Well since there are no flood claims of substance here (nor do any appear to be forthcoming), I took the time to watch the Surtees video above and respond to it. I'm still asking myself why exactly, but I guess it's because a) no one has seriously challenged anything I've said here so far and I obviously need to move things along; b) so I can show that my objection to being expected to refute entire videos is not due to an inability to do so; and c) it's fun to use my brain and learn things. Would that the same could be said for Surtees, who is obviously lacking some basic science education.

So, Surtees accepts that the geologic column exists. He says “that more or less reflects reality . . . the empirical evidence is there.” He also accepts that the oldest layers are at the bottom and the youngest at the top. His explanation of how this ties in with a global flood and young earth is one I haven't heard before; at least he can be given a little credit for realising that there are problems with the standard YEC model, but his personal model has similar problems.

He says that the layers in the geologic column show that fossils of the “rapid breeders” are on bottom layers because their numbers would have immediately been more numerous after coming off the ark, hence more chance of them being fossilised. He puts the flood layer at the Precambrian-Cambrian border.

Unfortunately for Surtees, all this reflects is wishful thinking, ignorance of basic science, and an unwillingness to check out his hypotheses.

Take this “rapid breeders” nonsense. Some amphibians are slow breeders (look up salamanders) and some mammals are rapid breeders (look up mice). Yet we know from the fossil record that amphibians evolved before mammals. He's really grasping at straws here. I won't even go into his weird ideas about animals magically shrinking and their reproduction being put on hold while on the ark.

There are also major problems with pinning a global flood layer to the Precambrian-Cambrian boundary. You're really looking at the Ediacaran here, which is the period immediately before the Cambrian. How do you reconcile a global flood layer with:

Death Valley, California – vertical burrowing by an ancient animal, treptichnus pedum, and arthropod scratch marks. They were doing this during a flood, and the evidence was preserved?

Hewitt's Cove, Massachusetts – rhythmites (varves) – formed of many alternating layers of finer or coarser silt or clay. Such layers cannot be deposited by turbulent water.

Browns Hole, Utah – aeolian (wind-deposited) sandstone with wind ripples.

To add to this, you'd expect a turbulent global flood to deposit a large sedimentary layer across the world. It doesn't exist in the Ediacaran or anywhere else, which is no doubt the reason why most YECs refuse to say where they think the layer must be.

Another very obvious problem with this model is the fact that the flood is supposed to have killed all land life on earth apart from those in the ark. Where are the fossils? The fossils we see are sorted in the geologic column, with trilobites at the bottom, then dinosaurs, then humans. Yet we find none of these in Ediacaran layers. What's more, in the layers above, they are sorted in a specific order around the world (not jumbled up or hydrologically sorted as they would have been in a flood). I've talked before here about animals such as horses and whales, for which we have more or less complete fossil records, and asked why, if they did not evolve, we see something in the fossil record that goes like this: a modern-looking horse at the top, then a slightly different horse in layers underneath, then a slightly different one underneath, until you get to an ancestor which is quite different from the modern horse, and which itself has a record of having evolved. It's clear that Surtees' ideas are not going to hold water, so to speak.

Another glaring error is his dismissal of radiometric dating. He gives two examples and says they disprove all radiometric dating, which is nonsense. I was able to find who came up with the dates for the Uinkaret Plateau lava flows in the Grand Canyon which say the lava flows are older than the canyon itself: it was Steve Austin. He made a basic error in taking his 5 samples from different lava flows in the formation, when he would have known full well that the samples need to come from isotopically homogenous (with respect to each other) materials. His dates actually tell us the time since his samples were last homogenised with respect to each other: a mantle age. This is the same person who dated recent Mount St. Helens lava flows with an inappropriate method for the type of formation, then declared radiometric dating methods invalid. In my book, being deliberately deceptive is worse than being ignorant. Surtees probably doesn't know who Austin is, doesn't care where this information came from, and thinks it proves his point when really all it shows is that he doesn't understand what he is talking about.

Some other points of note . . .

Creationists seem to like to categorise geologists as being “uniformitarians” – it's a classic strawman. Modern geologists are well aware that catastrophic events occur now and in the past, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, localised floods, meteorite impacts, and landslides. Yet accepting these does not mean that there are not also rock-forming processes that must by their nature be slow (like we discussed about the formation of oil). For example, blueschist forms as basalt in rift zones as part of new oceanic crust, then travels underneath the ocean (this is plate tectonics and it is a slow process) until it reaches a subduction zone. As it travels 15-30 km underground, it is metamorphosed by high pressures into blueschist. It then travels by a variety of means back to the surface, usually as part of mountain belts. This is not a rapid or catastrophic process.

Some truly amazing stupidity to add to this:

Horses would be a “kind” on the ark, which would include “things like zebras.” Current understanding is that zebras diverged from proto-horses 4 million years ago. Surtees is telling us that this hyper-evolution and speciation took place over a few thousand years, yet at the same time he denies that evolution happens.

“Pre-flood dinosaurs were small and vegetarians.” Not because this is what we see in the fossil record (it isn't), but because these are the logical contortions you have to do when “the Bible says so.”

Extinct animals got that way not because “they were primitive,” but because “they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.” This is just bizarre. “Primitive” and “Non-primitive” are not scientific categories. He also does not explain what he means by “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He's not going to be publishing in scientific journals any time soon. I wonder if he even understands the basics about ToE and natural selection if he's saying things like this.

“Formation of fossils requires rapid deposition.” He attempts to back up this claim by talking about Mesozoic rocks in Kansas. The rocks are a kilometer thick and cover a time period of about 180 million years. He assumes, averaging things out, that this means 1mm was added every 180 years, and then wonders how carcasses could form fossils instead of decaying. What he's actually proved is the depth of his ignorance of geography and a general lack of common sense. There are areas today where sediment is not being deposited at all, such as the Canadian Shield. Layers of the geologic column have been completely eroded in some areas – that's how we get sedimentary rock. So no, averaging it out won't work here. What's more, he has no understanding of how fossils actually form. In deep anoxic waters, such as those where varves form, the decay process slows dramatically. That's how we get peat bog bodies.

Moving on, he says the half-lives of isotopic elements are billions of years, so radiometric dating is not appropriate for samples less than many millions of years old. Of course it would have been easy to check this. You can use the uranium series for dating younger rocks, for example; this is done by chemically isolating the sample from the uranium source and dating the daughter elements: Uranium-234 has a half-life of 248,000 years and Thorium-230 has a half-life of 75,400 years. (This can also be used to date animal and human bones and teeth.) Other dating methods include cosmogenic; and information from tree rings (dendochronology), ice cores and varves. RAZD presented evidence for the correlation of these methods in a past thread, A Well Aged Earth, and I've recently presented evidence for the correlation of methods for older rocks in the Geologic Column thread.

In a nutshell (or case, more like): this guy has got it wrong. Why not learn some real science. It doesn't have to contradict belief in the Bible; there are Christian sites out there that explain this. You could have a look here for example:

Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective