Poop and Flood Geology

Naturalis Historia discusses how the existence of poop in the sediment column is a big problem for Young Earth Creationists.  It is a long post so I don't feel too bad in offering this extended quote:

Young earth creationists propose an alternative history. In their history a massive global flood deposited 10s of thousands of feet of sediments in this area over a period of a few days to maybe a few months. In the past 4000 year erosion has then sculpted the rocks into these mountains and hills.  Therefore, these flood geology theories of YECs would undoubtedly view the rock formations from which these fossils were found as having formed right in the middle of a chaotic global flood only 4-6 thousand years ago.
So how does a group of strange-looking 8-foot long reptiles survive the initial stages of a cataclysmic global flood in which 15,000 feet of sediments have already been deposited below where they gathered together? Even if they were running or swimming around during the flood and managed to find their way onto a small piece of land between waves how come these feces appear to have aged before being preserved (many show desiccation cracks as if they dried out before they were preserved)?  Also, how does a pile of loose digested plant material survive the next huge wave of water bringing sediments in to cover them up.  In this case these piles of feces look to have been preserved by a layer of volcanic ash being dumped on them. How does that happen in the middle of a global flood? 

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Naturalis Historia had previously discussed animal feces during the flood here.  The blogger described dinosaur, bird and fish feces as well as the action of dung beetles.  Here is an excerpt from the dung beetle portion:

Dung beetles take dung from large dung piles of herbivores like elephants and roll pieces up into balls, roll them away and bury them for safe keeping like a squirrel buries nuts.   The presence of these in the fossil record is yet another evidence that where they are preserved represents a place were the normal ecology of the world was working rather than a large global catastrophe.  For dung balls to be found in burrows, now only did there have to be fresh dung around but it had to be there long enough for beetles to do their work.  Again, in the young earth creationists view these beetles were living near the end of a global catastrophe after 20,000 feet of sediments had suddenly been laid down and yet they were still alive managed to find fresh dung and had time to roll it up and bury it before being covered by the next giant wave of water that would then cover them with many new layers of sediments that would become rock. 

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The Rocks Don't Lie is my favorite book on the subject.  As I read the book, I understood what the author was writing about but now, around a year later, the clearest and simplest evidence I remember from the book for an ancient Earth rather than a global flood was in discussion of Grand Canyon sediment.  Montgomery points out that the layers include sediment, then shale, then sediment, then shale, then sediment.  Sediment and shale require different processes to form so at least five different events had to have occurred.  He also points out the 'discontinuities' - parts where the column had built up, then been worn away, creating gaps of millions of years.  Silvestru had claimed that such discontinuities were simply guesses by secular scientists and chose to ignore any evidence to the contrary.

Silvestru's Global Flood: Part one

This was becoming a long blogpost.  To make commenting on specific points easier, I have broken my discussion of the video below into a few different blog posts. This is the first post and mostly discusses the whole video in general.

In early September, 2011, my coworker posted on a Facebook group comments and a link to a video of Dr Silvestru discussing how he feels the global flood occurred.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-BaMAt4dnE

The relevant part of the video is more than an hour long and it took me some time to watch it, take notes and research, to the extent I was able, his claims.  Although my coworker’s post mostly matched the aims of the Facebook group, discussion was squashed by the time I was able to add my comments.  As an aside, I do not exactly feel that my coworker was being restrained or censored so much as the limitations of Facebook Groups made his discussions unwieldy.  He might reasonably feel his views were censored by a philosophical group that should be anti-censorship, but I hope he can also see that Facebook’s everything-on-one-page format becomes annoying when multiple threads are simultaneously drawing comments.

Perhaps inviting people to an off-site location, on a Google Group or the like, would have been wiser and allowed me to post this critique somewhere.

Anyway, by the time I began writing this critique, the discussion is no longer ongoing at that Facebook page and I am not sure where to put this.  That’s part of the reason I have been coy about naming my coworker.

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One reason Silvestru's arguments are hard to rebut is that neither I nor his target audience have the background to really understand or debate his claims.  I believe that my unnamed coworker is in the same position.  Some of his arguments, though possibly not difficult to learn to follow, appear arcane enough that I have passed on the business of trying to learn the necessary background.

I think Carl Sagan described what I think to be a similar phenomenon in discussing the work of von Daniken.  I used “I think” twice as I going from memory and cannot find his exact quote.  He said something like,

“With my fellow astronomers, I felt the astronomical aspects of his claims were weak, but the archaeological claims appeared strong.  Then I spoke to archaeologists and found they felt the archaeological claims were weak but the astronomy looked strong.”

I feel there is something universal here.  Generally, if we do not have extensive knowledge in a field, we are inclined to accept the claims of others.  Sagan wasn’t an archaeologist, so he provisionally accepted the validity of the archaeological claims.  Silvestru’s audience, myself included, are not knowledgeable about geology, so it is easy to accept his claims.  Even if we do not, it is hard to determine if and where his errors or misrepresentations are.

Near the beginning and at the end, he mentions large and dramatic events that I can agree happened.  He starts his talk by mentioning large-but-local floods, and suggests there was a 1,000 year long ice age.  At the end of his talk, he shows a chart with three extinction events.  I am not sure that he did, could, or even should tie them into the main theme of his talk.

Why shouldn’t he tie them into his talk?  As an evolutionist, I think that the problems regarding the story of the Flood are too big and diverse to ever be answered, but that same size means that Flood proponents should focus on segments or individual issues and offer some in-depth solution to each...eventually bringing them into a whole, a ‘modern synthesis’ if you will.  Silvestru does first step; he focuses on a possible explanation for the Flood without looking into the Ark or it’s contents.  Silvestru isn’t a naval engineer or biologist and, to his credit, he doesn’t try to be.

At some point though, he needs to dig into the larger picture.  I would, someday and from someone, like to see a Young Earth Creationist timeline that includes the Age of the Earth, the Flood, the rise and fall of the tower of Babel (and an explanation for why the endeavor was stopped, but manned journeys to the moon and unmanned journeys much further have not been), about when Silvestru’s one-thousand-year Ice Age (I presume this is Veith's 600 year-long ice age as well) occurred and how and what caused the other two extinction events Silvestru touches upon.  Also, when did the huge-but-local flood occur in the US (come to think of it, he may have said it happened at the end of the Ice Age).

Somewhat related, I would also like some connection to other reasonably well-dated events, such as construction of the pyramids, which I think occurred both before and after the Flood.

Should a reader choose to look into this, I can definitely accept error bars or +/- or the like.  I do understand that exact figures are hard to find dealing with events thousands of years in the past and would not imagine using uncertainty (or uncertainty only) as a reason to attack the claims.  Still, I do feel that such a timeline would immediately show the problems with the Biblical narrative.  Some events could be simultaneous, like the building of Babel and an Ice Age mostly affecting Europe and other Northern locales, but I think that agreed upon dates for Egyptian, Greek, Persian, Indian, Chinese and other civilizations would make the gap between Flood and recorded history very busy.

Either as a discussion of one of Silvestru’s first points or as big-picture aside, I need to mention uniformitarianism  vs catastrophism.  I am by no means an expert, but I think creationists (as catastrophists) overly simplify the uniformitarian view, both original and as it is understood today.  Uniformists accept gradual, slow change through local and entirely natural forces.  This might typically mean erosion and storm damage, for example.  However, it doesn’t deny the effects of earthquakes, large floods, volcanoes, or even meteors.  Uniformists do accept that some catastrophes do happen.  I suppose that if the flood was caused by entirely natural forces, as Silvestru tries to show, it could even fit into the uniformist view.  Let’s bar the Flood for the moment but still note that, for example, the Uniformist view allows both slow and fast burial of fossils.

Now, onto the video.  At 51 minutes, Silvestru states “The Genesis Flood happened after the natural laws were set and should therefore be explainable by existing scientific methods."

Note that I try to quote accurately,

but I do not promise 100%.

I do promise not to distort quotes deliberately.

 I find this to be bad theology.  If the Flood can be explained by natural laws, I see two problems.  First, there is no need to add God to the narrative.  Because Silvestru has kept his focus narrow (and I do approve of his focus), he does not defend the building of the Ark or any of the biological claims.  Perhaps there was a Flood, life survived on high mountains (Silverstu will later offer a depth of 3km and does not go into detail about mountains growing after the Flood), and people of the Bible saw the evidence of the Flood and added it - with embellishments - to the Bible.

 A second problem works like this:  God created the world and built in the Flood so that two thousand years after He (pardon the crude description) hit the ‘start button’, calamity would strike.  If he didn’t know humanity would become so evil they needed wiping out, then we should see unnatural causes for the Flood.  If he did know, even before he started, he is no better than a three-year-old frustrated with his toy for not working right.

 Silvestru asks the rhetorical questions “Where did the water come from and where did it go?”  Admirably, he goes out of his way to reject two other Creationist explanations: the Vapor Canopy and Walt Brown’s Deep Earth water deposits of water.

 His mechanism is described from fifty-four minutes to one hour, although he adds to that description somewhat through his talk.  It seems that when plate tectonics started, it started fast and brought a lot of hot mantle to the surface.  The description sounds reasonable as he describes it, but I don’t think I could do it justice.  Even if I want to give it the best and most positive possible description, even if it is entirely true; my description and eloquence would fail.  Let’s just say that the ocean floor becomes quite hot.  This causes it to expand and rise one mile and super-heated water to evaporate and rain heavily around the world.  For more detail, watch the video.

 In twenty to forty days, Silvestru claims, the ocean floor raised one vertical mile and either at the same time or soon afterwards, the continents sank by a mile.  Again, I haven’t even tried to understand the evidence for this, or even looked for it.  As I heard it, it seemed reasonable that if part of a sphere swells, another part of the sphere should dimple.

Now on to specific points, some of which I can argue against, some of which, I cannot.  To facilitate commenting, I have broken up the rest of the video into several blog posts.

Coconino Sandstone: Silvestru's Global Flood, part 2

This is part of a longer post about Silvestru's video containing evidence for a Global Flood.  I chose to break up the posts so that individual claims can be better discussed.  The video can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-BaMAt4dnE

Note that the video starts with about thirty minutes of introduction.  I believe the original poster of the video has left some suggestions of where to start watching to skip the intro.

In this post, I look at silvestru's claims for the Coconino Sandstone.  As I mentioned in my original post, some claims, both for and against evolution, are beyond my ability to comment.  I am smart enough that I could learn more about geology and the like, but feel that it would take too much time to devote to a hobby.  The second set of points in this post are an example of what I am unable to argue for or against and, as part of trying to be fair, it is an example from the old-Earth side of the argument.

At some point between 51 minutes and one hour, 4 minutes (I didn't record the timestamp for this one) we come to evidence I can at least imagine I have a handle on.  Silvestru claims that the Coconino Sandstone, found around the Grand Canyon was laid down during the Flood.  I don’t see how this can be as there are footprints of terrestrial animals among those layers.  Some of those prints look be from newts, small aquatic vertebrates.  Others are from scorpions.  I feel this is good evidence that the location was not under three kilometres of water at the time.  There could have been water, but it would have to be fresh and relatively still - far less than the full torrent a global flood requires.

 Newts, indeed all amphibians, cannot tolerate salt water, and this water would be very salty for reasons that Silvestru gives and others that I will offer. At one hour twenty-six minutes, Silvestru describes ‘mineral-rich water’ permeating the mantle and sediments, so there is one source.  I feel that salt of the oceans, plus that of various salt lakes and deposits means that the total salt content of the water would be near current ocean levels and completely deadly to amphibians.  The fast moving water- carrying great quantities of fine silt - would also clog the newt’s gills.  It would also be somewhere between irritating and lethal for any animal with gills. This is one of the big-/small- picture problems I have with Silvestru.

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Below is an argument against Coconino being caused by a global flood.  There is little need to comment on it as I do not have the background to defend or dispute it.  I hope it does not seem dishonest to display a claim like this then back away from it.  In my defense, I have offered examples from Dr Silvestru where I do the same.    My goal here is to show the limits of my own understanding and to suggest that others in the same position (of ignorance) should not use such arguments.

Regarding the Coconino Sandstone: Again, I am not a geologist.  Here, I will quote someone about the Coconino Sandstone discussing desert sand.  I suppose it is possible to determine that the sand in sandstone was laid down by wind in a desert rather than by silt in water, but I don't have the background.

That prompts a rather obvious question: How does a giant desert form in the middle of a global flood?The Coconino sandstone contains lots of evidence that it formed on land, not underwater. It has tracks made by terrestrial animals, for example, which is a real problem for flood geology. What were terrestrial animals doing walking around, leaving tracks in sand dunes in the middle of a global flood, especially after thousands of feet of sediments had been deposited by that flood beneath them?

A commenter at that link also discusses the shape and size of the sand grains.  

Just to stick with the Coconino Sandstone for a while longer - it's also a second source sediment, if I remember my geology correctly. But even if I don't: a look through a hand lens at the sand grains will show you nicely rounded, nearly spherical, almost uniformly sized grains. That means they most likely have gone through at least two cycles of erosion and deposition.

For more on both subjects, Talk Origins has some citations.
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Updated May6: Another blog discussing the layers of the Grand Canyon.  An excerpt, there are more layers discussed at the link.

The Grand Canyon’s “layers”, on the other hand, are not all comprised of material one would associate with a volcanic eruption. In fact, they are comprised of a vast series of strata of different types, each requiring a distinct and long-lasting depositional environment in order to have time to form. The bottom layer is the Vishnu Group, mostly granite and precambrian rock. Above that, it’s all sedimentary rock, each layer deposited in an entirely different environment, in roughly this order from the bottom up:
Tapeats Sandstone: This is the oldest of what is called the Tonto Group, large strata formed at the edge of an ancient body of water called the Tonto sea. 300 feet thick, comprised of near-shore and sandbar deposits from the edge of that sea.
Bright Angel Shale: 325 feet thick, full of trilobites and other brachiopod and mollusk fossils, as well as lots of tracks, trails and burrows from animals. Formed in a shallow marine environment as the Tonto sea encroached further on land.
Muav Limestone: The last of the Tonto Group formations. 375 feet thick, with more trilobite and brachiopod fossils and yet more invertebrate tracks and trails. This was deposited as the Tonto sea encroached even further on the land.
Redwall Limestone: 500 feet thick. Like most limestones, this one is made up of the shells of sea creatures, made of calcium carbonate, after they die and settle to the bottom of a shallow sea. A 500-foot thick limestone takes an incredibly long time to form and it’s not possible for all of those sea creatures whose dead bodies are in the formation to have lived at the same time. This formation requires a shallow, relatively tranquil marine environment for a very long period of time in order to form.