‘Green River blues’ raises red flag …

From John Clavis of the US, who affirmed: ‘I would certainly stand behind it,’ regarding his submission. AiG editors respond point-by-point, interspersed as per normal email fashion.

In this article [URL] titled ‘Green River Blues’, Paul Garner suggests that the flood produced the 20 million varves over the course of about a year (the time of the Flood).

Mr Garner suggests no such thing. He and AiG agree that this is a formation caused by a post-Flood catastrophe (or series of catastrophes). Did you actually read the article? And did you, or anyone else for that matter, actually count 20 million, or (more likely) is this an extravagant extrapolation from such as the 18-inch formation where the laminations are clear enough to count?

If so, a simple calculation would yield a rate of over 38 varves a minute, every minute, every day, for a whole year! Deposits of millions of millimeter-thin layers of alternating rough and thin sediment, all during a catastrophic event like the Noachian Deluge?

As sedimentation experiments by Berthault show, a fast moving current carrying lots of sediment with differently sized particles is the ideal way to form multiple laminae very quickly (see the video, Experiments in Stratification). Also, the photos in Sandy stripes: Do many layers mean many years? show that hundreds or thousands of layers (-fine-coarse-fine-coarse-) formed in less than an hour.

It’s the long-agers who have the problem:

• They have no experimental or observational evidence that the layers formed one at a time over millions of years.

• The very smoothness of the varves speaks against their having been laid down annually—they show that there was no time for the slightest erosion or biological perturbation before the next varve was laid down.

• There are fossils penetrating many layers. This means that many varves must have formed before the organism had a chance to rot. Operational science shows that fish break down in days even when protected from oxygen and scavengers. And alkali would hardly preserve them; rather, they help break down organic polymers—why else are alkalis used in dishwasher powders?

Come on! He will have to do better than that. Please forward this message to him.

We’ve done better than that—made sure everyone else sees the message too (and our answer).

His arguments against an old Earth are ridiculous and easily disproven.

The term ‘ridiculous’ is a poor substitute for rational argument. You have disproven nothing, since you start from a false premise about Mr Garner’s explanation and were ignorant of experimental proof of rapid lamination.

No god, no master!

Thank you for revealing your true motivation for promoting fallacious old-earth arguments—a desperate attempt to avoid the fact that you are accountable to your Creator and will have to face Him personally one day. And of course this anti-Christian motivation is hardly a rarity among anti-creationists—see Hutton’s a priori commitment to uniformitarianism before examining the evidence and Lewontin’s a priori commitment to materialism regardless of how absurd it may seem.

Editors