Goshawk, you're right about the problem with fossilized rainprints, but it's even worse for the "flood geologists" than you've described.
For rainprints to even occur, raindrops have to fall on thick mud. Why mud? Obviously because a hard surface wouldn't take an imprint of a fallen raindrop. Why thick as opposed to thin mud? Because thin mud would just absorb the drop and there would be nothing preserved. And of course, this thick mud would have to be exposed to the air -- which would be unlikely given the usual YEC scenario of massive amounts of Flood water sloshing around continuously. For rainprints to be preserved, the mud they're in has to dry out. This is because if it were still wet when the next cycle of flooding came along, they would be wiped out by the flow of water. So for rainprints to show up in the fossil record of a supposed Flood, you would need an incredibly unlikely set of events to occur. The same goes for fossilized mudcracks and such. These goofy "flood geologists" have absolutely no way to explain such things.
Hooberus, I'm familiar with John Baumgartner. I have no doubt that he's a competent modeler of mantle convection, but only when his work is supervised and/or critiqued by others who do not have his YEC agenda. Under such circumstances YECs have enough sense to stick with the facts and not insert their foolishness into their work -- otherwise they would quickly lose credibility and their jobs. As for Baumgartner's results as applied to "flood geology", from what I've read in his work he really has no results at all. He has made many assumptions in applying his mantle convection models, all of which, so far as I can see, are completely unrealistic and designed purely to help make his results come out the way he wants. Naturally, this is done on his own time and without peer review, as I'm certain he knows that peer review would be fatal. On your own time you can be as foolish as you like, but you can't bring it to work.
As for the article you cited, it's a classically informationless piece of nonsense designed to fool naive Bible believers into thinking that YEC "scholars" are really on to something. Worse, it's designed to fool their own selves. The article contains almost nothing but qualitative descriptions of speculated mechanisms of "flood geology" akin to the wild silliness of Immanuel Velikovsky. Even I, not a professional geologist, can see huge holes in the descriptions. A good deal of the assumptions and descriptions are inconsistent. This is because the men doing the speculating are not trying to come up with a consistent theory of 'flood geology plate tectonics' but are trying to find ad hoc ways of fitting real plate tectonics -- which even they can no longer deny -- into the myth of Noah's Flood which they believe only because they learned these Bible stories on mommy's knee.
In other words, hooberus, these guys are not doing science -- they're doing biblical apologetics and using a farcical view of science to support it -- exactly as the Jehovah's Witnesses do. The difference is that they're a bit more sophisticated than the JW Governing Body.
AlanF
