mind numbing masses

So do you, like, have these bookmarked?

 

You've got a pretty faulty memory there, sir. He took the clean animals by seven and all other kinds by two. Stop reading so much into it.

As for the the water run-off, you ever heard of oceans and evaporation? It rained for only forty days inside the ark, but Noah spent several months inside the ark. Nowhere does Genesis 1 say God created the oceans. In fact in Gen 2, it talks about God not sending rain and a mist coming up from the earth.

 

Ironic Statement of the Year

 

You must admit, it does save me the trouble of doing lots of typing when the inevitable creationist appears in this forum. This has to be at least the fourth debate on evolution I've seen in the Politics forum in the past five years. The creationist arguments are the same every time.

 

Take by sevens, the male and the female. That means 7 pairs, moron. When I know the Bible from memory better than you know it after reading it, it's probably a good time for you to shut up.

BTW, please respond to this:

You know what the oceans are, right? They're low points on the earth's surface which fill with water due to the force of gravity.

 

Here's some age facts for ya-

The shrinking sun limits the earth-sun relationship to less than "billions of years." The sun is losing both mass and diameter. Changing the mass would upset the fine gravitational balance that keeps the earth at just the right distance for life to survive. )

The 0.5 inch layer of cosmic dust on the moon indicates the moon has not been accumulating dust for billions of years. ( *Insufficient evidence to be positive (almost all estimates before the lunar landing anticipated great quantities of dust.)

"I get a picture therefore, of the first spaceship, picking out a nice, level place for landing purposes, coming in slowly downward tail-first, and sinking majestically out of sight." -- Isaac Asimov, Science Digest, January, 1959, p 36

Lyttleton felt that the X-rays and UV light striking exposed moon rocks "could, during the age of the moon be sufficient to form a layer over it several miles deep." -- Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society of London, vol. 115, pp. 585-604

The existence of short-period comets indicates the universe is less than billions of years old.

Fossil meteorites are very rare in layers other than the top layers of the earth. This indicates that the layers were not exposed for millions of years as is currently being taught in school textbooks.

The moon is receding a few inches each year. Billions of years ago the moon would have been so close that the tides would have been much higher, eroding away the continents.

The moon contains considerable quantities of U-236 and Th-230, both short-lived isotopes that would have been long gone if the moon were billions of years old.

The existence of great quantities of space dust, which by the Pointing-Robertson effect would have been vacuumed out of our solar system in a few thousand years, indicates the solar system is young.

At the rate many star clusters are expanding, they could not have been traveling for billions of years.

Saturn’s rings are still unstable, indicating they are not billions of years old.

Jupiter and Saturn are cooling off rather rapidly. They are losing heat twice as fast as they gain it from the sun. They cannot be billions of years old. Jupiter’s moon, Io, is losing matter to Jupiter. It cannot be billions of years old.

Among other factors to consider is that all the ancient astronomers from 2000 years ago recorded that Sirius was a red star—today it is a white dwarf star. Since today’s textbooks in astronomy state that one hundred thousand years are required for a star to "evolve" from a red giant to a white dwarf, obviously this view needs to be restudied.

Evidence from Earth

The decaying magnetic field limits earth’s age to less than billions.

The volume of lava on earth divided by its rate of efflux gives a number of only a few million years, not billions. I believe that during the Flood, while "the fountains of the deep were broken up," most of the earth’s lava was deposited rapidly.

Dividing the amount of various minerals in the ocean by their influx rate indicates only a few thousand years of accumulation.

The amount of Helium 4 in the atmosphere, divided by the formation rate on earth, gives only 175,000 years. (God may have created the earth with some helium which would reduce the age more.)

The erosion rate of the continents is such that they would erode to sea level in less than 14,000,000 years, destroying all old fossils.

Topsoil formation rates indicate only a few thousand years of formation.

Niagara Falls’ erosion rate (four to five feet per year) indicates an age of less than 10,000 years. Don’t forget Noah’s Flood could have eroded half of the seven-mile-long Niagara River gorge in a few hours as the flood waters raced through the soft sediments.)

The rock encasing oil deposits could not withstand the pressure for more than a few thousand years.

The size of the Mississippi River delta, divided by the rate mud is being deposited, gives an age of less than 30,000 years. (The Flood in Noah’s day could have washed out 80% of the mud there in a few hours or days, so 4400 years is a reasonable age for the delta.)

The slowing spin of the earth limits its age to less than the "billions of years" called for by the theory of evolution.

A relatively small amount of sediment is now on the ocean floor, indicating only a few thousand years of accumulation. This embarrassing fact is one of the reasons why the continental drift theory is vehemently defended by those who worship evolution.

The largest stalactites and flowstone formations in the world could have easily formed in about 4400 years.

The Sahara desert is expanding. It easily could have been formed in a few thousand years. See any earth science textbook.

The oceans are getting saltier. If they were billions of years old, they would be much saltier than they are now.

Ice cores at the south pole and Greenland have a maximum depth of 10-14,000 feet. The aircraft that crash-landed in Greenland in 1942 and excavated in 1990 were under 263 feet of ice after only 48 years. This indicates all of the ice could have accumulated in 4400 years.

 

Oh the hits just keep on coming....

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html

Say, Daksims, when are you going to get around to the "Magnetic field" argument? I'm positively salivating to debunk that one...

 

Oops, I spoke to soon...

And now the refutations:

1) The most common form of this young-Earth argument is based on a single measurement of the rate of meteoritic dust influx to the Earth gave a value in the millions of tons per year. While this is negligible compared to the processes of erosion on the Earth (about a shoebox-full of dust per acre per year), there are no such processes on the Moon. Young-Earthers claim that the Moon must receive a similar amount of dust (perhaps 25% as much per unit surface area due to its lesser gravity), and there should be a very large dust layer (about a hundred feet thick) if the Moon is several billion years old.

Morris says, regarding the dust influx rate: "The best measurements have been made by Hans Pettersson, who obtained the figure of 14 million tons per year1."

Pettersson stood on a mountain top and collected dust there with a device intended for measuring smog levels. He measured the amount of nickel collected, and published calculations based on the assumption that all nickel that he collected was meteoritic in origin. That assumption was wrong and caused his published figures to be a vast overestimate.

Pettersson's calculation resulted in the a figure of about 15 million tons per year. In the very same paper, he indicated that he believed that value to be a "generous" over-estimate, and said that 5 million tons per year was a more likely figure.

Several measurements of higher precision were available from many sources by the time Morris wrote Scientific Creationism. These measurements give the value (for influx rate to the Earth) of about 20,000 to 40,000 tons per year. Multiple measurements (chemical signature of ocean sediments, satellite penetration detectors, microcratering rate of objects left exposed on the lunar surface) all agree on approximately the same value -- nearly three orders of magnitude lower than the value which Morris chose to use.

Morris chose to pick obsolete data with known problems, and call it the "best" measurement available. With the proper values, the expected depth of meteoritic dust on the Moon is less than one foot.

There is a recent creationist technical paper on this topic which admits that the depth of dust on the Moon is concordant with the mainstream age and history of the solar system ( Snelling and Rush 1993 ). Their abstract concludes with:

"It thus appears that the amount of meteoritic dust and meteorite debris in the lunar regolith and surface dust layer, even taking into account the postulated early intense bombardment, does not contradict the evolutionists' multi-billion year timescale (while not proving it). Unfortunately, attempted counter-responses by creationists have so far failed because of spurious arguments or faulty calculations. Thus, until new evidence is forthcoming, creationists should not continue to use the dust on the moon as evidence against an old age for the moon and the solar system."
Snelling and Rush's paper also refutes the oft-posted creationist "myth" about the expectation of a thick dust layer during to the Apollo mission. The Apollo mission had been preceded by several unmanned landings -- the Soviet Luna (six landers), American Ranger (five landers) and Surveyor (seven landers). The physical properties of the lunar surface were well-known years before man set foot on it. Even prior to the unmanned landings, Snelling and Rush document that there was no clear consensus in the astronomical community on the depth of dust to expect.

Even though the creationists themselves have refuted this argument, (and refutations from the mainstream community have been around for ten to twenty years longer than that), the "Moon dust" argument continues to be propagated in their "popular" literature, and continues to appear in talk.origins on a regular basis:

Baker (1976, p. 25)
Brown (1989, pp. 17 and 53)
Jackson (1989, pp. 40-41)
Jansma (1985, pp. 62-63)
Whitcomb and Morris (1961, pp. 379-380)
Wysong (1976, pp. 166-168)

2) The young-Earth argument: the dipole component of the magnetic field has decreased slightly over the time that it has been measured. Assuming the generally accepted "dynamo theory" for the existence of the Earth's magnetic field is wrong, the mechanism might instead be an initially created field which has been losing strength ever since the creation event. An exponential fit (assuming a half-life of 1400 years on 130 years' worth of measurements) yields an impossibly high magnetic field even 8000 years ago, therefore the Earth must be young. The main proponent of this argument was Thomas Barnes.

There are several things wrong with this "dating" mechanism. It's hard to just list them all. The primary four are:

While there is no complete model to the geodynamo (certain key properties of the core are unknown), there are reasonable starts and there are no good reasons for rejecting such an entity out of hand. If it is possible for energy to be added to the field, then the extrapolation is useless.

There is overwhelming evidence that the magnetic field has reversed itself, rendering any unidirectional extrapolation on field strength useless. Even some young-Earthers admit to that these days -- e.g., Humphreys (1988) .

Much of the energy in the field is probably locked in toroidal fields that are not even visible external to the core. This means that the extrapolation rests on the assumption that fluctuations in the observable portion of the field accurately represent fluctuations in its total energy.

Barnes' extrapolation completely ignores the nondipole component of the field. Even if we grant that it is permissible to ignore portions of the field that are internal to the core, Barnes' extrapolation also ignores portions of the field which are visible and instead rests on extrapolation of a theoretical entity.
That last part is more important than it may sound. The Earth's magnetic field is often split in two components when measured. The "dipole" component is the part which approximates a theoretically perfect field around a single magnet, and the "nondipole" components are the ("messy") remainder. A study in the 1960s showed that the decrease in the dipole component since the turn of the century had been nearly completely compensated by an increase in the strength of the nondipole components of the field. (In other words, the measurements show that the field has been diverging from the shape that would be expected of a theoretical ideal magnet, more than the amount of energy has actually been changing.) Barnes' extrapolation therefore does not really rest on the change in energy of the field.

3) The young-Earth argument goes something like this: helium-4 is created by radioactive decay (alpha particles are helium nuclei) and is constantly added to the atmosphere. Helium is not light enough to escape the Earth's gravity (unlike hydrogen), and it will therefore accumulate over time. The current level of helium in the atmosphere would accumulate in less than two hundred thousand years, therefore the Earth is young. (I believe this argument was originally put forth by Mormon young-Earther Melvin Cook, in a letter to the editor which was published in Nature.)

But helium can and does escape from the atmosphere, at rates calculated to be nearly identical to rates of production. In order to "get" a young age from their calculations, young-Earthers "handwave away" mechanisms by which helium can escape. For example, Henry Morris says:

"There is no evidence at all that Helium 4 either does, or can, escape from the exosphere in significant amounts." ( Morris 1974, p. 151 )
But Morris is wrong. Surely one cannot "invent" a good dating mechanism by simply ignoring processes which work in the opposite direction of the process which the date is based upon. Dalrymple says:

"Banks and Holzer (12) have shown that the polar wind can account for an escape of (2 to 4) x 106 ions/cm2 /sec of 4He, which is nearly identical to the estimated production flux of (2.5 +/- 1.5) x 106 atoms/cm2/sec. Calculations for 3He lead to similar results, i.e., a rate virtually identical to the estimated production flux. Another possible escape mechanism is direct interaction of the solar wind with the upper atmosphere during the short periods of lower magnetic-field intensity while the field is reversing. Sheldon and Kern (112) estimated that 20 geomagnetic-field reversals over the past 3.5 million years would have assured a balance between helium production and loss." ( Dalrymple 1984, p. 112 )

Oh heck, I'm getting tired. Since Daksims is getting all his stuff from the ICR, just go here:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/icr-visit/bartelt1.html

Happy reading.

 

1. I'm dying to know the context for this sentence.
2. You are aware, aren't you, that Asimov is a science fiction writer?

Here's some logic for you. I'm 39 years old. Therefore, my father is not a person, since he "claims" to be older than me.

This guy is turning me into an agnostic....

 

As far as the star billions of light years away -
http://drdino.com/cse.asp?pg=faq&specific=8

Joe, read my post. I've covered that.

Superdave, I seem to recall you saying they came by two.

 

Scholars still debate Neil Armstrong's first words when he set foot on the surface of the moon:

(1) That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.

(2) That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

(3) Here's to you, Mr. Gorsky.

(4) Son of a bitch! I'm sinking! Aldrin! Collins! For God's sake, help dig me out! I'm gonna die! AAAAAHH!

 

Dear Mike,

I've heard that somewhere before.

Sincerely,
Copernicus

 

Covered what? Citing thrice-refuted sources over and over? Yeah, you're all over that.

I see you don't have answers to my refutations of ICR's arguments, TalkOrigin's refutations or Dave's refutations of them. You just keep bouncing to different arguments. Too bad for you they've all been refuted too.

Oh, and I'm still waiting for you to haul out the "Darwin Deathbed Conversion" story. What's taking you so long? Doesn't the ICR website repeat that bit of nonsense too?

 

Can we incorporate this into your next avatar?

 

Ah, the "Speed Of Light" argument.

I'll let TalkOrigins handle this:

"Physicists would *love* to find evidence that radioactive decay rates are not constant, partly because it would make life more interesting (physics is the most fun when there's some mystery to be understood), and partly because the right rate of change could explain some coincidences in cosmology. The idea that ``constants'' may not be constant goes back at least to Dirac (Nobel Prize, 1933), and it has spawned a huge effort to search for evidence of change.

So far, the evidence is clear: the constants of nature really are constant. There's been some excitement recently over some tentative indications that the fine structure constant, which determines some decay rates (and lots of other things), may have changed, but if it has changed, it's been by less than about one part in 10^15 per year---see Webb et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 87, 091301 (2001).

Let me give an example:

The supernova SN1987A was observed in 1987, when we saw a star ``explode'' about 170,000 light years from Earth. This distance is unambiguous---it can be obtained by trigonometry, with no assumptions except that Euclidean geometry is nearly right in and near our galaxy.

After the initial supernova, much of the energy produced by SN1987A came from the radioactive decays of cobalt-56 and cobalt-57. These decays can be identified because they emit gamma rays of very precise frequencies, which are easily detectable. We've looked at the decay rates, and they're exactly the same as the ones we observe in the laboratory. So there's been no change in at least the 170,000 years it took for the light to reach us.

Note that you don't have to assume a constant speed of light here---the supernova gives an independent check. That's because many of the features of a supernova, from the amount of energy and the number of neutrinos emitted to the spectral lines of the elements in the ``afterglow,'' depend sensitively on the speed of light. If, for example, the speed of light had been different when the supernova occurred, we wouldn't have seen the cobalt decays at all, since the frequency of the gamma rays emitted in the decay depends on the speed of light.

I use this example because it's relatively simple to understand. But there have been *lots* of other searches for changes in physical constants, using methods ranging from astrophysical observations of the spectra of distant stars, to searches for anomalous luminosities of faint stars, to studies of abundance ratios of radioactive nuclides, to (for current variations) direct laboratory measurements.

The result is a net of observations that fit together quite rigidly ---you can't tweak one without contradicting many others. For instance, if you suppose the speed of light varies, that affects spectral lines in distant stars. It affects different lines in different ways, and so would be easy to see. (That's what Webb et al. were looking for.) You can try to compensate by allowing the charge of the electron to vary in synch with the speed of light. But that requires that the charge of the proton must vary as well, since otherwise hydrogen gas wouldn't be neutral (which would have dramatic and easily observable effects). But if the charge of the proton varies, the rates of nuclear reactions will change, affecting the production of energy by stars in a way we don't see. You might then propose that the strength of the nuclear interaction could change exactly in synch with the speed of light and the charge of the electron and proton. But nuclear interactions affect neutrons as well, and again you'd end up with drastic changes in the behavior of stars that we would see (and don't). People have gone through this kind of argument carefully and quantitatively. It just doesn't work.

I suggest that you look at the sci.physics FAQs on this question:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ParticleAndNuclear/constants.html


So far the score is:

Science 6 - 0 Creationism

 

Here's a site for Daksims, from the wacky atheists at, er, Answers In Genesis:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/Home/Area/faq/dont_use.asp

Again, happy reading.

Dear Daksims,

Yeah, Christians today really are too tolerant.

Sincerely,
Torquemada

PS: The Inquisition, what a show! The Inquisition, here we go!....

 

It's a deal.

 

Damn, Mike, I wish I'd have seen that quote from Daksims. I've been skimming his posts.

That's one thing he's right on. You are what's wrong with Christians today. I told ya so!!!

They came by two in 6:19-20.

They came by 4s and 14s in the verses you cited.

My point, and I hope this is plain enough, is

THE BIBLE CONTRADICTS ITSELF.

You are ignorant of the Bible. I am not. I am trying to guide you. I am leading a jackass to water, but he's gonna die of thirst.

 

Dear Daksims,

I sure hate all those wishy-washy moderate Muslims who refuse to blow themselves up in the name of Allah. They're what's wrong with Islam nowadays!

Allah akbar!

Osama bin-Laden

 

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/4005.asp

Thanks for the ammo.

 

http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/magazines/docs/v23n1_earth_how_old.asp

 

In all sincerity, Daksims is what is wrong with Christians today, and yesterday.

Daksims has a socio-sexual-economic-political world view. Fair enough, so do I. So does Loney and Segroves and Pakovits.

The problem is that Daksims takes that world view, and then uses IT to tell him what his theology is. Since if he actually read the Bible, his worldview would be blown away, he lets other people tell him what is in the Bible, setting up a vicious cycle of ignorance.

He's religious, so wants to stay true to God. And he gets the "Three's Company" version of the Bible, so he never challenges his worldview. And his worldview supports his theology.

If he would just sit and read the thing, he'd have his mind blown by the "Deer Hunter" like depth.

The problem with Christianity today, and yesterday, is that Christians want their faith to be easy. They don't want any of the creature comforts of their everyday life to conflict with their theology; in fact, they want their theology to justify their comforts. So they'll never read the first part of the book of Acts and say, wow, those early Christians were a bunch of raging socialists. They'll never hear of the Ancient Hebrew position on private property, and what it might mean for our modern form of capitalism.

And they'll never notice the conflict between Jesus' theology and Paul's theology, and how that conflict has never really left the faith.

 

Yeah, I really liked your former sig.

See my last post.

 

Sorry, but you're shooting blanks.


Most of the 12 argumetns on that page have been refuted in this very thread.

For the rest:


2. Comets disintegrate too quickly

Jupiter and Saturn wreak havoc to the comet orbits. Some long-period comets are perturbed into short period orbits, others are permanently ejected. Comets are believed to have a short lifetime after being perturbed to short periods.

Actually, the Oort cometary cloud hypothesis (published by Jan H. Oort in 1950) was originally proposed in order to explain "the rate of appearance of long-period comets" (i.e. there are a lot of them). It really didn't have anything to do with the age of short-period comets (which the note above refers to). [Long-period > 200 yrs, short-period &l< 200 yrs.]

The problem that is referred to by the creationist here is that the short- period comets have not occupied their present orbits for very long (in astronomical terms). Each time a comet passes close to the sun, some of its matter is driven off into space by the sun's energy (forming its "tail"). "Short-period" comets are believed by astronomers to have a lifetime of only a few thousand years, because after that all of their "tail-producing" matter would be used up (indeed, astronomers have noted comets to "vanish"; the remaining material only makes its presence known upon entering the Earth's atmosphere; this is likely the origin of meteoroid swarms.)

However, the fact that a comet cannot have occupied its present orbit for very long does not automatically imply that it is young. The Oort hypothesis does explain this problem as well, in that long-period comets -- if frequent enough -- will be moved into short-period orbits by a relatively near approach to a planet (comet loses momentum, planet gains it, comet is now in a vastly shorter orbit, planet is now in a very slightly longer orbit).

In fact, of the short-period comets, roughly half orbit pretty much between the sun and jupiter, leading astronomers to believe that jupiter "captured" them into their current orbits. (Statistically, we would expect the largest planet -- the best "capturer" -- to have captured the most short-period comets).

Finally, nobody really knows about the Oort cloud. Astronomers like the way it explains the frequency of long-period comets, and there is much support for it amongst them. It apparently also explains the youth of the short-period comets, quite nicely. However, until we see a comet get sucked into a short-period orbit (apparently this must happen every 100 years or so), or until we send something out to 10,000 A.U., Oort's proposal remains a hypothesis. (Conclusion: it was not cooked up to explain young short- period comets; this is something of a "fringe benefit". But we aren't very sure that it's true, either.)

[From Strahler, "Science and Earth History", New Yorkrometheus, 1987; p. 143]

11. Agriculture is too recent

So why has it taken this long to develop airplanes, computers and other technologies and sciences if early man was a smart as we are? Because knowledge builds on previous knowledge and not all new ideas work nor are they successfully implemented the first (or second or even third) time around. Even if isolated populations discovered agriculture early, that doesn't mean it was automatically successful. Heck, famines due to inconvenient weather still happen today.

12. History is too short

See "#11" above.

Another take on the "History Is Too Short " argument is "No people of English descent are more distantly related than thirtieth cousin" put forth by Davenport,which supposedly doesn't allow enough time for evolution.

Incorrect argument. The island population of Great Britian might well have interbreeded more than is the case if it were mixed with the rest of the world's human population, if you are inclined to believe Davenport's claim at all.

10. Not enough stone age skeletons

This is a subargument of the "Incomplete Fossil Record" argument and shares so many of the same flaws with its parent argument that I'll just post this in response:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/icr-visit/bartelt3.html

 

Every single point on that page has been refuted either here or on TalkOrigins. Every. Single. One.

Science 12 - 0 Creationism

When does the Slaughter Rule get invoked?