June 6, 2004 ...
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June 6 is divided into three folders:
Yosemite Falls - voyage into Yosemite Valley and hike from the Valley Visitor's Center to the base of Yosemite Falls
Vernal Falls - Hike from the base of Yosemite Falls to the base of Vernal Falls, with the star attraction a rainbow formed from the mist of Vernal Falls
Half Dome - Hike from the top of Vernal Falls to return to Yosemite Falls
***
I happened to encounter a beautiful example of creationist reasoning recently:
The Permian Extinction: Good Science, Bad Assumptions
by Brian Thomas, M.S.*
http://www.icr.org/...
Robert Gastaldo, a geologist at Colby College in Maine, re-visited each of the previously-reported Permian extinction sites in South Africa. It took six trips for him to establish that the Permian extinction event is actually recorded in different rock layers instead of one continuous layer. He painstakingly traced each site laterally, and each time the characteristic layer fizzled out less than 100 meters away. Thus, this "new" version of history required a series of calamities that befell the earth, killing off its inhabitants in waves over a time period that supposedly lasted "hundreds of thousands of years."2
Gastaldo explained his logic to Science: "Because the boundary event bed doesn’t occur at the same position in the rock record, there can be no one, unique event."2 But this conclusion relies on the assumption that each rock layer represents millions of years of earth history. This also leaves the question of why different rock layers—supposedly separated by vast ages—have such similar chemistry that they are identifiable as P-Tr rocks. Is it likely that different asteroids with somehow identical chemistries impacted the earth every 50,000 years or so, producing the same signature in rocks each time?
Okay. That's what science say. Separate events separated by 50,000 years or so.
How then do the creationist interpret this scientific evidence?
Listen to this:
The Flood of Noah has powerful implications in the context of this P-Tr extinction research. First, the fact that many more land creatures survived this calamity than marine creatures makes sense if God preserved the land creatures in a giant watertight box built by Noah and his sons for that purpose.4
Second, perhaps the layers that Gastaldo traced were formed from tidal oscillations that occurred while the earth was still underwater during the year-long Flood. In that case, the geochemical signatures and extinct fossilized creatures found in these P-Tr boundary rocks could be remnants of volcanic debris and floating animal carcasses that were on the earth’s surface during those few days or weeks.
In other words, if the rock layers do not represent vast eons, then they quite possibly do contain evidence of "one, unique event." And given the reliability of the written record of the global Flood event, this possibility becomes probable.
Yeah ... from scientific evidence of episodic events occurring millions of years ago and separated by 50,000 years of time the creationists conclude that the Permian Extinction event occurred as a single event within the last 10,000 years.
Say what you will about the creationists ... they sure can compress a lot of time and a huge number of events within Noah's Flood. They may not sound rational and they may not even make any sense ... but consider the sheer magnitude of imagination and suspension of disbelief necessary to accomplish this compression!
"I tell you with certainty, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you." (Matthew 17:20)
A similar amount of pixie dust reasoning and suspension of disbelief is exhibited by the global warming deniers. Needless to say, these two groups of anti-science fundamentalists are joined at the hip.
David Mathews
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