It Is A Young Earth After All! Coal Creation. Coal, A Memorial to The Flood. Update.

For “Scripture Sunday:

To Decay or not to Decay?

These trees are fossilized in the UPRIGHT position!

“To the “man on the street,” one of the most impressive arguments for an ancient Earth is the testimony of sedimentary-rock layers. Scientists (and park rangers) show us examples like the Grand Canyon and present their theory so effectively that—as we observe layer after layer of sedimentary rocks piled one on top of another—the only explanation seems to be that vast amounts of geologic time must have been involved. Each division of the rocks, we are told, represents a time long ago, and an ancient world that long since has ceased to exist. Creationists, however, beg to differ, and suggest that a closer look at the “record of the rocks” suggests youth, not antiquity, for our home planet.

Embedded in sedimentary rocks all over the globe are what are known as “polystrate” fossils. Polystrate means “many layers,” and refers to fossils that cut through at least two sedimentary-rock layers. Probably the most widely recognized of the polystrate fossils are tree trunks that extend vertically through two, three, or more sections of rock that supposedly were laid down in epochs covering millions of years.

However, organic material (such as wood) that is exposed to the elements will rot, not fossilize. Thus, the entire length of these tree trunks must have been preserved quickly, which suggests that the rock layers surrounding them must have been deposited rapidly—possibly (and likely) during a single catastrophe like Noah’s Flood.

Trees, reeds, catfish, whales, and the other organisms with which the fossil record abounds—and that exist as polystrate fossils—did not die and lie around for hundreds, thousands, or millions of years while slowly being preserved. Truth be told, polystrate fossils testify loudly to a young Earth whose layers formed rapidly—and not very long ago! It is a young Earth after all.”  From: http://thecreationclub.com/to-decay-or-not-to-decay/

________

Coal Creation.

“Recently someone asked a question that went something like this “If the earth is only thousands of years old, how did dinosaur bones turn into coal and oil?” After reading this question, I realized that a lot of people really don’t know what coal and oil are made of and how they are formed. In this article, we will talk about coal, and next time, we will talk about oil and natural gas.

First, let’s do some “myth busting”. Here are three common myths about coal:

1. Fossil fuels – coal, oil, and natural gas – come from dinosaur bones
2. It takes long periods of time (millions of years) to make coal
3. Diamonds are made of pressurized coal (learn about the origin of diamonds here)

Dinosaur. From Pixabay.com

Without a doubt, coal is made of plant material – not dinosaurs. If you look through coal deposits, you will find lots of plant fossils. Where in the world did people come up with the idea that coal came from dinosaurs? Maybe because people automatically think “dinosaurs” any time they hear the word, “fossil”. But, there is so much more to fossils than just dinosaurs! Coal can be found in many different layers, or coal seems, around the world.  It can be found in layers below the rocks that contain dinosaur bones, in rock layers alongside dinosaurs, and in layers above them.  The most popular rock unit to find coal in is the carboniferous group, made up of the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian units (more about rock units and the order of the rock layers here).

The global flood, mentioned in the Bible, offers a much better model for coal formation than the ancient swamp explanation and actually fits better with what we see happening today. In this model, the violent flood waters would have gathered many different types of plants, turning them into peat. We see lots of different plant fossils in coal – including plants that don’t live in swamps. The peat would be deposited between layers of mud, where it would get the right amounts of heat and pressure, thanks to the mud layers on top of it and other flood factors. This flood model for coal is a “catastrophic transport” model, in which the plant material was transported away from where the plants grew and buried quickly.

Mount Saint Helens eruption. From wikimedia commons

Excerpts from: http://thecreationclub.com/coal-creation/

_________

Coal: Memorial to The Flood

“The Gippsland Basin, deposited at the edge of the Australian continent.

South-East Australia’s Latrobe Valley has some extremely thick deposits of brown coal which are mined to fuel several huge power stations. One bucket-wheel excavator removes the relatively thin overburden and exposes the coal seam. Another excavator digs the coal and drops it onto a moving conveyor belt for the power-station boilers.¹

The machines are immense, towering over the people who work on them. Indeed, a person could easily disappear inside one of the many buckets. Each excavator can dig up to 60,000 tonnes of coal each day.¹ Yet the coal seams are so thick that they dwarf these massive excavators, which must traverse the seam several times before the coal is completely removed.

Huge coal basin

The coal seams occur within thick layers of clay, sand and basaltic lava, which together form a 700-metre (2,300-foot) sequence of rocks, known as the Latrobe Valley Coal Measures.² These lie in a large, deep depression, called a ‘basin’, shaped like a triangle 300 km (190 miles) long and 300 km (190 miles) wide (see diagram below). Most of the basin lies under the ocean off the southern coast of Australia. Offshore the coal measures are estimated to be almost 5 km (3 miles) thick.

Latrobe Valley coal consists of a mass of very fine plant debris containing partly-decomposed plant remains.¹ It is clear that a great quantity of plant material accumulated in the past to produce such huge deposits of coal. 

This huge tree trunk, broken and dumped by watery cataclysm, is now coalified.

How did the coal get there?

How would such a great amount of vegetation collect together in one place? No-one alive today has ever observed such a process. All scientists can do is to invent plausible explanations based on what they think may have happened.

“It is consistent with the devastation of Noah’s Flood, which would have uprooted the entire pre-Flood biosphere and buried it with huge quantities of sand and mud.”

For those who believe the Bible, the presence of such great quantities of buried vegetation is easily explained. It is consistent with the devastation of Noah’s Flood, which would have uprooted the entire pre-Flood biosphere and buried it with huge quantities of sand and mud.

However, geologists who do not believe the Bible base their explanations on a different philosophy. They are committed, from the outset, to explaining the evidence using what we see happening today. There has only ever been one global Flood, and according to the Bible it occurred some 4,300 years ago. Since it can’t be observed today, these geologists will not accept that it happened in the past. Thus, they try to explain everything by slow and gradual processes over millions of years.

For these brown coal deposits, they say that the vegetation accumulated as peat in a swamp during ideal climatic and geologic conditions.¹ They say the swamps formed on floodplains near the coast,² which were slowly sinking and eventually inundated by the ocean.³

Then there are a number of distinct ash layers that run horizontally through the coal. If the vegetation had grown in a swamp, these distinct ash layers would not be there. After each volcanic eruption, the volcanic texture of the ash would have been obliterated when the swamp plants recolonized the ash, turning it into soil. Not only is there no soil, but the vegetation found in the coal is not the kind that grows in swamps today. Instead, it is mostly the kind that is found in mountain rainforests. The best match for the mix of vegetation in the coal occurs in the mountains of the western half of the island of New Guinea some 1,200–2,200 metres (4,000–7,000 feet) above sea level.⁴ Similar vegetation is also found in the mountains in Australia, Malaysia, New Caledonia and New Zealand. The kinds of plants that make up the coal did not grow in a swamp on a floodplain.”   

Excerpts from: http://thecreationclub.com/coal-memorial-to-the-flood-tas-walker/

_________

Update:

On Monday, Roy did some more floating on the new wall between the living room and bedroom, and while that was drying he installed the light fixture that goes in the pass-thru bar, and started to wire the similar one which will go over the kitchen sink.  It will also have it’s own switch, too.  I bought some energy-saving LED light bulbs for these light fixtures because the ones that came with them gave out a lot of heat, so you know they were making the meter spin faster.

One afternoon my front door lock seized up. I couldn’t open the front door, so I took the screws out and took the handle off. I had to slide the latch bolt over with a screwdriver each time I had to go out until Roy arrived the next day, then he fixed it.  The house had moved and the strike plate was catching on the lock’s bolt.  I had filed at the strike plate a little, but he took it off, put it in the vise to straighten it and then put it back.  But the strike plate for the deadbolt was also off a bit, so we had to fix that.  The house had moved during the hurricane with all that rain going under it, and then moved back again as everything dried up.

Zack showed up one morning, so we started to get the house ready for winter while Roy did some more floating the wall.  Another day, we moved and inspected some of the stuff stored here, discarded some, and took pictures of other items to list them for sale.  Zack and Roy had Friday off, as they were working other places, and I was getting ready for the church the next day, like doing my hair, setting out my clothes, etc, and cooking.

As my freezer is full, I had cooked a big batch of boneless, skinless chicken breasts that I had been given.  Some was donated to Zack, but I knew I would never eat the rest of them, as I am not really that crazy about chicken.  I prefer organic foods like bison, lamb, some beef, cod or salmon.  Often I am given food by the other people at the church.  We share when we have an over-abundance of anything, so the best place to use up the chicken breasts was for the church potluck.  So I sautéed onion, green and orange bell-peppers, tomatoes, and garlic, mixed that with Cream of Mushroom soup and the chicken.  It was a great hit.  I also made some Brown Rice in Chicken Bone Broth, Broccoli with Fontina Cheese Soup and some Crockpot Apples for dessert, so I went to church with four different sizes of crockpots.

The Bible readings were Gen. 12:1-17:27, Isa. 40:27-41:16, and Rom. 4:1-25.  and the Teaching was more about Martin Luther’s life and accomplishments which have shaped a lot of religious beliefs over the last 500 years.

We had a good crowd and some visitors from the sister church in Cisco TX who haven’t been here for a year as he has been battling cancer, and won.   It was so good to see him, his wife, daughter and granddaughter again.  When we all went into the dining room we had lots of good dishes to eat, some chicken, some lamb, some beef, many veggies, salads and desserts.  As usual there was more than we could eat so some folks had ‘doggie bags"’.   Sometimes we put left over food in the freezer for the next week.   Waste not, want not!

Today is Guy Fawkes Day in the United Kingdom

“Guy Fawkes Night is annually held on November 5. It is sometimes known as Bonfire Night and marks the anniversary of the discovery of a plot organized by Catholic conspirators to blow up the Houses of Parliament in London in 1605. Many people light bonfires and set off fireworks.” More at: https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/uk/guy-fawkes-day

The weather is still crazy, and we are having to run the AC each day.