Sorry, somehow I completely missed your comment here:
http://friendlyatheist.com/2008/03/23/how-to-ruin-a-trip-to-the-museum/#comment-144882

discussing fossils, etc. But I see Cautious has already addressed most of the points and he obviously knows a lot more about fossils than me so I’ll let most of it go.

A few remarks though:

Your question: “If there was a global flood, where are the stone tools in the deep layers?”
We simply may not have found stone tools in the deeper layers. The human population was likely sparse prior to the Flood, and tools more prevalent following the Flood.

But we see a progression from simple to more complex tools in upper layers. Layers no where near where the dinosaur fossils are for example. If you use the concept of hydrological sorting to explain the apparent history of life, the heavy tools should not all be in the top layers arranged in their own order.

Or if you then assume all those top layers of tools happened after the flood, you have a harder problem of explaining how so many layers formed over a span of thousands of years when it appears to be physically (and radiologically) millions of years.

Hydrological sorting can also not explain the multiple extinction events in history, or the distinctive K-T boundary where we find the unique iridium deposit suggesting an asteroid impact. Why would churning flood waters create a single layer of the element iridium? Here Occam’s razor must be applied.

Your question: “~What would convince me that a global flood never happened?~”
I would have to deny the God I have come to know personally and discredit His Word I have come to rely on as authoritative. The more I see of nature, the more it attests to his workmanship.

Not necessarily. You would only have deny your interpretation of that word. Maybe you are just mistaken? If we suppose a creator did form the universe, how do you know it wasn’t the Hindu’s god Brahman? I don’t think there is anything in nature that shows the fingerprints of one god over another. Or maybe the “true” god creator is something no religion has ever described? Supposing a “god” or “force” was the prime mover of all things still leaves you a million miles away from any specific creation story written down by a human society.

So I guess the question should be, “what would convince you that your particular interpretation of Genesis is incorrect?”

Maybe Yahweh really is a poet and not a lawyer, and his day is like a billion years. But then, that’s the problem here. Interpretation, scripture and revelation aren’t sciences. We can’t have good scientific evidence to get at the “true” meaning of a book written by unknown authors.

Personally I think if there really is a God who created all things he is more like a physicist than a poet. He would not deceive us with an Earth that seems old or stars that appear millions and billions of light-years away, yet whose light rays were “actually” created in transit to fool us. In fact I would bet that his true revelation would be found in the heart of mathematics, etched in the very fabric of reality for anyone to find and learn from, not in some dusty myths from a random desert tribe.

But I don’t believe any of that. It isn’t in my nature to believe things without good evidence. However, it would be pretty cool!

This post was addressed to nycatheist, but I’m hijacking it.

I don’t have an adequate answer to your pollen question, but I did read where in the Grand Canyon, fossil pollen grains have been found in “Precambrian” rock which is supposed to be a time before seed plants evolved.

Your quotes around Pre-Cambrian are unnecessary, the geological record is quite clear that there was a period of earth history before multicellular animals with hard, fossilized parts were common. This is the Pre-Cambrian. It’s the first ~4 billion years of the Earth’s history.

The paper that claimed that fossil angiosperm pollen was found in very old rocks in the Grand Canyon is: Burdick, C. 1966. Microflora of the Grand Canyon. Creation Research Society 1966 Annual 3(1):38-50. Burdick wrote a few more papers on the subject, during which time he seemed less and less adamant about his claim. In 1981, Chadwick re-examined the area that Burdick claimed he found pollen from, and was unable to find any pollen. Chadwick (1981) raised the possibility that Burdick’s sample was contaminated. Different creationists take different sides in the debate.

We simply may not have found stone tools in the deeper layers. The human population was likely sparse prior to the Flood, and tools more prevalent following the Flood.

Isn’t it…odd that we find the first stone tools with creatures that are more ape-like than we? And that as we get closer in time to the present, these stone tools, and the organisms found in association with them, show more complexity?

Given the rare circumstances for a fossil to occur(dead animals typically rot or get eaten), the animal examples you gave being small in size/weight compared to dinosaurs likely floated and rotted.

Indricotheres were as big as a T. rex and yet, somehow, they show up in the fossil record millions of years later. Fossil whales like Basilosaurus are as big as Mesozoic marine reptiles, and yet they don’t show up in the same fossil biochronological zones.

Size is not the reason why there is a fossil record that shows order. Temporal succession, evolution through time, extinction of old species, and the origin of new ones… these patterns, these natural patterns, explain why fossils from the Big Badlands of South Dakota are different from those of Hell Creek in Montana.

Tom, what’s your location, I could give you better more spatially-compatible samples than referring to localities from the great plains.

If the Big Bang was disproved tomorrow I wouldn’t cry. If Darwin’s theory, quantum theory, or the Big Bang theory were shown to be incorrect in next month’s Scientific American it wouldn’t bother me a bit. In fact I would love for some interesting scientific revolution to happen in my lifetime. If it was solid good science with good evidence, it would be very exciting.

Me, too! I’m not married to evolution or any other theory (ok, maybe gravity ) but I am pretty insistent on any disproof being rigorously scientific, as I expect you are.

I’m already pretty awed at the changes and increased understanding in my lifetime. I’m especially fascinated by what we have learned about the human brain, much more than I am interested in evolution, and would much rather spend my time reading about that, if those damn creationists and ID folk would just give it a rest and leave science alone ….

And yes, I’m procrastinating too, it’s so much more fun!

To call that ‘ease of understanding’ is to either completely misunderstand or completely misrepresent it.

Claire is right of course. I chose to use the phrase “easy to understand” in my too long comment above without thinking. I think you all know what I meant though. (Occam’s razor, parsimony, etc.)

Dangerously known as “common sense”