Why do you think

Calilasseia · July 19, 2023, 6:43pm

Poppycock. Bretz’s work on the Missoula floods does NOT support the “global flood” myth from your sad little mythology.

Bretz hypothesised that a large body of water moving quickly resulted in the features observed in the Channeled Scablands, because those features are not observed as a result of flows involving small volumes of water. He later identified the source of those flows in his 1923 paper, viz:

J Harland Bretz (1923):

This unique combination of topographic features of the Columbia Plateau in Washington has only one interpretation consistent with all the foregoing items. The channeled scablands are the erosive record of large, high-gradient, glacier-born streams. The basalt plain records the southern limit reached by the ice sheet from which these streams took origin. Before this glaciation occurred, the entire plateau of Washington was covered with a loessial soil, varying in depth from a few feet to 200 feet. This and the underlying basalt had been eroded to maturity and a network of drainage lines covered it. The major water courses of this mature topography were consequent on the warped surface of the plateau which descends in a general way from the northeast to the southwest.

The ice sheet approached and invaded the plateau from its northern high margin. It barely crossed to the headwaters of the consequent drainage. In places, it did not cross, but by blocking all other escapeways, its waters were forced to cross. By about a dozen different routes, at different altitudes and distributed along more than 150 miles of the ice front, water entered the mature drainage system. The capacity of the pre-existing valleys was wholly inadequate for the volume of most of these streams. Furthermore, gradients were high and the glacial waters eroded enormously, sweeping away the overlying loessial material, crossing low divides and isolating many groups of the maturely eroded hills to produce the anastomosing pattern of the scablands, biting deeply into the basalt to make the canyons and rock basins, and spilling into the Snake and Columbia in three times as many places as the pre-existing drainage had used.

Citation: The Channeled Scablands Of The Columbia Plateau by J. Harlen Bretz, The Journal of Geology, 21(8): 617-649 (November/December 1923) [Full paper downloadable from here].

So, no fantasy “global flood” then. Oh, and Bretz dated the event in question to 15,000 years before present, which is 9,000 years before your favourite mythology asserts that the entire universe was “created”.

Meanwhile, creationist waffle about geology is nicely dealt with here, viz:

Geologists today no longer subscribe to Lyell uniformitarianism. Starting in the late ninteenth century, fieldwork showed that natural catastrophes still have a role in creating the geologic record. For example, in the later twentieth century, J. Harlan Bretz showed that the Scablands in eastern Washington formed from a large flood when a glacial lake broke through an ice dam; and Luis Alvarez proposed that an asteroid impact was responsible for the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Actualism (modern uniformitarianism) states that the geologic record is the product of both slow, gradual processes (such as glacial erosion) and natural catastrophes (such as volcanic eruptions and landslides). However, natural catastrophes are not consistent with creationist catastrophism, such as “Flood geology.” First, they are much smaller than the world-shaping events proposed as part of the creationists’ catastrophism. More to the point, they still represent processes observed in the present. Meteorites, glacial melting, and flash floods still occur regularly, and we can (and do, as in the examples above) extrapolate from the observed occurrences to larger events of the same sort. The scale of events may change, but the physical laws operating today are key to the past.

Do you really think no one has dealt with your apologetics before, especially as some of the apologetics in question happen to be decades old?