Examining ATI Wisdom Booklets: Booklet 2: Science-ish – Disciplines Of Science

Geology
- That’s a special kind of crazy….most people would describe geology as the study of the solid portion of the Earth and the processes that change it.
- “Thorns and thistles” are examples of plant defense processes and should be back in with biology, not in geology.
- If the layering found in rock layers was entirely based on the Flood, the sedimentary layers would always have to end in finest layer on top with more coarse sediments settling lower and lower in the rock column. You don’t have to believe me; you can replicate the flood at home with some different soils, some water and a clear plastic container with a lid.
  - Dump some gravel, sand and topsoil into the plastic container. (This is the land before the Flood.)
  - Fill the container with water. (The Flood!)
  - Cover the container and shake for as long and as hard as you want. (The Flood!)
  - Put the container somewhere where it won’t be disturbed and wait until the soils settle out. (This is the bit where the waters are receding.)
  - Look at where the gravel, sand and topsoil separate out in the bottle. Assuming your topsoil is silty, you’ll get gravel at the bottom, sand in the middle and topsoil on the top. (This is the rock formation after the Flood.) You can repeat this forever, but you still get the heaviest materials at the bottom and the lightest at the top. Hint: that’s not what rock strata look like.
- ATI decides that desertification – a problem that is currently most severe in portions of Africa and Asia – is a clear sign of God’s hatred of sinners. That’s classy.
- Desertification, deforestation, and weather events don’t fall in geology; they are examples of Earth science topics which is a much larger discipline. Attacks of locusts actually fits within the biology category, not geology.
Uniformitarianism
- Uniformitarianism is the idea that the main processes that form geological features that we see today have been in existence throughout time. For example, the process by which water erodes soil and rock has existed throughout time. Over very long time periods, erosion can produce very large canyons.
- Uniformitarianism does require millions or billions of years to produce all of the features we see today – but some features can be created or destroyed very quickly through volcanic processes. This is fine because physics and chemistry demonstrate that the Earth is 4.6 billion years old.
- Uniformitarianism makes no statements about the size of human populations or the availability of energy.

Since they brought it up, however, I will state that ecology has shown that every organism has a maximum population size that can survive on a given amount of resources. I don’t think humans have reached the carrying capacity (or upper limit) of population size on the planet Earth, but going over that size will lead to massive human suffering.
There are not a whole lot of areas that are suitable for agriculture that haven’t already been utilized. I don’t know where the extra food ATI believe in is coming from.
I’d love to hear ATI’s ideas on energy usage. I suspect they are of the “no, we’ll always have oil” type rather than “let’s use more solar power” type.

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Examining ATI Wisdom Booklets: Booklet 2: Science-ish – Disciplines of Science