If you consider any education you had as "indoctrination", that suggests you may have or had an agenda/bias which could have impacted your views of what it was you learned in the first place.



One of the disadvantages of studying something "on your own" is that we tend to study those sources with which we already agree. This is one of the benefits to taking courses in college: it's not that you can't learn it on your own, but that you will probably be exposed to both sides of an issue.

Certainly something as many-faceted as evolution demands that anyone who is truly interested must look at various sources, especially if they conflict. Limiting one's study to Ernst Haeckel's doctrine of "organic recapitulation", a series of Jack Chick tracts -- or even just the early works of Darwin himself -- will not give you a broad understanding of the issue.



It is in the eyes of almost everyone else; it was Charles Lyell who first came up with his "uniformitarianism", a hypothesis which has veen validated constant times. Of course, there are cases where dikes, sills, and other magmatic intrusions will appear to turn the "rule" upside down (literally), but a course in stratigraphics shows exactly why and how that happens. In any case, as you're probably aware from your readings in geology, the "uniformitarianism" approach works best with sedimentary and other depositional formations.



Actually, there would be a lot of problems with that.

First, because a supposed "really big" flood would have to wash down mountains with varying layers of sediment-causing structure; as you're undoubtedly aware, orogenies simply don't work that way.

Second, although water can remove sedimentary layers (as shown by the fact that everything in the Grand Canyon above the late Jurassic Canyon Redwall formation is gone, as is everything in the Great Discontinuity between the Precambrian schist at the Inner Gorge and the Permian depositions directly above it), catastrophic floods, such as the flooding of what is now the Black Sea about ten thousand years ago, remove material much better than it deposits it!

Third, there simply isn't enough water on the Earth (nor is there any evidence that there ever was) to cover cover it in its entirety as the Gilgamesh or Noahic myths assert that there were.