Uniformitarianism or catastrophism?

[Mr-Vaquero]

Hello,
Uniformitarianism and catastrophism are 2 ways to look at Earth's geologic history.

Uniformitarianism suggests for example that surface features we see on Earth are caused by long term uniform processes such as weathering or plate tectonics.

Catastrophism suggests that features on Earth can be explained by sudden, short events. Such as Noah's flood or a meteorite impact.

So, what theory do you like best and why?

[Jose Fly]

the current deep-time belief is that catastrophes happen once every 27 million years .

Citation please.

It is really nothing more than an ad hoc hypothesis because all landforms we see on the earth can be explained by catastrophism. Uniformitarianism was proposed by Hutton in an attempt to counter Biblical Catastrophism. But after 150 years we are right back to catastrophism. Actualism is a testimonial to the failure of uniformitarianism. All landforms can be explained by catastrophism.

To repeat, there's no way I'm going with your baseless say-so over the actual work of professionals.

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to Jose Fly in post #41]

To repeat, there's no way I'm going with your baseless say-so over the actual work of professionals.

I will have to say that this is another great example of the logical fallacy called "appealing to authority."

[Jose Fly]

[Replying to Jose Fly in post #41]

To repeat, there's no way I'm going with your baseless say-so over the actual work of professionals.

I will have to say that this is another great example of the logical fallacy called "appealing to authority."

LOL...yeah, I suppose that encapsulates the internet creationist's position...."If I say it is so, it is so. And if the professionals say otherwise, they're wrong.....because I say so."

Again I have to wonder....just who do you think you are?

[The Barbarian]

[Replying to The Barbarian in post #36]

So you are saying that catastrophism is not irrelevant and Lydell said that catastrophism is not irrelevant.

I'm pointing out that Lyell cited cases of catastrophic change. Catastrophism is mot a scientific term, but one can hardly argue that a theory that includes catastrophic change is the opposite of a belief in catastrophic change.

That is not what Josefly said. He said that Castrosphism IS irrelevant.

But just saying that they both happen does not end the discussion. Because then you have deside how much of the topography we see is due to uniformitarianism and how much is due to catastrophism.

This is true. And there is an abundance of evidence about this. Ironically, one of the most devastating sets of evidence against catastrophic change as the norm, is an example of catastrophic change. The Washington Scablands were formed by a huge regional flood. They look nothing at all like other water-eroded formations like the Grand Canyon or the Mississippi River valley.

[The Barbarian]

[Replying to Jose Fly in post #41]

To repeat, there's no way I'm going with your baseless say-so over the actual work of professionals.

I will have to say that this is another great example of the logical fallacy called "appealing to authority."

I don't ask my accountant about medical issues. Never occurred to me that I was committing a logical fallacy by consulting my physician. Could you explain how that is?

[The Barbarian]

Everybody believes that catastrophes happened and caused major changes on the earth. (except for Josefly, who believes that catastrophes are irrelevant)

I thought he said that castastrophism was irrelevant.

But everybody else does. As far as I know, there is no landform that cannot be explained by a water catastrophe.

Hawaiian Islands, Cascade Mountans, Grand Canyon, Mississippi Valley, Himalaya Mountains... It's easier to point out the few that can be.

But there are many landforms that cannot be explained by uniformitarianism

Perhaps you don't know what "uniformitariansim" means. It does not mean that all things happened gradually. But we do have lots of evidence for that. For example, we see that North America is moving away from Europe and Africa by a few centimeters per year (yes, we can accurately measure that rate). Since we discovered the Mid-Atlantic ridge where the ocean floor is moving apart, it is obvious that it's been going on for many millions of years.

which is why everyone believes that catastrophes are relevant. (except for some people on this forum.) But soft tissue in most dinosaur bones is quite a problem for those that believe dinosaurs lived 65 million years ago.

You've been misled about that. There was no "tissue" found. Tissue in biology, means a group of cells organized to a particular function. In fact, there isn't even confirmation of cells. What was found was some heme (a fragment of hemoglobin) and some collogen. So a few molecules of organic material. Which isn't surprising. We've found cholesterol from the Precambrian. But more interesting is what that heme told us. When investigated the heme turned out to be more like that of birds than like that of any modern reptile. Which is one more confirmation that birds are the last living dinosaurs.

[The Barbarian]

[Replying to DrNoGods in post #0]

Those walls look very stepped to me, with debris at the bottom typical of erosion from above over a long period of time.

They are stepped because they are made of different kinds of rock which weather at different rates. So that's exactly what you'd expect to see. But there places where there isn't a great deal of difference in weathering.


More significantly, there is no way for an entrenched meander like this to be formed by a sudden rush of water. Would you like to know how this formed? It's very easy to understand.

No, I am claiming that the evidence says that dinosaur bones are not tens of millions of years old. Proteins can not exist for 247 million years.

What is your evidence that they can't? Been a long time since I took Pchem, but iron-stabilized proteins have very, very slow decay reactions.

And there's the problem of things like the Grand Canyon, which are inexplicable without many millions of years. Would you like to know how we know?

[EarthScienceguy]

[Replying to The Barbarian in post #0]

I thought he said that catastrophism was irrelevant.

Are you saying that worldwide catastrophes did not happen?

Hawaiian Islands, Cascade Mountans, Grand Canyon, Mississippi Valley, Himalaya Mountains... It's easier to point out the few that can be.

Hawaiian Islands really have you never heard of Surtsey, or Parícutin in Mexico?

The Cascade Mountains and Himalayas mountains how about if we just explain mountain building in general from plate tectonics. I will also address this statement you made because it goes with mountain building.

For example, we see that North America is moving away from Europe and Africa by a few centimeters per year (yes, we can accurately measure that rate). Since we discovered the Mid-Atlantic ridge where the ocean floor is moving apart, it is obvious that it's been going on for many millions of years.

Let's first look at some observations and questions that need answers.
1. There is a graveyard of tectonic plates under the Pacific plate.
a. Why would there be a graveyard only under the pacific plate?
b. Why would there still be a temperature difference between the mantle and these plates? Why are the plates not melting and mixing with the mantle as they are subducted?
2. There are tectonic plates at the bottom of the mantle
a. How did tectonic plates sink to the bottom of the mantle?
Quote "For the most part, today’s subducting slabs can only sink so far, to about 670 kilometers below the surface, before the mantle’s makeup turns from a honey-like consistency, to that of paste — too dense for most
slabs to penetrate further. Scientists have suspected that this density filter existed in the mantle for most of Earth’s history. https://news.mit.edu/2017/ancient-earth ... slabs-0822"
b. If the mantle really has the consistency of honey how do deep earthquakes occur?

All of the above questions can be answered if the mantle density changed. The density can only change by the addition of heat.
Quote "Now, however, geologists at MIT have found that this density boundary was much less pronounced in the ancient Earth’s mantle, 3 billion years ago. In a paper published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, the researchers note that the ancient Earth harbored a mantle that was as much as 200 degrees Celsius hotter than it is today — temperatures that may have brewed up more uniform, less dense material throughout the entire mantle layer.

The researchers also found that, compared with today’s rocky material, the ancient crust was composed of much denser stuff, enriched in iron and magnesium. The combination of a hotter mantle and denser rocks likely caused subducting plates to sink all the way to the bottom of the mantle, 2,800 kilometers below the surface, forming a “graveyard” of slabs atop the Earth’s core. https://news.mit.edu/2017/ancient-earth ... slabs-0822"

“This seems to suggest there was a big change going back in Earth’s history in terms of how mantle convection and plate tectonic processes would have happened. https://news.mit.edu/2017/ancient-earth ... slabs-0822”

So the hotter the mantle is the faster the plates would move. So the question then becomes not whether the mantle was less dense than it is today at one point in the past but how large was the density difference in the past and whether it happened billions of years ago or a few thousand years ago. Because we can still have deep earthquakes which many believe can happen because the plate in the mantle are still hard and brittle and because we can still detect the temperature difference between the plates and the mantle.

This seems to indicate that the subduction did not happen long ago so that means that the plates had to subduct quickly by sudden heating of the plates. As the plates slowed vaulting and folding occurred. This all seemed to have occurred in the presence of huge amounts of water as evidenced by the large amounts of water in the mantle.

Fast subduction in the presence of water is really the only theory that makes logical sense given all of the observations that must be explained.

The Grand Canyon and the Mississippi Valley would be evidence of the erosion and deposition by large amounts of water that covered the earth during the tectonic event.

You've been misled about that. There was no "tissue" found. Tissue in biology, means a group of cells organized to a particular function. In fact, there isn't even confirmation of cells. What was found was some heme (a fragment of hemoglobin) and some collogen. So a few molecules of organic material. Which isn't surprising. We've found cholesterol from the Precambrian. But more interesting is what that heme told us. When investigated the heme turned out to be more like that of birds than like that of any modern reptile. Which is one more confirmation that birds are the last living dinosaurs.

I said proteins of collagens. Proteins cannot last millions of years. Large organic molecules are very easily broken down. And yes it is a problem for any deep-time theory.

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to EarthScienceguy in post #48]

Fast subduction in the presence of water is really the only theory that makes logical sense given all of the observations that must be explained.

Define "fast." If you are a YEC and think Noah's flood happened around 4500 years ago, and lasted only about a year (371 days from entering the ark, to disembarking), the rapid receeding of the waters (to where, nobody can explain of course) to cause all this catastrophism must have happened in mere days or weeks. It isn't logical to think that huge chunks of continental plates were broken off and rammed down deep into the mantle in a period of days or weeks. The normal subduction process takes millions of years.

If the violence of the mythical flood waters receeding was enough to actually cause something like this to happen, a measly 4500 years ago, there would not be a trace of anything that was living, or built by humans, from prior to the flood, except maybe tiny pieces of violently destroyed items. Instead, we have remains of civilizations, cities, written docoments, structures around the world, and an unbroken record of humans existing and thriving from many thousands of years before the flood period, through it, and to the present day. Not the slightest hint of evidence that any global flood happened as described in the bible, when it supposedly happened. It is very clearly a myth.

[Jose Fly]

Even though this is yet another topic that has been done to death, plus ESG's repeated ignoring of posts and questions, I'll go ahead and post this paper from a creationist journal regarding the flood, tectonic movements, and mountain ranges. It's pretty revealing (and kinda funny in a way).

http://static.icr.org/i/pdf/technical/N ... hanges.pdf

Baumgardner looks at the implications of the flood being triggered by the breakup of Pangea and subsequent massive and rapid tectonic movements. And what initiated all of that?

"In regard to an energy source, it would therefore appear that none besides the sinking oceanic lithosphere is required, provided the process can somehow be initiated and the mantle viscosity is sufficiently low."

Did you catch that? It was initiated "somehow". All righty then.....

Then he gets into the cooling of the lithosphere that had to have happened to get it to its current state. He runs through some brief calculations and concludes...

"It appears that some additional mechanism is required for cooling the oceanic lithosphere to its present thickness on a brief timescale."

Some additional mechanism? Again...hilarious.

Then he looks at batholiths (e.g. Sierra Nevada range) that also must have rapidly cooled and concludes....

"Again thermal conduction alone simply cannot cool a body so vast in the span of a few thousand years. Although hydrothermal fluids undoubtedly were present and played a role in the cooling history, the geological evidence does not reveal any large-scale hydrothermal plumbing which could have been the primary means for removing the heat. Some other mechanism seems to be needed."

Then he looks at the mantle and wonders how, given its current viscosity, rates of tectonic movements could have been so rapid during the flood. He assumes without evidence that...

"It appears almost essential to conclude the average mantle viscosity during the Flood and probably for many centuries afterward was several orders of magnitude lower than present to allow the large displacements of the continental blocks to their present positions."

So no actual evidence led to this conclusion, rather it's just assumed to be so because it is "essential" to the flood story. That's a pretty good representation of how creationism operates. Start with your story and then try and find ways to support it, even if you have to just make things up out of thin air.

Then he sums up these issues with heat...

"These observations all point to the need to remove large amounts of heat from extensive bodies of rock in the earth in order to account for the geological change proposed for the Flood. It is the author’s conclusion that this cannot happen within the framework of time-invariant physics. Therefore, an important clue as to the nature of the change that occurred seems to be that it involved a decrease in thermal energy throughout the planet."

He then proposes a model that again lacks an initiating mechanism and doesn't resolve any of the heat issues. About that, he concludes....

"The viability of the proposed model then appears to depend on a volumetric loss of thermal energy, not only from the newly forming ocean floor but probably from the bulk of the entire planet."

Interestingly, he also acknowledges that this model would result in "extreme intensity of both volcanic and tsunami activity", but he never wonders how a large wood boat would survive such conditions.

His final paragraph is actually a significant admission from a creationist...

"Finally, it seems evident that the Flood catastrophe cannot be understood or modeled in terms of time invariant laws of nature. Intervention by God in the natural order during and after the catastrophe appears to be a logical necessity. Manifestations of the intervention appear to include an enhanced rate of nuclear decay during the event and a loss of thermal energy afterward. Although many scientists do not readily entertain such possibility, Scripture indicates that God has indeed on rare occasions intervened in the laws of nature on a grand scale."

And thus we see two things: 1) why creationism isn't science, and 2) just how accurate this classic cartoon is...