Yes, multituberculates have something to say about the ongoing division among YECs about where to locate the Flood/post-Flood boundary in the geological column. Is that boundary to be found in the Quaternary, at the Cretaceous/Paleogene boundary or way down in the Pennsylvanian Period? These are the three primary models that YECs have proposed. The problem for YECs is that each proposal has the goods on the others. When I read their critiques of each other I agree with all their reasons the others must be wrong. Why might that be? Maybe because the boundary can’t be found in any of these locations. The inability of YECs to find even a modicum of agreement on this topic should tell you that maybe there is a deeper problem with the Young-Earth hypothesis.
So what light can multituberculates shed on YEC geological models and this Flood boundary problem in particular? And what exactly is a multituberculate anyway? You will have to watch my video to find out.
YECs have a similar and I believe even worse problem in trying to explain fossil tracks and trace fossils, which are abundant and widespread throughout the most of the fossil record. There are tens of thousands of such sites at contless geologic horizons from Cambrian onward (with the animals represented matching the body fossil record), most indicating calm or at most very shallow water conditions, leaving no place for them to put the Flood. Especially problematic are vast dinosaur nesting sites, which ironically occur in geologic strata when many YECs say the Flood was at or near it’s peak. See: http://paleo.cc/ce/tracefos.htm
Likewise YECs have a huge problem explaining fossil succession for countless groups of organisms, which fly in the face of Flood Geology. Their few proposed explanations (ecological zonation, hydrologic sorting, and differential escape) not only fail miserably, but often make matters worse. For example, if animals sorted during the flood, then small and medium sized dinosaurs should sort together with many large animals, while prehistoric marine creatures such as ichthyosaurs and mosasaurs should be fossilized with dolphins and whales, but we never find this. Especially hard for them to explain are the fossil distributions of microfossils such as forams, diatoms, pollen, etc. which you have covered before. One might thing some of the “new” creationists would wake up and smell the coffee, and realize that as you say, their paradigm just doesn’t work, but most seem too devoted to their narrow and rigid interpretation of Genesis to do that.
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The very first slide says ‘Mulituberculites’ instead of ‘Multituberculates’.
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Joel, I must admit I had only watched about half your video when you made your comments. Now that I’ve finished it, I realize that you present even more powerful and varied lines of evidence against all three Flood-boundary models. Not only not only do none of them begin to explaining the geologic and geographic distribution of fossil multituberculates, but the problem is greatly compounded by their trace fossils (burrows) in the same layers and in association with dinosaur tracks—requiring environmental conditions and time spans quite impossible during a violent global Flood. Plus as you note, one can cite hundreds of similar problems for countless other fossil groups.
So while I realize you were probably trying to sound overly harsh toward YECs, as I see it your comments that “maybe” these models don’t work because YECism is wrong are overly kind and understated. There is no maybe about it. Their models starkly conflict with massive amounts and types of fossil evidence, as well as corresponding radio dates. It’s a shame YECs so many YEC seem to be largely unfamiliar with a lot of this evidence, while others ignore or neglect a lot of it, or twist themselves into pretzels trying to explain what they do know about, with little success.
A classic example are articles by AIG and ICR attempting to explain the lack of human fossils and tracks in most of the fossil record–suggesting that it may be because the human populations were small or not widely distributed before the Flood, or that humans were able to escape the Flood waters better than other creatures, etc. Besides some problems even with these suggestions (for example, why would God use a global Flood to destroy a few small population of humans?) it obscures that the problems with fossil distributions extends way beyond humans. Even just considering mammals, they have to explain why also missing from the entire Mesozoic and Paleozoic are countless other groups of large modern mammals, including apes, monkeys, horses, cattle, deer, sheep, goats, cats, dogs, hippos, rhinos, titanotheres, elephants and kin, sloths, anteaters, bears, giraffes, camels, bats, seals, manatees, walruses, etc. No YEC/Flood models begin to adequately explain this. We’d have to believe that even the slowest moving mammals like sloths were somehow better at escaping floodwaters than swift-running dinos like velociraptors and ornithomimids, not to mention flying reptiles (pterosaurs). Likewise, we’d have to believe that somehow all whales and dolphins managed to avoid fossilization in all Mesozoic sediments while countless marine reptiles of similar size, shape, and habitats did not, and that none of these Cenozoic or Mesozoic marine creatures got fossilized in any Flood-deposited Paleozoic sediment, despite all living in the same oceans. Likewise, they have to explain how no modern bony fish like bass, carp, and even bottom-dwelling catfish, flatfish, etc got fossilized anywhere in the Paleozoic, while countless species of jawless fish and placoderms were fossilized there in large numbers. On top of this are the distributions of microfossils like diatoms and forams, which as you’ve pointed out before, make no sense in any YEC?FG model. In short, all YEC Flood models fail miserably.
I can understand how some young YECs and those with little research experience have not yet realized these things (since in my youth I also tried to make YECIsm work), but how some YECs with considerably scientific education continue to hold onto YECism for decades, rather than consider that their assumption of a literal Genesis may be flawed, is perplexing to me. Then again, many are engineers, doctors, chemists, etc, with fewer biologists, even fewer geologists, and almost no paleontologists, so maybe many don’t have much more knowledge of the fossil record than the average lay person.
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