocean floor of basalt as it cools.
I appreciate the idea that basalt would have been warmer and ride hjigher on the mantle than colder sea floor would and could br an explanation for how sea water got bpushed up over the continents. The problem with that is that the same thing isn't happeneing in the Pacific Ocean. There is no subduction in the Atlantic because there is no old sea floor to subduct, but it beasdues the direction of movmenet being in the wrong directio, but in the Pacific subjection is what is happening to the original sea floor and there is nothing to replace it on that dside of the contentn. There is no ridge there with magma welling up to create new sea floor and besides there is no place for it to create it anyway. I'm not sure how the cvolcanic acativity that created the Hawaiian Islands is explainsed in realtion to the subduction and the movement of the continents.
On his model the Flood came to an end when the new basalt ocean floor cooled and dropped to a lower level, proving space for the water over the contnents to drain. But thjaathat's only one cocean where that would have been occurring, or maybea other oceans are doing the same but not the Pacific.
jSomething is Wrong with This PIcture and I can't figure it out. If I'm seeing it wrong I'd like to understand how. To this point I'd been objecting to descriptions of the tectonic movement during the Flood being quite violent which I figured would ahve made it impossible for the Geologic Column to form as neatly as it appears to have done as seen int eh GFrand Canyon area and in core samples from various places.
Oh another thing is if the movement of the continents was happening during the Flood the fact that we have identical strata and fossil s on both sides of the Atlantic wouldn't have formed, eouwoultd it/ There is no ievidenc t evidence that I know ifof of strata with fossils in the order of teh Geologic Columm being laid down on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, to cross the ocean snd continue on the opposite continent.
I think this post must be a particularly messy one with typos because that's how it feels under my fingers and I really wish I had a way to wcorrect it but all I can say is sorry and hope it doesn't making reading impossible.
So I'm flummoxed about all this and would send it to Paul Garner for his explanations except that when I've sent things to those guys they don't respod, at least about my own theories, and he's busy and I don't want to do it that way. Maybe I'll send him a link eventially and find out if he has anything to say then. Or maybe somebody else who understands this stuff will answer. Thank you whoever you are if you do.
faithswindow@mailcom
Later. It occurred to me that if both Asia and the Americas are subducting sea floor at such a high rate as meters per second that they would have been laterally pushig the water up over the land, a differnt way of flooding than the rising of the basalt wsea floor in the atlandts c which is apparently the catastrophic plate tectonics explanation. but if you want to get the land flooded why not take whatever you can get.
I still don't know what the fountains of the deep were or area. I don't think it could be explainaed by the guysers Gardner describes as occurreing when the rising magma at the Atlantic ridge meets the cold sea ater. Whtever happened scripture describes the fountains of the deep as occurring just abouit simultaneously with the opening of the windows of heaven which started the forty tdays and night of rain. Sometimes I think maybe they need to rethink the canopy idea because some source of water above is sorely needed for the asscribtural description to work.
Whatever the fountains of the deep areae they must b water. That's how the word fountains is always used I think. Something causing the sea floor or Warth's crusst to break up in the oceans is what seems to be meant. Water beneath the floor? It's been suggested somewhere. Then the sea floor would eventually sink back to a lower level as that chambeaer beneath it was emptiesd. Or something like that. But it would explain the flood's coming to an end and the water having a place to go.
I've soetimes wondered if the great heat generated by the flood and the tectonic movement wouldn't have been some of the expalnation for the reduction in the amount of water as i wuld have radiated furiously into space, espcially if there were no atmosphere there aft erher Flood to be a barrier. THe atmosphere would have rebuilt itself slowly afte rthe Flood as water evaporated with less heat.
Oh, one more thing I just remembered. I had written to the Let's Talk Creation site about maybe udoing a podcast on the standard timing of evens around the period of the Exodus in the BIble as I'm aware of the film and thinking of DVID rOHL WHO CHALLENGES THE STANDARD TIMING WHICH petty much eliminates the biblical account. He gives new evidence which brings it\\the archaeological and biblical accounts closer together, validating the biblical description of events. Todd Wood answered my query that there are other studies of that time period that also find more correspondence with the blibical account and yes he's aware of David Rohl's work on it, and why don't we just leave it to the experts, and besides it's not really within the range of topics they want to discucuss on their creationist podcast. Well, but Paul Garner mentions it in one of his chapters of his book so sorry but it is within the range of topics you could discuss there. Iit's about validating the bilbical timeline in general which is of course pertinent to the creationist endeavor. Grner doesn't mention Rohl, I jus happen to be rafamiliar with his stuff but I'd be happy to hear a discussion of all the different reworiings of the time line.
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