theophilus wrote:There is plenty of evidence of a flood. The earth is covered with fossils of living creatures that were buried in the flood.
No, theophilus. You give yourself away by adding those last six words, which turn your supposed evidence into ideology. It is true that the earth is covered with fossils, but that is not evidence for any kind of flood. The answersingenesis article is rather naive, and factually wrong in important details:
"Wouldn’t we expect to find rock layers all over the earth that are filled with billions of dead animals and plants that were rapidly buried and fossilized in sand, mud, and lime?" Not really, no. We would expect the flood to have eroded the land, washing sediment into the ocean basins in huge quantities, but not sediment over the top of the continents. Once the flood had covered the highest land, it would not then erode anything, and such sediment as it carried simply as a result of being disturbed would not amount to very much. So the sediment layer on the bottoms of the ocean would be much thicker than the layer over the continents. That is exactly the reverse of what we find. Furthermore, we would certainly not expect the sediment, wherever it settled, to sort itself and the "billions of dead animals and plants", into the complex layers in which we actually find it. So no, the geological record does not support this statement.
"Though at the top of the sequence, this limestone must have been deposited beneath ocean waters loaded with lime sediment that swept over northern Arizona (and beyond)." No. Limestone is not generally from eroded sediment, but from organisms living peacefully in the sea, and the Kaibab limestone is no exception. It is strong evidence that no turbulent conditions occurred in that area as it was being laid down.
"The crinoids, for example, are found with their columnals (disks) totally separated from one another, while in life they are stacked on top of one another to make up their “stems.” Thus, these marine creatures were catastrophically destroyed and buried in this lime sediment." No. Again. Crinoid fossils are common because of their carbonate "vertebrae" which remain after the connective tissue has decomposed, but, since there's nothing to hold them together, they fall apart. Crinoids buried suddenly remain in one piece, as there is no time for the connective tissue to decompose. The evidence cited is evidence for gradual settlement and decomposition, not for catastrophic destruction.
"All geologists agree that ocean waters must have buried these marine fossils in these limestone beds. So how did these marine limestone beds get high up in the Himalayas?" In two words, plate tectonics.
"We must remember that the rock layers in the Himalayas and other mountain ranges around the globe were deposited during the Flood, well before these mountains were formed." Clever, but no cigar. The rock layers of which parts of the Himalayas are formed were indeed deposited before the mountains formed, but there is no evidence that they were deposited during a flood. Quite the reverse; they show every sign of having been deposited very gradually, over thousands of years.
"There is only one possible explanation for this phenomenon—the ocean waters at some time in the past flooded over the continents." Nonsense. There are much better explanations.
And so on.
The reason this evidence isn't recognized is that most researchers don't believe the flood took place and they assume that the fossils were formed over millions of years.
No. That's not the way we 'researchers' work. We don't assume a conclusion and then make the evidence fit it. We first look at the evidence and then derive a conclusion. The neatly sorted layers of rock, each strata containing a different collection of fossils, look as if they were formed over millions of years. We are familiar with the effects of floods, and the geological column looks nothing like it.
