@Ervin Taylor: The problem here is not with the evidence …

Comment on Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull by Sean Pitman.

@Ervin Taylor:

The problem here is not with the evidence for impact craters or the concept of large meteors hitting the Earth in the past; so large that they would have caused far more damage than “coastal flooding” – more like flooding over entire continents which were very “flat” and devoid of mountain chains during this time, even according to mainstream geologists. The problem is with the notion that such events happened 65 million years ago. There is strong evidence to suggest that these events occurred in recent history (such as the preservation of elastic soft tissues and sequencable proteins within pretty much all large dinosaur bones – a finding that is markedly inconsistent with long ages according to degeneration experiments based on kinetic chemistry; Link).

Also, while it is true that the geologic column contains evidence of meteorites or meteorite impacts (Link), it seems like these meteorites are far far more difficult to find than would be expected if the geologic column really had formed over hundreds of millions of years of elapsed time. The current rate of meteoric impacts over the entire globe (for meteorites greater than 100g in size) is about 14 per 10 km^2 per year (link). That’s 1,400 million meteorites per 100 million years (i.e., 140 million kilograms or about 280 million pounds) per 10 km^2. You’d think, therefore, that they’d be a bit more common than they actually are within the geologic record.

For example, if one considers the layers in the Grand Canyon from the mainstream perspective it would take an average of 100 million years to deposit about 100 feet (~30 meters) of sediment. Sandstone weighs about 2,323 Kg/m^3. There are 3 billion cubic meters in a 30 meter layer of sediment covering 10 km^2. That’s a total weight of almost 7 trillion Kg. Of this, 140 million Kg should be made up of meteoric material ( 0.002%). Another way to look at the same problem is that there should be enough meteoric material to make up about 60,000 cubic meters of sediment in 100 million years (0.002%).

Now, this might not seem like a significant percentage, but it is quite significant given that only a handful of meteoric rock fragments have ever been found in the layers of the entire geologic column on a global scale. There should be literally tons of them. Yet, geologist Davis Young (1988, p.127) writes that,

“The chances of finding a fossil meteorite in sedimentary rocks are remote. It is not to be expected.”

G. J. McCall, in Meteorites and Their Origins (1973, p.270), said,

“The lack of fossil record of true meteorites is puzzling, but can be explained by the lack of very diagnostic shapes and the chemical nature of meteorites, which allows rapid decay…”

It seems like rapid decay would have to be very rapid indeed – especially since far more delicate fossils are discovered far more commonly than are meteorites within the geologic column. Ironically, the evidence of meteoric impacts in the geologic column actually favors a catastrophic/rapid depositional model for the formation of the geologic record – i.e., this evidence strongly conflicts with your model for hundreds of millions of years of formation of the geologic record…

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com

Sean Pitman Also Commented

Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
Consider the following comments from the E.G.. White Estate regarding the origin of disease, suffering and death:

Suffering, other than sickness due to neglect of physical laws, is also caused by Satan and not the deliberate intervention of God. On many occasions she reinforced the teaching of Jesus on this point…

Her teachings regarding the cause of death, as well as suffering, flowed from the big picture of the great controversy between God and Satan:

“It is true that all suffering results from the transgression of God’s law, but this truth had become perverted. Satan, the author of sin and all its results, had led men to look upon disease and death as proceeding from God—as punishment arbitrarily inflicted on account of sin… Sickness, suffering, and death are [the] work of an antagonistic power. Satan is the destroyer; God is the restorer.”

Ellen White, The Desire of Ages, p. 471. and The Ministry of Healing, p. 113

http://www.whiteestate.org/books/mol/Chapt7.html

So, again, neither the Bible nor Mrs. White see diseases, like childhood leukemia, as being the result of a deliberate act or intervention of God…

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
@Ron:

Where talking about the ability to detect the need to invoke intelligent design to explain various phenomena that exist in nature – regardless of if the intelligent agent is God or your wife or some alien from Zorg.

The loaves of bread that Jesus made by Divine power were the obvious result of intelligent design. They looked like regular loaves of bread that your wife might make. No one could tell the difference by looking at them if they were placed side-by-side. Yet, one loaf would have been made by God and the other by your wife. The fact is that God can make what humans can make. What would be obvious, however, is that both loaves of bread required intelligence to produce. In other words, they weren’t the product of mindless process of nature or natural laws that had no access to deliberate intelligence.

In short, just because your wife’s intelligence is “natural” doesn’t mean that all natural processes have access to intelligence or that every natural phenomena requires intelligence to explain beyond the basic non-intelligent laws of nature.

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


Revisiting God, Sky & Land by Fritz Guy and Brian Bull
@Ron:

So, you think that if God is directly responsible for the death of anyone that He is therefore the direct cause of all sickness, disease, death, and destruction? Every natural disaster is God’s doing? – a miracle of Divine design and creative power?

Do you not see the difference between the miracle of something like Lazarus being raised from the dead and a tornado wiping out an entire town the other day in the Midwest?

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com


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