Young Earth Evidence
Robert Paveza
billion years old.
Young Universe Evidence
1) Insufficient number of supernovas / rate at which they occur. A new
supernova event is observed about every 30 years, and we see only a few
thousand in existence.
2) Absence of field galaxies. With stellar evolution, it would seem that
some galaxies would not be gravitationally bound and would just spread out
in a "field".
3) Gravitationally bound star clusters with stars of different ages. If a
star cluster is gravitationally bound, under stellar evolution theory one
would expect all the stars would be the same age.
Young Solar System Evidence
1) Rate of bombardment of meteoritic dust / amount of dust measured on the
moon. Should be several hundred feet of dust on the moon. Several years ago
this creationist argument was dismissed, and many creationists themselves
stopped using it. However, in light of the latest scientific research, this
argument has been revived.
2) Existence of short-period comets. They can only last a maximum of several
thousand years because they give off copious material each orbit.
3) Continued presence of small meteorites in the face of the
Poynting/Robertson effect. Poynting-Robertson effect should sweep the solar
system clean of small particles.
4) Existence of unstable rings around planets like Saturn. Rings are not
stable and will not last.
5) Extensive tectonic activity on Jupiter's moon Io. Inadequate heat sources
for a small moon so far from the sun to still be geologically active.
6) Presence of magnetic fields around solar system bodies (Mercury,
Jupiter's moon Ganymede, Neptune, Uranus) without an obvious internal
dynamo. No natural process is known which could sustain a magnetic field
around these bodies - their magnetic fields should have decayed out of
existence if they ever had any.
7) Rock flow and lunar craters - Rock flow should have eliminated old
craters on the moon.
8) Recession of the moon from the earth. Moon is moving away from the earth
gradually due to tidal activity. Movement is too fast for earth-moon system
to be 4.6 billion years old.
9) Shrinking sun - Sun may be shrinking a few feet each year. Can't
extrapolate this trend back to the past very far without effecting earth's
environment.
10) Absence/shortage of solar neutrinos. Nuclear fusion in the sun's core
should give off neutrinos. Experiments have not detected an adequate number
of neutrinos - this is a well known problem. Some creationists have argued
that this implies solar heat is due to gravity and not fusion - this would
imply a young sun.
11) Heat level of the sun's corona. Not sustainable for extended time
period.
12) High concentration of Uranium-236 on the moon. Should have decayed.
13) High concentration of Thorium-230 on the moon. Should have decayed.
Young Earth Evidence
1) Exponential decay in the earth's magnetic field (half-life of 1400-2000
years). This half-life cannot be extrapolated back more than about 10,000
years without the field becoming intolerably powerful. Creationists have
been criticized for taking the original work on this matter out of context
and failing to show that the magnetic field is cyclic (decaying then
strengthening). However, it is the old earth believers that have concocted
this data in an imaginary hypothetical cyclic extrapolation. It is the
creationist who has used only the empirical evidence, to devise a theory
that truly explains that data now available to us.
2) Insufficient mass of helium in earth's atmosphere to account for 4.6
billion years of radioactive decay. Helium is a by-product of radioactive
decay of some elements. It is a noble gas which doesn't combine with any
other element, but there is not enough of it to account for the radioactive
decay which should have occurred in an old-earth scenario.
3) Despite inferior medical and nutritional practices, evidence indicates
that the human species should have populated the earth much more quickly if
they had been around for millions of years.
4) Earliest known human civilizations are only a few thousand years old.
5) Tree rings, including rings on petrified forest trees, cannot be traced
back more than several thousand years.
6) Dating of Niagara falls. Erosion of the system indicates it is only a few
thousand years old.
7) Dating of Mississippi river delta. Erosion rate and amount of sediment
accumulated indicate that it is only a few thousand years old.
8) Lack of equilibrium of Carbon-14/Carbon-12 ratio. This ratio should reach
equilibrium in the atmosphere in only some thousands of years, but it hasn't
reached that point yet.
9) Erosion rate of the continents. Continental mass divided by net erosion
rate (that is, despite accretion due to volcanism, tectonic activity, and
geosyncline) would wash all of the continents into the ocean in about 14
million years.
10) Amount of salts in the ocean divided by rate of influx. This is actually
many dating methods - one for each salt which can be measured. For example,
all the sodium chloride in the ocean would have been ashed in about 62
million years, if the ocean was pure water to begin with.
11) Amount of water on earth's surface / rate at which it is expelled from
below ground. Enough water is expelled from deep below the earth via
volcanoes, etc. to rapidly produce more than all the water on the earth's
surface.
12) No plausible explanation for the pressure in oil reservoirs remaining so
high for millions of years.
13) Existence of uranium halos.
14) Existence of polonium halos. Some believe that the polonium halos
disqualify radiometric dating as a reliable dating method because they may
indicate that the rate of radioactive decay has not been constant throughout
history. Others feel these halos indicate a rapid (instant) creation of the
earth.
-Polonium Halos from www.halos.com-
"Etched within Earth's foundation rocks--the granites--are beautiful
microspheres of coloration
produced by the radioactive decay of primordial polonium, which is known to
have only a fleeting
existence. A simple analogy shows, on one hand, how these polonium
microspheres--or halos--contradict
the evolutionary belief that granites formed as hot magma slowly cooled over
millions of years. On the
other hand, it demonstrates how these halos provide unambiguous evidence of
an almost instantaneous
creation of granites: A speck of polonium in molten rock can be compared
with an Alka-Seltzer dropped
into a glass of water. The beginning of effervescence is equated to the
moment that polonium atoms began
to emit radioactive particles.
In molten rock the traces of those radioactive particles would disappear as
quickly as the Alka-Seltzer bubbles in water. But if the water were
instantly frozen, the bubbles would be preserved. Likewise, polonium halos
could have formed only if specks of polonium had been instantly encased in
solid rock. An exceedingly large number of polonium halos are embedded in
granites around the world. Just as the frozen bubbles would be clear
evidence of quick-freezing of water, so are polonium halos undeniable
evidence that many rapidly 'effervescing' specks of created polonium
interacted with a sea of primordial matter which was directly 'frozen' as
solid granite. The occurrence of these polonium halos, then, distinctly
implies that our earth was formed in a very short time, in complete harmony
with the biblical record of creation."
"Evidence for a Rapidly Formed Geologic Column"
The geologic column (representing all the earth's observed sedimentary rock)
in classical geology represents hundreds of millions of years of
evolutionary history. Evidence that this column formed rapidly rather than
over millions of years is therefore evidence for a young geologic column and
a young earth. It should be noted that the "geologic column" is purely
hypothetical and cannot be found in a complete form anywhere on earth other
than in a textbook.
1) Lack of meteorites in the geologic column. If the geologic column is
billions of years old one would expect to find meteorites throughout.
2) Ripple marks, rain drops, and animal tracks in sedimentary rocks. This
implies very rapid burial and hardening because these fragile features could
not survive even trivial erosion.
3) Polystrate fossils. These are fossils which cut across multiple geologic
layers that were supposedly laid down millions of years apart. Fossilized
trees and animals are often found in tact and spanning supposedly millions
of years of geologic layers.
4) Regional deposition. Current known geologic processes don't account for
regional deposits (covering multiple U.S. states, for example). This applies
to certain types of rocks, as well as coal and oil reserves.
5) Deformation of strata implies it was soft when deformed and hadn't
hardened into rock.
6) Absence of bioturbation in the geologic column. Biological activity soon
disturbs sedimentary deposits formed by modern catastrophes (hurricanes and
floods) but is not evidenced in the geologic column. This implies that the
geologic column was buried very deeply and rapidly.
7) Lack of recognizable soil layers in the geologic column. Soil material is
seldom found in the geologic column. One would think that the earth had soil
layers in the past, and if it was slowly buried, some would be preserved.
8) Undisturbed bedding planes. Different geologic rock layers often show
sharp, knife-edge breaks between layers, with no evidence of erosion
between. This is not realistic if the layers formed over long periods of
time.
9) Clastic dikes. Clastic dikes are formed from soft sand squeezed up
through newer layers of rock. This implies that the sandy older (lower)
layer was still soft enough to squeeze sand up (like squeezing a toothpaste
tube) through the younger upper layers.
The Earth's Magnetic Field
The earth's magnetic field is a powerful witness for a world much younger
than the billions of years required by evolutionary theories. Let's start
the story with the most prominent feature of the field today--its very rapid
decay.
"The Field Is Decaying Rapidly"
The average 'intensity' of the earth's magnetic field has decreased
exponentially by about 7% since its first careful measurement in 1829. The
field's intensity includes components of strength and direction and tells us
the amount of force turning a compass needle northward. By estimating the
field intensity everywhere (in, on, and above the earth), we can calculate
the total electrical "energy" stored in the field. Such calculations show
that the total energy in the field has decreased by about 14% since 1829.
This rapid decay of both energy and intensity was not widely known, even
among scientists, until Dr. Thomas Barnes, a reationist physicist, began
publicizing it in 1971. He pointed out that such a decay would occur very
naturally if the electrical current producing the field were slowly losing
energy because of the electrical resistance of the core. This theory is
called 'free decay.' The observed decay rate is exactly what one would
expect from the electrical properties of the materials most likely to be in
the core.
"Evolutionary Theories Haven't Worked"
The free-decay theory contradicts the evolutionary "dynamo" theories, which
claim that complex processes in the earth's core have converted heat energy
into electrical energy, much like an electric generator, maintaining the
field for billions of years. Many intelligent scientists have been working
on dynamo theories for over four decades without great success. Furthermore,
recent measurements of electric currents in the sea floor weigh heavily
against the most popular class of dynamo theories.
Thus evolutionary dynamo theories do not have a good explanation for the
rapid decay of the field, whereas the free-decay theory does. However, our
historical data on the intensity of the field only goes back to 1829. Was
the field decaying before that? Fortunately, there is a scientific way to
answer that question.
"Archaeomagnetism" is the study of the magnetization of bricks, pottery,
campfire stones, and other man-related objects studied by archaeologists.
Iron oxides in those objects retain a record of the strength and direction
of the earth's magnetic field at the time they last cooled to normal
temperatures. Archaeomagnetic data taken worldwide show that the intensity
of the earth's magnetic field was about 40% greater in 1000 A.D. than it is
today, and that it has declined steadily since then.
Such a rapid decay could not have been going on continuously for millions of
years, because the field would have to have been impossibly strong in the
past in order for it to still exist today. Creationists of the 1970s
extrapolated today's decay back into the past, showing that the field could
not be more than about 10,000 years old, assuming a constant decay of
intensity."
"The Field's 'Energy' Has Always Decreased"
According to the dynamic-decay theory, the 'energy' in the field has always
decreased rapidly. In fact, the energy loss during reversals and
fluctuations would have been even faster than today's rate. This information
allows us to estimate the age of the field.
The data and the dynamic-decay theory imply that, ever since creation, the
field has always lost at least half its energy every 700 years. Figure 2
illustrates the factors involved. The maximum energy in the figure comes
from another theory I proposed about the nature of the field when God
created the earth, a theory which successfully predicted space probe
measurements of planetary magnetic fields. Extrapolating today's energy
decay rate back (along the dotted straight line labeled 'free decay') to
that limit yields a maximum age of 8700 years. According to the
dynamic-decay theory, the true age would be less than that because of extra
losses during the reversals and fluctuations. The solid line (labeled
'dynamic decay') shows that with a significant loss of energy during the
Genesis flood, the age of the field would be about 6000 years.
Conclusion
At present, the only working theory for the origin, fluctuations, rapid
reversals, and decay of the field is a creationist theory-a theory that fits
all the data. Thus, according to the best theory and data we have, the
earth's magnetic field certainly is less than 100,000 years old; very likely
less than 10,000 years old, and fits in well with the face-value Biblical
age of 6,000 years.
Cyborg Stan of CyKoLaJx, Inc.
sure I heard these before.
Boikat
>
> Here you go, everybody. Some reasons that the earth cannot POSSIBLY be 4.6
> billion years old.
> Young Universe Evidence
> 1) Insufficient number of supernovas / rate at which they occur. A new
> supernova event is observed about every 30 years, and we see only a few
> thousand in existence.
What does that have to do with the age of the
earth? Besides, we do not have the ability to
cover every square arc second of sky. Also,
what's your source that claims that "x" number of
SN should be occurring, and also in what frame of
reference? Last I read the rate for *our* galaxy
was around one pr century or so.
> 2) Absence of field galaxies. With stellar evolution, it would seem that
> some galaxies would not be gravitationally bound and would just spread out
> in a "field".
Ever heard of "gravity"?
> 3) Gravitationally bound star clusters with stars of different ages. If a
> star cluster is gravitationally bound, under stellar evolution theory one
> would expect all the stars would be the same age.
That was the "old theory".
> Young Solar System Evidence
> 1) Rate of bombardment of meteoritic dust / amount of dust measured on the
> moon. Should be several hundred feet of dust on the moon. Several years ago
> this creationist argument was dismissed, and many creationists themselves
> stopped using it. However, in light of the latest scientific research, this
> argument has been revived.
And still not valid.
> 2) Existence of short-period comets. They can only last a maximum of several
> thousand years because they give off copious material each orbit.
Ever heard of the Kuiper Belt? It's full of
cometary bodies, and the HST has imaged several of
them.
> 3) Continued presence of small meteorites in the face of the
> Poynting/Robertson effect. Poynting-Robertson effect should sweep the solar
> system clean of small particles.
And minor collisions and impacts with asteroids
will replenish them.
> 4) Existence of unstable rings around planets like Saturn. Rings are not
> stable and will not last.
So what? Who says that saturn has always had a
ring system like we see today?
> 5) Extensive tectonic activity on Jupiter's moon Io. Inadequate heat sources
> for a small moon so far from the sun to still be geologically active.
Ever heard of "tidal stress"? Obviously not.
> 6) Presence of magnetic fields around solar system bodies (Mercury,
> Jupiter's moon Ganymede, Neptune, Uranus) without an obvious internal
> dynamo. No natural process is known which could sustain a magnetic field
> around these bodies - their magnetic fields should have decayed out of
> existence if they ever had any.
Do you assume that we know everything there is to
know about those bodies at this time?
> 7) Rock flow and lunar craters - Rock flow should have eliminated old
> craters on the moon.
"Rock flow"? Bwahahahahah! Besides of which, the
gravity is much weaker on the moon, so any
degradation to "rock flow" would be minor.
> 8) Recession of the moon from the earth. Moon is moving away from the earth
> gradually due to tidal activity. Movement is too fast for earth-moon system
> to be 4.6 billion years old.
Ho Hum. Old as dino dung. The moon is moving
away only a few CM per year, and not at a constant
rate. The recession changes in proportion to
distance and is effected by mutual interaction
with the tidal bulge. By the way, have you ever
actually figured out how far the moon's orbit has
supposedly changed?
> 9) Shrinking sun - Sun may be shrinking a few feet each year. Can't
> extrapolate this trend back to the past very far without effecting earth's
> environment.
The sun is not shrinking.
> 10) Absence/shortage of solar neutrinos. Nuclear fusion in the sun's core
> should give off neutrinos. Experiments have not detected an adequate number
> of neutrinos - this is a well known problem. Some creationists have argued
> that this implies solar heat is due to gravity and not fusion - this would
> imply a young sun.
It could also mean that we do not have all the
answers. And is that "Neutrinos" or "Neutrons"?
> 11) Heat level of the sun's corona. Not sustainable for extended time
> period.
Why not?
> 12) High concentration of Uranium-236 on the moon. Should have decayed.
Why?
> 13) High concentration of Thorium-230 on the moon. Should have decayed.
It's a decay product. None of it would be there
if something else had not decayed. Do you know
what that parent element is? No? Why don't you
go look it up?
> Young Earth Evidence
> 1) Exponential decay in the earth's magnetic field (half-life of 1400-2000
> years). This half-life cannot be extrapolated back more than about 10,000
> years without the field becoming intolerably powerful. Creationists have
> been criticized for taking the original work on this matter out of context
> and failing to show that the magnetic field is cyclic (decaying then
> strengthening). However, it is the old earth believers that have concocted
> this data in an imaginary hypothetical cyclic extrapolation. It is the
> creationist who has used only the empirical evidence, to devise a theory
> that truly explains that data now available to us.
Another oldie but goody. BTW, the cyclic strength
of the magnetic field is recorded in the magnetic
banding that lay on either side of tectonic
spreading zones, IIRC.
> 2) Insufficient mass of helium in earth's atmosphere to account for 4.6
> billion years of radioactive decay. Helium is a by-product of radioactive
> decay of some elements. It is a noble gas which doesn't combine with any
> other element, but there is not enough of it to account for the radioactive
> decay which should have occurred in an old-earth scenario.
Helium, being a very light element, and can be
stripped from the upper atmosphere by ionization
and the solar wind.
> 3) Despite inferior medical and nutritional practices, evidence indicates
> that the human species should have populated the earth much more quickly if
> they had been around for millions of years.
Only if you ignore factors that slow population
growth, such as wars famines, natural disasters
plagues....
> 4) Earliest known human civilizations are only a few thousand years old.
Had to start some time.
> 5) Tree rings, including rings on petrified forest trees, cannot be traced
> back more than several thousand years.
Bwahahahahah! Why don't you *research* this
crap? By the same token, the world is only twenty
or so years old because that's the oldest tree in
my back yard!
> 6) Dating of Niagara falls. Erosion of the system indicates it is only a few
> thousand years old.
So what?
> 7) Dating of Mississippi river delta. Erosion rate and amount of sediment
> accumulated indicate that it is only a few thousand years old.
So what?
> 8) Lack of equilibrium of Carbon-14/Carbon-12 ratio. This ratio should reach
> equilibrium in the atmosphere in only some thousands of years, but it hasn't
> reached that point yet.
That's because the rate C-14 decays is different
than the rate it is generated, which varies over
time, slightly.
> 9) Erosion rate of the continents. Continental mass divided by net erosion
> rate (that is, despite accretion due to volcanism, tectonic activity, and
> geosyncline) would wash all of the continents into the ocean in about 14
> million years.
Ignores mountain building, and tectonic activity.
Ho hum.
> 10) Amount of salts in the ocean divided by rate of influx. This is actually
> many dating methods - one for each salt which can be measured. For example,
> all the sodium chloride in the ocean would have been ashed in about 62
> million years, if the ocean was pure water to begin with.
Ignores removal methods such as salt flats, and
that chlorine evaporates out.
> 11) Amount of water on earth's surface / rate at which it is expelled from
> below ground. Enough water is expelled from deep below the earth via
> volcanoes, etc. to rapidly produce more than all the water on the earth's
> surface.
It's recycled water through fractures in the
bedrock. Sheesh!
> 12) No plausible explanation for the pressure in oil reservoirs remaining so
> high for millions of years.
Non porous cap rock.
> 13) Existence of uranium halos.
How is that a problem?
> 14) Existence of polonium halos. Some believe that the polonium halos
> disqualify radiometric dating as a reliable dating method because they may
> indicate that the rate of radioactive decay has not been constant throughout
> history. Others feel these halos indicate a rapid (instant) creation of the
> earth.
They are wrong. Polonium is a daughter element of
a whole chain of decay products.
[snip same old poop.]
> "Evidence for a Rapidly Formed Geologic Column"
>
> The geologic column (representing all the earth's observed sedimentary rock)
> in classical geology represents hundreds of millions of years of
> evolutionary history. Evidence that this column formed rapidly rather than
> over millions of years is therefore evidence for a young geologic column and
> a young earth. It should be noted that the "geologic column" is purely
> hypothetical and cannot be found in a complete form anywhere on earth other
> than in a textbook.
Is there *any* geological reference book that says
that the *complete* uninterrupted geological
column is *supposed* to be present somewhere?
>
> 1) Lack of meteorites in the geologic column. If the geologic column is
> billions of years old one would expect to find meteorites throughout.
There have been some found. It's rare enough to
find one "now" on the surface, much less to find
one entombed in sedimentary rock.
> 2) Ripple marks, rain drops, and animal tracks in sedimentary rocks. This
> implies very rapid burial and hardening because these fragile features could
> not survive even trivial erosion.
Nope. Besides, what are they doing scattered
throughout the geologic column?
> 3) Polystrate fossils. These are fossils which cut across multiple geologic
> layers that were supposedly laid down millions of years apart. Fossilized
> trees and animals are often found in tact and spanning supposedly millions
> of years of geologic layers.
Ever heard of volcanos? Ash falls? local river
floods?
> 4) Regional deposition. Current known geologic processes don't account for
> regional deposits (covering multiple U.S. states, for example). This applies
> to certain types of rocks, as well as coal and oil reserves.
What?
> 5) Deformation of strata implies it was soft when deformed and hadn't
> hardened into rock.
Or that it was under a tremendous amount of
pressure. Limestone slugs have been compressed
like marshmallows in the lab under hydraulic
pressure.
> 6) Absence of bioturbation in the geologic column. Biological activity soon
> disturbs sedimentary deposits formed by modern catastrophes (hurricanes and
> floods) but is not evidenced in the geologic column. This implies that the
> geologic column was buried very deeply and rapidly.
Nope.
> 7) Lack of recognizable soil layers in the geologic column. Soil material is
> seldom found in the geologic column. One would think that the earth had soil
> layers in the past, and if it was slowly buried, some would be preserved.
Wrong.
> 8) Undisturbed bedding planes. Different geologic rock layers often show
> sharp, knife-edge breaks between layers, with no evidence of erosion
> between. This is not realistic if the layers formed over long periods of
> time.
Not a problem, but what happened to that ol' #
"6" make up your mind, was the flood violent or
calm as a mirror?
> 9) Clastic dikes. Clastic dikes are formed from soft sand squeezed up
> through newer layers of rock. This implies that the sandy older (lower)
> layer was still soft enough to squeeze sand up (like squeezing a toothpaste
> tube) through the younger upper layers.
And usually found in relation to fault zones, and
areas prone to volcanism, right?
>
> The Earth's Magnetic Field
See above.
[snip]
>
> "The Field's 'Energy' Has Always Decreased"
>
> According to the dynamic-decay theory, the 'energy' in the field has always
> decreased rapidly. In fact, the energy loss during reversals and
> fluctuations would have been even faster than today's rate. This information
> allows us to estimate the age of the field.
Quickly in geological terms.
> The data and the dynamic-decay theory imply that, ever since creation, the
> field has always lost at least half its energy every 700 years. Figure 2
> illustrates the factors involved.
"figure 2"? Is this a simple "cut and paste"
parrot post?
> The maximum energy in the figure comes
> from another theory I proposed about the nature of the field when God
> created the earth, a theory which successfully predicted space probe
> measurements of planetary magnetic fields. Extrapolating today's energy
> decay rate back (along the dotted straight line labeled 'free decay') to
> that limit yields a maximum age of 8700 years. According to the
> dynamic-decay theory, the true age would be less than that because of extra
> losses during the reversals and fluctuations. The solid line (labeled
> 'dynamic decay') shows that with a significant loss of energy during the
> Genesis flood, the age of the field would be about 6000 years.
Anyone can make up pictures using selective data
points.
>
> Conclusion
>
> At present, the only working theory for the origin, fluctuations, rapid
> reversals, and decay of the field is a creationist theory-a theory that fits
> all the data. Thus, according to the best theory and data we have, the
> earth's magnetic field certainly is less than 100,000 years old; very likely
> less than 10,000 years old, and fits in well with the face-value Biblical
> age of 6,000 years.
Too bad the "problems" are not "problems".
Boikat
UR32212451
>Here you go, everybody. Some reasons that the earth cannot >POSSIBLY be 4.6
billion years old.
Excellent post Robert. Boikats response appears to be a host
of special pleading and pooh poohing rather than any kind of
effort toward rebuttal.
Bdiller's post merely references a T.O. FAQ which touches
only on a few of your evidences, and some of these are
inconclusive and/or speculative.
raven1
>"Robert Paveza" <Ref...@email.msn.com> wrote
>
>>Here you go, everybody. Some reasons that the earth cannot >POSSIBLY be 4.6
>billion years old.
>
>Excellent post Robert. Boikats response appears to be a host
>of special pleading and pooh poohing rather than any kind of
>effort toward rebuttal.
Specifically?
Boikat
> billion years old.
>
> of special pleading and pooh poohing rather than any kind of
> effort toward rebuttal.
Yah, right. Two ignorant twits pat each other on
the back, Big whoopy!
>
> Bdiller's post merely references a T.O. FAQ which touches
> only on a few of your evidences, and some of these are
> inconclusive and/or speculative.
In other words, you didn't understand/read the
Merrit article?
Boikat
ZenIsWhen
>Here you go, everybody. Some reasons that the earth cannot POSSIBLY be 4.6
>billion years old.
And here we have a repeat of just about every creationist fantasy theory that
has been presented in T.O. within the past year .... and been soundly refuted
by real, scientific evidence.
Lots of "It seems", "not likely", "it couldn't" "I can't understand" type of
crap ..
and no real evidence or facts - just the same old assertions.
ZenIsWhen
>"Robert Paveza" <Ref...@email.msn.com> wrote
>
>billion years old.
>
>of special pleading and pooh poohing rather than any kind of
>effort toward rebuttal.
>
>only on a few of your evidences, and some of these are
>inconclusive and/or speculative.
>
All of this crap has been posted before - and soundly refuted.
Why keep answering, in detail, the same crap lies over and over again?
If T.O. FAQ doesn't cover it (and I'm sure they cover more than you indicate -
and in more and real detail than you want to admit) - try doing a search in
Deja News for ALL of the past posts on most of the exact same topics.
As far as being "inconclusive and / or speculative" ... show any point in that
whole post where Robert offered anything more than just uneducated assertions.
Kevin R. Henke
Robert Paveza wrote in message
<001f402332303...@email.msn.com>...
KRH: No. The sun's radiation pushes some of the particles back.
Other particles are trapped indefinitely between gravitation pulls of
planets. See Strahler, 1987, p. 145.
Strahler, A. N., 1987, Science and Earth History: The
Evolution/Creation Controversy, Prometheus, Buffalo, NY.
4) Existence of unstable rings around planets like Saturn. Rings are
not
stable and will not last.
KRH: Wrong again. See Strahler, 1987, p. 145-146
5) Extensive tectonic activity on Jupiter's moon Io. Inadequate heat
sources
for a small moon so far from the sun to still be geologically active.
KRH: Jupiter's powerful gravitational field is the cause.
6) Presence of magnetic fields around solar system bodies (Mercury,
Jupiter's moon Ganymede, Neptune, Uranus) without an obvious internal
dynamo. No natural process is known which could sustain a magnetic
field
around these bodies - their magnetic fields should have decayed out of
existence if they ever had any.
7) Rock flow and lunar craters - Rock flow should have eliminated old
craters on the moon.
KRH: Glenn Morton was one of the guys that came up with this idea. He
no longer believes it. Glenn and his coauthors of this Creation
Research Society Quarterly article used unrealistic viscosity values
for the rocks. Glenn told me that if this paper was true, glass
knives in ancient Egyptian tombs would have flowed and lost their
sharp edges by now.
8) Recession of the moon from the earth. Moon is moving away from the
earth
gradually due to tidal activity. Movement is too fast for earth-moon
system
to be 4.6 billion years old.
KRH: Brown's false argument. Refuted many times on Talkorigins. See
if the rebuttal is in the FAQs.
9) Shrinking sun - Sun may be shrinking a few feet each year. Can't
extrapolate this trend back to the past very far without effecting
earth's
environment.
KRH: Not even creationist Ackerman believes this claim. It was
totally refuted by a chapter in Van Till et al, 1988.
See:
Van Till, H. J., Young, D. A., and Menninga, C., 1988, Science Held
Hostage: What's Wrong with Creation Science AND Evolutionism,
InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL.
Ackerman, P. D., 1986, It's a Young World after All, Baker Book House,
Grand Rapids, MI.
10) Absence/shortage of solar neutrinos. Nuclear fusion in the sun's
core
should give off neutrinos. Experiments have not detected an adequate
number
of neutrinos - this is a well known problem. Some creationists have
argued
that this implies solar heat is due to gravity and not fusion - this
would
imply a young sun.
KRH: If the creationists were right, there wouldn't be any neutrinos
at all. But some have been detected. Also it takes a few million
years for radiation to migrate from the sun's core to the surface.
See:
Noyes, Robert W., 1982, The Sun, Our Star, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA.
So the sun can't be only 6,000 to 10,000 years old. The H/He ratio of
the sun also indicates that it's about 5-6 billion years old. Not bad
and fairly consistent with the 4.6 billion year old dates given by
meteorites. See:
Krauskopf, Konrad B., 1979 (1995 with Bird), Introduction to
Geochemistry, McGraw-Hill, New York.
11) Heat level of the sun's corona. Not sustainable for extended time
period.
12) High concentration of Uranium-236 on the moon. Should have
decayed.
KRH: U-236 is regenerated by slow neutron capture in uranium ores,
Strahler, 1987, p. 135.
13) High concentration of Thorium-230 on the moon. Should have
decayed.
KRH: Np-237 is regenerated by cosmic rays on the moon. Check
Strahler, 1987, p. 134-135. I think you got the wrong isotope.
Either way, you're mistaken.
Young Earth Evidence
1) Exponential decay in the earth's magnetic field (half-life of
1400-2000
years). This half-life cannot be extrapolated back more than about
10,000
years without the field becoming intolerably powerful. Creationists
have
been criticized for taking the original work on this matter out of
context
and failing to show that the magnetic field is cyclic (decaying then
strengthening). However, it is the old earth believers that have
concocted
this data in an imaginary hypothetical cyclic extrapolation. It is the
creationist who has used only the empirical evidence, to devise a
theory
that truly explains that data now available to us.
KRH: You're wrong. More disinformation from creationist Barnes.
Magnetic studies on pottery and volcanics show that the Earth's
magnetic dipole fluctuates over time. Up to about 2000 years ago, it
was INCREASING. Even creationist Humphreys admits this. You can even
find this evidence by looking through creationist Barnes' references.
For the truth, see:
Brush, Stephen G., 1983, "Finding the Age of the Earth: By Physics or
By Faith", p. 296f, in Zetterberg, J. P., (Ed.), Evolution versus
Creationism: The Public Education Controversy, Oryx Press.
Young, Davis A., 1982, Christianity and the Age of the Earth,
Zondervan, Grand Rapids, MI.
2) Insufficient mass of helium in earth's atmosphere to account for
4.6
billion years of radioactive decay. Helium is a by-product of
radioactive
decay of some elements. It is a noble gas which doesn't combine with
any
other element, but there is not enough of it to account for the
radioactive
decay which should have occurred in an old-earth scenario.
KRH: Contrary to Vardiman's claims, helium leaks from the atmosphere.
See:
Dalrymple, G. B., 1984, "How Old is the Earth?: A Reply to
`Scientific' Creationism," in Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting
of the Pacific Division, American Association for the Advancement of
Science, vol. 1, pt. 3, Frank Awbrey and William Thwaites (Eds).
3) Despite inferior medical and nutritional practices, evidence
indicates
that the human species should have populated the earth much more
quickly if
they had been around for millions of years.
KRH: Wrong. The 14th century plagues wiped out 50% to 75% of the
population of Europe. Until the development of modern medicine, human
population growth was surpressed by disease and accidents.
4) Earliest known human civilizations are only a few thousand years
old.
KRH: That has NOTHING to do with the age of the Earth.
5) Tree rings, including rings on petrified forest trees, cannot be
traced
back more than several thousand years.
KRH: Wrong. Tree ring data, including rings in dead trees, have a
continuous record going back 9,000 years. Varve records go back even
further.
6) Dating of Niagara falls. Erosion of the system indicates it is only
a few
thousand years old.
KRH: Niagara Falls formed after the end of the last ice age, about
9,000 years ago. This has NOTHING to due with the age of the Earth.
7) Dating of Mississippi river delta. Erosion rate and amount of
sediment
accumulated indicate that it is only a few thousand years old.
KRH: Wrong. The Mississippi delta is millions of years old and
stretches up to Tennessee. See: Strahler, 1987, p. 286-289.
8) Lack of equilibrium of Carbon-14/Carbon-12 ratio. This ratio should
reach
equilibrium in the atmosphere in only some thousands of years, but it
hasn't
reached that point yet.
KRH: More creationist disinformation. See Strahler, 1987, p. 157-158
for details.
9) Erosion rate of the continents. Continental mass divided by net
erosion
rate (that is, despite accretion due to volcanism, tectonic activity,
and
geosyncline) would wash all of the continents into the ocean in about
14
million years.
KRH: Denudation rates are not well measured. However, plate tectonic
forces and volcanism DO offset denudation. See Strahler, 1987,
chapter 29.
10) Amount of salts in the ocean divided by rate of influx. This is
actually
many dating methods - one for each salt which can be measured. For
example,
all the sodium chloride in the ocean would have been ashed in about 62
million years, if the ocean was pure water to begin with.
KRH: Creationist Austin is confusing residence times with dating
methods. Sodium will eventually sorb onto sea clays and chloride
evaporates from sea spray.
11) Amount of water on earth's surface / rate at which it is expelled
from
below ground. Enough water is expelled from deep below the earth via
volcanoes, etc. to rapidly produce more than all the water on the
earth's
surface.
KRH: The creationist arguments were made before plate tectonics. We
now know that water recycles through subducting marine sediments and
then erupts in lavas.
12) No plausible explanation for the pressure in oil reservoirs
remaining so
high for millions of years.
KRH: Wrong. Keith Littleton recently gave a brillant explanation of
this creationist misconception at Talkorigins.
13) Existence of uranium halos.
14) Existence of polonium halos. Some believe that the polonium halos
disqualify radiometric dating as a reliable dating method because they
may
indicate that the rate of radioactive decay has not been constant
throughout
history.
KRH: Refuted by Brush, 1983 in the above reference. Gentry's halos
are debunked by this reference:
Odom, A. Leroy and William J. Rink, "Giant Radiation-induced Color
Halos in Quartz: Solution to a Riddle," Science, vol. 246, October,
1989, p. 107-109.
-Polonium Halos from www.halos.com-
to emit radioactive particles.
KRH: Wakefield has also thoroughly refuted Gentry's Kindergarten
geology:
Wakefield, J. R., "Gentry's Tiny Mystery - Unsupported by Geology,"
Creation/Evolution Journal, Issue XXII, 1988a, p. 13f.
Wakefield, J. R., "Shadowing Walter Brown in Ontario,"
Creation/Evolution Newsletter, Jan. and Feb., 1988b, p. 8f.
Wakefield, J. R., The Continuing Saga of the Po Halo "Mystery,"
unpublished paper, available from National Center for Science
Education, Inc., P.O. Box 9477, Berkeley, CA, 94709-0477, October,
1988c (criticizes statements made by Gentry in the 1988 edition of his
book: Creation's Tiny Mystery).
"Evidence for a Rapidly Formed Geologic Column"
The geologic column (representing all the earth's observed sedimentary
rock)
in classical geology represents hundreds of millions of years of
evolutionary history. Evidence that this column formed rapidly rather
than
over millions of years is therefore evidence for a young geologic
column and
a young earth. It should be noted that the "geologic column" is purely
hypothetical and cannot be found in a complete form anywhere on earth
other
than in a textbook.
KRH: Creationist Woodmorappe has identified at least 10 locations,
including western North Dakota and parts of Poland, that have all 10
geologic periods (always in the correct order).
1) Lack of meteorites in the geologic column. If the geologic column
is
billions of years old one would expect to find meteorites throughout.
KRH: No. Meteorite impacts are common in the geologic record,
including the Pennsylvanian of western North Dakota. Meteorites and
tektites are found in the geologic record. Tektites have been
recently discussed on Talkorigins.
2) Ripple marks, rain drops, and animal tracks in sedimentary rocks.
This
implies very rapid burial and hardening because these fragile features
could
not survive even trivial erosion.
KRH: Not necessarily. However, rapid deposition has long been
recognized by geologists. It's obvious that earthquakes, mudslides,
hurricanes, etc. have been impacting and influencing the geologic
record for billions of years. The geologic record is a product of
both slow and gradual change (like evaporating sea water and
glaciations) and NATURAL catastrophes, such as local floods,
earthquakes, mudslides, and hurricanes.
For information on sedimentation and sedimentary rock formation, see:
Blatt, H., G. Middleton, and R. Murray, 1980, Origin of Sedimentary
Rocks, second edition, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 07632.
3) Polystrate fossils. These are fossils which cut across multiple
geologic
layers that were supposedly laid down millions of years apart.
Fossilized
trees and animals are often found in tact and spanning supposedly
millions
of years of geologic layers.
KRH: No! Geologists do NOT believe that all rocks were deposited
slowly. Polystrate trees form when mudslides or floods bury trees
(sometimes in minutes, like at Mt. St. Helens) or from sedimentation
in swampy areas over several decades.
4) Regional deposition. Current known geologic processes don't account
for
regional deposits (covering multiple U.S. states, for example). This
applies
to certain types of rocks, as well as coal and oil reserves.
KRH: False. Nice future coal deposits are now forming in northern
Minnesota and Upper Michigan.
5) Deformation of strata implies it was soft when deformed and hadn't
hardened into rock.
KRH: J. Morris forgets that calcite cement may dissolve and sediment
may not become well lithified for ten's of millions of years until
silica cement develops. Look at the poorly lithified Tertiary
sediments in western Nebraska or the Dakotas.
6) Absence of bioturbation in the geologic column. Biological activity
soon
disturbs sedimentary deposits formed by modern catastrophes
(hurricanes and
floods) but is not evidenced in the geologic column. This implies that
the
geologic column was buried very deeply and rapidly.
KRH; Actual bioturbation in rocks at the Grand Canyon refutes Austin
et al.'s flood geology claims for those rocks.
7) Lack of recognizable soil layers in the geologic column. Soil
material is
seldom found in the geologic column. One would think that the earth
had soil
layers in the past, and if it was slowly buried, some would be
preserved.
KRH: Wrong. Again. Soils are very common in rocks of all ages.
Here's some examples:
Rye, R. and H.D. Holland, 1998, “Paleosols and the Evolution of
Atmospheric Oxygen: A Critical Review,” American Journal of Science,
v. 298, October, p. 621-672.
Ancient soils with good horizons could not have formed during a
"Flood" and often not even in 10,000 years. As examples, Meyer (1997,
p. 120) lists several paleosols and other soil phenomena that would
exceed YEC time frames. Specifically, a one meter alterite in India
is estimated to have taken 55,000 years to develop. Silcrete takes
100,000 to 1 million years to form. An iron-rich bauxite in Hawaii
formed over a period of 10,000 years. A complex iron-rich duricrust
in Senegal took 6 million years to form. A one meter thick calcrete
with good drainage typically takes about 1 million years to develop.
In other examples, Retallack (1986) describes a Precambrian paleosol
in a complex series of metamorphosed sedimentary rocks and basalts.
Retallack (1986) estimated that the one soil, alone, took 7,000 years
to form.
Meyer, R., 1997, “Paleoalterites and Paleosols: Imprints of
Terrestrial Processes in Sedimentary Rocks,” A.A. Balkema, Rotterdam.
Retallack, G., 1986, “Reappraisal of a 2200 Ma-Old Paleosol near
Waterval Onder, South Africa,” Precambrian Research, v. 32, p.
195-232.
8) Undisturbed bedding planes. Different geologic rock layers often
show
sharp, knife-edge breaks between layers, with no evidence of erosion
between. This is not realistic if the layers formed over long periods
of
time.
KRH: Natural turbidites will do this. No Noah's Flood is needed. See
the above reference, Blatt et al. (1980).
9) Clastic dikes. Clastic dikes are formed from soft sand squeezed up
through newer layers of rock. This implies that the sandy older
(lower)
layer was still soft enough to squeeze sand up (like squeezing a
toothpaste
tube) through the younger upper layers.
KRH: Clastic dikes are rare, but can easily form in sediments that are
Tertiary and younger and that have little or no silica cement.
KRH: Barnes' arguments are so bad that not even creationist Humphreys
believes him. See Brush, 1983 and Young, 1982, above.
KRH: See the above references by Brush, 1983 and Young, 1982. The
dipole field fluctuates. Even creationist Humphreys knows better.
Conclusion
KRH: Again, your arguments are outdated. The dynamo hypothesis has
good paleomagnetic support. Read Young, 1982 and Brush, 1983.
Rydain Darkstar
> "Robert Paveza" <Ref...@email.msn.com> wrote
>
> >Here you go, everybody. Some reasons that the earth cannot >POSSIBLY be 4.6
> billion years old.
>
> Excellent post Robert. Boikats response appears to be a host
> of special pleading and pooh poohing rather than any kind of
> effort toward rebuttal.
Why should Boikat bother answering, in detail, the same creationist
regurgibullshit that gets foisted upon this newsgroup all too often when said
regurgibullshit has already been soundly refuted a gazillion times over?
> Bdiller's post merely references a T.O. FAQ which touches
> only on a few of your evidences, and some of these are
> inconclusive and/or speculative.
Why should Bdiller bother answering, in detail, the same creationist
regurgibullshit that gets foisted upon this newsgroup all too often when said
regurgibullshit has already been soundly refuted a gazillion times over?
-Rydain D.
--
http://www.personal.psu.edu/gak139
WARNING: This site is not likely to be of any educational value whatsoever!!! :D
"If you were canoeing in the desert and a wheel fell off, how many pancakes would
it take to reshingle a doghouse?"
-Anonymous comment card, Redifer Dining Commons, PSU Main Campus
"What?"
-Reply to said anonymous comment card
Rydain Darkstar
It astounds me that the creationists who post this outdated drivel act like it's
the first time we've ever seen it. You'd think that if the earth really WERE
10,000 years old, they'd have real evidence instead of easily refuted bullshit.
Dick C.
>In article <001f402332303...@email.msn.com>, "Robert Paveza"
> <Ref...@email.msn.com> wrote:
>>billion years old.
>
>has been presented in T.O. within the past year .... and been soundly refuted
>by real, scientific evidence.
>
>Lots of "It seems", "not likely", "it couldn't" "I can't understand" type of
>crap ..
>and no real evidence or facts - just the same old assertions.
>
Which is, of course, the only method of arguementation that most of the
fundies comprehend. They get it in the sermons in church, when they pick up
a book that supports creationism they get the same thing. Critical thinking is
a skill that is defintely discouraged.
Dick, Atheist #1349
email: dic...@uswest.net
Homepage http://www.users.uswest.net/~dickcr/
Thomas Scharle
|> Here you go, everybody. Some reasons that the earth cannot POSSIBLY be 4.6
|> billion years old.
To begin with, please note that this is, by the assertion of
the poster, "reasons that the earth cannot POSSIBLY be 4.6
billion years old."
That is, *none* of this is evidence *for* a young earth, *even
if* any of this is correct.
And, by the way, let me make a guess. I guess that you didn't
construct this list on your own. I guess that you substantially
lifted this from another source, a source that you trust, but that
you don't want to tell us about. Perhaps identifying your souce
would be embarrassing to you?
The technical expression from logic describing this is "non
sequitur", just simply that your conclusion does not follow from
your assertions.
As is typical for "creationists", they have nothing to affirm,
but only rely upon "maybe, possibly, perhaps, there is something
wrong somewhere".
I'll just take one of these as an example.
[...snip...]
|> 10) Absence/shortage of solar neutrinos. Nuclear fusion in the sun's core
|> should give off neutrinos. Experiments have not detected an adequate number
|> of neutrinos - this is a well known problem. Some creationists have argued
|> that this implies solar heat is due to gravity and not fusion - this would
|> imply a young sun.
[...snip...]
Aside from the fact that there are recent studies which show
that there are transitions between different kinds of neutrinos,
so that there is an explanation for why, when looking for
neutrino type X, some of those have transformed to type Y, so
that the count will be low ...
Let's see the "creationist" argument about how "gravity and not
fusion" explains why there are *any* solar neutrinos at all. Or
any of a load of the other details which point to fusion as the
energy source of the sun.
It isn't just enough to say, `I don't know the details of
the solar neutrino deficit, therefore the world is 10,000 years
old'.
How do you go from the number of solar neutrinos to the
earth being 1 billion, 1 million or 1 thousand years old?
That's the old "creationist" ploy, isn't it? `I don't know
everything about everything, therefore creationism must be true.'
It might have some plausibility as a ploy, *if* there were an
alternative "theory of creationism". *If* you could show some
connection between "creationism" and "the number of observed
solar neutrinos". Or even if there were some connection between
"creationism" and gravity as a source of solar heat; or between
gravity and neutrinos; or if there were any prospect of
"creationism" even attempting to explain anything.
|> At present, the only working theory for the origin, fluctuations, rapid
|> reversals, and decay of the field is a creationist theory-a theory that fits
|> all the data. Thus, according to the best theory and data we have, the
|> earth's magnetic field certainly is less than 100,000 years old; very likely
|> less than 10,000 years old, and fits in well with the face-value Biblical
|> age of 6,000 years.
Oh? I have *never* seen a "creationist theory", much less a
creationist "theory that fits all the data".
Could you tell me about this "creationist theory"?
--
Tom Scharle scha...@nd.edu "standard disclaimer"
Clark Dorman
"Robert Paveza" <Ref...@email.msn.com> writes:
> Here you go, everybody. Some reasons that the earth cannot
> POSSIBLY be 4.6 billion years old.
How many of these reasons do we have to refute before you begin
to think that maybe your sources are a little off?
I ask because each of them has been discussed and refuted
multiple times on this newsgroup. When a creationists is
presented with a refutation of a particular point, the tendency
seems to be for them to say "what about these other ones". Those
get refuted and then the creationist says "what about _these_
other ones." The problem from the point of view of those that
want to explain the generally accepted view of cosmology is that
crap is far, far easier to post (namely, the list below) and it
takes a while refute it.
Let's take two (related ones) in particular:
> 9) Shrinking sun - Sun may be shrinking a few feet each
> year. Can't extrapolate this trend back to the past very far
> without effecting earth's environment.
> 10) Absence/shortage of solar neutrinos. Nuclear fusion in the
> sun's core should give off neutrinos. Experiments have not
> detected an adequate number of neutrinos - this is a well known
> problem. Some creationists have argued that this implies solar
> heat is due to gravity and not fusion - this would imply a
> young sun.
Both of these argument has been refuted many times. The original
suggestion came (IIRC) from a short article that discussed the
measure of the sun's radius over historical time. The error bars
are huge. The present evidence, based on real astronomy, is that
the sun is not shrinking, but that it oscillates in interesting
ways (See, for example, the book "A Positron Named Pricilla").
In addition, you give us absolutely no numbers and no references.
You apparently either read this or heard this and are just
parrotting what you think are devastating arguments against solar
physics. What, you think that all those scientists are just
sitting around doing nothing? Do you not realize that there are
people writing PhD dissertations, running computer models, doing
analyses and calculations, and actually doing something that
would tell us something about the sun? Do you think that somehow
these scientists are just ignoring these problems? No, you are
just parrotting and have no idea if there is anything to these
arguments.
Finally, the Homestake, Kamiokande, SAGE, and GALLEX experiments
most definitely did and are measuring neutrinos coming from the
sun. There are fewer measured than would be expected from
standard soloar models, by about half. First, what is the
gravitational explanation for the presence of neutrinos? Second,
the MSW hypothesis is that there are matter-induced oscillations
that are converting electron neutrinos into muon neutrinos, and
the preliminary evidence is that it is correct. Third, please,
please, please calculate the change in the size of the sun that
we would see if the energy being produced by the sun is due to
gravitational contraction. Please point me to a calculation by
anyone to that effect. The energy and the size change are off by
orders of magnitude.
Please see attached posts. I can only conclude that you don't
have any idea what you are talking about and think that nobody
else does either.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The Solar Neutrino Problem
and the Age of the Sun
1. The Standard Solar Model(s)
2. The Solar Neutrino Problem
3. Recent Evidence on Neutrinos
4. Hope for a Solution to SNP
5. The Solar Radius, Kelvin's Argument, and the Gravity Solution
6. Conclusion
1. The Standard Solar Model(s)
The sun (and other stars) works by fusion. Most basically, protons in
the core fuse, creating deuterium and releasing energy. Deuterium combines
with another proton to make light Helium. Other reactions follow and in the
process release energy and create heavier elements. In a standard solar model
(SSM), this process is modeled by representing the sun's layers, computing
pressures, temperatures, densities, and calculating the resulting nuclear
reactions. The amounts of the elements on the sun's surface can be calculated
or determined through astrophysics and observations and are used in the models
(see Taylor, 1970 for a relatively simple description). The amount of helium
is not particularly well known and is one of the assumptions of the SSM.
Different initial amounts of helium produce slightly different models that can
be fitted to all the known observations of the sun (except for one, to be
discussed in 2.)
The SSM has proven to be extremely useful in understanding the
way that stars work. The amount of evidence that backs it up is very
large. The SSM and the related solar modeling efforts explain the
evolution of stars, how they ignite, why the elements that exist in
the universe are in the proportions that they are, how novas and
supernovas occur and why most stars become white dwarfs, why the solar
spectrum is the way that it is, and why the distribution of stars
along the main sequence of stars is what it is. From the SSM, we
calculate that the sun "burns" about 600 million tons of hydrogen
every second. (For the creationists, it is important to point out
that the energy that is created in the core takes several tens of
thousands of years to reach the surface.) According to the SSM, the
sun has been operating for about 5 billion years, and has another 5
billion to go (Taylor, 1970; Zirin, 1988).
The most important reactions in the sun for our purposes are:
2 +
I. p + p --> H + e + nu (<0.420 MeV)
2 3
II. H + p --> He + gamma
3 3
III. He + He --> alpha + 2 p
2 3
where p=proton, H = deuterium (a proton and neutron), He=light
+
helium (two protons and a neutron), e = positron, gamma=gamma-ray,
alpha=normal helium (two protons, two neutrons), and nu=electron
neutrino (Bahcall, 1990; Taylor, 1970). Since we are discussing the
solar neutrino problem, we are also interested in the following
reactions:
3 7
IV. He + alpha --> Be + gamma
7 - 7
V. Be + e --> Li + nu (0.861 or 0.383 MeV)
7
VI. Li + p --> 2 alpha
7 8
VII. Be + p --> B + gamma
8 8 +
VIII. B --> Be + e + nu (<15 MeV)
8
IX. Be --> 2 alpha
where Be=beryllium, Li=lithium, B=boron. The numbers on the right
side of equations I, V, and VIII are the energy of the neutrinos that
are produced. Two more reactions also produce neutrinos, but at
lower rates:
- 2
X. p + p + e --> H + nu (1.442 MeV)
3 +
XI. He + p --> alpha + e + nu (9.625 MeV)
Because of the large amount of time that it takes for the
energy from the core of the sun to reach the surface, the light that
we see is due to core events from a long time ago. The light is also
greatly modified by the journey. Neutrinos react so poorly with
matter that the neutrinos that are released in the above reactions
travel straight through the sun, through space, and through the earth.
Thus, detecting neutrinos is a particularly good way to examine what
is happening in the core of the sun now. The neutrinos travel at or
near the speed of light (an important issue discussed later), so like
light, take just over 8 minutes to reach the earth. For fundamental
physics, the sun is a very convenient producer of neutrinos, as they
are difficult to produce otherwise. For the standard electroweak
theory, all neutrinos have zero rest mass. For various grand unified
theories that try to combine the electromagnetic and weak forces with
strong nuclear force, neutrinos have non-zero rest mass.
2. The Solar Neutrino Problem.
Dr. Raymond Davis Jr. and colleaques developed/built a
neutrino detector in the early 1970s. It consists of a large pool
(100,000 gallons) of perchloroethylene in the Homestake Gold Mine in
Lead, South Dakota. Below, it is referred to as Homestake. Depending
upon the specific SSM that is being used, we should expect a rate of
about 8 solar neutrino units (SNU) to be detected. Rather, in the
first two decades of using Homestake, a rate of 2.2 SNU was detected.
This difference is called the Solar Neutrino Problem (SNP) (Cherry et
al, 1985).
The Homestake detector is based on the reaction of neutrinos with
chlorine. Occasionally, a neutrino will react with the chlorine in a
perchloroethylene (cleaning fluid) molecule. This produces an electron and a
radioactive Argon atom (37Ar). Every couple of months, the researchers clean
all of the argon out of the tank resulting in about 15 total argon atoms out
of the 10^30 total atoms in the tank. Experiments have confirmed that the
extraction process gets about 90% of the argon atoms that are present.
Because of the process that produces the argon, only the 7Be and 8B neutrinos
are energetic enough to be detected, from equations V and VIII above
(Abdurashitov et al, 1994).
A second detector was built to study the problem. It is the
Kamiokande detector, jointly developed by Japan and the United States
and built in a mine in the Japanese Alps. It consists of 2,140 tons
of purified water. It detected approximately 45% of the expected
number of neutrinos, but this detector is only sensitive to the 8B
neutrinos. The Cherenkov detectors used in the experiment work by
detecting light that is emmited by electrons that are pushed forward
by the neutrinos. An important result of this experiment is that the
neutrinos that are being detected are in fact coming from the sun, as
opposed to other sources. In addition, unlike the Homestake
experiment, the Kamiokande experiment does not have a several month
time delay and is able to determine the timing and direction of the
neutrinos.
The discrepency between the expected and detected number of
neutrinos is the one "big problem" with solar astrophysics. Just
about everything else about the sun and models of it has been
confirmed, so the SNP sticks out like a sore thumb. In addition,
while the size of the errors is expected in both the estimated number
of neutrinos and the actual number detected are fairly large (as
physics goes), the uncertainties do not overlap (Hata, 1994).
3. Recent Evidence on Neutrinos
Because of the lower than expected number of neutrinos
detected by the two detectors above, more recent experiments have been
developed. In particular, the Homestake and Kamiokande experiments
are largely sensitive to high-energy 8B solar neutrinos, whose
production rate depends critically (proportional to T^18 [!]) on the
core temp of sun. Therefore, recent experiments have been designed to
capture other neutrinos. The two that have produced recent results
are the SAGE and GALLEX experiments.
SAGE uses a Gallium--Germanium Neutrino Telescope to measure
the integral flux of solar neutrinos. It is in Baksan Neutrino
Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the Northern
Caucasus Mountains. The main experimental area is in a chamber 60m
long, 10m wide, and 12m high. The Ga is held in 8 Teflon lined
reactors, 2 cubic meters each, holding about 7t of metallic gallium.
At first, 30 tons of gallium were used, and now the full experiment is
using 57 tons. The experiment uses the neutrino reacting with 71Ga to
produce 71Ge. As in the Homestake experiment, the amount of Ge is
measured after an extended exposure time, in this case of about 4
weeks. The Ga-Ge reaction is sensitive to the pp, 7Be, and 8B neutrinos
(~55%, ~25%, ~10%, resp.) (Abdurashitov, 1994).
GALLEX also uses Gallium as well but the form that the gallium
is in is different. (I do not have a paper specifically discussing
the GALLEX experiment so I do not know how the SAGE and GALLEX
experiments differ. Sorry) In any case, the SAGE and GALLEX
experiments have been producing approximately the same results. The
following is from Hata and Langacker (1994) and sums the most recent
experiments, and combines the SAGE and GALLEX experiments:
Experiment Element Used Expected(1) Expected(2) Actual %
---------- ----------- ---------- ---------- --------- ----
Homestake Chlorine 8+-1 6.4 +- 1.4 2.32+-0.23 (29%)
Kamiokande Water 1+-.14 0.77+-.19 0.51+-0.07 (51%)
SAGE gallium \__
GALLEX gallium / 131.5+-7 122.5+-7 81+-13 (62%)
1. Bahcall and Pinsonneault model (BP SSM)
2. Turck-Chieze and Lopez model (TCL SSM)
Clearly, the SNP is still present. While the SAGE and GALLEX
experiments are detecting a higher percentage of the neutrinos
expected, the error ranges still do not overlap (Hata, 1994).
4. Hope for a Solution to SNP
The scientific solutions that have been suggested for the SNP
have fallen into two categories: First, an astrophysical change that
will result in a lower number of neutrinos expected; or second, a
change in neutrino physics that will explain why the neutrinos
produced are either not making it to earth or are not being detected.
The SNP is not expected to be due to an astrophysical mistake
because of the relative results of the experiments. The correlations
of the fluxes and the fact that astrophysical processes do not distort
neutrino spectrum, rules out most astrophysical explanations for the
SNP. Basically, the different experiments agree on the ratios of the
neutrinos being detected and these agree with the standard SSMs.
Further, all non-standard models have had difficulty producing
detected number of neutrinos without conflicting with other observed
sun properties. From above, a reduction in the core temperature of
the sun should reduce the number of neutrinos. Thus, non-standard
models have tried to reduce the core temperature by using: heavy
elements, high magnetic fields, turbuelent diffusion, continuous
mixing, rapidly rotation or burned-out helium cores, convective mixing
of hydrogen into the core, and new equations of state. But, the
problems that each of these solutions produces is far greater than the
neutrino problem that it solves (Abdurashitov, 1994).
The physics solution that has the best chance of being correct is
called the Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein (MSW) solution. The MSW scenario
is that neutrinos have mass and that matter-induced oscillations convert
the electron neutrinos into other neutrino types, for example muon
neutrinos, to which the detectors above are less sensitive or insensitive.
This is why the issue of the rest-mass (and hence whether they travel at
the speed of light or not) of neutrinos is fairly important, as the MSW
solution requires a non-zero rest mass. However, based on further
theoretical work, the MSW solution would explain the above data and would
result in a fairly minimal change of standard neutrino physics. MSW
permits neutrino oscillations to occur in two disjointed regions of
parameter space, these being called the "small and large mixing angle
solutions to the SNP" (Hata, 1994).
(Note: I do not pretend to understand the physics involved (nor the
math behind the physics). I'm just repeating what I've read in the
astrophysics journals.)
There are three important future experiments that are going to
shed some light on the issues: SuperKamiokande, SNO, and Borexino.
SNO and SuperKamiokande will measure the 8B neutrino energy spectrum.
The shape of the neutrino spectrum is determined by nuclear processes
only, independent of the solar model. So, any spectral distortion
will be due to unconventional neutrino properties which will affect
MSW. SNO will also detect solar neutrinos through both a charged
current reaction and a neutral current reaction. The ratio will be
independent of the solar model and will also test unconventional
neutrino properties. Finally, SuperKam and SNO (charge currect
detector) together should be able to detect the presence of muon
neutrinos.
Borexino will measure with improved accuracy the 7Be neutrino
line. This, combined with 8B neutrino from SuperKam and SNO, and the
pp, 7Be, 8B from GALLEX and SAGE should determine the components of
the neutrino flux. Together, these will produce a good test of the
Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein (MSW) solution to the SNP.
If, for some reason, the detectors above have difficulties,
other detectors could use 81Br, 115In, and 127I as they may have
significant sensitivity to neutrinos from the decay of 7Be. Use of
these in experiments would further examine the problem (Fiorentini
et al, 1994; Hata et al, 1994) and perhaps shed light on further
issues raised in the SuperKam, SNO, and Borexino experiments.
In conclusion, I would like to point out that the standard
solar models do an excellent job at describing the activity of the sun
and other stars in almost all ways. The Solar Neutrino Problem is a
serious problem in that something unknown is occuring that cannot be
explained using normal astrophysics or standard neutrino physics.
Recent detectors have produced results that are within a factor of two
of the theoretical number of neutrinos which provides us with great
confidence that there is fusion occuring and that we are largely along
the right track. However, the differences in the the experimental
measurements and the theoretical calculations, along with confidence
that the errors associated with them, shows that there is a
fundamental process that is not fully understood. This provides us
with an opportunity to test advanced neutrino physics and develop a
better understanding of the sun. However, the presence of the Solar
Neutrino Problem is not sufficient justification to reject the
standard solar model which has been verified in many other ways.
5. The Solar Radius, Kelvin's Argument, and the Gravity Solution
Creationists have used the solar neutrion problem as a reason
to reject the standard solar models in toto. Rather, they fall back
to the argument that the energy output of the sun is due to the
gravitational contraction of the mass of the sun. For example,
examine Hilton Hinderliter "The Shrinking Sun: A Creationist's
Prediction, Its Verification, and the Resulting Implications for
Theories of Origins." Scientific arguments and proposals regarding
the source for the energy of the sun go back to Helmholtz and Kelvin
and is very interesting from a history of science point of view. As
we will see though, recent information does not provide a good reason
for returning to these idea.
As an example of the creationist approach, here is a section
cut from another talk.origins FAQ regarding the "shrinking sun", along
with the FAQ's response:
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> # 7. Since 1836, over one hundred different observers at the Royal
> # Greenwich Observatory and U.S. Naval Observatory have made
> # direct visual measurements which show that the diameter of the
> # sun is shrinking at a rate of about .1% each century or about 5
> # feet per hour! Furthermore, records of solar eclipses indicate
> # that this rapid shrinkage has been going on for at least the past
> # 400 years.
> #
> # Several indirect techniques also confirm this gravitational
> # collapse, although these inferred collapse rates are only about
> # 1/7th as much. Using the most conservative data, one must
> # conclude that had the sun existed one million years ago, it would
> # have been so large that it would have heated the earth so much
> # that life could not have survived.
> #
> # Yet, evolutionists say that a million years ago all the present
> # forms of life were essentially as they are now, having completed
> # their "evolution" that began 200 million years ago.
>
> More evidence that "no error favorable to creationism ever dies." And
> this one is an error. The Greenwich Observatory scientsts calculated a
> decrease in solar diameter of 0.008 percent over the last 300 years,
> with a standard error of 0.007 percent. This amount is negligible, and
> the data further indicates that the diameter oscillates with a period
> of about 80 years and an amplitude of 0.025 percent. [8]
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
During the early 1800's, the output of the sun was a difficult
topic, as it was unclear what how the sun was able to continuously
produce the huge amount of energy that was observed. The concepts of
a burning mass or other chemical reaction had been rejected as being
insufficient to continue at the rate that they had been seen during
recorded history.
Based on earlier work by Helmholtz, Lord Kelvin produced
calculations (which unfortunately I have not had opportunity to
actually read) that determined the amount of energy, its distribution,
and history that could be produced by the sun based on gravitational
contraction. The data produced was used along with his geological
arguments to argue that the planet could not have been around long
enough for non-directed evolution to have occured. Kelvin's
calculations placed what geologists (and biologists) considered far
too short a time for the history of the sun : "it is around
100,000,000 years and on no account can be more than 500,000,000". It
should be pointed out that this provides no support for the claim for
a young earth on the order of 10,000 years. In addition, it assumes a
history of the solar system that is inconsistent with ex nihilio
creation.
The radius of the sun has been measured since at least the
17th century. The question is then whether or not the sun has been
decreasing or increasing in radius and by how much. Eddy and
Boornazian delivered a paper to the American Astronomical Society in
1979 using meridian circle observations that purported to show a
decrease in the solar radius by approximately 1 arc second per
century, which was a completely unexpected result. Unfortunately, I
do not have a copy of the paper, as I cannot find where it was
published. The usual citation of the paper is:
Eddy, J. A. and Boornazian, A. A. "Secular decrease in the solar
diameter, 1863-1953". Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society,
Volume 11, p 473.
Unfortunately, this is just the abstract of the paper. I would be
very grateful for for a copy of the actual paper.
A reduction of this magnitude in the solar radius would pose a
problem for standard solar models. Standard solar models predict an
undetectable increase in the radius of the sun on the order of
3.3x10-6 arc seconds per century. However, a couple of points should
be made:
1. the historical data are not clear and there are contradictory
reports based on the same data and on other data (see below)
2. the presence of a decrease in radius does not mean that fusion
is not occuring in the sun. For example, if fusion was not
occuring, where are the neutrinos that _are_ detected coming
from (especially since they are coming from the direction of
the sun)?
3. Kelvin-Helmholtz theory implies that the decrease in the solar
radius should be 0.004 arc seconds per century, which is well
within the noise of the historical measurements.
In a counter-paper published in Nature (Parkinson, et al.
1980), evidence is presented that the sun has kept a constant radius
(within errors) for the past 250 years. The data that was used was
the same as in the Eddy and Boornazian paper, but a different subset
of the data was used. This is an important point, as it turns out
that everybody that has studied this issue has thrown out many of the
measurements performed prior to the 1940's as being unreliable.
Parkinson et al argue that there were significant changes in
instrumentation, personnel, and techniques during the time that the
measurements occured to argue that certain data should be used and
others should not. They point to sudden changes in the values
measured when these variables changed.
Parkinson et al also consider solar radius measurements based
on the transit times of Mercury and the data from solar eclipses.
These data are quite noisy but they seem to support the claim that the
solar radius has decreased by 0.14 arc seconds per century (Mercury
transit data) or 0.08 arc seconds per century (eclipse data).
However, Shapiro (1980) also uses Mercury transit data and determines
an _increase_ in radius of 0.05 arc seconds per century. Again, the
researchers were using subsets of the entire data.
Dunham et al (1980) use eclipse data to show support for the
claim that the solar radius has decreased .34 arc seconds since 1715
(or 0.129 arc seconds per century). However, this data only consists
of three data points and conflicts with Parkinson et al.
In yet another paper, Gilliland (1981) discusses and combines
all of the above data and derives the following conclusion: the
_average_ solar radius may have decreased by 0.1 arc seconds per
century since the 1700's. However, he also concludes that there is a
cyclical variation in the solar radius that is negatively correlated
with sun spots and their 11 year cycle. In particular, there is a
variation of with an half-amplitude of 0.1 arc seconds every 11 years
with the peak occuring when sun spots are at their minimum. He also
finds evidence for a 76 year cycle with an half-amplitude of 0.23 arc
seconds. This cycle is in phase with the "Gleissberg cycle" of
approximately 80 years that modulates the 11 year sunspot cycle. The
idea of negatively correlated sun spot activity and radius goes all
the way back to 1872 and was proposed by Secchi. Gilliland also
determines the standard deviation for these data and comes up with an
average s.d. of .2 arc seconds. Compared to the size of the change in
the radius, the data are quite noisy. See in particular his figure 1
and table 1.
Much of the discussion about the historical data has been over
what types and what size the errors were. Brooks (1988) discusses,
for example, how changes in the micrometers that were used (where they
were with regard to focal plane, screw errors in pitch, etc.) changed
over time and how they could cause systematic errors, and how they
would cause an overestimation. He in particular discusses the
measurements of Picard in the second half of the 17th century were
wrong and, hence, why the claim by Ribes (1987) is incorrect that
Picard measured the sun to be 3 arc seconds larger than now.
The issue of a secular decrease in the solar radius is
presently unsettled. For more information, see Strahler (1987). The
data are contradictory and filled with noise and errors. If the sun
is in fact decreasing in radius, it is important to understand why and
what the effects would be. However, the size of the decrease in
radius proposed by several researchers is far too _large_ to account
for in terms of gravitational contraction in the Kelvin model.
According to Gilliland, Kelvin's model predicts 0.004 arc second per
century decrease, which is too small to be measurable within the
noise.
Using Kelvin's theory to explain the sun creates more problems
than it causes. It does not explain the neutrinos that are detected,
it does not explain the observed distribution of stars, it does not
explain novas and super novas, and is inconsistent (based on the
above) with the disputed contractions of the sun discussed above. An
alternative theory, that combines gravitational contraction and
nuclear processes could be considered. According to Gilliland, the
evidence seems to suggest oscillations in radius of several different
cycles. However, I do not know of any theoretical studies of the
issue. The more important point is that even with using gravitational
contraction to explain the solar neutrino problem, this does not imply
a young sun. Kelvin's calculations themselves estimate a sun of over
100,000,000 years. Combining nuclear processes and gravitational
contraction also does not produce a young-sun.
It is interesting to note that the shrinking sun argument has
been criticized by creationists themselves, see DeYoung and Rush
(1989). However, as frequently is the case, the contradiction of an
argument by the creationists' own "research" sources does not lead to
general knowledge of the contradiction, so it continues to appear in
talk.origins.
6. Conclusion
The solar neutrino problem is a well recognized, serious issue
for solar astrophysics. In the past several years, the detected
number of neutrinos has increased and is now approximately 60% of the
expected number. A theory has been proposed to explain the difference
between detected and predicted, and this theory will be tested in the
next decade or two. In the mean time, the standard solar model
continues to explain a vast array of solar (and other star) data.
The possible change in the radius of the sun is another issue
that may have to be dealt with. The data are not clear, and the noise
is extremely large for the historical measurements. The continued
accurate measurements done in the astronomical and astrophysical
communities will, over the next decades, provide a much better
determination of the radius of the sun and its fluctuations.
Possible changes in the solar radius do not support Kelvin's
theory of gravitational contraction as the source of energy of the
sun. Even if it did, the use of Kelvin's theory does not support the
idea of a young earth. First, Kelvin's own theory predicts an old sun
(>100,000,000) by young earth creationist's standards although
considerably less than the accepted age (~5 billion). Second, the
gravitational theory does not explain the observed properties of the
sun and other stars. Combining nuclear and gravitational processes
does not produce a young sun. Finally, Kelvin's theory predicts a
change of the radius of the sun that we would not be able to determine
from the historical data. Changes on the order of .1 to 1 arc second
per century are far too large to account for using Kelvin's theory.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Abdurashitov, J.N. et al. Results from SAGE (The Russian-American
Gallium solar neutrino Experiment). In: Physics letters. [part b].
MAY 26 1994 v 328 n 1 / 2 Page: 234
Austin, Sam M. Anantaraman, N. Love, W.G. Charge exchange
reactions and the efficiency of solar neutrino detectors. In:
Physical review letters. JUL 04 1994 v 73 n 1 Page: 30
Bahcall, John N. Where Are the Solar Neutrinos? How something as
elusive as the neutrino can stand astronomy and physics on its head.
In: Astronomy. MAR 01 1990 v 18 n 3 Page: 40
Brooks, R. C. (1988). Errors in measurement of the solar diameter in
the seventeenth and eighteen centuries. Journal for the History of
Astronomy, Vol 19, #4, p.239-255.
Cherry, M.L., K. Lande, and W.A. Fowler (eds.). Solar neutrinos and
neutrino astronomy : (Homestake, 1984) New York : American Institute
of Physics, 1985.
DeYoung, Don B. and Rush, David E. (1989) "Is the Sun an Age
Indicator?" _Creation Research Society Quarterly_
26(September):49-53.
Dunham, D. W., Sofia, S., Fiala, A. D., Herald, D., Muller, P.M.
(1980), Science, 210, p. 1244.
Eddy, J. A. and Boornazian, A. A. "Secular decrease in the solar
diameter, 1863-1953". Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society,
Volume 11, p 473.
Fiorentini, G., Lissia, M., and Mezzorani, G. Solar neutrino
experiments and determination of the neutrino oscillation parameters.
In: Physical review d: particles, fields, gravitat JUN 15 1994 v 49 n
12 Page: 6298
Gilliland, R. L. (1981). Solar Radius Variations over the past 265
years. The Astrophysical Journal, vol 248, 1144-1155.
Hata, Naoya, and Langacker, Paul. Solar model uncertainties, MSW
analysis, and future solar neutrino experiments. In: Physical review
d: particles, fields, gravitat JUL 15 1994 v 50 n 2 Page: 632
Parkinson, J.H., Morrison, L.V., and Stephenson, F.R. "The constancy
of the solar diameter over the past 250 years," Nature, 288, 1980,
p.548-551.
Shapiro, I. I. (1980). Science, 208, p. 51
Strahler, Arthur N., Science and Earth History; New York: Prometheus
Books, 1987
Taylor, R. J. The Stars: Their Structure and Evolution. Springer -
Verlag, New York, 1970.
Zirin, Harold. Astrophysics of the sun / Harold Zirin. Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1988.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: talk.origins
From: hahn@newshost (Karl Hahn)
Subject: Re: Proof of the World not being too old
Nntp-Software: PC/TCP NNTP
Sender: ne...@lds.loral.com
Reply-To: ha...@lds.loral.com
Organization: Loral Data Systems
> >3. The sun is shrinking at 1% every 1000 years, and if you went back
> >far enough in time, it would literally be touching the earth, therefore,
> >the sun must have been made at the same time as the earth, and couldn't
> >be created too long ago
The physics of how much energy is released by the gravitational shrinkage
of an object is well known. If the sun were shrinking at the rate you
say it is, it would have to be putting out nearly 200 times as much
energy as it is (calculations included as an appendix to this post).
We would all fry.
By whose measurement is the sun shrinking at the rate you say it is?
In addition, 1000 years ago humans were not able to measure the diameter
of the sun to 1% accuracy. A century ago humans were not able to
measure it to 0.1% accuracy. How is this data arrived at?
To anyone who, like Diana, is willing to believe philisophical
statements supposedly based upon science without first understanding
some science (and the math that goes with it), you are as vulnerable
to liars and charlatans who wish only to further their own dogma
as sheep are to a pack of wolves.
Make the investment. Learn the science. Learn it well. Knowledge,
besides being power, is its own reward.
>>><<<
Appendix: If the sun were uniform density (which it isn't), its
gravitational binding energy would be
E = 3/5 * G * m^2 / r [derivation available upon request]
where E is the binding energy, G is the universal gravitational constant,
m is the mass of the sun, and r is its radius.
G = 6.7e-11 newton meters^2 / kg^2
mass of sun = 2.0e30 kg
radius of sun = 6.9e8 meters
Since the sun is denser at the center than at the outside, the actual
binding energy is even more, so the formula above gives a lower bound
to E.
By taking the derivative of the above formula, we get a bound on how
much energy the sun must give up to shrink by one meter:
dE/dr = -(3/5) * G * m^2 / r^2
dE/dr = -3.4e32 Joules per meter
So, for each meter the sun shrinks, it must give up 3.4e32 Joules to
its surroundings. Diana has proposed that the sun shrank 1% in 1000
years. 1% of the suns radius is
delta_r = 6.9e6 meters
So the energy released is:
delta_E = -delta_r * dE/dr = 2.3e39 Joules
1000 years is 3.1e10 seconds, so this amounts to a power output of
P = delta_E / t = 7.4e28 Joules per second (i.e. watts)
where t is the time elapsed in seconds.
The measured output of the sun is 3.9e26 watts. So the lower bound of
the sun's power output as predicted by Diana's statement is about 190
times the observed power output of the sun.
Clearly Diana's number was misquoted, mismeasured, or made up.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
--
Clark
Dick C.
"Robert Paveza" <Ref...@email.msn.com> wrote:
> Here you go, everybody. Some reasons that the earth cannot POSSIBLY
be 4.6
> billion years old.
Thank you, I guess, for posting all of these tired and oft refuted
arguements in one long post.
I won't bother responding to them as several others already have, and
refutations can be found at the talk.origins faq site. Or by applying a
bit of knowledge and some critical thinking.
But I do have a question, in all these supposed aruguements/evidences
for a young earth, where is the evidence of a young earth? They are all
arguements against an old earth or universe. None are for a young earth.
When a scientist lists evidence for a theory, the evidence actually
provides positive support for the theory, not attacks on some other
theory.
He may argue that a particular piece of evidence is better support for
his theory than some other, but all of his arguements are of the type
that support his theory.
Where are the postive arguements in this mish mash?
--
Dick, Atheist #1349
email: dic...@uswest.net
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
Chris C.
This reminds me of a part of the movie "Twelve Angry Men" where the guy goes
forget all that other stuff you can throw it all out.
Shane D. Killian
>
> Here you go, everybody. Some reasons that the earth cannot POSSIBLY be
> 4.6 billion years old.
> Young Universe Evidence
> 1) Insufficient number of supernovas / rate at which they occur. A new
> supernova event is observed about every 30 years, and we see only a few
> thousand in existence.
>
not billions of years anyway, so it is decidedly *not* evidence for a
young earth or against an old universe.
> 2) Absence of field galaxies. With stellar evolution, it would seem that
> some galaxies would not be gravitationally bound and would just spread
> out in a "field".
>
What the smeg are yout alking about? And what does it have to do with a
young or old earth?
> 3) Gravitationally bound star clusters with stars of different ages. If
> a star cluster is gravitationally bound, under stellar evolution theory
> one would expect all the stars would be the same age.
>
Why? What would preclude the formation of stars from nebulous material?
> Young Solar System Evidence
> 1) Rate of bombardment of meteoritic dust / amount of dust measured on
> the moon. Should be several hundred feet of dust on the moon.
>
Wrong. It should be a couple of inches. And it is.
> 2) Existence of short-period comets. They can only last a maximum of
> several thousand years because they give off copious material each
> orbit.
>
And the problem with this is...?
> 3) Continued presence of small meteorites in the face of the
> Poynting/Robertson effect. Poynting-Robertson effect should sweep the
> solar system clean of small particles.
>
Well, eventually, it will. How many billions of years do you want to
wait to find out?
> 4) Existence of unstable rings around planets like Saturn. Rings are not
> stable and will not last.
>
And the evidence for this is? And please explain why they are not held
in place by tractor moons, as has been observed.
> 5) Extensive tectonic activity on Jupiter's moon Io. Inadequate heat
> sources for a small moon so far from the sun to still be geologically
> active.
>
Massive tidal forces from the largest planet in the solar system is, by
you, inadequate? What the smeg *would* you consider adequate???
> 6) Presence of magnetic fields around solar system bodies (Mercury,
> Jupiter's moon Ganymede, Neptune, Uranus) without an obvious internal
> dynamo. No natural process is known which could sustain a magnetic field
> around these bodies - their magnetic fields should have decayed out of
> existence if they ever had any.
>
Except, of course, for just about all of quantum mechanics.
> 7) Rock flow and lunar craters - Rock flow should have eliminated old
> craters on the moon.
>
Yeah, from all that lava that's up there. Sheesh...
> 8) Recession of the moon from the earth. Moon is moving away from the
> earth gradually due to tidal activity. Movement is too fast for
> earth-moon system to be 4.6 billion years old.
>
Huh? I'm going to have to ask for a source on this.
> 9) Shrinking sun - Sun may be shrinking a few feet each year. Can't
> extrapolate this trend back to the past very far without effecting
> earth's environment.
>
Whoever said the earth's environment was unchanged?
> 10) Absence/shortage of solar neutrinos. Nuclear fusion in the sun's
> core should give off neutrinos. Experiments have not detected an
> adequate number of neutrinos - this is a well known problem.
>
Not to anyone who's measured stellar neutrinos.
> Some creationists have argued that this implies solar heat is due to
> gravity and not fusion - this would imply a young sun.
>
Then please explain the existance of heavier elements.
> 11) Heat level of the sun's corona. Not sustainable for extended time
> period.
>
Yeah, only 10 or 20 billion years.
> 12) High concentration of Uranium-236 on the moon. Should have decayed.
>
Source?
> 13) High concentration of Thorium-230 on the moon. Should have decayed.
>
Source?
> Young Earth Evidence
> 1) Exponential decay in the earth's magnetic field (half-life of
> 1400-2000 years).
>
Sorce?
> 2) Insufficient mass of helium in earth's atmosphere to account for 4.6
> billion years of radioactive decay. Helium is a by-product of
> radioactive decay of some elements. It is a noble gas which doesn't
> combine with any other element, but there is not enough of it to account
> for the radioactive decay which should have occurred in an old-earth
> scenario.
>
Probably because most of it's leaked out into space. Duh!!!
> 3) Despite inferior medical and nutritional practices, evidence
> indicates that the human species should have populated the earth much
> more quickly if they had been around for millions of years.
>
Why?
> 4) Earliest known human civilizations are only a few thousand years old.
>
So?
> 5) Tree rings, including rings on petrified forest trees, cannot be
> traced back more than several thousand years.
>
Tree rings have been tracked more than 15,000 years, far, far older than
YEC's claim is the age of the earth.
> 6) Dating of Niagara falls. Erosion of the system indicates it is only a
> few thousand years old.
>
Source? And relevance?
> 7) Dating of Mississippi river delta. Erosion rate and amount of
> sediment accumulated indicate that it is only a few thousand years old.
>
Ditto.
> 8) Lack of equilibrium of Carbon-14/Carbon-12 ratio. This ratio should
> reach equilibrium in the atmosphere in only some thousands of years, but
> it hasn't reached that point yet.
>
Yeah, because we've got all these pesky plants and the sun making more
C-14.
> 9) Erosion rate of the continents. Continental mass divided by net
> erosion rate (that is, despite accretion due to volcanism, tectonic
> activity, and geosyncline) would wash all of the continents into the
> ocean in about 14 million years.
>
And, of course,t here's absolutely no method for returning this sediment
to the continents. Right.
> 10) Amount of salts in the ocean divided by rate of influx. This is
> actually many dating methods - one for each salt which can be measured.
> For example, all the sodium chloride in the ocean would have been ashed
> in about 62 million years, if the ocean was pure water to begin with.
>
And, of course, there are no water cycles. Water stays in the ocean
forever.
> 11) Amount of water on earth's surface / rate at which it is expelled
> from below ground. Enough water is expelled from deep below the earth
> via volcanoes, etc. to rapidly produce more than all the water on the
> earth's surface.
>
And this water comes from....?
> 12) No plausible explanation for the pressure in oil reservoirs
> remaining so high for millions of years.
>
Unless you count gravity, that is.
> 13) Existence of uranium halos.
>
Why is this a problem?
> 14) Existence of polonium halos. Some believe that the polonium halos
> disqualify radiometric dating as a reliable dating method because they
> may indicate that the rate of radioactive decay has not been constant
> throughout history. Others feel these halos indicate a rapid (instant)
> creation of the earth.
>
But these people, of course, are clueless and haven't the slightest idea
how radiation works.
> 1) Lack of meteorites in the geologic column. If the geologic column is
> billions of years old one would expect to find meteorites throughout.
>
Post a source saying there are no meteorites in the geologic column.
Seems I remember one from Mars being dug up awhile back...
I'm not going to do any more...It's monotonous, the rest of this is so
idiotic.
--
Shane D. Killian -- sha...@vnet.net -- http://users.vnet.net/shanek
"uuunnn k mmmmmmk hhhhhhhh khbbbbbbbbbbbh
gnhjjjjjjjjjjj rrrrrrrrrddddfc gvb uyyyyyyyhubbbbbbb"
--Sinclair Mitchell Killian, born 1/29/98
Jim Phillips
> Here you go, everybody. Some reasons that the earth cannot POSSIBLY be 4.6
> billion years old.
> Young Universe Evidence
> 1) Insufficient number of supernovas / rate at which they occur. A new
> supernova event is observed about every 30 years, and we see only a few
> thousand in existence.
???
Supernovas don't last very long--they brighten in a few days, then
fade away over weeks/months. Thus, there can't be "thousands in existence".
Also, *why* would the number of supernovas be "insufficient"?
> 2) Absence of field galaxies. With stellar evolution, it would seem that
> some galaxies would not be gravitationally bound and would just spread out
> in a "field".
???
Could you cite the paper or textbook that talks about "field
galaxies"? I received a Bachelor degree in astronomy 12 years ago, and
I've tried to keep up with the literature, but I've never run across
"field galaxies" before. I can't even figure out exactly what it's
supposed to be based on what you wrote above.
> 3) Gravitationally bound star clusters with stars of different ages. If a
> star cluster is gravitationally bound, under stellar evolution theory one
> would expect all the stars would be the same age.
No, it doesn't. Also, you do realize that the "stellar evolution
theory" you mention measures the age of star clusters in millions of years,
not to mention billions of years for individual stars?
> Young Solar System Evidence
> 1) Rate of bombardment of meteoritic dust / amount of dust measured on the
> moon. Should be several hundred feet of dust on the moon. Several years ago
> this creationist argument was dismissed, and many creationists themselves
> stopped using it. However, in light of the latest scientific research, this
> argument has been revived.
Refuted by the talk.origins FAQ (you didn't read it, did you?).
> 2) Existence of short-period comets. They can only last a maximum of several
> thousand years because they give off copious material each orbit.
Regenerated by the Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt.
> 3) Continued presence of small meteorites in the face of the
> Poynting/Robertson effect. Poynting-Robertson effect should sweep the solar
> system clean of small particles.
Unless of course there's a continual source for those small
meteorites. Remember those short-period comets you mentioned, that
"give off copious material each orbit"? I do appreciate you giving
the answer to point #3 in point #2.
> 4) Existence of unstable rings around planets like Saturn. Rings are not
> stable and will not last.
By this reasoning, sandy beaches can't last either.
> 5) Extensive tectonic activity on Jupiter's moon Io. Inadequate heat sources
> for a small moon so far from the sun to still be geologically active.
Tidal friction from Jupiter and its other moons.
> 6) Presence of magnetic fields around solar system bodies (Mercury,
> Jupiter's moon Ganymede, Neptune, Uranus) without an obvious internal
> dynamo. No natural process is known which could sustain a magnetic field
> around these bodies - their magnetic fields should have decayed out of
> existence if they ever had any.
This is just plain wrong. If it isn't, please cite the technical
paper or textbook that makes this claim.
> 7) Rock flow and lunar craters - Rock flow should have eliminated old
> craters on the moon.
Why? Pleas be specific.
> 8) Recession of the moon from the earth. Moon is moving away from the earth
> gradually due to tidal activity. Movement is too fast for earth-moon system
> to be 4.6 billion years old.
Nonsense--do the math (not to mention the fact that the recession
rate has changed over time).
> 9) Shrinking sun - Sun may be shrinking a few feet each year. Can't
> extrapolate this trend back to the past very far without effecting earth's
> environment.
I note the "may be shrinking" - that's hardly evidence if you have
to couch it in such terms.
> 10) Absence/shortage of solar neutrinos. Nuclear fusion in the sun's core
> should give off neutrinos. Experiments have not detected an adequate number
> of neutrinos - this is a well known problem. Some creationists have argued
> that this implies solar heat is due to gravity and not fusion - this would
> imply a young sun.
See the recent book "The Case Of The Missing Neutrinos" by John
Gribbin. Good reading, and it's non-technical in nature.
> 11) Heat level of the sun's corona. Not sustainable for extended time
> period.
Says who?
> 12) High concentration of Uranium-236 on the moon. Should have decayed.
Unless of course there's an outside source for it, right?
> 13) High concentration of Thorium-230 on the moon. Should have decayed.
> Young Earth Evidence
See #12.
> 1) Exponential decay in the earth's magnetic field (half-life of 1400-2000
> years). This half-life cannot be extrapolated back more than about 10,000
> years without the field becoming intolerably powerful. Creationists have
> been criticized for taking the original work on this matter out of context
> and failing to show that the magnetic field is cyclic (decaying then
> strengthening). However, it is the old earth believers that have concocted
> this data in an imaginary hypothetical cyclic extrapolation. It is the
> creationist who has used only the empirical evidence, to devise a theory
> that truly explains that data now available to us.
Please cite the papers from the scientific peer-reviewed journals
that indicate an "exponential decay in the earth's magnetic field". A
website is not adequate, as I could most likely find a flat-earth website
to "prove" the earth is flat.
> 2) Insufficient mass of helium in earth's atmosphere to account for 4.6
> billion years of radioactive decay. Helium is a by-product of radioactive
> decay of some elements. It is a noble gas which doesn't combine with any
> other element, but there is not enough of it to account for the radioactive
> decay which should have occurred in an old-earth scenario.
Helium is light enough to escape from the Earth's gravitational
field, given enough time.
> 3) Despite inferior medical and nutritional practices, evidence indicates
> that the human species should have populated the earth much more quickly if
> they had been around for millions of years.
Please cite this "evidence", preferably from the peer-reviewed
scientific literature.
> 4) Earliest known human civilizations are only a few thousand years old.
So? Oldest human remains are 100,000+ years old.
> 5) Tree rings, including rings on petrified forest trees, cannot be traced
> back more than several thousand years.
Incorrect.
> 6) Dating of Niagara falls. Erosion of the system indicates it is only a few
> thousand years old.
So?
> 7) Dating of Mississippi river delta. Erosion rate and amount of sediment
> accumulated indicate that it is only a few thousand years old.
Cite evidence (again, peer-reviewed scientific literature, please).
> 8) Lack of equilibrium of Carbon-14/Carbon-12 ratio. This ratio should reach
> equilibrium in the atmosphere in only some thousands of years, but it hasn't
> reached that point yet.
Cite evidence (peer-reviewed, as usual).
> 9) Erosion rate of the continents. Continental mass divided by net erosion
> rate (that is, despite accretion due to volcanism, tectonic activity, and
> geosyncline) would wash all of the continents into the ocean in about 14
> million years.
No, they don't.
> 10) Amount of salts in the ocean divided by rate of influx. This is actually
> many dating methods - one for each salt which can be measured. For example,
> all the sodium chloride in the ocean would have been ashed in about 62
> million years, if the ocean was pure water to begin with.
So, you're saying that there's no way for these salts to leave the
ocean once they get there?
> 11) Amount of water on earth's surface / rate at which it is expelled from
> below ground. Enough water is expelled from deep below the earth via
> volcanoes, etc. to rapidly produce more than all the water on the earth's
> surface.
So, there's no way such water came from, say, the ocean?
> 12) No plausible explanation for the pressure in oil reservoirs remaining so
> high for millions of years.
Yes, there is, you just haven't read it/refuse to read it.
> 13) Existence of uranium halos.
Explained adequately--see the FAQ.
> 14) Existence of polonium halos. Some believe that the polonium halos
> disqualify radiometric dating as a reliable dating method because they may
> indicate that the rate of radioactive decay has not been constant throughout
> history. Others feel these halos indicate a rapid (instant) creation of the
> earth.
See talk.origins FAQ (if you dare).
Rest snipped.
--
Jim Phillips, jphi...@bcpl.net
A man asked the Universe, "Sir, why am I here?"
"None of your business," replied the Universe.
Jim Phillips
> "Robert Paveza" <Ref...@email.msn.com> wrote
>
> >Here you go, everybody. Some reasons that the earth cannot >POSSIBLY be 4.6
> billion years old.
>
> Excellent post Robert. Boikats response appears to be a host
> of special pleading and pooh poohing rather than any kind of
> effort toward rebuttal.
>
> Bdiller's post merely references a T.O. FAQ which touches
> only on a few of your evidences, and some of these are
> inconclusive and/or speculative.
Please comment on my reply, which covered all of his points with
only a few references to the talk.origins FAQ.
Will Pratt
Shane D. Killian wrote in message <375834F1...@vnet.net>...
>Robert Paveza wrote:
<snip>
>> 6) Dating of Niagara falls. Erosion of the system indicates it is only a
>> few thousand years old.
>>
>Source? And relevance?
<snip>
The Great Lakes are a Late Wisconsin-Holocene phenomenon, which did not
exist prior to the Pleistocene glaciations (and there dosen't seem to be any
evidence for their existence during interglacials, so far as my admittedly
elderly sources here in my office go). Prior to about (very roughly) 8,500
yr bp the present areas of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario were a single lake
basin and the area of the present Niagara River was under water. As the
postglacial lake level fell, the divide between the Erie and Ontario basins
was exposed, the Niagara river developed, and cutting of the gorge began.
Incidentally, this antedates the supposed creation date for a young earth by
2500 years.
Will
--
William L. Pratt, Ph.D., Curator of Invertebrates, Barrick Museum
Mail Stop 4012, Univ. Nevada, Las Vegas 89154-4012
(702) 895-1403; Fax (702) 895-3094; pra...@nevada.edu
Dave Woetzel
UR32212451 wrote in message
<19990603225014...@ng-fp1.aol.com>...
>"Robert Paveza" <Ref...@email.msn.com> wrote
>
>>Here you go, everybody. Some reasons that the earth cannot >POSSIBLY be
4.6
>billion years old.
>
>of special pleading and pooh poohing rather than any kind of
>effort toward rebuttal.
>
material. As he points out, some of Robert's stuff is dated. IMHO, the
strongest of it is ocean salinity, atmospheric helium, erosion & marine
deposition. Although, I am surprised Henke could not do better on the
dendrochronology, comets, galaxy stuff, and magnetic fields around solar
system bodies. Those may be stronger than I thought.
Dave
Boikat
>
> UR32212451 wrote in message
> <19990603225014...@ng-fp1.aol.com>...
> >"Robert Paveza" <Ref...@email.msn.com> wrote
> >
> 4.6
> >billion years old.
> >
> >of special pleading and pooh poohing rather than any kind of
> >effort toward rebuttal.
> >
> Boikat is a good, old-fashioned skeptic.
Thank you. :}
> More to the point is Henke's
> material. As he points out, some of Robert's stuff is dated. IMHO, the
> strongest of it is ocean salinity, atmospheric helium, erosion & marine
> deposition. Although, I am surprised Henke could not do better on the
> dendrochronology, comets, galaxy stuff, and magnetic fields around solar
> system bodies. Those may be stronger than I thought.
No, they are covered in the FAQ's, but if that's
not good enough, there is a easy way to verify or
refute the claims. Do a search on the net.
Dendrochronology: How long does wood last in the
open environment? Why are bristle cone pines more
durable, both as a living tree, and as dead wood?
Also, dendrochronology is an ongoing field of
investigation. Stay tuned.
Comets were covered quite well. The Oort and
Kuiper belt are a source in deep freeze out beyond
pluto, and objects from the kuiper belt have been
directly imaged by the Hubble space telescope.
The Kuiper Belt is real, it exists.
"Field Galaxies" Ever see the HST "Deep Sky"
image?
Also, as in the case of the magnetic fields,
since the planets in question are not exact
replicas of earth, it's reasonable that they would
have some variation when compared with the earth's
magnetic field, and how it's generated.
Those creationist argument are just a weak as the
rest of them.
Boikat
Tedd Hadley
|>Excellent post Robert. Boikats response appears to be a host
|>of special pleading and pooh poohing rather than any kind of
|>effort toward rebuttal.
|>
|Boikat is a good, old-fashioned skeptic. More to the point is Henke's
|material. As he points out, some of Robert's stuff is dated. IMHO, the
|strongest of it is ocean salinity, atmospheric helium, erosion & marine
|deposition. Although, I am surprised Henke could not do better on the
|dendrochronology, comets, galaxy stuff, and magnetic fields around solar
|system bodies. Those may be stronger than I thought.
If this isn't email accidently posted, it sounds vaguely like
taunting. I believe all of the areas you mentioned are old
creationist arguments and refuted many times over. Do you really
find ocean salinity, atmospheric helium, and the erosion arguments
strong? In what way?
Kevin R. Henke
be 4.6
billion years old.
Young Universe Evidence
[snip]
2) Existence of short-period comets. They can only last a maximum of
several
thousand years because they give off copious material each orbit.
KRH: The following article shows how comets are consistent with a 4.6
billion year old solar system:
Wyckoff, Susan, "Comets: Clues to the Early History of the Solar
System," 1991, Earth-Science Reviews, v. 30, p. 125-174.
KRH: The Kuiper belt, a source of some comets, was predicted and then
found in 1992. Search the web for the details. The discovery of the
Kuiper belt is an example of good science making accurate predictions.
[snip] [discussed earlier]
Dave Woetzel
Boikat wrote in message <37585008...@bellsouth.net>...
>Dave Woetzel wrote:
>>
>> UR32212451 wrote in message
>> <19990603225014...@ng-fp1.aol.com>...
>> >"Robert Paveza" <Ref...@email.msn.com> wrote
>> >
be
>> 4.6
>> >billion years old.
>> >
>> >of special pleading and pooh poohing rather than any kind of
>> >effort toward rebuttal.
>> >
>> Boikat is a good, old-fashioned skeptic.
>
Hey, you occupy an *important* place in the fulfillment of prophecy.
>> More to the point is Henke's
>> material. As he points out, some of Robert's stuff is dated. IMHO, the
>> strongest of it is ocean salinity, atmospheric helium, erosion & marine
>> deposition. Although, I am surprised Henke could not do better on the
>> dendrochronology, comets, galaxy stuff, and magnetic fields around solar
>> system bodies. Those may be stronger than I thought.
>
>No, they are covered in the FAQ's, but if that's
>not good enough, there is a easy way to verify or
>refute the claims. Do a search on the net.
>
>Dendrochronology: How long does wood last in the
>open environment? Why are bristle cone pines more
>durable, both as a living tree, and as dead wood?
>Also, dendrochronology is an ongoing field of
>investigation. Stay tuned.
Yes, it is ongoing. However, are you aware of anything that has passed the
10,000 year wall?
>Comets were covered quite well. The Oort and
>Kuiper belt are a source in deep freeze out beyond
>pluto, and objects from the kuiper belt have been
>directly imaged by the Hubble space telescope.
>The Kuiper Belt is real, it exists.
You mean, as compared to the Oort cloud?
>"Field Galaxies" Ever see the HST "Deep Sky"
>image?
>
> Also, as in the case of the magnetic fields,
>since the planets in question are not exact
>replicas of earth, it's reasonable that they would
>have some variation when compared with the earth's
>magnetic field, and how it's generated.
Speculation.
>Those creationist argument are just a weak as the
>rest of them.
No, Boikat. Unlike what some imply on T.O. Creationists *do* 'fess up to
hard evidence that outdates an argument. That may be the case for shrinking
sun and moon dust, but is *not* true of the others.
Dave
Dave Woetzel
Boikat wrote in message <37585008...@bellsouth.net>...
>Dave Woetzel wrote:
>>
>> UR32212451 wrote in message
>> <19990603225014...@ng-fp1.aol.com>...
>> >"Robert Paveza" <Ref...@email.msn.com> wrote
>> >
be
>> 4.6
>> >billion years old.
>> >
>> >of special pleading and pooh poohing rather than any kind of
>> >effort toward rebuttal.
>> >
>> Boikat is a good, old-fashioned skeptic.
>
>Thank you. :}
Hey, you occupy an important place in fulfilled prophecy!
>> More to the point is Henke's
>> material. As he points out, some of Robert's stuff is dated. IMHO, the
>> strongest of it is ocean salinity, atmospheric helium, erosion & marine
>> deposition. Although, I am surprised Henke could not do better on the
>> dendrochronology, comets, galaxy stuff, and magnetic fields around solar
>> system bodies. Those may be stronger than I thought.
>
>No, they are covered in the FAQ's, but if that's
>not good enough, there is a easy way to verify or
>refute the claims. Do a search on the net.
>
>Dendrochronology: How long does wood last in the
>open environment? Why are bristle cone pines more
>durable, both as a living tree, and as dead wood?
>Also, dendrochronology is an ongoing field of
>investigation. Stay tuned.
Yes. It is ongoing. However, are you aware of any finds that break the
10,000 year barrier?
>Comets were covered quite well. The Oort and
>Kuiper belt are a source in deep freeze out beyond
>pluto, and objects from the kuiper belt have been
>directly imaged by the Hubble space telescope.
>The Kuiper Belt is real, it exists.
You mean, as compared to the Oort cloud?
>"Field Galaxies" Ever see the HST "Deep Sky"
>image?
>
> Also, as in the case of the magnetic fields,
>since the planets in question are not exact
>replicas of earth, it's reasonable that they would
>have some variation when compared with the earth's
>magnetic field, and how it's generated.
Speculation.
>Those creationist argument are just a weak as the
>rest of them.
>
Boikat, you know that creationists have 'fessed up when hard evidences
outdates an argument like shrinking sun and moon dust (despite what some may
claim on T.O.). However, this does not apply to all the others that were
cited above.
Dave
hrgr...@my-deja.com
"Dave Woetzel" <dwoe...@juno.com> wrote:
>
> Boikat wrote in message <37585008...@bellsouth.net>...
> >Dave Woetzel wrote:
> >>
> >> UR32212451 wrote in message
> >> <19990603225014...@ng-fp1.aol.com>...
> >> >"Robert Paveza" <Ref...@email.msn.com> wrote
> >> >
> >> >>Here you go, everybody. Some reasons that the earth cannot
>POSSIBLY
> be
> >> 4.6
> >> >billion years old.
<snip>
> >Comets were covered quite well. The Oort and
> >Kuiper belt are a source in deep freeze out beyond
> >pluto, and objects from the kuiper belt have been
> >directly imaged by the Hubble space telescope.
> >The Kuiper Belt is real, it exists.
>
> You mean, as compared to the Oort cloud?
But in order to use the comet argument against an Earth age in
gigayears, you have to present evidence that there is *no source* for
comets. Just claiming that the Oort cloud is speculation is not
sufficient.
(The argument only makes sense in the other direction: we have so many
consistent indications of an old Earth, thus there has to be an Oort
cloud. We observe it by the comets it emits).
Regards,
HRG.
<snip>
Roberta Waddle
>
> Here you go, everybody. Some reasons that the earth cannot POSSIBLY be 4.6
> billion years old.
You obviously parroted this nonsense out of some cretinist book or website without making
even minimal effort to determine its validity. Had you taken the time to check it in the
Talk.Origins Archives or even lurked this ng a week or two you could have avoided exposing
your credulity and extreme ignorance pertaining to that which you posted. I am not going to
comment on most of your claims since others have already done so. But there are two in
particular that I want to explain so that you may understand the considerable dishonesty of
whomever wrote that which you parroted.
> 2) Ripple marks, rain drops, and animal tracks in sedimentary rocks. This
> implies very rapid burial and hardening because these fragile features could
> not survive even trivial erosion.
There are large numbers of ripple marks, rain drops, and animal tracks (and sun cracks) in
the geologic record. Over 500 animal trackways have been found in the Western US alone.
These trackways are in sediments ranging from late Paleozoic to Recent with most of them
being in sediments creationists attribute to Noah's flood. It does not take much
intelligence to understand that if these sediments truly were laid down by the flood, it
would have washed away any footprints that were laid down. But there should have been few,
if any footprints laid down anyway since the sediments should have been laid down mostly
under water after the animals were drowned. Moreover, there are dinosaur nesting sites near
the top of the Mesozoic sediments. Most of what creationists claim is flood sediment lies
below them. And above the nesting sites is the world-wide iridium layer that marks the end of
the Mesozoic. And above that is far too much sediment to have been laid down by natural
processes in a mere 10,000 years.
Thus in reality, trace fossils disprove the claim of a world-wide flood and verify the
reality of an old earth. That the creationists should use them to "prove" a young earth only
proves their willingness to make selective use of facts to create to create a false
impression
> 3) Polystrate fossils. These are fossils which cut across multiple geologic
> layers that were supposedly laid down millions of years apart. Fossilized
> trees and animals are often found in tact and spanning supposedly millions
> of years of geologic layers.
As you would have found had you checked the Talk.Origins Archives, this claim is pure
creationist nonsense. The "polystrate trees" of Nova Scotia aren't even trees. What your
cretinist source does not tell you is that they are filled in stumpholes - and, of course,
holes cannot be deposited in the middle of a flood. Neither does it tell you that they were
determined to be stumpholes back in the late 1800's, i.e., long before the creationist claim
was even made. The creationists knew their claim was false, but they made it anyway.
By repeating lies such as these, you align yourself with unethical people. Why would you do
that?
Floyd
<rest snipped>
Mark Isaak
Robert Paveza <Ref...@email.msn.com> wrote:
>Here you go, everybody. Some reasons that the earth cannot POSSIBLY be 4.6
>billion years old.
What you have posted is a list of evidences that creationists can't
think. To give just one example (picked arbirarily):
>2) Insufficient mass of helium in earth's atmosphere to account for 4.6
>billion years of radioactive decay. Helium is a by-product of radioactive
>decay of some elements. It is a noble gas which doesn't combine with any
>other element, but there is not enough of it to account for the radioactive
>decay which should have occurred in an old-earth scenario.
This assumes, contrary to evidence, that helium doesn't escape the
atmosphere.
Most of the other examples assume that non-uniform processes are uniform
from the beginning of time. Really stupid.
--
Mark Isaak atta @ best.com http://www.best.com/~atta
"My determination is not to remain stubbornly with my ideas but
I'll leave them and go over to others as soon as I am shown
plausible reason which I can grasp." - Antony Leeuwenhoek
DrFidelius
>Here you go, everybody. Some reasons that the earth cannot POSSIBLY be 4.6
>billion years old.
I am going to do a lot of snippage, and try to answer those points to which I
have an answer. Others I may ask for further information.
>1) Insufficient number of supernovas / rate at which they occur. A new
>supernova event is observed about every 30 years, and we see only a few
>thousand in existence
As I understand it, supernova debris is pretty dark and thus hard to see in
space. Also, the debris is recycled into dust clouds and then into new stars,
such as we see in the Pleiades (sp.). These "observed supernova events" you
reference, are you including supernovae in other galaxies in this 30-year
figure?
>2) Absence of field galaxies. With stellar evolution, it would seem that
>some galaxies would not be gravitationally bound and would just spread out
>in a "field".
I ask "Why would it seem so?" in an attempt to gain further information.
>3) Gravitationally bound star clusters with stars of different ages. If a
>star cluster is gravitationally bound, under stellar evolution theory one
>would expect all the stars would be the same age.
Again, why? Stars are continually being born and dying. Larger stars tend to
live shorter lives and their remnants are turned into new stars. A cluster
would be expected to show stars in all stages of growth, unless they were all
created simultaneously by Divine fiat.
>Young Solar System Evidence
>1) Rate of bombardment of meteoritic dust / amount of dust measured on the
>moon. Should be several hundred feet of dust on the moon. Several years ago
>this creationist argument was dismissed, and many creationists themselves
>stopped using it. However, in light of the latest scientific research, this
>argument has been revived.
Please cite "the latest scientific research." Last I heard, orbiting devices
measured the influx of interplanetary dust. This matched with the measured
thickness of the dust layer on the Moon to a high degree of accuracy. The
amount of dust was not what was ESTIMATED it should have been before we could
measure it in space, but estimates are always being abandoned when accurate
observations are made.
>2) Existence of short-period comets. They can only last a maximum of several
>thousand years because they give off copious material each orbit.
Yes, but Kuiper Belt objects have been observed by the Hubble telescope. This
gives a source for new comets.
>3) Continued presence of small meteorites in the face of the
>Poynting/Robertson effect. Poynting-Robertson effect should sweep the solar
>system clean of small particles.
I am not familiar with the Poynting/Robertson effect. What kind of time scale
do they propose for the complete elimination of small interplanetary objects?
>4) Existence of unstable rings around planets like Saturn. Rings are not
>stable and will not last.
The harmonics observed in the rings of Saturn suggest that the particles have
had a lot of time to fall into meta-stable orbits. But no, I don't think
they'll last more than ten or twelve billion years more even if we don't mine
them.
>5) Extensive tectonic activity on Jupiter's moon Io. Inadequate heat sources
>for a small moon so far from the sun to still be geologically active.
Tidal forces are more than adequate to keep Io active. Show your equations
that this is an inadequate heat source and I'll show you my equations.
>6) Presence of magnetic fields around solar system bodies (Mercury,
>Jupiter's moon Ganymede, Neptune, Uranus) without an obvious internal
>dynamo. No natural process is known which could sustain a magnetic field
>around these bodies - their magnetic fields should have decayed out of
>existence if they ever had any.
Yup, we still gotta work on this one. However, I am not the brightest light on
the tree when it comes to planetary science. Maybe someone else can help here.
>7) Rock flow and lunar craters - Rock flow should have eliminated old
>craters on the moon.
What rock flow? The Moon is geologically inactive, tidal forces from the
Earth's gravity are insufficient to keep it going in the way Jupiter fuels Io.
>8) Recession of the moon from the earth. Moon is moving away from the earth
>gradually due to tidal activity. Movement is too fast for earth-moon system
>to be 4.6 billion years old.
Show your work.
>9) Shrinking sun - Sun may be shrinking a few feet each year. Can't
>extrapolate this trend back to the past very far without effecting earth's
>environment.
Sun also may not be shrinking, in fact it pretty darn sure isn't.
>10) Absence/shortage of solar neutrinos. Nuclear fusion in the sun's core
>should give off neutrinos. Experiments have not detected an adequate number
>of neutrinos - this is a well known problem. Some creationists have argued
>that this implies solar heat is due to gravity and not fusion - this would
>imply a young sun.
The neutrino problem was solved just a year or so ago. Neutrinos have a little
mass and change from one type to another in the time it takes to come from the
Sun to here. Is a gravitationally fueled Sun consistent with the supernovae
you referenced at the start of this post?
>11) Heat level of the sun's corona. Not sustainable for extended time
>period.
How long an "extended time period"? And how is fusion an inadequate mechanism
for this?
>12) High concentration of Uranium-236 on the moon. Should have decayed.
>13) High concentration of Thorium-230 on the moon. Should have decayed.
I do not know anything about radioisotope dating of Moon rocks...
>Young Earth Evidence
>1) Exponential decay in the earth's magnetic field (half-life of 1400-2000
>years). This half-life cannot be extrapolated back more than about 10,000
>years without the field becoming intolerably powerful. Creationists have
>been criticized for taking the original work on this matter out of context
>and failing to show that the magnetic field is cyclic (decaying then
>strengthening). However, it is the old earth believers that have concocted
>this data in an imaginary hypothetical cyclic extrapolation. It is the
>creationist who has used only the empirical evidence, to devise a theory
>that truly explains that data now available to us.
The cyclic extrapolation is well established from the fossil magnetism in sea
floor rocks.
>2) Insufficient mass of helium in earth's atmosphere to account for 4.6
>billion years of radioactive decay. Helium is a by-product of radioactive
>decay of some elements. It is a noble gas which doesn't combine with any
>other element, but there is not enough of it to account for the radioactive
>decay which should have occurred in an old-earth scenario.
Helium is also the second-lightest gas and has a habit of floating out of a
little gravity well like the Earth's.
>3) Despite inferior medical and nutritional practices, evidence indicates
>that the human species should have populated the earth much more quickly if
>they had been around for millions of years.
What evidence? Extrapolation based on present day population growth doesn't
cut it. If we use the population curve of rabbits, they were created in the
late 1970s.
>4) Earliest known human civilizations are only a few thousand years old.
Yes, so?
>5) Tree rings, including rings on petrified forest trees, cannot be traced
>back more than several thousand years.
The use of entire forests has extended the time-line back very far, I am sure
one of our dendrochronology experts will give you the details.
>6) Dating of Niagara falls. Erosion of the system indicates it is only a few
>thousand years old.
>7) Dating of Mississippi river delta. Erosion rate and amount of sediment
>accumulated indicate that it is only a few thousand years old.
Yes, both of these features were formed after the last Ice Age, about ten
thousand years ago.
I have been on-line for a while now, I may come back and answer a few more
later.
Dr. Fidelius, Charlatan
Associate Curator Anomalous Paleontology, Miskatonic University
"You cannot reason a man out of a position he did not reach through reason."
Mike
news:19990603225014...@ng-fp1.aol.com...
> "Robert Paveza" <Ref...@email.msn.com> wrote
>
> >Here you go, everybody. Some reasons that the earth cannot >POSSIBLY be
4.6
> billion years old.
>
> of special pleading and pooh poohing rather than any kind of
> effort toward rebuttal.
I would say "pot, kettle, black" but I don't think Boikat would classify as
a kettle. But, if you can justify your claim, please critique Boikat's
points. Otherwise you are guilty of "special pleading and pooh poohing
rather than any kind of effort toward rebuttal."
Mike
Sverker Johansson
Dave Woetzel wrote:
> Boikat wrote in message <37585008...@bellsouth.net>...
> >Dave Woetzel wrote:
> >>
> >> UR32212451 wrote in message
> >> <19990603225014...@ng-fp1.aol.com>...
> >> >"Robert Paveza" <Ref...@email.msn.com> wrote
> >> >
> >> >>Here you go, everybody. Some reasons that the earth cannot >POSSIBLY
> be
> >> 4.6
> >> >billion years old.
> >> >
> >> >Excellent post Robert. Boikats response appears to be a host
> >> >of special pleading and pooh poohing rather than any kind of
> >> >effort toward rebuttal.
When the same debunked arguments return for the nth time,
pooh-poohing is rather understandable.
> >> Boikat is a good, old-fashioned skeptic.
> >
> >Thank you. :}
>
> Hey, you occupy an important place in fulfilled prophecy!
>
> >> More to the point is Henke's
> >> material. As he points out, some of Robert's stuff is dated. IMHO, the
> >> strongest of it is ocean salinity, atmospheric helium, erosion & marine
> >> deposition.
And since that is trivially debunked, we can then assume that the rest
is even weaker?
> >> Although, I am surprised Henke could not do better on the
> >> dendrochronology, comets, galaxy stuff, and magnetic fields around solar
> >> system bodies. Those may be stronger than I thought.
Have you considered that field galaxies may not be Henke's field?
[snip]
> >Also, dendrochronology is an ongoing field of
> >investigation. Stay tuned.
>
> Yes. It is ongoing. However, are you aware of any finds that break the
> 10,000 year barrier?
It used to be a 4004 BC barrier. When that was decisively broken,
it became a 10,000-year barrier. Where will the goalposts go
next time? You might wish to have a look at:
Kitagawa, H & van der Plicth, J (1998) 'Atmospheric radiocarbon calibration
to 45,000 yr BP: late glacial fluctuations and cosmogenic isotope production',
Science 279:1187-1190
[snip]
--
Best regards, HLK, Physics
Sverker Johansson U of Jonkoping
----------------------------------------------
Claiming that there are no transitional fossils,
makes you into a counter-example.
Dave Woetzel
Sverker Johansson wrote in message <375904BF...@no.hlk.spam.hj.se>...
You caught my interest with this statement. Where was this barrier 6004 ya
cited? Can you give me a couple references? I am only aware of the appx.
10,000 ya date.
Thanks,
Dave
Sverker Johansson
> Robert Paveza wrote:
> >
> > Here you go, everybody. Some reasons that the earth cannot POSSIBLY be
> > 4.6 billion years old.
> > Young Universe Evidence
> > 1) Insufficient number of supernovas / rate at which they occur. A new
> > supernova event is observed about every 30 years, and we see only a few
> > thousand in existence.
> >
> So? This happens only after the star has been burning for millions if
> not billions of years anyway, so it is decidedly *not* evidence for a
> young earth or against an old universe.
Can be less than a million for SN type II. But SN Ia takes at least a
billion or so, and we see plenty of those.
> > 2) Absence of field galaxies. With stellar evolution, it would seem that
> > some galaxies would not be gravitationally bound and would just spread
> > out in a "field".
> >
> What the smeg are yout alking about? And what does it have to do with a
> young or old earth?
This is probably a distorted echo of the dark matter problem.
One of the reason we postulate dark matter is that galaxies wouldn't
be gravitationally bound in clusters otherwise.
> > 3) Gravitationally bound star clusters with stars of different ages. If
> > a star cluster is gravitationally bound, under stellar evolution theory
> > one would expect all the stars would be the same age.
> >
> Why? What would preclude the formation of stars from nebulous material?
More to the point, the majority of stars in a cluster generally _are_ the
same age. The minority that aren't are consistent with field stars
wandering in.
> > 3) Continued presence of small meteorites in the face of the
> > Poynting/Robertson effect. Poynting-Robertson effect should sweep the
> > solar system clean of small particles.
> >
> Well, eventually, it will. How many billions of years do you want to
> wait to find out?
P-R can be pretty quick. But the stuff is replenished from among other
sources the abovementioned comets.
Incidentally, the really fine dust would be swept out much faster than
6000 years, if it weren't replenished. So the 4004BC date isn't
tenable either....
> > 6) Presence of magnetic fields around solar system bodies (Mercury,
> > Jupiter's moon Ganymede, Neptune, Uranus) without an obvious internal
> > dynamo. No natural process is known which could sustain a magnetic field
> > around these bodies - their magnetic fields should have decayed out of
> > existence if they ever had any.
> >
> Except, of course, for just about all of quantum mechanics.
QM has not a lot to do with it.
But the fact that all of the above have (or possibly have had)
conducting fluids in or around them does.
> > 9) Shrinking sun - Sun may be shrinking a few feet each year. Can't
> > extrapolate this trend back to the past very far without effecting
> > earth's environment.
> >
> Whoever said the earth's environment was unchanged?
Life's continuous existence for 4 billion years says the
envirnoment hasn't changed too much. The argument
from shrinkage is still bunk, though, but for
other reasons. See my Solar FAQ:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-solar.html
> > 10) Absence/shortage of solar neutrinos. Nuclear fusion in the sun's
> > core should give off neutrinos. Experiments have not detected an
> > adequate number of neutrinos - this is a well known problem.
> >
> Not to anyone who's measured stellar neutrinos.
I've measured a few stellar neutrinos, but I doubt if you have.
It IS a well-known problem, though it also has solutions.
See the solar FAQ again:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-solar.html
> > Some creationists have argued that this implies solar heat is due to
> > gravity and not fusion - this would imply a young sun.
> >
> Then please explain the existance of heavier elements.
>
> > 11) Heat level of the sun's corona. Not sustainable for extended time
> > period.
> >
> Yeah, only 10 or 20 billion years.
>
> > 12) High concentration of Uranium-236 on the moon. Should have decayed.
>
> Source?
>
> > 13) High concentration of Thorium-230 on the moon. Should have decayed.
>
> Source?
Both are produced in cosmic-ray interactions, the moon's surface not being
shielded by an atmosphere.
Sorry, Shane. You and I are on the same side, but I doubt if our cause is
helped by factually incorrect "debunking".
Sverker Johansson
Ussher (1650) "Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti"
Did you check the Kitagawa reference yet?
Keith Littleton
"Robert Paveza" <Ref...@email.msn.com> wrote:
>Here you go, everybody. Some reasons that the earth
>cannot POSSIBLY be 4.6 billion years old.
.... creationist silliness deleted ...
>Young Earth Evidence
.... creationist silliness deleted ...
What I would like a plausible explanation for is why
creationists fail to research the material they post as
evidence for a young Earth. For example, the below
claim.
>12) No plausible explanation for the pressure in oil
>reservoirs remaining so high for millions of years.
Contrary to what Young Earth creationists, like you
claim, a vast number of oil and gas fields exhibit
pressures that are consistent with the hydrostatic
pressure at the depth which it has been found. In such
fields, the pressure of the oil in the field, and the
formation water surrounding it are the same as the
hydrostatic gradient. Untapped by oil wells, the pressure
in these oil fields will not bleed off as long as they
remain buried at the same depth. The pressure will
decrease only as the strata above the oil field is eroded
off and, thus, reducing the hydrostatic head. The pressure
of the oil field will increase if it is buried deeper. As
long as the burial depth remains the same, the pressure of
a normally pressured oil reservoir will remain the same.
To say that the pressure of these oil fields will bleed
over any period of time is simply nonsense.
The pressure of the oil and gas in such a field represents
the normal weight of water in the strata overlying the
oil-bearing layer that forms the oil field. In the Gulf
of Mexico region, for example, a reservoir pressure of
about 5,000 pounds per square inch (PSI) at 11,000 ft.
(2.1 miles) is expected for reservoir pressure. Since
this pressure results from the static weight of the
overlying water-saturated strata, this part of a
reservoir's pressure is not contained by the overlying
strata will never bleed off as claimed. The oil can be
be contained by a relatively impermeable layer of rock
but the pressure is not.
When a oil boring is opened to oil-bearing strata, the
oil flows or bleeds into the hole because the mile or
two of mud in the hole exerts less pressure than the
mile or two of hydrostatic pressure exerted on the fluids
in the reservoir. As a result, the pressure of the
reservoir rock around the hole is depleted as oil, often
with lots of water, flows into it. In response to the
loss of pressure, more fluid from higher pressure flows
through the pores to the hole. If the well is abandoned
and plugged with bentonite and concrete, then the original
pressure of the reservoir strata will eventually be
restored over a very long period of time. The pressure
can bleed off only as long as the oil well is open. If
the well wasn't there the pressure of the reservoir would
remain the same for millions of years.
Overpressured (geopressured) reservoirs, where by
definition, the pressure of the hydrocarbons exceeds the
pressure that would be created by the overlying strata
and water column within them. What Young Earth
creationists fail to realize is that formation waters
above and below the oil reservoir are also overpressured.
There are various processes which creates overpressure.
In the Gulf of Mexico the overpressure results from the
strata compacting faster than water can be expelled from
it towards the surface. When this happens, any of the
fluids in strata, whether it be oil or water, are required
to support the overburden pressure. This pressure will
continue to be generated in areas of rapid sedimentation
This and a number of mechanisms for generating
overpressures are discussed in great detail by Parker
(1991) and Osborne and Swarbrick (1997).
In specific cases, i.e. Gulf of Mexico, once sedimentation
has ceased, overpressures should dissipate as water is
expelled from sedimentary strata as it compacts. However,
as in case of the Gulf of Mexico the shear volume of water
that has to be moved, the very low permeabilities of clayey
strata, and the vast thickness of strata through which the
water has to pass through, often laterally instead of
vertically, requires millions and even tens of millions
of years for this happen. Creationist claims that
pressure within the oil bed should have bled off within a
few thousand years is refuted by innumerable geotechical
and geologic research. Such research can be found in the
references listed below.
I would recommend for for further reading on this topic
the articles which are listed below.
References Cited
Bitzer, K (1999) Discussion and Replies: Mechanisms for
generating overpressures in sedimentary basins. American
Association of Petroleum Geologists. vol. 83, no. 5,
pp. 798-799.
Bradley, J. S. (1975) Abnormal formation pressure.
American Association of Petroleum Geologists. vol. 59,
pp. 957-973.
Osborne, M. J., and R. E. Swarbrick (1997) Mechanisms for
generating overpressures in sedimentary basins. American
Association of Petroleum Geologists. vol. 81, no. 6,
pp. 1023-1041.
Parker, C. A. (1991) Geopressures and Hydrodynamics in the
Gulf Coast Tertiary. In D. Goldwaithe, ed., An Introduction
to Central Gulf Coast Geology. New Orleans Geological
Society, New Orleans, LA, pp. 151-162.
.... rest of creationsit nonsence deleted ...
Yours
Keith Littleton
litt...@vnet.net
New Orleans, LA
Read a first-hand description of the Ongoing Pogrom
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For how a person can help do something about the horrific
suffering, a person can go to:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/wld/iframes/Kosovo_relief.asp
For recent information about the Kosovo crisis, go to:
1.http://wwwnotes.reliefweb.int/
2. Catholic Relief Services - http://www.catholicrelief.org
3. InterAction - http://www.interaction.org
4. U.S. Committe for Refugees - http://www.refugees.org
5. UNHCR - http://www.unhcr.ch/refworld/welcome.htm
6. Albanian Immigrant and Cultural Resource - http://www.frosina.org
(http://www.frosina.org/NRKitsKosa.htm)
7. DHHS/ORR - http://www.acf.dhhs.gov/programs/orr/
Shane D. Killian
>
> >Dendrochronology: How long does wood last in the
> >open environment? Why are bristle cone pines more
> >durable, both as a living tree, and as dead wood?
> >investigation. Stay tuned.
>
> 10,000 year barrier?
>
> >Comets were covered quite well. The Oort and
> >Kuiper belt are a source in deep freeze out beyond
> >pluto, and objects from the kuiper belt have been
> >directly imaged by the Hubble space telescope.
> >The Kuiper Belt is real, it exists.
>
> You mean, as compared to the Oort cloud?
>
Kuiper Belt.
Besides, if this comet thing were true, the solar system could only be
as old as the youngest short-period comet, which would make it about 150
years old.
Shane D. Killian
>
> You caught my interest with this statement. Where was this barrier 6004
> ya cited?
>
with a start date of 4004 BCE. Of course, to do it, he had to make the
average human age over 400 years...
Shane D. Killian
>
[snip lots of corrections--thanks, BTW!]
> Sorry, Shane. You and I are on the same side, but I doubt if our cause
> is helped by factually incorrect "debunking".
>
again!
Keith Littleton
>Here you go, everybody. Some reasons that the earth
>cannot POSSIBLY be 4.6 billion years old.
.... creationist laundry list deleted ...
>Young Earth Evidence
.... creationist laundry list deleted ...
What I would like a plausible explanation for is why
creationists fail to research the material they post as
evidence for a young Earth. For example, the below
claim.
>1) Lack of meteorites in the geologic column. If the
>geologic column is billions of years old one would
>expect to find meteorites throughout.
Given the frequency with which meteorites fall to Earth,
many creationists claim that the lack of "fossil"
meteorites within the geologic record show that the
kilometers of strata that compose it all accumulated
within a very brief period of time, e.g. the duration
of the Noachian Flood.
For example, go see Walter Brown's "In the Beginning" at:
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/scc/078.shtml
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/scc/079.shtml
However, the claim that meteorites are completely lacking
in the geologic record is a false claim. It is a false
claim, because although rare, "fossil" meteorites have
been found in the geologic column. In addition, proof
of comet and asteroid impacts have also been found
throughout the geologic column. "Fossil" meteorites are
rare for four main reasons:
1. In strata other than limestones, dolomites, and
evaporites, they are typically indistinguishable from
regular, ordinary rocks. If a meteorite was seen in a
conglomerate, it would be virtually impossible to
differentiate it from the other gravel in the
conglomerate;
2. Most meteorites, especially the iron meteorites will
weather rapidly, within a few thousand of years into
clay and sand indistinguishable terrestrial sediment;
3. In case of large impacts, the impacting meteorite is
completely vaporized or melted. The meteoritic material
is incorporated into the impact ejecta and becomes a minor
part of spherules and tektites produced by the impact; and
4. People typically don't know what to look for and just
don't recognize them when they see them.
And as Andrew Macrae once noted:
"5. Although the total amount of meteoritic material
arriving on Earth every year sounds quite impressive
when expressed in tonnes, the vast majority of that
mass arrives at the Earth's surface as micrometeoritic
dust/spherules (which are known from rocks of many
ages), not visible meteorites."
"6. The total amount of meteoritic material arriving
on Earth is miniscule compared to the total area of
the Earth and to the volume of sediment moved around
on the surface of the Earth. Most meteoritic material
is tremendously diluted by terrestrial sedimentation
processes."
Despite these problems, people have been finding all
sorts of meteorites in Ordovician limestones of Sweden.
For example, in the October 3, 1997 issue of "Science,"
there is:
Schmitz, B. Peucker-Ehrenbrink, Lindstrom, M.,
and Tassinari, M. (1997) Accretion Rates of Meteorites
and Cosmic Dust in the Early Ordovician. Science
volume 278, number 5335, pp. 88-90.
The abstract begins, "Abundant fossil meteorites in
marine, condensed Lower Ordovician limestones..."
Other instances of fossil meteorites are discussed in
Hansen and Berstrom (1997). They note that the first
of the specimens was a 4-inch in diameter meteorite
discovered in middle Ordovician Limestone in 1951. It
was not described until 1981 by Thorslund and Wickman
(1981). In 1988, another Swedish meteorite, called
"Osterplana 1," was discovered in Lower Ordovician
Limestone about 5 million years older and 300 miles
away from the first (Hansen and Berstrom 1997, pp. 1).
Twelve more meteorites have been found at the Thorsberg
Limestone Quarry. Hansen and Berstrom (1997, pp. 3)
state:
"A 10-foot-thick section of the Holen ("Orthoceratite")
Limestone, of Early Middle Ordovician age, is extracted
at the Thorsberg quarry and sawed into thin slabs that
are used for windowsills and floor tile. Quarry workers
discarded slabs with impurities, such as the meteorites,
until Professor Maurits Lindstrom of the University of
Stockholm alerted them to save such slabs. The 12
specimens were recovered between 1992 and 1996. Ten of
the specimens were recovered from a 2-foot-thick bed of
limestone and may represent a single meteorite fall. The
other three specimens were recovered from two separate
levels above this layer. Seven of the specimens,
collected between 1993 ant 1996, are from a quarried
limestone volume of no more than about 127,000 cubic
feet. Most of the specimens are now on display at the
Stiftelsen Paleo Geology Center in Lidkoping, Sweden.
The Thorsberg quarry meteorites range in size from
about 0.5 to 3.5 inches in diameter and have been
almost completely replaced (pseudomorphosed) by
calcite and barite. The dark, reddish brown meteorite
masses look like iron nodules surrounded by a zone
of lighter colored limestone and would be mistaken by
many people for common sedimentary features. However,
they contain grains of chromite and have a high iridium
content, among other confirming characteristics of
extraterrestrial origin."
Reference Cited
Hasen, M. C., and Bergstrom, S. M. (1997) Ancient
meteorites. Ohio Geology, Spring 1997.
Further Readings from Hansen and Berstrom (1997)
about the Swedish meteorites.
Nystrom, J. O., and Wickman, F. E. (1991) The Ordovician
chondrite from Brunflo, central Sweden; II, Secondary
minerals. Lithos. volume 27, number 3, pp. 167-185.
Nystrom, J. O., Lindstrom, M., and Wickman, F. E.,
(1988) Discovery of a second Ordovician meteorite
using chromite as a tracer. Nature. volume 336, pp.
572-574.
Schmitz, B., Lindstrom, M., Asaro, F., and Tassinari,
M., (1996) Geochemistry of meteorite-rich marine
limestone strata and fossil meteorites from the Lower
Ordovician at Kinnekulle, Sweden. Earth and Planetary
Science Letters. volume 145, pp. 31-48.
Thorslund, Per, and Wickman, F. E. (1981) Middle
Ordovician chondrite in fossiliferous limestone from
Brunflo, central Sweden. Nature. volume 289, pp. 285-286.
Thorslund, Per., Wickman, F. E., and Nystrom, J. O. (1984)
The Ordovician chondrite from Brunflo, central Sweden,
I. General description and primary minerals. Lithos.
volume 17, pp. 87-100.
For many more cases of meteorites, see,
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/dave_matson/
And go to "Library: Modern Documents: Dave Matson:
Young Earth: Specific Arguments: Meteor" at:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/dave_matson/young-earth
/specific_arguments/meteor.html
Dave Matson at the above URL wrote:
"After reviewing such difficulties, geologist Davis
Young (1988, p.127) tells us that, 'The chances of
finding a fossil meteorite in sedimentary rocks are
remote. It is not to be expected.' G. J. McCall, in
Meteorites and Their Origins (1973, p.270), said, 'The
lack of fossil record of true meteorites is puzzling, but
can be explained by the lack of very diagnostic shapes
and the chemical nature of meteorites, which allows
rapid decay...'
It may surprise you, therefore, to hear that we do
have such a find! Two Swedish scientists made the
first positive identification of a fossilized stoney
meteorite (Astronomy, June 1981). Per Thorslund and
Frans Wickman reported in Nature that a 10 centimeter
object found in a limestone slab from a quarry in
Brunflo, central Sweden in 1952 is really a stoney
meteorite as demonstrated by microscopic examinations
and other properties. It has a terrestrial age of
about 463 million years. The object had until recently
been mistaken for something else. If the odds were
not bent enough, it appears that the meteorite hit an
Ordovician mollusk which is fossilized in conjunction
with the meteorite! (Spratt and Stephens, 1992, p.53)
In 1930 a fist-sized piece of nickel-iron was said to
have been recovered from a bore hole at a depth of 1,525
feet, from the Eocene. This 'Zapata County' Texas iron
has since been lost (Nature, January 22, 1981).
Fritz Heide mentioned that 'The iron of Sardis, Burke
County, Georgia, was found in 1940, in strata believed
to be of Middle Miocene age.' (Heide, 1964, pp.118-119.)
We may conclude, therefore, that it is not true that
fossil meteorites don't exist in the geologic record.
However, recovering and identifying them is extremely
rare."
This is true of *Macroscopic* meteorites, but not of
micrometeorites. In contrast to rarer larger meteorites,
many micrometeorite localities are known.
The impact craters that have so far been found within the
geologic column are listed at:
A. http://gdcinfo.agg.emr.ca/crater/world_craters.html .
B. http://spaceart.com/solar/eng/tercrate.htm
However, when large impacts create very large craters, a
variety of materials ejected from the crater which can be
identified as the products of such as impact. The various
types of debris and ejecta that are produced by a meteorite
impact are described at:
C. http://earth.agu.org/revgeophys/claeys00/claeys00.html .
A list of some of the known ejecta from massive meteorite
impacts has been compiled by Grieve (1997). His list of
such debris from impacts includes:
1. Australasian microtektites - 0.7 million years BP
microtektites, shocked minerals, and small Ir anomaly
- Koeberl (1993)
2. Tikal tektites - 0.8 million years BP
tektites - Hildebrand et al. (1994)
3. Ivory Coast tektites - 1.1 million years BP
microtektites associated with Bosumtwi structure
- Koeberl and Shirley (1993)
4. South Pacific debris - 2 million years BP (about)
meteoritic debris and Ir and Au anomalies
- Kyte et al. (1988)
5. North Pacific Miocrotektites - 2.2 million years BP
microtektites and siderophile anomaly - Peng et al.
(1994).
6. Southern Urals Tektite- 6.2 million years BP
tektites - Deutsch et al. (1996)
7. Chzechoslovakian Moldavites - 15 million years BP
tektites associated with Ries structure - Englehardt
et al. (1987)
8. Urengonite, Russia tektites - 24 million years BP
(tektites) - Deutsch et al. (1996)
9. North American microtektites - 35 million years BP
tektites, microtektites, and shocked minerals associated
with Chesapeake Bay structure - Glass et al. (1985)
For the Chesapeake Bay structure and its ejecta, also, see:
D. http://woodshole.er.usgs.gov/epubs/bolide/index.html .
10. Clinopyroxene spherules - 35 million years BP
microtektites (microkystiles) and small Ir anomaly
- Glass and Burns (1987)
11. Late Eocene, Italy - 35.7 million years BP
shocked quartz and small Ir anomaly
- Clymer et al. (1995)
12. Cretaceous - Tertiary (global) - 65 million years BP
tektites, shocked minerals, and siderophile anomaly
associated with Chixalube structure - Ryder et al. (1996)
Recently, impact diamonds have also been found at
this boundary - Hough et al. (1997)
13. Manson ejecta, Iowa - 73.8 million years BP
shocked ejecta (minerals) associated with Manson
structure - Izett et al. (1993)
14. Barents ejecta, Barents Sea - 143 million years BP
shocked ejecta (minerals) associated with Mjolner
structure - Dypvik et al. (1996)
15. spherules, southern Alps - 120 million years BP.
chrondritic spherules - Jehanno et al. (1988)
16. Qidong microtektites - 363 million years BP (approx.)
microtektites and small Ir anomaly - Wang (1992) and
Wang et al. (1994)
17. Belgium microtektites - 365 million years BP (approx.)
microtektites - Claeys et al. (1992, 1994)
18. Alamo breccia, Nevada - 370 million years BP
shocked minerals and brecciated strata
- Leroux et al. (1995)
For more about the Alamo breccia, see:
E. http://www.geosociety.org/pubs/gsatoday/gsat9601.htm .
F. http://www.geosociety.org/pubs/geo95112.htm#S11 .
19. Late Precambrian, Australia - 588 million years BP
shocked minerals and siderophile anomaly associated
with Acraman structure - Wallace et al. (1990)
20. Early Archean, South Africa and Australia - 3400
million years BP (approx.) spherule beds and siderophile
anomaly - Lowe et al. (1989).
References
Claeys, P., J. G. Casier, and S. V. Margolis (1992)
Microtektite glass at the Frasnian-Famennian boundary in
Belgium: Evidence for an asteroid impact? Science.
vol. 257, pp. 1102-1104.
Claeys, P., F. T. Kyte, and J. G., Casier (1994) Frasnian-
Famennian boundary, mass extinctions, anoxic oceans,
microtektite layers, but not much iridium. In New
Developments Regarding the KT Event and Other
Catastrophies in Earth History. Lunar and Planetary
Institute Contribution, no. 825, pp. 22-24.
Clymer, A. K., D. M. Bice, A. Montanari (1995) Shocked
quartz in the Late Eocene: bolide impact evidence from
Massignano, Italy. 4th International Workshop on Impact
and Evolution of Planet Earth, pp. 60.
Deutsch, A., M. Ostermann, and V. L. Masaitis (1996)
Neodymium-stronium isotopes systematics of impact-
related glassy objects (Uregonites, South Ural glass,
Zhamanshinites, Izghizites). Metoeritics and Planetary
Sciences vol. 31, pp. A37.
Dypvik, H., S. T. Gudlaugsson, F. Tsikalas, M. J. Attrep,
and others (1996) Mjolner structure: an impact crater in
the Barents Sea. Geology. vol. 24, pp. 779-782.
Englehardt, W. v., E. Luft, J. Arndt, H. Schock, and W.
Weiskirchner (1987) Origin of moldavites. Geochemica
Cosmochima Acta. vol. 51, pp. 1425-1443.
Glass, B. P., C. A. Burns, J. R. Crosbie, and D. L.
Dubois, Late Eocene North American microtektites and
clinopyroxene-beraing spherules, Journal of Geophysical
Research, vol. 90, pp. D175-D196.
Glass, B. P., and C. A. Burns (1987) Late Eocene crystal-
bearing spherules, two layers or one? Meteoritics. vol. 22.
pp. 265-279.
Grieve, R. A. F. (1997) Extraterrestrial impact events:
the record in the rocks and the stratigraphic record.
Palaeogeography, Paleoclimatology, Paleoecology,
vol. 132, no. 1-4, pp. 5-23.
Hildebrand, A. R., H. Moholy-Nagy, C. Koeberl, L. May,
and others (1994) Tektites found in the ruins of the Maya
city of Tikal, Guatemala. Lunar and Planetary Science,
vol. 77, pp. 213-219.
Hough, R. M., Gilmour, I., Pilliger, C. T., Langenhorst,
F., and Montanari et al. (1997) Diamonds from the
Iridium-rich K-T boundary layer at Arroyo el Mimbral,
Tamaulipas, Mexico. Geology. vol. 25, no. 11,
pp. 1019-1022.
Izett G. A., W. A. Cobban, J. D. Obradovivh and M. J.,
Kunk (1993) The Manson impact structure: Ar/ Ar
age and its distal impact ejecta in the Pierre Shale in
Southeastern South Dakota, Science. vol. 262, pp. 729-732.
Jehanno, C., D. Bacon, P. Bonte, A. Castellarin, and R.
Rocchia (1988) identification of two populations of extra-
terrestrial particles in a Jurassic hardground of southern
Alps. Proceedings of the Lunar and Planetary Science
Conference. vol. 18, pp. 623-630.
Koeberl, C., (1993) Extraterrestrial component associated
with Austrasian microtektites in a core from OPD Site
758B. Earth and Planetary Science Letters. vol. 119,
pp. 453-458.
Koeberl, C., and S. B. Shirley (1993) Detection of a
meteoritic component in Ivory Coast tektites with
rhenium-osmium isotopes. Science. vol. 261, pp. 595-598.
Kyte F. T, L. Zhou, and J. T. Wasson (1988) New evidence
on the size and possible effects of a Late Pliocene
oceanic asteroid impact, Science. vol. 241, pp. 63-65.
Leroux, H., J. E. Warme, and J. C. Doukhan (1995) Shocked
quartz in the Alamo breccia, southern Nevada: evidence for
a Devonian impact event. Geology. vol. 23, pp. 1003-1006.
Lowe, D. R., G. R. Byerly, F. Asaro, and F. T. Kyte (1989)
Geological and geochemical record of 3400-million-year
old terrestrial meteorite impacts. Science. vol. 245,
pp. 959-962.
Peng, H. (1994) An extraterrestrial event at the Tertiary-
Quaternary boundary. In New Developments Regarding
the KT Event and Other Catastrophies in Earth History.
Lunar and Planetary Institute Contribution, no. 825,
pp. 88-89.
Ryder, G., D. Fastovsky, and D. Gardner (1996) New
Developments Regarding the KT Event and Other Catastrophies
in Earth History. Geological Society of America Special
Paper. no. 306. Geological Society of America, Boulder,
Colorado.
Wallace, M. A., V. A., Gostin, and R. R. Keays (1990)
Acraman impact ejecta and host shales: evidence for low-
temperature mobilization of iridium and other platinoids.
Geology. vol. 18, pp. 132-135.
Wang, K. (1992) Glassy microspherules (microtektites)
from an Upper Devonian Limestone, Science. vol. 256 pp.
1546-1549.
Wang, K., H. H. j., Geldsetzer, and B. D. E., Chalterton
(1994) Devonian extraterrestrial impact and extinction in
eastern Gondwana: geochemical, sedimentological, and
faunal evidence. In Large Meteorite Impacts and Planetary
Evolution. Geological Society of America Special Paper.
no. 293, pp. 111-120. Geological Society of America,
Boulder, Colorado.
Thus, it can be easily seen that an abundance of evidence
for meteorite and asteroid impacts exists within the
geologic record contrary to what creationists like Rev.
Hovind falsely claim.
A few of the many on-line stuff about meteorites can be
found at
1. "The Meteorite Hunters" by Jeffrey C. Wynn and Eugene
M. Shoemaker -- "The Day the Sands Caught Fire"
This is about a large meteorite that slammed into Arabia
quite "recently." It created the Wabar impact craters.
It is at:
http://www.sciam.com/1998/1198issue/1198wynn.html
and
2. "The Search for Greeland's Mysterious Meteor" by
W. Wayt Gibb. This is about a meteorite that streaked
across the Artic skies in view of witnesses and cameras
and the search that is going on for it in the Greenland
region. It is at:
http://www.sciam.com/explorations/1998/080398meteor/index.html
3. The Wabar Meteorite Impact Site, Ar-Rub' Al-Khali
Desert, Saudi Arabia Jeff Wynn and Gene Shoemaker
(deceased*)
http://minerals.er.usgs.gov/emrst/wynn/3wabar.html
4. Terrestrial Impact Craters
http://spaceart.com/solar/eng/tercrate.htm
5. The Chesapeake Bay Bolide:
Modern Consequences of an Ancient
Cataclysm
Principal Investigator C. Wylie Poag wp...@usgs.gov
http://woodshole.er.usgs.gov/epubs/bolide/index.html
.... rest of creationist silliness deleted ...
Yours
Keith Littleton
litt...@vnet.net
New Orleans, LA
Read a first-hand description of the pogrom
in Kosovo in the "Diary From Kosovo" at:
http://abcnews.go.com/onair/Nightline/nl_kosovardiary990528.html
For how a person can help do something about the horrific
suffering, a person can go to:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/wld/iframes/Kosovo_relief.asp
Jim Lovejoy
UR32212451 wrote:
> "Robert Paveza" <Ref...@email.msn.com> wrote
>
> >Here you go, everybody. Some reasons that the earth cannot >POSSIBLY be 4.6
> billion years old.
>
> Excellent post Robert. Boikats response appears to be a host
> of special pleading and pooh poohing rather than any kind of
> effort toward rebuttal.
So what part of the post presents *any* 'Young Earth Evidence'?
Even if it were accurate, all it would show is that the earth is less than 4.6
Giga Years old.
Since this 'Excellent Post' is the evidence for a young earth, are we to conclude
under young earth evidence, that there is none?
Boikat
>
> Boikat wrote in message <37585008...@bellsouth.net>...
> >Dave Woetzel wrote:
> >>
> >> UR32212451 wrote in message
> >> <19990603225014...@ng-fp1.aol.com>...
> >> >
> >> >>Here you go, everybody. Some reasons that the earth cannot >POSSIBLY
> be
> >> 4.6
> >> >billion years old.
> >> >
> >> >Excellent post Robert. Boikats response appears to be a host
> >> >of special pleading and pooh poohing rather than any kind of
> >> >effort toward rebuttal.
> >> >
> >
> >Thank you. :}
>
> Hey, you occupy an important place in fulfilled prophecy!
Gee, you sound like karl now. What's next?
Referring to those that accept the evidence that
supports an ancient universe and earth and
evolution as "evobabblers"? Condemning us to
"Hell's Fire"? Besides the "prophecies" are BS.
Sure, the writers of the Bible "predicted"
skeptics. So did Darwin. Guess that makes Darwin
right too.
>
> >> More to the point is Henke's
> >> material. As he points out, some of Robert's stuff is dated. IMHO, the
> >> strongest of it is ocean salinity, atmospheric helium, erosion & marine
> >> deposition. Although, I am surprised Henke could not do better on the
> >> dendrochronology, comets, galaxy stuff, and magnetic fields around solar
> >> system bodies. Those may be stronger than I thought.
> >
> >No, they are covered in the FAQ's, but if that's
> >not good enough, there is a easy way to verify or
> >refute the claims. Do a search on the net.
> >
> >Dendrochronology: How long does wood last in the
> >open environment? Why are bristle cone pines more
> >durable, both as a living tree, and as dead wood?
> >Also, dendrochronology is an ongoing field of
> >investigation. Stay tuned.
>
> Yes. It is ongoing. However, are you aware of any finds that break the
> 10,000 year barrier?
Why is it a "barrier"? Sounds like curtsey
rhetoric to me. Besides, you or the originator of
that little gem has yet to explain the logic
behind the assertion that since our current
knowledge extends only so far, how that is "proof"
that there was not earth around prior to that. It
could be that there were no Bristle Cone Pine
trees in that area prior to 10,000 years ago. If
you find a stack of news papers that goes back to
1967, does that mean that there were no news
papers printed prior to 1967?
>
> >Comets were covered quite well. The Oort and
> >Kuiper belt are a source in deep freeze out beyond
> >pluto, and objects from the kuiper belt have been
> >directly imaged by the Hubble space telescope.
> >The Kuiper Belt is real, it exists.
>
> You mean, as compared to the Oort cloud?
The Oort cloud is theoretical, but matches quite
well with "long period" comet orbital
calculations. You have a problem with that, take
it up with an astronomer. But it's nice to see
that you acknowledge that there is a Kuiper Belt,
which has a supply of cometary bodies in "deep
freeze" that explains why there are still comets
around, despite the age of the solar system, and
in spite of the creationists arguments.
>
> >"Field Galaxies" Ever see the HST "Deep Sky"
> >image?
> >
> > Also, as in the case of the magnetic fields,
> >since the planets in question are not exact
> >replicas of earth, it's reasonable that they would
> >have some variation when compared with the earth's
> >magnetic field, and how it's generated.
>
> Speculation.
Your point? Oh, that's right! Since I didn't
gobble it up and say "Oh! Gee! I hadn't thought
of that! Wow, the earth *is* only 10,000 years
old, max!" and instead pointed out that we don't
have all the answers, and the possible reason,
it's dismissed as "speculation". So how does
creationism "better explain it"? I didn't see
anything about magnetic fields *anywhere* in the
Bible. The *only* conclusion that can be drawn
from the original post is that we do not know
everything there is to know about planetary
magnetic fields. So how does "We don't have all
the answers" even *begin* to equate to a "Young
Earth"?
>
> >Those creationist argument are just a weak as the
> >rest of them.
> >
> Boikat, you know that creationists have 'fessed up when hard evidences
> outdates an argument like shrinking sun and moon dust (despite what some may
> claim on T.O.). However, this does not apply to all the others that were
> cited above.
"Fessed up"? Hah! Then how come the same refuted
arguments were just posted? Get real Dave!
"Polystrate Fossils"! Sheesh, the fools even cite
Mt. St. Helen as evidence that trees and massive
amounts of "sediment" can be deposited in a short
time, thus "proving the flood", yet you will note
that Mt. St. Helen did not involve a world wide
flood. There own "evidence" refutes their claim.
Also, geologists can tell the difference between
ash deposits and regular mud deposits from local
river flooding, and deposits that *do* take a long
time to accumulate. Even then, a "polystrate
tree" would not prove a "Young Earth", since many
petrified trees are preserved by silicate
replacement, and if an upright petrified tree,
such as some of the ones at Specimen ridge, were
to be covered over again with mores sediment,
you'd have a "petrified tree spanning millions of
years of sediment".
Another example: The crap about the Moon's orbit.
Have *you* bothered to calculate the distances
involved? Try it. But do get the current, more
accurate rates of recession. Yet there it was.
"Fessed up"? Please, pull the other finger Dave,
I got nine more! I guarantee that the same
argument will show up here again.
And all that from the guy that thinks "Forbidden
Archaeology" is significant, even though
"Forbidden Archaeology" implies that Man is
Billions of years old as a species! (2.5-2.8
billion year old ball bearings, remember?)
Boikat
Keith Littleton
>Here you go, everybody. Some reasons that the earth
>cannot POSSIBLY be 4.6 billion years old.
.... creationist laundry list deleted ...
>Young Earth Evidence
.... creationist laundry list deleted ...
>"Evidence for a Rapidly Formed Geologic Column"
>The geologic column (representing all the earth's observed
>sedimentary rock) in classical geology represents hundreds
>of millions of years of evolutionary history. Evidence that
>this column formed rapidly rather than over millions of
>years is therefore evidence for a young geologic column
>and a young earth. It should be noted that the "geologic
>column" is purely hypothetical and cannot be found in a
>complete form anywhere on earth other than in a textbook.
This statement is incorrect. There are a number of places
where a complete "geologic column" can be found. For the
evidence go read "The Geologic Column and Its Implications
to the Flood" at:
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/geo.htm
There, Mr. Morton provides the example of one well, the
W. H. Hunt Trust Estate Larson #1 will in Section 10
Township 148 N Range 101 W. It was drilled to 15,064 feet
through a geologic section in which the strata was in
the correct order. 15,064 ft is 2.8 miles or 4.6
kilometers.
At the same web page, Glen Morton notes:
"They are wrong. You just saw the whole column piled
up in one place where one oil well can drill through
it. Not only that, the entire geologic column is found
in 26 other basins around the world, piled up in proper
order. These basins are:
The Ghadames Basin in Libya
The Beni Mellal Basin in Morrocco
The Tunisian Basin in Tunisia
The Oman Interior Basin in Oman
The Western Desert Basin in Egypt
The Adana Basin in Turkey
The Iskenderun Basin in Turkey
The Moesian Platform in Bulgaria
The Carpathian Basin in Poland
The Baltic Basin in the USSR
The Yeniseiy-Khatanga Basin in the USSR
The Farah Basin in Afghanistan
The Helmand Basin in Afghanistan
The Yazd-Kerman-Tabas Basin in Iran
The Manhai-Subei Basin in China
The Jiuxi Basin China
The Tung t'in - Yuan Shui Basin China
The Tarim Basin China
The Szechwan Basin China
The Yukon-Porcupine Province Alaska
The Williston Basin in North Dakota
The Tampico Embayment Mexico
The Bogata Basin Colombia
(Robertson Group, 1989)"
In each of these places the consists of sedimentary
strata at least a couple of miles thick.
The validity of faunal succession, on which the
geologic column is based, was discovered by devout
creationists. I would guess that more than half the
naturalists who worked out the geologic column were
creationists. For example, Murchison, the person who
defined the Silurian and Permian Periods (and documented
fossil successions in for almost the entire Paleozoic),
states his creationist beliefs in the last chapter of
his book "Siluria".
>1) Lack of meteorites in the geologic column. If the
>geologic column is billions of years old one would
>expect to find meteorites throughout.
If you would research this topic, you would find that
they are, as I detail in another post, found throughout
the geologic column. This claim is utterly false and
easily proved false. Although rare, "fossil" meteorites
have been found in ancient strata. In addition, evidence
of meteorite and asteroid impacts have also been found
throughout the geologic column. "Fossil" meteorites
are rare for six main reasons:
1. In strata other than limestones, dolomites, and
evaporites, they are typically indistinguishable from
regular, ordinary rocks. If a meteorite was seen in a
conglomerate, it would be virtually impossible to
differentiate it from the other gravel in the
conglomerate;
2. Most meteorites, especially the iron meteorites will
weather rapidly, within a few thousand of years into clay
and sand indistinguishable terrestrial sediment;
3. In case of large impacts, the impacting meteorite is
completely vaporized or melted. The meteoritic material
is incorporated into the impact ejecta and becomes a minor
part of spherules and tektites produced by the impact; and
4. People typically don't know what to look for and just
don't recognize them when they see them.
As Andrew Macrae once noted:
Finally, although large meteorites are rare. Smaller
micrometeorites has been found wherever conditions for
their preservation was favorable.
Reference Cited
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/dave_matson/young-earth
/specific_arguments/meteor.html
>2) Ripple marks, rain drops, and animal tracks in
>sedimentary rocks. This implies very rapid burial
>and hardening because these fragile features could
>not survive even trivial erosion.
This is not always true. If the sediment in which the rain
drop or footprint is made contains the least amount of clay
in it, upon drying, it will have the consistency of an adobe
brick. All that needs to happen is the footprint or rain
drop imprint to be made in wet mud and have that mud dry
out. Such material could easily be covered by sand in
another flood without eroding it. Also, in carbonate muds
in tidal flats, i.e. the Glen Rose Formation, sufficient
cementation of the mud will occur as it dries out to allow
it to be later buried. In case of dune sands, geologists
have found in modern dunes that bio-films composed of fungi
and bacteria can form in the upper centimeter or so of the
dune sand. These bio-films can bind the surface sediment
together sufficiently to prevent erosion of footprints,
scorpion tracks, and other features when they are later
buried by more dune sand.
What I would like to know is why there are footprints
and rain drops imprints are found in strata which
creationists claim to be part of the deposits of the
Noachian Flood?
As far as ripple marks being preserved, closely observed
a river or tidal flat and a person can see that they can
be frequently preserved under a number of conditions when
sedimentation is temporarily rapid.
>3) Polystrate fossils. These are fossils which cut across
>multiple geologic layers that were supposedly laid down
>millions of years apart. Fossilized trees and animals are
>often found in tact and spanning supposedly millions
>of years of geologic layers.
For explanations why polystrate fossils are not a
problem for conventional geologists, a person can go to:
http://www.geo.ucalgary.ca/~macrae/talk_origins.html ,
http://www.geo.ucalgary.ca/~macrae/t_origins/polystrate_trees.html ,
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/polystrate.html ,
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/polystrate/trees.html ,
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/polystrate/polystrate_trees.html ,
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/polystrate/yellowstone.html ,
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/polystrate/dawson_tree2.html , and
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/polystrate/coal.html .
>4) Regional deposition. Current known geologic processes
>don't account for regional deposits (covering multiple
>U.S. states, for example). This applies to certain types
>of rocks, as well as coal and oil reserves.
It is well documented in the published literature that
known geological processes and a few inferred from the
basic laws of physics and chemistry can account for
regional deposits including coal and oil reserves. There
are innumerable papers, books, and articles in the
scientific literature which refute your claim. Some
examples are:
Galloway, W. E., and D. K. Hobday. (1983) Terrigenous
Clastic Depositional Systems: Applications to Petroleum,
Coal, and Uranium Exploration. Springer-Verlag, New York.
Schlee, J. S., ed., Inter-regional Unconformities and
Hydrocarbon Accumulation. AAPG Memoir no. 36. American
Association of Petroleum Geologists, Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Van Wagoner, J.C., R. M. Mitchum, K. M. Campion, and V. D.
Rahmanian. (1990) Siliciclastic Sequence Stratigraphy in
Well Logs, Cores, and Outcrops. AAPG Methods in Exploration
Series no. 7. American Association of Petroleum Geologists,
Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Someone need only examine the latest issues of either
the "Journal of Sedimentary Research" and "Sedimentary
Geology" to see paper after paper which refute the claim
that known geologic processes, many of which can be
observed currently operating, are unable to account for
regional sedimentary deposits and the oil and gas deposits
they contain.
>5) Deformation of strata implies it was soft when
>deformed and hadn't hardened into rock.
This is completely false. Someone need only consult a
textbook about structural geology, i.e. "Structural
Geology" by George H. Davis, to find ample evidence that
many rocks were lithified rocks when they were deformed.
Cleavage, stretched pebbles, fracturing and deformation
of even sand grains, pressure shadows, foliation at the
crystal level, and many other characters prove that
strata in the geological column were deformed after they
had hardened into rock. Only someone who has failed to
either carefully look at rocks in outcrops, hand specimens,
or thin sections or examine the literature can make such
a false and stupid statement.
>6) Absence of bioturbation in the geologic column.
>Biological activity soon disturbs sedimentary deposits
>formed by modern catastrophes (hurricanes and floods)
>but is not evidenced in the geologic column. This
>implies that the geologic column was buried very deeply
>and rapidly.
I would advise you to go to "INTRODUCTION TO ICHNOLOGY
The Study of Plant and Animal Traces" at:
http://www.emory.edu/GEOSCIENCE/HTML/TFW3.HTML
and "Dinosaur Trace Fossils" at:
http://www.emory.edu/GEOSCIENCE/HTML/Dinotraces.htm
At those pages, you find that bioturbation is indeed found
throughout the geologic column. The claim that
"bioturbation is not evidenced in the geologic column" is
false.
For proof of how false this claim is, you can go read.
Benton, M., and D. Harper (1997) Basic Palaeontology
(Chapter 12 - Trace Fossils). Longman, New York.
Bromley, R.G. (1996) Trace Fossils. Biology, Taphonomy
and Applications - Second edition. Chapman & Hall, New
York.
For some on-line examples, you can go to:
1.
http://www.eurekalert.org/Elert/current/public_releases/deposit/insects.html
"Two Recent Fossil Discoveries Show Insects' Recycling Traits"
by Stephen Hasiotis.
Additional versions of this are at:
2. http://www.desertusa.com/news/du_news-ants.html ,
3. http://www.sltrib.com/97/mar/033097/utah/8216.htm , and
4. http://207.179.44.6/96/OCT/29/tci/00065115.htm.
At URL #1 above, the press release states:
"A second find of 150 million-year-old fossilized ant
nests in Utah, Arizona and New Mexico by Hasiotis and
Tim Demko of Colorado State University predates the
known origin of ants on Earth by some 70 million years.
... text deleted...
Found in 1995 and 1996, the fossil ant nests consist of
interconnected galleries and chambers, an indication the
ants were behaving socially, he said. ... text deleted ...
The largest of the roughly 50 nests discovered in the
sandstone formations are up to five meters on a side and
up to three meters deep, indicating they had been
expanded upon for decades or centuries. The nests are
similar to fossil ant nests from Utah, Wyoming and
Colorado dating from 65 million years ago to the present.
The fossil ant nests were found near Arches and
Canyonlands National Parks and on the Navajo Reservation.
... text deleted ... "
Even if ants could live underwater, which they cannot, the
deposition of sediments by the flood would had to stop for
decades for each bed containing the fossil ant nests for the
nests to have formed. This and other evidence, i.e. fossil
soils in these strata, show that Young Earth creationists
are wrong about these sediments being deposited by their
Biblical Flood.
Not only are the trace fossils of ants found in the geologic
column, but other land-dwelling insects as well. For example:
Thackray, G. D. (1994) Fossil nest of sweat bees
(Halictinae) from a Miocene paleosol, Rusinga Island,
western Kenya. Journal of Paleontology vol. 68, pp. 795-800.
An example of bioturbation by marine organisms can be
found in "Ichnology of Rhythmically Bedded Demopolis Chalk
(Upper Cretaceous, Alabama): Implications for
Paleoenvironment, Depositional Cycle Origins, and
Tracemaker Behavior by R. E. Locklair and C. E. Savrda at:
http://web.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/sepm/palaios/9810/locklair.html
>7) Lack of recognizable soil layers in the geologic column.
>Soil material is seldom found in the geologic column. One
>would think that the earth had soil layers in the past,
>and if it was slowly buried, some would be preserved.
I have to wonder if creationists ever take the time to
either go out and look at the strata of which they talk
about or read anything other than creationist comic books
about geology. The claim that recognizable soil layers
are lacking in the geologic column is simply false. Buried
soils, called "paleosols" are abundant in the geologic
column and their presence has been documented by innumerable
papers. Documented examples of recognizable soils being
found in the geologic column are described in:
Reinhardt, J., and W. R. Sigleo (eds.)(1989) Paleosols
and weathering through geologic time: principles and
applications. Geological Society of America Special Paper
no. 216, 181pp.
Retallack, G. J. (1983) Late Eocene and Oligocene Paleosols
from Badlands National Park, South Dakota. Geological
Society of America Special Paper no. 193, Geological
Society of America, Boulder, Colorado, 82 pp.
Rettalack, G. J. (1990) Soils of the Past: an introduction
to paleopedology. Unwin Hyman, Boston.
Wright, V. P. (ed.)(1986) Paleosols: Their Recognition
and Interpretation, Princeton University Press, New
Jersey.
Wright, V. P. (1994) Paleosols in shallow marine
sequences. Earth-Science Reviews. vol. 37 pp. 367-395.
(See also pp. 135-137.)
It is interesting to note that the vast majority of
coals are underlain by paleosols, which even included
rooted stumps.
Finally, the latest issue of "Journal of Sedimentary
Research," there are these articles about paleosols that
lie within the geologic column.
Joekel, R. M. (1999) Paleosol in Galesburg Formation
(Kansas City Group, upper Pennsylvanian), northern
Midcontinent, U.S.A.: evidence for climate change and
mechanism of marine transgression. Journal of
Sedimentary Research. vol. 69, pp. 711-719.
Gustavson, T. C., and V. T. Holiday (1999) Eolian
sedimentation and soil development on a semi-arid to
subhumid grassland, Tertiary Ogallala and Quaternary
Blackwater Draw Formations, Texas and New Mexico
High Plains. Journal of Sedimentary Research. vol. 69,
pp. 622-634.
Some of the other articles describe paleosols found
within the geologic column.
>8) Undisturbed bedding planes. Different geologic rock
>layers often show sharp, knife-edge breaks between
>layers, with no evidence of erosion between. This is
>not realistic if the layers formed over long periods
>of time.
There is nothing unrealistic about the presence of "sharp,
knife-edge breaks" between layers. They can form, and are
forming today, in innumerable modern environments. Erosion
and deposition that forms such breaks are done by floods
hurricanes, density currents, and many other processes.
What you and many other creationists overlook are the
innumerable "fuzzy" contacts preserved within the geologic
record created by bioturbation, soil formation, and other
processes. They demonstrate that the accumulation of the
sediments within the geologic column ceased for long
periods of time during its formation. There were brief
periods of erosion and rapid deposition which created the
sharp contacts as there were just as many periods of
nondeposition which formed the fuzzy contacts and
features such as hardgrounds and paleosols.
>9) Clastic dikes. Clastic dikes are formed from soft
>sand squeezed up through newer layers of rock. This
>implies that the sandy older (lower) layer was still
>soft enough to squeeze sand up (like squeezing a
>toothpaste tube) through the younger upper layers.
It is well documented that earthquakes can liquefy water-
saturated sands that have been otherwise behaved as solid
materials for thousands of years. A good example, are the
thousands of sand and mud volcanoes, all fed by clastic
dikes, that were formed by the New Madrid Earthquake of
1812. These occurred where water-saturated sands,
thousands of years old were overlain by clayey backswamp
and distal natural levee deposits that accumulated slowly
over thousands of years. Rapid deposition is not
necessary for the formation of clastic dikes as the below
references prove.
(In fact, for the above clastic dikes to form, the
overlying clayey strata had to be consolidated and
brittle, not soft. Otherwise, they could not fractured
in a way to produce the cracks needed for the sand to
intrude them.)
Some examples:
Audemard, F. A., and F. de Santis (1991) Survey of
liqueifaction stuctures induced by recent moderate
earthquakes. Bulletin of the Internation Association
of Engineering Geology. vol. 44, pp. 5-16.
Obermier, S. F. (1996) Using liquefaction-induced features
for paleoseismic analysis. In McCalpin, ed., pp. 331-385,
Paleoseismology. Academic Press, New York.
Obermier, S. F., J. R. Martin, A. D. Frankel, T. L. Youd,
P. J. Munson, C. A. Munson, and E. C. Pond. (1993)
Liquefication evdience for one or more strong Holocene
earthquakes in the Wabash River Valley of southern
Indiana and Illinois, with a prelimianry estimate of
magnitude. U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper no.
1536, U.S. Geological Survey, Reston, Va. 28 pp.
Tuttle, M.P., R. H. Lafferty, III, M. J. Guccione, E. S.
Sweig, III, N. Lopinot, R. F. Cande, K. Dyer-Williams,
and M. Haynes. (1996) Use of archaeology to date
liquefaction events in the New Madrid seismic zone,
Central United States. Geoarcaheology. vol. 11, pp 451-480
.... creationist silliness deleted ...
Yours,
Keith Littleton
litt...@vnet.net
New Orleans, LA
"Geology shows that fossils are of different ages.
Paleontology shows a fossil sequence, the list of
species representing changes through time. Taxonomy
shows biological relationships among species.
Evolution is the explanation that threads it all
together. Creationism is the practice of squeezing
one's eyes shut and wailing "DOES NOT!"
-- Dr. Pepper
Jonathan Stone
[snip]
|> >
|> >It used to be a 4004 BC barrier.
|> <snip>
|>
|> You caught my interest with this statement. Where was this barrier 6004 ya
|> cited? Can you give me a couple references? I am only aware of the appx.
|> 10,000 ya date.
I took it as read that Sverker was referring to Bishop Ussher's estimate.
I'm rather suprrised you havent' ever heard of it.
Dave Woetzel
Sverker Johansson wrote in message <37590D65...@no.hlk.spam.hj.se>...
>Dave Woetzel wrote:
>
>> Sverker Johansson wrote in message
<375904BF...@no.hlk.spam.hj.se>...
>> >Dave Woetzel wrote:
the
>> >> 10,000 year barrier?
>> >
>> <snip>
>>
>> You caught my interest with this statement. Where was this barrier 6004
ya
>> cited? Can you give me a couple references? I am only aware of the
appx.
>> 10,000 ya date.
>
>
I was hoping you might have something relevant to dendrochronology. If you
are going to cite dating arguments from over 300 years ago, would you expect
them to be accurate? Evolutionists gripe if creationists use a quote that is
30 years old!
Dave
Dave Woetzel
Boikat wrote in message <37598B15...@bellsouth.net>...
Wait! Its better than that. Read II Peter 3:3-4. (I would quote it for
you, but the dust that has built up since our last Bible-based thread needs
to be cleaned off anyway.) It predicts uniformitarian skeptics that make up
there own morality. It does everything but give Boikat's street address!
:)
For starters, I never said it "proved" anything. Get your facts straight
and the rest of your argument might actually have some credence.
Until you have some evidence beyond "Boikat's speculation," I'll say
Robert's arguments stand the reasonableness test.
I never said that there were *no* creationists still arguing some of these
things. But go back and check the string of Henke's recent posts if you
think that creationists never criticize their peers outdated arguments.
I'll let you debate that with him. BTW, if you think that presenting old
stuff is unique to creationists, go back and check out some of Julie Thomas'
arguments about current texts with recapitulation still in them.
>And all that from the guy that thinks "Forbidden
>Archaeology" is significant, even though
>"Forbidden Archaeology" implies that Man is
>Billions of years old as a species! (2.5-2.8
>billion year old ball bearings, remember?)
Last I checked, you ran off on that thread mid-stroke. If you have
something relevant to add to the Red Crag discussion, I'll be happy to
debate it some more.
Dave
Adam Noel Harris
:
:Sverker Johansson wrote in message <37590D65...@no.hlk.spam.hj.se>...
:>Ussher (1650) "Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti"
:>
:
:I was hoping you might have something relevant to dendrochronology. If you
:are going to cite dating arguments from over 300 years ago, would you expect
:them to be accurate? Evolutionists gripe if creationists use a quote that is
:30 years old!
If the data set never changed, evolutionists would be wrong to gripe.
Ussher's analysis is based on lineages as given in the Holy Bible.
If you think the Book of Mormon adds new relevant information, perhaps
Ussher is out of date.
-Adam
--
Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of Stanford University.
PGP Fingerprint = C0 65 A2 BD 8A 67 B3 19 F9 8B C1 4C 8E F2 EA 0E
Kevin R. Henke
Dave Woetzel wrote in message <03442191602...@csi.com>...
KRH: Textural evidence indicates that 2 Peter was written well into
the
2nd century by someone pretending to be Peter. Also, no manuscripts
or
citations from 2nd Peter occur from the 1st century. So why should we
take the words of a forger seriously? It's obvious that the critics
of Christianity in the 2nd century were citing verses like Revelation
1:3 against Christians. "Your apostles promised that Christ would
soon return, well, where is he?" 2 Peter was the best invention that
these
Christians could come up with to respond to these critics.
[snip]
Boikat
> >
> >> Sverker Johansson wrote in message
> the
> >> >> 10,000 year barrier?
> >> >
> >> <snip>
> >>
> >> You caught my interest with this statement. Where was this barrier 6004
> ya
> >> cited? Can you give me a couple references? I am only aware of the
> appx.
> >> 10,000 ya date.
> >
> >
>
> I was hoping you might have something relevant to dendrochronology. If you
> are going to cite dating arguments from over 300 years ago, would you expect
> them to be accurate? Evolutionists gripe if creationists use a quote that is
> 30 years old!
>
Let's put it this way Dave: The oldest
Bristlecone Pine tree is about 4,765 years old,
according to the growth rings. If there were no
dead bristle cones around to compare it to, and
match a correlation in the growth patterns, then
the dendrochronology "barrier" derived from the
bristlecone pine trees would be 4,765 years,
wouldn't it, according to the logic you seem to be
using. And again, why does this, at 4,765 or
10,000 year span of dendrochronology mean that the
earth is only 10,000 years old? It could just
mean that prior to 10,000 years ago, bristlecone
pines didn't grow there. Nah, it couldn't be a
possibility, now could it?
Boikat
Boikat
Perhaps we should just start referring to you as
Karl Jr. then. :}
Sorry, "predictions" that come from the
self-serving writers of the Bible do not
intimidate nor impress me.
My "facts" are straight. I'm trying to keep with
the point of the original post, which was that the
earth couldn't be billions of years old because
dendrochronology only goes back to around 10,000
years, according to the original post.
What test? The dynamics of the magnetic fields of
the other planets has nothing in the world to do
with the age of the Earth, or the rest of the
solar system, or the universe. If it does, please
explain how.
Yet you are defending one that just did, and
defending arguments that have been refuted or are
just plain irrelevant.
> But go back and check the string of Henke's recent posts if you
> think that creationists never criticize their peers outdated arguments.
I never said they didn't. I'm addressing the
regurgiposting of arguments that were dead decades
ago.
> I'll let you debate that with him. BTW, if you think that presenting old
> stuff is unique to creationists, go back and check out some of Julie Thomas'
> arguments about current texts with recapitulation still in them.
Heckle exaggerated aspects of his drawings. No
doubt about it. That tends to happen when you
draw something by hand, and want to emphasize
something. The bottom line on that is we still do
recapitulate structures of our ancestors.
>
> >And all that from the guy that thinks "Forbidden
> >Archaeology" is significant, even though
> >"Forbidden Archaeology" implies that Man is
> >Billions of years old as a species! (2.5-2.8
> >billion year old ball bearings, remember?)
>
> Last I checked, you ran off on that thread mid-stroke.
Did I? Perhaps I just missed post, or someone
else handled the last point better than I could
have, and thus any response from me would have
been redundant. Surely you don't think that I
think that if two separate "evolutionists" tell
you the same thing that that's going to convince
you?
> If you have
> something relevant to add to the Red Crag discussion, I'll be happy to
> debate it some more.
I already said what I had to say about that. Is
there some reason that there could not have been
H. h. in that area? So what if it's early in their
history. Big deal. And just how does that mess
up the "Out of Africa" theory, other than placing
a small migration earlier than the general
migration? Is that a problem? Why? Could it not
be possible that a band of merry hab's got a
severe case of "wanderlust"? And since the finds
supposedly are from that era, what's the problem?
Now, about those 2.8 billion year old ball
bearings. Where do you suppose they came from?
Boikat
pim...@my-deja.com
"Robert Paveza" <Ref...@email.msn.com> wrote:
Let's see what remains after looking at real science.
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/8851/radiometric.html
Good page for radiometric dating rebuttals.
http://www.gate.net/~rwms/AgeEarth.html
Other rebuttals
> Young Solar System Evidence
> 1) Rate of bombardment of meteoritic dust / amount of dust measured on
> the moon. Should be several hundred feet of dust on the moon. Several
> years ago this creationist argument was dismissed, and many
> creationists themselves stopped using it. However, in light of the
> latest scientific research, this argument has been revived.
Such as ?
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/moon-dust.html
> 2) Existence of short-period comets. They can only last a maximum of
> several
> thousand years because they give off copious material each orbit.
Kuiper and Oort
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/8851/resp9.html
> 3) Continued presence of small meteorites in the face of the
> Poynting/Robertson effect. Poynting-Robertson effect should sweep the
> solar system clean of small particles.
Directly false. While it is true that the dynamic lifetime of dust in
the solar system is short compared to the age of the solar system, the
statement that there is no significant source of replenishment is known
to be false. A detailed response is available.
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/8851/resp7.html
> 4) Existence of unstable rings around planets like Saturn. Rings are
> not stable and will not last.
Shows merely that the rings might not be old.
> 5) Extensive tectonic activity on Jupiter's moon Io. Inadequate heat >
sources for a small moon so far from the sun to still be geologically >
active.
Ever heard of tidal forces? The closeness to Jupiter is basically
'ripping' Io apart.
> 8) Recession of the moon from the earth. Moon is moving away from the
> earth gradually due to tidal activity. Movement is too fast for > >
earth-moon system to be 4.6 billion years old.
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/dave_matson/young-earth/specific_
arguments/moon_recede.html
> 9) Shrinking sun - Sun may be shrinking a few feet each year. Can't
> extrapolate this trend back to the past very far without effecting
earth's environment.
Directly false. The original proponents of this argument failed to
appreciate the fact that the study cited by Dunham was never
published. In fact, it was revoked by the authors prior to publication
when they realized that their own data were flawed. Current
detailed observations show that the sun is not shrinking in radius, but
may pulsate slowly over a solar cycle period of about 11
years. Theory suggests that the sun is slowly expanding over time. A
detailed response is available.
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/8851/resp8.html
> 10) Absence/shortage of solar neutrinos. Nuclear fusion in the sun's
>core should give off neutrinos. Experiments have not detected an
>adequate number of neutrinos - this is a well known problem. Some
>creationists have argued that this implies solar heat is due to
>gravity and not fusion - this would imply a young sun.
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/8851/fusion.html
> 12) High concentration of Uranium-236 on the moon. Should have
decayed.
> 13) High concentration of Thorium-230 on the moon. Should have
decayed.
> Young Earth Evidence
Thorium-230 is an intermediate decay product of uranium-238 which has a
half-life of about 4.468 billion years (Strahler, 1987, p.131). Thus, it
will be continually generated as long as the supply of U-238 lasts.
Funny, that Wysong, whose argument Hovind is using, should have
overlooked the intermediate decay products of longlived isotopes!
According to the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, 7th
edition (1992), the naturally existing uranium isotopes are: U-234
(0.00054%); U-235 (0.7%); U-238 (99.275%). However, trace amounts of
U-236 also exist in nature. Dalrymple (1991, p.376) informs us that
"U-236
is rare but is produced by nuclear reactions in some uranium ores where
sufficient slow neutrons are available."
Thus, Th-230 and U-236 are currently being generated and their existence
in nature proves nothing. Creationists will find the following table of
the known
radioactive nuclides with half-lives greater than 1 million years far
more interesting. Here is elegant proof that the earth is old!
http://www.freethinker.org/library/modern/dave_matson/young-earth/specif
ic_arguments/moon_isotopes.html
> 1) Exponential decay in the earth's magnetic field (half-life of
1400-2000
> years). This half-life cannot be extrapolated back more than about
10,000
> years without the field becoming intolerably powerful. Creationists
have
> been criticized for taking the original work on this matter out of
context
> and failing to show that the magnetic field is cyclic (decaying then
> strengthening). However, it is the old earth believers that have
concocted
> this data in an imaginary hypothetical cyclic extrapolation. It is the
> creationist who has used only the empirical evidence, to devise a
theory
> that truly explains that data now available to us.
The argument in general is very weak. The argument as made by Barnes is
directly false. I have already written an extensive
critique of Barnes' work, which is found in the talk.origins archive.
Barnes' argument is tightly circular and illogical, since it
directly assumes the truth of the proposition to be proved. Barnes makes
the simplistic mistake of extraplating an empirical fit to
a 150 year data set over a 10,000 year range and claims the
extrapolation is valid! Barnes wrongly insists that dynamo action is
forbidden by Cowling's theorem, ignoring the fact that Cowling himself
had already proven that this could not be true, 15 years
before Barnes published his book! A very poor argument.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/magfields.html
> 2) Insufficient mass of helium in earth's atmosphere to account for
4.6
> billion years of radioactive decay. Helium is a by-product of
radioactive
> decay of some elements. It is a noble gas which doesn't combine with
any
> other element, but there is not enough of it to account for the
radioactive
> decay which should have occurred in an old-earth scenario.
Directly false. Current observation & measurement shows that the rate of
helium loss from the atmosphere balances the rate of
production through radioactive decay in the crust and mantle. Cook was
unaware of the loss of ionized helium along polar
magnetic field lines, as are more current champions of the same
argument. A detailed response is available.
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/8851/resp3.html
> 5) Tree rings, including rings on petrified forest trees, cannot be
> traced back more than several thousand years.
at least 7,000 years and counting. Merely shows a limit on trees not on
the age of the earth.
> 6) Dating of Niagara falls. Erosion of the system indicates it is only
> a few thousand years old.
And ?
> 7) Dating of Mississippi river delta. Erosion rate and amount of
sediment
> accumulated indicate that it is only a few thousand years old.
Not at all.
> 8) Lack of equilibrium of Carbon-14/Carbon-12 ratio. This ratio should
reach
> equilibrium in the atmosphere in only some thousands of years, but it
hasn't
> reached that point yet.
> 10) Amount of salts in the ocean divided by rate of influx. This is
actually many dating methods - one for each salt which can be measured.
For example,
> all the sodium chloride in the ocean would have been ashed in about 62
> million years, if the ocean was pure water to begin with.
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/salt.htm
> 12) No plausible explanation for the pressure in oil reservoirs
remaining so
> high for millions of years.
Glenn Morton
I wanted to re-iterate something that I had said earlier in response to
Vernon. Young-earth creationists say that oil deposits are leaky and
thus
could not last the millions of years evolutionists believed.
At 09:53 PM 8/24/98 +0100, Vernon Jenkins wrote of arguments for a young
earth.
>However, in case not,
>here are some: oil gushers,
I replied:
The pressure in oil wells is kept in by capillary pressure not in the
way
that Young-earthers calculate it. They use permeability and ignore
capillary pressure.
"Petroleum and natural gas are held at high pressures in underground
reservoirs of porous rock and sand. These fluids are retained in their
reservoirs by relatively impermeable cap rock. However, in many cases
the
pressurs are exceedingly high. Calculations based on the measured
permeability of the cap rock show that the oil or gas pressure could not
be
maintained for much longer than 10,000 years or perhaps a maximum of
100,000 years (permeability is a measure of how easily fluids under
pressure will seep through the rock.) If these fossil fuel deposits
were
actually millions or hundreds of millions of years old, they would long
ago
have leaked out through their cap rock to the surface." ~ Robert E.
Kofahl,
Handy Dandy Evolution Refuter, (San Diego: Beta Books, 1977), p. 122-123
He cites as source Melvin A. Cook Prehistory and Earth Models, (London:
Max
Parish, 1966), p. 254-262 and P. Dickey, et al Science, May 10, 1968, p.
609
who says nothing about rapid leakage.
I brought home from work an excel spreadsheet that I use in calculating
whether or not a trap could hold natural gas. It is based upon the
article
R.R. Berg, "Capillary Pressures in Stratigraphic Traps AAPG June
1975:939-956, in Traps and Seals II Treatise of Petroleum Geology
Reprint
Series No. 7, p. 36-37 especially equatiosn 16 and 20
The height of an oil column which can be held by capillary pressure is:
zc = pc/g/(pw-po)
where pc= 16.3 gamma/D
where D is the grain diameter
where gamma is the surface tension 35 in the case of oil and
approximately
72 in the case of gas (see Revil et al, "Capillary Sealing in
Sedimentary
Basins, Geophysical Research letters 25:3 (1998), pp 389-392, esp. p.
391)
where pw is water density
where po is the density of the hydrocarbons (.9 in the case of oil and
.05
in the case of gas.
Using a smectite grain diameter .0007 cm and a density difference of .1
for
oil, we find that capillary pressure can hold a 560 foot column of oil
without leaking. Salt can hold about a 4000 foot column if need be and
many of the oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico are associated with salt.
Young earth creationists are wrong to ignore capillary pressure when
dealing with oil fields (of course very few of them actually work in the
oil industry).
> 13) Existence of uranium halos.
> 14) Existence of polonium halos. Some believe that the polonium halos
> disqualify radiometric dating as a reliable dating method because they
may
> indicate that the rate of radioactive decay has not been constant
throughout
> history. Others feel these halos indicate a rapid (instant) creation
of the
> earth.
That one has been debunked a long time ago
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/po-halos.html
> 1) Lack of meteorites in the geologic column. If the geologic column
is
> billions of years old one would expect to find meteorites throughout.
Directly false. Meteorites in fossilized sediments are rare, but they do
exist. And meteoritic dust and debris are quite common in
sediments. There are also a few hundred undeniable impact structures
(i.e. craters) on the earth. A detailed response is available.
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/8851/resp4.html
> 2) Ripple marks, rain drops, and animal tracks in sedimentary rocks.
This
> implies very rapid burial and hardening because these fragile features
could
> not survive even trivial erosion.
Not compatible with a flood which would be so devastating it would wash
out any evidence. The animal tracks have to dry...
> The Earth's Magnetic Field
>
> The earth's magnetic field is a powerful witness for a world much
younger
> than the billions of years required by evolutionary theories. Let's
start
> the story with the most prominent feature of the field today--its very
rapid
> decay.
>
> "The Field Is Decaying Rapidly"
Incorrect
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/magfields.html
pim...@my-deja.com
"Dave Woetzel" <dwoe...@juno.com> wrote:
>
> >Dendrochronology: How long does wood last in the
> >open environment? Why are bristle cone pines more
> >durable, both as a living tree, and as dead wood?
> >Also, dendrochronology is an ongoing field of
> >investigation. Stay tuned.
>
passed the
> 10,000 year wall?
>
> >Comets were covered quite well. The Oort and
> >Kuiper belt are a source in deep freeze out beyond
> >pluto, and objects from the kuiper belt have been
> >directly imaged by the Hubble space telescope.
> >The Kuiper Belt is real, it exists.
>
> You mean, as compared to the Oort cloud?
The evidence for the Oort cloud is quite impressive.
> >"Field Galaxies" Ever see the HST "Deep Sky"
> >image?
> >
> > Also, as in the case of the magnetic fields,
> >since the planets in question are not exact
> >replicas of earth, it's reasonable that they would
> >have some variation when compared with the earth's
> >magnetic field, and how it's generated.
>
> Speculation.
Yep.
> >Those creationist argument are just a weak as the
> >rest of them.
> No, Boikat. Unlike what some imply on T.O. Creationists *do* 'fess
> up to hard evidence that outdates an argument.
Some do but many continue with the same old arguments:
Salt in oceans
Polonium halos
Thorium on moon
Moon receding
Sun shrinking
Magnetic fields
Dust on moon
Dust in solar system
No meteorites in sediment
decay of speed of light
And many more...
sad...
> That may be the case for shrinking
> sun and moon dust, but is *not* true of the others.
Really?
pim...@my-deja.com
"Dave Woetzel" <dwoe...@juno.com> wrote:
>
> >Dendrochronology: How long does wood last in the
> >open environment? Why are bristle cone pines more
> >durable, both as a living tree, and as dead wood?
> >Also, dendrochronology is an ongoing field of
> >investigation. Stay tuned.
>
> Yes, it is ongoing. However, are you aware of anything that has
passed the
> 10,000 year wall?
Getting closer and closer 7,000 years in one of the resources I found.
And what does this show ? Certainly not necessarily a young earth.
Something to combine a few data points:
1967 Bucha and Neustupny provided paleomagnetic intensity measurments
that supported the existence of secular variations in the Earth's
magnetic field first proposed by Thellier. They were able to
model the variations of 14C production, and almost exactly match
the deviations between the tree-ring and radiocarbon time scales.
and this one 13,000 years
Stockwell continues.
Here are a few additional references that you might want to check out
regarding 14C dating. The bottom line is that 14C dating is
quite a bit more advanced than creationist sources give it credit for
being. Through comparison with tree ring dates, the 14C method has
been calibrated back to more than 13,000 years before the present,
[Becker, et al. 1991].
...
In addition, 14C dating has also been calibrated back to more
than 30,000 years before the present using uranium-thorium (isochron)
dating of corals [Bard, et al, 1990] and [Edwards, et al, 1993].
While it is unlikely that 14C will be useful for objects older
than 50,000 years, owing to the problems of background contamination
[Dickin, 1995] and [Lowe, 1991], there is a recent paper by
[Kitagawa, H., and van der Plicht, J., 1998] discusses calibration
back to 45,000 b.p.
References:
Bard, E., Hamelin, B., Fairbanks, R.G., and Zinder, A., (1990),
Calibration of the 14C timescale over the past 30,000 years
using mass spectrometric U-Th ages from Barbados corals,
Nature, 345, 405-410.
Becker, B., Kromer, B., and Trimborn P., 1991, A stable-isotope
tree-ring timescale of the Late Glacial/Holocene boundary:
Nature, vol. 353 (17 Oct 1991), 647-649.
pim...@my-deja.com
"Dave Woetzel" <dwoe...@juno.com> wrote:
>
> >> >It used to be a 4004 BC barrier.
> >> <snip>
> >>
> >> You caught my interest with this statement. Where was this barrier
6004
> ya
> >> cited? Can you give me a couple references? I am only aware of
the
> appx.
> >> 10,000 ya date.
> >
> >Ussher (1650) "Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti"
> >
>
> I was hoping you might have something relevant to dendrochronology.
If you
> are going to cite dating arguments from over 300 years ago, would you
expect
> them to be accurate? Evolutionists gripe if creationists use a quote
that is
> 30 years old!
Let's first address some Young earth evidence, including
dendrochronology:
http://bsuvc.bsu.edu/prn/oldearth.html
the generally accepted "mainstream" figure for the age of
the earth is about 4.5 GY (4.5 * 109 years).
The talk. origins FAQ on the subject suggests 4.5 billion
years ą 1%, but for present purposes, we
can be considerably more lenient with the margin of error
since the "opposing" view puts the figure at
about 6000 years, a difference of 6 orders of magnitude!
Needless to say, the young-earth creationists dispute virtually
all of the details involved in deriving a figure like
the above, particularly all the "assumptions" (actually
conclusions, but that's creationist language for you) having
to do with radioactive decay and dating methods derived from
radioactivity.
It is, of course, true that radiometric methods are the only ones
that yield absolute figures for the age of the
earth. On the other hand, the precise age of the earth is not
exactly what this matter is all about. I want to
ensure that no creationists can take any comfort from the
statement that only radiometric dating can provide an
absolute age for the earth and interpret that to mean that there
is no other evidence for an "old earth."
Now, exactly what might be meant by "an old earth" is not yet
completely clear, but most young-earth
creationists are looking for ages on the order of 6,000 to 10,000
years and would certainly be more than a little
distressed if they were forced to admit that the true age
differed by as much as an order of magnitude from that
figure. In practice, virtually no one is willing to consider ages
of less than 6k, but even when pressed hard, even
Bob Bales, probably the most persistent young-earth creationist
to "grace" the talk.origins newsgroup over the
years, tended to say nothing more committal than "probably less
than 50k" (approximate quote, I don't have
Bob's posts archived like some people do :-).
Anyway, despite any limitations to radiometric methods for
determining the full age of the earth, there are
additional lines of evidence that can place lower limits on the
earth's age. Several of these other,
non-radiometric, methods require ages of considerably more than
6k years. Here are some of my favorites
cribbed shamelessly from my own talk.origins archives. Visit the
"official" archives too.
1) Dendrochronology
This is dating from counting tree rings and correlating the
patterns of wide and narrow rings between trees, thus
working back farther than the age of a single individual tree.
This methodology does not gain an order of
magnitude, but patterns of tree rings have been traced back to
ages that are at least significantly too old for the
Ussher dates. For example, Becker et al., Nature 353:647-649,
1991 discusses a sequence of oak trees from
Europe that yields a continuous chronology from the (1991)
present back 9,928 years.
The same authors also have a 1600 year old pine chronology which
overlaps the end of the oak chronology. As
interspecies comparison is difficult they had not yet fixed an
absolute age for the pine chronology at the time of
the 1991 article. It appears that they have since been able to
correlate the pines with the oaks to obtain a
chronology going back approximately 11,000 years. Ref: Becker, D.
(1993) An 11,000 year German oak and
pine dendrochronology for radiocarbon calibration. Radiocarbon
35:201-213.
The oldest living trees are bristlecone pine trees from the White
Mountains of California/Nevada. The oldest
known live tree is 4763 years old (in 1964, the oldest was 4950
years old, but it was cut down in 1964 :-() and
dead trees have been matched with live ones, extending the scale
of bristlecone pine tree rings of known age
back almost 9000 years before the present. Note, too, that even
the ages of some of the living trees extend
back beyond the usual dates of approximately 2400 BCE (4400 years
ago) cited (and calculated from Biblical
references) for the purported global flood. For more information
on bristlecone pines, see The Ancient
Bristlecone Pine and particularly the page on dendrochronology.
Another study, finished in 1984 in Ireland, established an
unbroken record of tree rings in oak trees from the
"present" [i.e., 1984] to 7,272 years ago.
Due to the fact that dendrochronology has been able to accurately
calibrate 14C dating for such a period, there
is also a broken chronology of trees found in Tasmania ranging in
age from about 8000 BP to about 13000 BP
(i.e., about 6000 BCE to about 11000 BCE). Ref: Barbetti, M. et
al (1992) Radiocarbon variations from
Tasmainian conifers; First results from late Pleistocene and
Holocene logs. Radiocarbon 34(3):806-817.
Obviously, this latter result will be slightly less convincing to
young-earth creationists, since it is mediated by
radiocarbon dating (at the near end), even though the 14C dating
at that end had already been calibrated by
strictly dendrochronological (ring-counting) methods. Note,
though, that the sequence itself, at 5000 years, is
already longer than the time from the alleged flood to the
present, so this sequence would still be a problem for
"flood geology" even if the absolute ages are ignored entirely.
Creationists sometimes object that counting rings may not be
reliable because some trees have been known to
form multiple rings in a single year, but this can be and is
controlled for. For example, trees can, under the
proper environmental conditions, grow "false" (i.e., not annual)
rings. This usually occurs when a lengthy "warm
snap" in late winter "tricks" a tree into believing it is spring.
This "warm snap" is then followed by the return of
winter cold, and the tree reverts to winter dormancy (or a
lengthy "cold snap" occurs in the middle of spring).
This process is, however, extremely rare, and due to the
relatively short duration of the "artificial" spring, under a
microscope "false" rings are easily distinguished from real
rings.
In addition, the "warm snaps" that lead to "false" rings are
almost invariably a result of micro-climatic conditions.
One can correlate most of the "false" rings out by comparing the
tree rings of trees separated by distance. For
example, a dendrochronologist could compare redwood slabs from
California and Oregon, and map out a
reliable annual history.
Furthermore, different trees require different environmental
conditions to produce false rings. In all but the most
unusual of cases, one can (if the material is available)
cross-compare two different species of tree (e.g., a
redwood and a maple) from the same area and eliminate most of the
spurious "false" rings.
In short, "false" tree rings are easily discernable (albeit not
naively visible) in a single tree. Comparing trees from
distinct geographic regions can be used to eliminate the vast
majority of spurious rings, as can comparison of
samples from distinct species of trees within a given region.
The conclusion that trivially emerges from this data is that 6000
years is certainly insufficient to account for the
tree-ring record. Even a less-constrained ("fast and loose")
figure of 10,000 years, which is certainly stretching
the "Bibilical record" line, cannot cover the ages found by
counting tree rings, which are visible with the naked
eye.
Acknowledgements for much of the material above are due to Matt
Brinkman, Peter Lamb, Chris Nedin, and, of course,
Leonard Miller, of the U of Arizona, who compiled the Bristlecone
pine site mentioned above. For more information on
dendrochronology, see the Ultimate Tree-Ring Web Pages by Henri
Grissino-Mayer.
2) Ice cores
There is a talk.origins FAQ on this one. Matt Brinkman has
compiled a beautiful summary of what is known.
Briefly, though, people have counted annual layers of ice in
places like Greenland and Antarctica. Naturally, the
layers become harder to distinguish as you go deeper in the ice,
but the principles are comparatively simple. It is
comparatively easy to show (e.g., using inclusions of ash from
known volcanic eruptions) that the layers do
correspond to years rather than snowfalls as some people have
asserted.
As the ice gets compacted, the layers do become hard to
distinguish and there are various theoretical methods
used to test them, so someone who is inclined to disbelieve in
them may feel uncomfortable accepting figures
from beyond the point where people can actually see them
reliably. However, even within this more restricted
range, the news is bad for a "young earth." For example, in the
Greenland ice divide (summit) core, it is possible
to distinguish 40,000 annual layers before they grow too thin.
Note that in those 40,000 years, there is no sign
of a flood.
Deeper in the core we get to ice laid down in the last
interglacial (circa 120,000 years ago). According to both
observations and theory (Milankovitch) this was a time in which
the northern hemisphere was much warmer than
today. Sure enough, at this point the annual layers reappear.
Precipitation was much higher at this time (a
consequence of the greater capacity of air to hold water vapor as
temperature increases) and the annual layers
are still 6mm thick despite the thinning induced by the flow of
ice. Roughly another ten thousand layers can be
counted. It is possible, though not yet confirmed, that more
sophisticated isotopic analysis may allow annual
layers to be counted between these two zones, perhaps back to
around 70,000 years before present. This will
be quite difficult because these layers have been considerably
thinned by ice flow, and unlike the last interglacial
layers, they were never that thick to begin with.
Very preliminary results on this core were published in Nature
volume 359, page 311. (Thanks also to Bill
Hyde, from whom the last couple of paragraphs have been stolen.
:-) See also Scientific American February
1998.
3) Varves
Varves are annual layers of sediment laid down on lake bottoms.
Depending on the climate and environment,
you may get different numbers of layers per year, but in any case
they cycle as 2, 3, or 4 distinct types of
sediment and then repeat the same cycle again. In the Green River
formation of what is now Wyoming, there are
places with 20,000,000 thin varves, each varve consisting of a
thin layer of fine light sediment and an even
thinner layer of finer dark sediment. According to the
conventional geologic interpretation, the layers are
sediments laid down in a complex of ancient freshwater lakes. The
coarser light sediments were laid down
during the summer, when streams poured run-off water into the
lake. The fine dark sediments were laid down in
the winter when there was less run-off. (This process can be
observed in modern freshwater lakes.) Thus, the
varves of the Green River formation must have formed over a
period of about twenty million years.
Young-earth creationists insist that the earth is less than
10,000 years old and that the geologic strata were laid
down by the Flood. In The Genesis Flood, Whitcomb and Morris
therefore attempt to attribute the Green
River varves to "a complex of shallow turbidity currents..." (p.
427). Turbidity currents--flows of mud-laden
water--generally occur in the ocean, resulting from underwater
landslides. If the Green River shales were laid
down during the Flood, there must have been forty million
turbidity currents, alternatively light and dark, over
about three hundred days. A simple calculation (which
Creationists have consistently avoided) shows that the
layers must have formed at the rate of about three layers every
two seconds. A sequence of forty million
turbidity currents covering tens of thousands of square miles
every two-thirds of a second seems ridiculously
unlikely.
A real age of 20 million years is far beyond even the most
liberal of "literal" readings of Genesis.
4) Coral clocks
Short explanation: the moon is slowly sapping the earth's
rotational energy. Angular momentum is being
transferred, by "tidal friction", from the earth's rotation to
the moon's orbit. The earth should have rotated more
quickly in the distant past, meaning that a day would have been
less than 24 hours, and there would have been
more days per year.
There is an exceedingly strong correlation between the "supposed
age" of a wide range of fossils (corals,
stromatolites, and a few others -- collected from geologic
formations throughout the column and from locations
all over the world) and the number of days per year that their
growth pattern shows.
Modern corals deposit a single, very thin layer of lime once a
day. It is possible with some difficulty, to count
these diurnal (day-night) growth lines and to determine how old
the coral is in days. More important seasonal
fluctuations will cause the growth lines to change their spacing
yearly so that annual increments can also be
recognized much as in growth rings of trees. Professor John Wells
of Cornell University began looking for
diurnal lines of fossil corals. He found several Devonian
(410-360 MYA) and Pennsylvanian (325-286 MYA)
corals that do show both annual and daily growth patterns. He
found that the Pennsylvanian forms had an
average of 387 daily growth lines per annual cycle, and that the
Devonian corals had about 400 growth lines.
The agreement between these clocks, radiometric dating, and the
theory of superposition is a little hard to
explain away as the result of a number of unlucky coincidences in
a 300-day-long flood.
The coral clocks thus yield another, non-radiometric,
confirmation of a lower bound for the age of the earth that
is far beyond the figures given by the young-earth creationists
like Morris, Gish and the ICR. Pointing as they do
to a minimum age of approximately 400 million years and
calibrated not by radioactivity but by "simple"
Newtonian mechanics, denial of this figure requires denial of
virtually all of physics.
[The above excerpts, edited, reorganized, rewritten and reworked
by me, are based on postings to talk.origins over several
years by a number of people, some of whom I can't even identify
from my files. :-( I have attempted to credit those that I can
identify, but I suspect that Chris Stassen, Matt Brinkman, Bill
Hyde, Karl Kluge and Bill Jefferys are among those whom I have
not credited sufficiently.]
hat these various data show is that there is a good deal
more than radiometric methods available to
establish that the earth is much more than 6,000 years
old. Anyone trying to build a history of the
earth from the chronology given in Genesis will have a
lot of trouble with any of these, let alone all of
them. The correlations between these methods and the
radiometric methods is much too high to be
dismissed as coincidental.
On to the next essay
Back to the previous essay
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hrgr...@my-deja.com
This response would have some justification, if Robert had claimed that
a billion-year Earth had not been proven (as far as scientific proof
goes).
Since his original claim was different - that an old Earth was
scientifically *disproven* - it would be his task (or yours) to argue
convincingly against all of Boikat's "speculations", if you call them.
Robert: "X is impossible because of B"
Boikat: "But B can be explained consistently with X under the
assumptions C/in the model D/ etc,"
Dave: "Speculation!"
Sorry, that is not sufficient.
Regards,
HRG.
<snip>
Dave Woetzel
Boikat wrote in message <3759E436...@bellsouth.net>...
I hate to admit my ignorance of someone who is apparently a much-esteemed
T.O. contributor, but I do not know who Karl Jr. is.
My point (which is what seemed to set you off) is that the response to
Robert's dendrochronology argument was weaker than I would have anticipated.
I see now that some have contributed stronger evidence.
So, you agree with Robert now?
Baloney. Even Gould gave up on that "evidence" a long time ago.
>> >And all that from the guy that thinks "Forbidden
>> >Archaeology" is significant, even though
>> >"Forbidden Archaeology" implies that Man is
>> >Billions of years old as a species! (2.5-2.8
>> >billion year old ball bearings, remember?)
>>
>> Last I checked, you ran off on that thread mid-stroke.
>
>Did I? Perhaps I just missed post, or someone
>else handled the last point better than I could
>have, and thus any response from me would have
>been redundant. Surely you don't think that I
>think that if two separate "evolutionists" tell
>you the same thing that that's going to convince
>you?
My server shows no activity for a week. If you responded, please repost it
or send it directly to me and we can take it up again in the appropriate
thread.
>> If you have
>> something relevant to add to the Red Crag discussion, I'll be happy to
>> debate it some more.
>
>I already said what I had to say about that. Is
>there some reason that there could not have been
>H. h. in that area? So what if it's early in their
>history. Big deal. And just how does that mess
>up the "Out of Africa" theory, other than placing
>a small migration earlier than the general
>migration? Is that a problem? Why? Could it not
>be possible that a band of merry hab's got a
>severe case of "wanderlust"? And since the finds
>supposedly are from that era, what's the problem?
>
>Now, about those 2.8 billion year old ball
>bearings. Where do you suppose they came from?
Since you appear to have a special affection for them, Boikat, you can keep
them with your cartridge fossil. Maybe some day you can start your own
museum.
Dave
Boikat
A small imitation of the real thing, I'm afraid.
He too was fond of comparing "evobabbalers" to the
"skeptics" and detractors that were "predicted" in
the Bible.
In what way? How was the refutation supposed to
be stronger. "Argument Au CAPS LOCK"? The fact
is that his "weak evidence" is destroyed by the
simple observation that the limited tree ring
record is not "evidence" that supports a young
earth, which is what you seemed to think also.
Part of the refutation of the claim was, and still
*is*, "please explain why the limit of
Dendrochronology sets the maximum age of the Earth
at where the tree ring data is missing". Is it
implied that since "They only go back "X" number
of years, then the Earth was not there prior to
that time"?
Ah, the old twistaroo! Read it again, I asked
what the magnetic fields of the other planets had
to do with the age of the earth. I notice that
never seems to get answered, much like explaining
why the current dendrochronology date means the
earth did not exist prior to that time.
Oh? So human embryos do not have "tails"?
>
> >> >And all that from the guy that thinks "Forbidden
> >> >Archaeology" is significant, even though
> >> >"Forbidden Archaeology" implies that Man is
> >> >Billions of years old as a species! (2.5-2.8
> >> >billion year old ball bearings, remember?)
> >>
> >> Last I checked, you ran off on that thread mid-stroke.
> >
> >Did I? Perhaps I just missed post, or someone
> >else handled the last point better than I could
> >have, and thus any response from me would have
> >been redundant. Surely you don't think that I
> >think that if two separate "evolutionists" tell
> >you the same thing that that's going to convince
> >you?
>
> My server shows no activity for a week. If you responded, please repost it
> or send it directly to me and we can take it up again in the appropriate
> thread.
Re-read my reply above, and below
>
> >> If you have
> >> something relevant to add to the Red Crag discussion, I'll be happy to
> >> debate it some more.
> >
> >I already said what I had to say about that. Is
> >there some reason that there could not have been
> >H. h. in that area? So what if it's early in their
> >history. Big deal. And just how does that mess
> >up the "Out of Africa" theory, other than placing
> >a small migration earlier than the general
> >migration? Is that a problem? Why? Could it not
> >be possible that a band of merry hab's got a
> >severe case of "wanderlust"? And since the finds
> >supposedly are from that era, what's the problem?
> >
> >Now, about those 2.8 billion year old ball
> >bearings. Where do you suppose they came from?
>
> Since you appear to have a special affection for them, Boikat, you can keep
> them with your cartridge fossil. Maybe some day you can start your own
> museum.
Yes. A museum dedicated to "anomalous" finds on
the geological record that the gullible tried to
use to refute mainstream science, and support
their religious dogmas. Wait, Baugh already has
one in Glenn Rose Texas, except he's still trying
to use them to support his religious dogma.
>
Curious you should continue to harp on the Red
Crag stuff, which is still within the age range of
H.h. Your only comment on the last thing I had to
say about that was that if the tools were from
H.h, then that would be bad for the "Out of
Africa" theory. I responded to that above as
well, as did others in the original thread. (I saw
no reason to be redundant about their points, and
I still don't.) yet you seem to not want to
address the more bizarre claims of "Forbidden
Archaeology". Especially those "weakly refuted"
items already covered in the T. O. article.
Boikat
Boikat
> Dave
Robert Grumbine
Dave Woetzel <dwoe...@juno.com> wrote:
>
>>Dendrochronology: How long does wood last in the
>>open environment? Why are bristle cone pines more
>>durable, both as a living tree, and as dead wood?
>>Also, dendrochronology is an ongoing field of
>>investigation. Stay tuned.
>
>10,000 year wall?
The tree ring chronology is to 11-13,000 years last I saw.
Varved lake sediments are quite routine to 22,000 years, with it
recently reported that they've been counted to 45,000 years in a
Japanese lake.
Annual layers in the Greenland ice sheet have been counted back
to 50,000 years.
What 'wall' are you thinking of?
Why is counting the only dating method that is acceptable?
--
Robert Grumbine http://www.radix.net/~bobg/ Science faqs and amateur activities notes and links.
Sagredo (Galileo Galilei) "You present these recondite matters with too much
evidence and ease; this great facility makes them less appreciated than they
would be had they been presented in a more abstruse manner." Two New Sciences
Thomas Scharle
[...snip...]
|> There's a pine somewhere in Australia dated (IIRC) 43,000 years.
There is a 10,000 year old stand of Huon pines in Tasmania,
Australia, but none of the individuals is that old.
See:
<http://www.parks.tas.gov.au/veg/pines.html>
There is also a clone of King's lomatia in Tasmania which
is 43,600 years old, but none of the individuals is that old:
<http://www.parks.tas.gov.au/esl/holly.html>
As far as back-dating by tree rings, this has been done by
overlapping, but I don't have any figures handy as to just how
far back this has been done.
I guess that it also has to be pointed out that when you're
buying a used car, don't accept the claim that it is a late-model
used car because it has new tires on it. The age of any part of
the world sets a *minimum* on the age of the earth. I don't have
any references for the age of ice cores from Antartica and from
Greenland, but some of them may go back continuously more than
10,000 years.
Another point ... *something* had to happen about 10,000
years ago, just as something had to happen about 40,000 years
ago, and something had to happen 500 years ago. To pick out
one particular event that happened about that long ago doesn't
tell us a whole lot about the age of the earth. If there were
"young earth creationists" who decide that the earth is 500
years old, they could point to the lack of printed books
before that time; if these YECs decided on 40,000 years, they
could point out that there was no cave art before that. Yes,
there is a limit to the ages of trees which can be reliably
dated by tree rings. That's just one of the "somethings"
which had to happen at some time. The only connection with
the age of the earth is that 10,000 years happens to represent
a common YEC belief, and 10,000 years was the state of knowledge
about tree rings at the time that the list was composed. The
composer of this list merely picked one of the "somethings"
which happened at the time that he/she/they were interested in.
(And avoided all of the other equally significant "somethings"
which happened at other times.)
Oh, yes, one more point. I would really like to know more
about the composition of this list. In particular, I would
like to know whether the original list could be considered
copyrighted, or whether I can feel free to keep and distribute
copies of it.
---
Tom Scharle scha...@nd.edu "standard disclaimer"
Mark Isaak
Robert Grumbine <bo...@Radix.Net> wrote:
>In article <065ed260002...@csi.com>,
>Dave Woetzel <dwoe...@juno.com> wrote:
>>
>>Yes, it is ongoing. However, are you aware of anything that has passed
>>the 10,000 year wall?
>
> The tree ring chronology is to 11-13,000 years last I saw.
>
> Varved lake sediments are quite routine to 22,000 years, with it
>recently reported that they've been counted to 45,000 years in a
>Japanese lake.
And those are just sequences that are continuous with the present. There
are other tree ring and varve sequences which are older than that, but we
don't know how much older because there is a gap between them and the
"anchored" sequences. In the case of varves, this extends the age of the
earth to millions of years at least.
--
Mark Isaak atta @ best.com http://www.best.com/~atta
"My determination is not to remain stubbornly with my ideas but
I'll leave them and go over to others as soon as I am shown
plausible reason which I can grasp." - Antony Leeuwenhoek
Dave Woetzel
Adam Noel Harris wrote in message ...
>Dave Woetzel <dwoe...@juno.com> wrote:
>:
>:Sverker Johansson wrote in message
<37590D65...@no.hlk.spam.hj.se>...
>
>:>
>:
>:I was hoping you might have something relevant to dendrochronology. If
you
>:are going to cite dating arguments from over 300 years ago, would you
expect
>:them to be accurate? Evolutionists gripe if creationists use a quote that
is
>:30 years old!
>
>Ussher's analysis is based on lineages as given in the Holy Bible.
>
>If you think the Book of Mormon adds new relevant information, perhaps
>Ussher is out of date.
>
premise that the genealogies show a "hard" number that is not open to
interpretation. The dating is based on certain assumptions regarding the
age at which patriarchs sired children. As archaeology and cultural studies
can add new and relevant information to the dating process.
Dave
Robert Grumbine
Mark Isaak <at...@best.comNOSPAM> wrote:
>In article <7jdos5$nrl$1...@saltmine.radix.net>,
>Robert Grumbine <bo...@Radix.Net> wrote:
>>
>> Varved lake sediments are quite routine to 22,000 years, with it
>>recently reported that they've been counted to 45,000 years in a
>>Japanese lake.
>
>And those are just sequences that are continuous with the present. There
>are other tree ring and varve sequences which are older than that, but we
>don't know how much older because there is a gap between them and the
>"anchored" sequences. In the case of varves, this extends the age of the
>earth to millions of years at least.
Oops. Good point. The Green River formation has 27 _million_ layers
(give or take), as was known by the late 1920's (thanks to the t.o.
person who posted the cite -- it's a good read). There are also formations
in New Jersey which are stratigraphically earlier by a goodly bit and
which also contain some millions of annual layers (Paul Olsen papers
on milankovitch-like periodicities in the formation).
Again, though, why is it creationists only accept counting as a method
of dating?
(The obvious, but sarcastic, answer need not be posted.)
maff91
wrote:
>Dave Woetzel wrote:
>>
>> You caught my interest with this statement. Where was this barrier 6004
>> ya cited?
>>
>Bushop Usher, who traced back the geneology of the Bible and came up
>with a start date of 4004 BCE. Of course, to do it, he had to make the
>average human age over 400 years...
Bishop Ussher
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/ussher.htm
http://www.bc-freemasonry.com/Writings/annolucis.html
http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_date.htm
http://www.ees.nmt.edu/Geol/classes/geol102/ussher.html
:-)
Dave Woetzel
Kevin R. Henke wrote in message <7jcmlq$bs0$1...@news.uky.edu>...
>the
>2nd century by someone pretending to be Peter. Also, no manuscripts
>or
>citations from 2nd Peter occur from the 1st century. So why should we
>take the words of a forger seriously? It's obvious that the critics
>of Christianity in the 2nd century were citing verses like Revelation
>1:3 against Christians. "Your apostles promised that Christ would
>soon return, well, where is he?" 2 Peter was the best invention that
>these
>Christians could come up with to respond to these critics.
>
There has indeed been some debate in portions of Christendom regarding the
authenticity of II Peter. But *most* of the ancient Christian teachers and
scholars received it as genuine. The first writer that mentions it by name
is Origen (c 240 AD), who calls it Scripture but notes that its authority
was questioned. Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, regarded it with some
suspicion and placed it in the Antilegomena. Jerome included it in his
Latin Vulgate, albeit with some uncertainty. However, Athanasius,
Augustine, Epiphanius, Ruginus and Cyril received it as genuine. Moreover,
Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Didache and Clement of
Rome all alluded to it in their writings. In the fourth century, two
separate church councils formally recognized it and placed it in the Canon.
For more information on the historical perspective, see _The ISBE_, 1983,
pp.2355-2356.
Seven pieces of internal evidence have been given for accepting Petrine
authorship and apostolic authority:
1. unique diction (“precious,” “virtue,” “supply,” “love of brethren,”
“eyewitnesses,” “without blemish,” etc.) Some disparities in the Greek are
easily attributed to different interpreters for the two epistles.
2. similarities in thought (bringing together “elect” and “called,” and
stressing prophecy)
3. Claim to Petrine authorship (no pseudonymous writings uses the name of
the apostle “Simon.” The forger would most likely have merely copied the
beginning of the first epistle.
4. Christian earnestness (Remember that Christianity was NOT in vogue.
Would one so acquainted with the precious truths of the faith deliberately
forge the name of an apostle?)
5. Relation to Apostles (there is an apostolic spirit here…an acquaintance
with Paul’s work, particularly the epistles receiving wide circulation [Col
4:16], and a concern for purity. Unlike “Gospel of Peter” or “Apocalypse of
Peter,” it contains nothing novel, romantic, or anachronistic.)
6. Autobiographical details (II Peter 1:16-18, 19-21, 3:1)
7. Quoted by Jude (One of the highest authorities, Zahn, argues with great
force in support of the view that Peter is older and is quoted by Jude in
_Introduction to the O.T_ vol. II, p. 289.)
For further reading, in addition to _ISBE_, see _Unger’s Bible Dictionary_,
1957, pp. 851-852, and _Wycliffe Commentary_, 1971, pp. 986-988.
On a more personal, anecdotal note; II Peter has always been one of my
favorite books. It was the third chapter of this epistle that changed my
life as a young science student struggling with uniformitarianism. The book
seems particularly appropriate in this modern age of popular skepticism.
1:18-21 yield important insight into the nature of inspiration. Chapter two
is a pertinent exhortation against apostasy and false teachers. Often I
have gone back to contemplate again II Peter 3:9-12. No passage has been
more powerful for keeping my focus straight. As one reflects on the
short-lived nature of material concerns which will all be burned up in a
nuclear meltdown of God’s judgment, the importance of spiritual concerns
becomes apparent anew.
Dave
Dave Woetzel
Boikat wrote in message <375A6029...@bellsouth.net>...
<sigh> You seemed to relish the "skeptic" label as a compliment. Would you
prefer instead to be compared to the ancient intelligentsia that occupied
Mars Hill (Acts17:21) and spent their time debating every new turn of
philosophy and knowledge? That comparison also occurred to me.
No. At best it is merely interesting supporting evidence. I have to agree
with you that Robert overplayed the hand. Dendrochronology, even back in
Morris' _Genesis Flood_ pp. 392-393 that appeared in 1961, was only
presented as collateral evidence for the Flood, not for any absolute dating
of the earth. Historically, creation scientists had commented on two
aspects of dendrochronology: the dating at various geographic regions seemed
to hit a wall about 10,000 years ago; and there only appeared to be one
generation of bristlecone pine...going back to approximately the time of the
flood. More recently John Morris (_The Young Earth_, 1994, p. 48) only
spends a scant couple of paragraphs on dendrochronology, using it merely as
an illustration of how dating methods work. It has not, therefore, been
used as you imply by most creation scientists.
Go back and read Robert's post again. It seems to me that his point is
pretty clear.
I got some polywogs in a pool in my backyard. I'll swap one for one of your
fossil bullets. Then you can do some comparative anatomy work. :)
Hey Boikat, remember what I said? I am not prepared to accept all of their
stuff. I objected to your characterization of their research (like on the
Red Crag) as "sloppy and credulous." You accused them of accepting anything
critical of the prevailing paradigm as gospel without checking it. I
proceeded to demonstrate that they exhaustively documented this particular
find, cited the critics, gave the international response, cited more critics
and responded to that. If you took the time to read it, like you claimed,
then you would appreciate that it would be fairly easy for you to improve on
the T.O. critique of the book.
Dave
Jim Phillips
But all that will add to the "dating process" is give a minimum
age for humanity's presence on Earth. Why should we assume that humans
have been on Earth as long as there's been an Earth?
--
Jim Phillips, jphi...@bcpl.net
A man asked the Universe, "Sir, why am I here?"
"None of your business," replied the Universe.
Kevin R. Henke
Dave Woetzel wrote in message <045fb361019...@csi.com>...
KRH: Or he had copies of the gospels and knew something about Peter's
life from them.
4. Christian earnestness (Remember that Christianity was NOT in vogue.
Would one so acquainted with the precious truths of the faith
deliberately
forge the name of an apostle?)
KRH: You bet! The author would want to use the name of someone whose
opinion was highly respected by the Christians, like Peter, and
someone who was regarded by non-Christians as an appropriate
spokesperson for Christianity, like Peter.
5. Relation to Apostles (there is an apostolic spirit here…an
acquaintance
with Paul’s work, particularly the epistles receiving wide circulation
[Col
4:16], and a concern for purity. Unlike “Gospel of Peter” or
“Apocalypse of
Peter,” it contains nothing novel, romantic, or anachronistic.)
6. Autobiographical details (II Peter 1:16-18, 19-21, 3:1)
KRH: The author definitely plagerized Jude. He probably had copies of
other New Testament books, like Matthew, Mark and Luke.
7. Quoted by Jude (One of the highest authorities, Zahn, argues with
great
force in support of the view that Peter is older and is quoted by Jude
in
_Introduction to the O.T_ vol. II, p. 289.)
KRH: Most critics argue that Jude is older. IF 2 Peter is from the
1st century, I think it would be difficult to tell which was older.
Nevertheless, either Jude copied 2 Peter or 2 Peter copied Jude.
For further reading, in addition to _ISBE_, see _Unger’s Bible
Dictionary_,
1957, pp. 851-852, and _Wycliffe Commentary_, 1971, pp. 986-988.
On a more personal, anecdotal note; II Peter has always been one of my
favorite books. It was the third chapter of this epistle that changed
my
life as a young science student struggling with uniformitarianism.
The book
seems particularly appropriate in this modern age of popular
skepticism.
1:18-21 yield important insight into the nature of inspiration.
Chapter two
is a pertinent exhortation against apostasy and false teachers. Often
I
have gone back to contemplate again II Peter 3:9-12. No passage has
been
more powerful for keeping my focus straight. As one reflects on the
short-lived nature of material concerns which will all be burned up in
a
nuclear meltdown of God’s judgment, the importance of spiritual
concerns
becomes apparent anew.
Dave
KRH: Just remember that geologists have believed in actualism and not
Lyell Uniformitarianism for some time now.
Shane D. Killian
>
> No. I'll pass on Moroni's revelation. But I disagree with your general
> premise that the genealogies show a "hard" number that is not open to
> interpretation. The dating is based on certain assumptions regarding
> the age at which patriarchs sired children. As archaeology and cultural
> studies can add new and relevant information to the dating process.
>
It was the only way he could make it fit anything believable.
--
Shane D. Killian -- sha...@vnet.net -- http://users.vnet.net/shanek
"uuunnn k mmmmmmk hhhhhhhh khbbbbbbbbbbbh
gnhjjjjjjjjjjj rrrrrrrrrddddfc gvb uyyyyyyyhubbbbbbb"
--Sinclair Mitchell Killian, born 1/29/98
Boikat
Like I said, allusions to Biblical "skeptics" does
not impress or intimidate me. Shake your bones
and beads at someone else.
How? In what way does it qualify as "supporting
evidence"?
> I have to agree
> with you that Robert overplayed the hand. Dendrochronology, even back in
> Morris' _Genesis Flood_ pp. 392-393 that appeared in 1961, was only
> presented as collateral evidence for the Flood, not for any absolute dating
> of the earth. Historically, creation scientists had commented on two
> aspects of dendrochronology: the dating at various geographic regions seemed
> to hit a wall about 10,000 years ago; and there only appeared to be one
> generation of bristlecone pine...going back to approximately the time of the
> flood. More recently John Morris (_The Young Earth_, 1994, p. 48) only
> spends a scant couple of paragraphs on dendrochronology, using it merely as
> an illustration of how dating methods work. It has not, therefore, been
> used as you imply by most creation scientists.
Except for the "bazillion" times it's been
presented here.
No, it was just another misapplication of the
data. Again, what does the magnetic fields of
other planets have to do with the age of the earth
or solar system?
And "pollywogs" have tails and adult frogs do
not. Hmmm. interesting point there that i trust
you didn't miss. As far as trading my fossil
bullets.. Huh uh! You go find your own. Look
under the bridge where the Ochillee Creek passes
under "First Mountain Division Road" bridge, on
Ft. Benning GA.
I'm not the only one that holds that opinion.
> You accused them of accepting anything
> critical of the prevailing paradigm as gospel without checking it.
Yet they presented some pretty lame stuff in the
book, didn't they?
>I
> proceeded to demonstrate that they exhaustively documented this particular
> find, cited the critics, gave the international response, cited more critics
> and responded to that.
And in that particular case, did I not say that it
could be conceivably possible that the artifacts
were genuine, and that it could have possibly been
due to a small group of H h.'s that had left
africa for some reason long before the main "out
of Africa" dispersal?
> If you took the time to read it, like you claimed,
Your post, or the book? I read you post, and
based upon what you posted, I formed the response
I presented. If you are saying I claimed to have
read the book, you are wrong, I said I looked
through a copy. That means I flipped through it,
read a few short bits here and there, chuckled,
and gave it back.
> then you would appreciate that it would be fairly easy for you to improve on
> the T.O. critique of the book.
What's wrong with the critique that's already
there? I would suggest that you take *that* up
with the author though.
Boikat
Roberta Waddle
>
> In article <7jdos5$nrl$1...@saltmine.radix.net>,
> Robert Grumbine <bo...@Radix.Net> wrote:
> >Dave Woetzel <dwoe...@juno.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>[re Dendrochronology]
> >>Yes, it is ongoing. However, are you aware of anything that has passed
> >>the 10,000 year wall?
> >
> > The tree ring chronology is to 11-13,000 years last I saw.
> >
> >recently reported that they've been counted to 45,000 years in a
> >Japanese lake.
>
> And those are just sequences that are continuous with the present. There
> are other tree ring and varve sequences which are older than that, but we
> don't know how much older because there is a gap between them and the
> "anchored" sequences. In the case of varves, this extends the age of the
> earth to millions of years at least.
Speaking of "anchored sequences", I don't have the issue of Science in which it was reported
immediately at hand, but 2-3 years ago scientists took a barge out to the middle of Lake
Baikal and left it to freeze solid into the winter ice. From that platform they drilled a
core of some 5 million varves.
Floyd Waddle
Dave Woetzel
Shane D. Killian wrote in message <375AF7FD...@vnet.net>...
>Dave Woetzel wrote:
>>
>> No. I'll pass on Moroni's revelation. But I disagree with your general
>> premise that the genealogies show a "hard" number that is not open to
>> interpretation. The dating is based on certain assumptions regarding
>> the age at which patriarchs sired children. As archaeology and cultural
>> studies can add new and relevant information to the dating process.
>>
>His main assumption was that the average human age was over 400 years.
>It was the only way he could make it fit anything believable.
>
generations.
Dave
Sverker Johansson
> Shane D. Killian wrote in message <375AF7FD...@vnet.net>...
> >His main assumption was that the average human age was over 400 years.
> >It was the only way he could make it fit anything believable.
> >
> The average human age is irrelevant. What counts is the timespan between
> generations.
True. But since the timespan between generations is given as several
centuries in various places in the Bible, Shane's point follows.
Unless we're talking stored frozen sperm, so that men beget
sons 400 years after they died... :->
--
Best regards, HLK, Physics
Sverker Johansson U of Jonkoping
----------------------------------------------
Claiming that there are no transitional fossils,
makes you into a counter-example.
Sverker Johansson
> Sverker Johansson wrote in message <37590D65...@no.hlk.spam.hj.se>...
> >Dave Woetzel wrote:
> >
> >> Sverker Johansson wrote in message
> >> >It used to be a 4004 BC barrier.
> >> You caught my interest with this statement. Where was this barrier 6004
> ya
> >> cited? Can you give me a couple references? I am only aware of the
> appx.
> >> 10,000 ya date.
> >
> >Ussher (1650) "Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti"
>
> I was hoping you might have something relevant to dendrochronology. If you
> are going to cite dating arguments from over 300 years ago, would you expect
> them to be accurate?
So the Ussher ref was only semi-serious :-> I have a hard time trying to
keep a straight face when arguing with creationists.
Seriously, Ussher (1650) IS the original source for the 4004BC date,
which was used by Biblical creationists well into this century
(maff91 gave you a couple of links on that).
But since you still haven't shown any interest in the serious reference
I did give you a couple of posts back (Kitagawa et al), I
really don't feel motivated to do any library work for you.
> Evolutionists gripe if creationists use a quote that is
> 30 years old!
Only when the ref is superseded by more recent research.
AFAIK Ussher hasn't been superseded by anything YECs
accept.
Dave Woetzel
Boikat wrote in message <375B0177...@bellsouth.net>...
Come on, Boikat. You aren't normally wound so tight. Loosen up. Nobody is
trying to "intimidate you" here. You're taking yourself too seriously (or
perhaps you have a guilty conscience after the last long weekend?) Read the
Acts citation, it doesn't even mention "skeptics."
It was mostly used in relation to the flood as I state below.
>> I have to agree
>> with you that Robert overplayed the hand. Dendrochronology, even back in
>> Morris' _Genesis Flood_ pp. 392-393 that appeared in 1961, was only
>> presented as collateral evidence for the Flood, not for any absolute
dating
>> of the earth. Historically, creation scientists had commented on two
>> aspects of dendrochronology: the dating at various geographic regions
seemed
>> to hit a wall about 10,000 years ago; and there only appeared to be one
>> generation of bristlecone pine...going back to approximately the time of
the
>> flood. More recently John Morris (_The Young Earth_, 1994, p. 48) only
>> spends a scant couple of paragraphs on dendrochronology, using it merely
as
>> an illustration of how dating methods work. It has not, therefore, been
>> used as you imply by most creation scientists.
>
>Except for the "bazillion" times it's been
>presented here.
Get out and about a little. The few adventurous souls that stray into this
shrine of naturalism are not necessarily representative of mainstream
creationism.
What data are you claiming he is misapplying? His post was pretty
straightforward..."Presence of magnetic fields around solar system bodies
(Mercury, Jupiter's moon Ganymede, Neptune, Uranus) without an obvious
internal dynamo." What is unclear here? He argues that these decaying
fields should have decayed out of existence if these planets were billions
of years old.
Yeah sperm have tails too. Good point.
Come on Boikat! If huge flint industries were already underway in Britain
at the time pithecine were just supposed to be evolving into earliest
habilis in Africa, don't you think that stretches the current paradigm just
a bit?
jac...@gl.umbc.edu
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Young Earth Evidence
Date: 4 Jun 1999 17:26:21 -0400
Organization: The University of Ediacara
Lines: 24
UR32212451 wrote in message
<19990603225014...@ng-fp1.aol.com>...
>"Robert Paveza" <Ref...@email.msn.com> wrote
>
>>Here you go, everybody. Some reasons that the earth cannot >POSSIBLY be
4.6
>billion years old.
>
>Excellent post Robert. Boikats response appears to be a host
>of special pleading and pooh poohing rather than any kind of
>effort toward rebuttal.
>
Dave Woetzel mentioned:
:Boikat is a good, old-fashioned skeptic. More to the point is Henke's
:material. As he points out, some of Robert's stuff is dated. IMHO, the
:strongest of it is ocean salinity, atmospheric helium, erosion & marine
:deposition. Although, I am surprised Henke could not do better on the
:dendrochronology, comets, galaxy stuff, and magnetic fields around solar
:system bodies. Those may be stronger than I thought.
***** Reading the rest of the thread, it veered heavily into
dendrochronology and didn't talk about the fact that ocean salinity is
here considered to be some of the "strongest" of Paveza's twaddle.
In fact, the mere appearance of it indicates just how weak the entire
presentation is, scientifically, because the use of elemental residence
times as dating method is incorrect, and anyone with a basic knowledge
of oceanography would quickly realize this.
Oceanic residence times are a way of comparing the relative reactivities
of elements in seawater. They are determined by estimating the input
rate of a given element to the oceans and comparing this to the average
concentration of the element in seawater. The "residence time" is
calculated as the approximate length of time an atom of a given element
would remain in oceanic seawater solution before being removed. Long
residence times indicate that the element is relatively non-reactive
and does not participate in reactions that would remove it from
solution. Short residence times indicate that the element IS reactive
and will participate in reactions (or processes, such as adsorption
onto particulate matter) that will remove it from solution. As a
general rule, transition metals have short residence times. Transition
metals are frequently removed due to adsorption on flocculated organic
matter that forms in the fresh water / salt water interface in
estuaries.
Jim Acker
jac...@gl.umbc.edu
Ken Cox
> IMHO, the strongest of it is ocean salinity, atmospheric helium,
> erosion & marine deposition.
An interesting set of choices, in that they all have an identical
flaw. Do you see what that flaw is?
--
Ken Cox k...@research.bell-labs.com
Brent Howatt
> Boikat wrote in message <37585008...@bellsouth.net>...
>>Dave Woetzel wrote:
>>>
>>> UR32212451 wrote in message
>>> <19990603225014...@ng-fp1.aol.com>...
>>> >"Robert Paveza" <Ref...@email.msn.com> wrote
[snip]
>>> More to the point is Henke's
>>> material. As he points out, some of Robert's stuff is dated. IMHO, the
>>> strongest of it is ocean salinity, atmospheric helium, erosion & marine
>>> deposition. Although, I am surprised Henke could not do better on the
>>> dendrochronology, comets, galaxy stuff, and magnetic fields around solar
>>> system bodies. Those may be stronger than I thought.
>>
>>No, they are covered in the FAQ's, but if that's
>>not good enough, there is a easy way to verify or
>>refute the claims. Do a search on the net.
>>
>>Dendrochronology: How long does wood last in the
>>open environment? Why are bristle cone pines more
>>durable, both as a living tree, and as dead wood?
>>Also, dendrochronology is an ongoing field of
>>investigation. Stay tuned.
> Yes. It is ongoing. However, are you aware of any finds that break the
> 10,000 year barrier?
Did you take his advice to look into it yourself?
>>Comets were covered quite well. The Oort and
>>Kuiper belt are a source in deep freeze out beyond
>>pluto, and objects from the kuiper belt have been
>>directly imaged by the Hubble space telescope.
>>The Kuiper Belt is real, it exists.
> You mean, as compared to the Oort cloud?
Are you saying that the Oort Cloud does not exist? He refers to the
Kuiper Belt because it is the source of the short period comets.
>>"Field Galaxies" Ever see the HST "Deep Sky"
>>image?
No comment about this, I see.
>> Also, as in the case of the magnetic fields,
>>since the planets in question are not exact
>>replicas of earth, it's reasonable that they would
>>have some variation when compared with the earth's
>>magnetic field, and how it's generated.
> Speculation.
It is speculation that Earth is different in structure from the gas
giants? Earth has a molten, metallic, mostly iron core that is rotating.
Most junior high science students understand that this creates a strong
magnetic field. Planets without such a core would likely have a different
sort of magnetic field. The surprise about some of the gas giants was not
that their magnetic fields were different from Earth's, but rather how
strong they were.
>>Those creationist argument are just a weak as the
>>rest of them.
>>
> Boikat, you know that creationists have 'fessed up when hard evidences
> outdates an argument like shrinking sun and moon dust (despite what some may
> claim on T.O.). However, this does not apply to all the others that were
> cited above.
Yet I have seen the shrinking sun and moon dust "arguments" presented here
more than once in the last few days. Not only presented, but presented in
such a manner as to imply that one would have to be a complete idiot not
to just accept them at face value. Creationists may "fess up" when
publicly nailed (although those like Nando, Jabriol, Karl, etc. will not),
but they usually go right back to repeating the same refuted nonsense as
soon as they think no one is looking. For documentation of this I refer
the interested reader to Jim Lippard's documentation of this in relation
to the Paluxy "Man Tracks".
--
H. Brent Howatt, Dir. of Ins. Svcs. | The first days are the hardest days,
Humboldt County Office of Education | Don't you worry any more.
Eureka, California | When life looks like Easy Street,
Behind the Redwood Curtain | There is danger at your door.
============================================================================
hho...@humboldt1.com PGP public key by keyserver or e-mail
bho...@humboldt.k12.ca.us http://www.humboldt.k12.ca.us
cdo...@my-deja.com
In article <slrn7ljnbg...@elaine31.Stanford.EDU>,
ad...@stanford.edu.XX (Adam Noel Harris) wrote:
> Dave Woetzel <dwoe...@juno.com> wrote:
> :
> :Sverker Johansson wrote in message <37590D65...@no.hlk.spam.hj.se>...
>
> :>Ussher (1650) "Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti"
> :>
> :
> :I was hoping you might have something relevant to dendrochronology. If you
> :are going to cite dating arguments from over 300 years ago, would you expect
> :them to be accurate? Evolutionists gripe if creationists use a quote that is
> :30 years old!
>
> If the data set never changed, evolutionists would be wrong to gripe.
> Ussher's analysis is based on lineages as given in the Holy Bible.
The Bible does not give a complete genealogy -- "descended from....." could
be skipping several generations. Ussher is giving a "spit in the wind"
approximation.
> If you think the Book of Mormon adds new relevant information, perhaps
> Ussher is out of date.
Interesting, but I've not seen anyone address that issue. The Jaredites have
been associated by some with the olmecs.
Best regards,
Charles dowis
Ken Cox
> No. I'll pass on Moroni's revelation. But I disagree with your general
> premise that the genealogies show a "hard" number that is not open to
> interpretation. The dating is based on certain assumptions regarding the
> age at which patriarchs sired children.
The only assumption that is used is that the Bible is right in
Genesis 5 and elsewhere when it says things like "And Jared was
a hundred sixty two years old when he begat Enoch". If you want
to throw out that assumption, fine, but why stop there? Why not
just throw out Genesis 1 through 10 or so, and dump creationism
entirely?
--
Ken Cox k...@research.bell-labs.com
Stephen Watson
Dave Woetzel <dwoe...@juno.com> wrote:
>
>Boikat wrote in message <37598B15...@bellsouth.net>...
>>Dave Woetzel wrote:
>>>
>>> Boikat wrote in message <37585008...@bellsouth.net>...
>>> >Dave Woetzel wrote:
>>> >> Boikat is a good, old-fashioned skeptic.
>>>
>>> Hey, you occupy an important place in fulfilled prophecy!
>>
>>Gee, you sound like karl now. What's next?
>Wait! Its better than that. Read II Peter 3:3-4. (I would quote it for
>you, but the dust that has built up since our last Bible-based thread needs
>to be cleaned off anyway.) It predicts uniformitarian skeptics that make up
>there own morality. It does everything but give Boikat's street address!
>:)
You mean the bit about "...all continues just as it was from the
beginning of creation" (NASB) ? The is discussing people who deny
that Christ will return, based on the lack of obvious historical
signs. Taking that phrase and trying to apply it to scientific
concepts of uniformitarianism (of which it's a lousy description)
seems rather a stretch, and out of context.
[..............]
--
## Steve Watson: swa...@nortelnetworks.com # Nortel Networks, Ottawa Canada ##
## The above is the output of a 7th-order Markovian analysis of all posts on ##
## this group for the past month. Not only is it not Nortel's opinion, it's ##
## not even *my* opinion: it's really just a mish-mash of all YOUR opinions! ##
Ken Cox
> The Bible does not give a complete genealogy -- "descended from....." could
> be skipping several generations.
It doesn't matter. The genealogies are all of the formula, "And
X was N years old when Y was born", followed shortly by "And Y
was M years old when Z was born". It doesn't matter if there
were unnamed people between X and Y or between Y and Z -- you
still have to say that there were (N+M) years between the birth
of X and of Z, if "literalism" is to mean anything.
--
Ken Cox k...@research.bell-labs.com
Dave Woetzel
Sverker Johansson wrote in message <375BBC17...@no.hlk.spam.hj.se>...
>Dave Woetzel wrote:
>
>> Shane D. Killian wrote in message <375AF7FD...@vnet.net>...
>> >His main assumption was that the average human age was over 400 years.
>> >It was the only way he could make it fit anything believable.
>> >
>> The average human age is irrelevant. What counts is the timespan between
>> generations.
>
>True. But since the timespan between generations is given as several
>centuries in various places in the Bible, Shane's point follows.
>Unless we're talking stored frozen sperm, so that men beget
>sons 400 years after they died... :->
Sverker, you seem to completely miss the point you just agreed to. Do you
understand the difference between "age" and "intergenerational timespan?"
If you do, kindly show me some of the places in the Bible where "the
timespan between generations is given as several
centuries." (And don't try to extricate yourself with Genesis 5:32.)
Since the timespan must be approximated for the large number of generations
in the later geneologies, Shane's point fails, even if you were correct.
Dave
Boikat
>
> Boikat wrote in message <375B0177...@bellsouth.net>...
> >Dave Woetzel wrote:
> >>
[snip]
> >
> >Like I said, allusions to Biblical "skeptics" does
> >not impress or intimidate me. Shake your bones
> >and beads at someone else.
>
> Come on, Boikat. You aren't normally wound so tight. Loosen up. Nobody is
> trying to "intimidate you" here. You're taking yourself too seriously (or
> perhaps you have a guilty conscience after the last long weekend?) Read the
> Acts citation, it doesn't even mention "skeptics."
Who cares, and why did you even bring it up?
[snip some more]
> >
> >How? In what way does it qualify as "supporting
> >evidence"?
>
> It was mostly used in relation to the flood as I state below.
Same question. Why does lack of wood fragments
from the Bristlecone pine present evidence for a
flood? Because there are no fragments? How does
that equal "flood" and not the limits of the
durability of the wood?
>
> >> I have to agree
> >> with you that Robert overplayed the hand. Dendrochronology, even back in
> >> Morris' _Genesis Flood_ pp. 392-393 that appeared in 1961, was only
> >> presented as collateral evidence for the Flood, not for any absolute
> dating
> >> of the earth. Historically, creation scientists had commented on two
> >> aspects of dendrochronology: the dating at various geographic regions
> seemed
> >> to hit a wall about 10,000 years ago; and there only appeared to be one
> >> generation of bristlecone pine...going back to approximately the time of
> the
> >> flood. More recently John Morris (_The Young Earth_, 1994, p. 48) only
> >> spends a scant couple of paragraphs on dendrochronology, using it merely
> as
> >> an illustration of how dating methods work. It has not, therefore, been
> >> used as you imply by most creation scientists.
> >
> >Except for the "bazillion" times it's been
> >presented here.
>
> Get out and about a little. The few adventurous souls that stray into this
> shrine of naturalism are not necessarily representative of mainstream
> creationism.
This is the forum where they were presented.
>
[snipage]
> >
> >No, it was just another misapplication of the
> >data. Again, what does the magnetic fields of
> >other planets have to do with the age of the earth
> >or solar system?
>
> What data are you claiming he is misapplying? His post was pretty
> straightforward..."Presence of magnetic fields around solar system bodies
> (Mercury, Jupiter's moon Ganymede, Neptune, Uranus) without an obvious
> internal dynamo." What is unclear here? He argues that these decaying
> fields should have decayed out of existence if these planets were billions
> of years old.
Where does he get the information that the fields
are decaying? And even then, how does he know
they do not fluctuate? Also, it still comes back
to "we may not know everything involved" which
does not by default mean that the only explanation
is that the solar system is around 6-10 thousand
years old.
[chop]
> >And "pollywogs" have tails and adult frogs do
> >not. Hmmm. interesting point there that i trust
> >you didn't miss. As far as trading my fossil
> >bullets.. Huh uh! You go find your own. Look
> >under the bridge where the Ochillee Creek passes
> >under "First Mountain Division Road" bridge, on
> >Ft. Benning GA.
> >
>
> Yeah sperm have tails too. Good point.
Totally different structure. Not *even* in the
same ball park.
[chop again]
> >
> >And in that particular case, did I not say that it
> >could be conceivably possible that the artifacts
> >were genuine, and that it could have possibly been
> >due to a small group of H h.'s that had left
> >africa for some reason long before the main "out
> >of Africa" dispersal?
>
> Come on Boikat! If huge flint industries were already underway in Britain
> at the time pithecine were just supposed to be evolving into earliest
> habilis in Africa, don't you think that stretches the current paradigm just
> a bit?
Why should it? The "frayed ends" or "error bars"
of the lineage would allow for that to happen. As
I pointed out in another thread once, in 5 or 5
thousand years, it will look like we went from the
first powered flight to landing on the moon in a
blink of the eye. Same goes for the 2.8 million
year appearance of habils Are you saying that it
is *impossible* for a band to migrate a bit over
the course of a few meager thousand years or so?
And so what if it stretches the "Out of Africa"
paradigm. it's only changing the schedule a bit,
nothing more.
[snip]
Boikat
Boikat
>
> A few comments from the peanut gallery.
>
> In article <slrn7ljnbg...@elaine31.Stanford.EDU>,
> ad...@stanford.edu.XX (Adam Noel Harris) wrote:
> > Dave Woetzel <dwoe...@juno.com> wrote:
> > :
> > :Sverker Johansson wrote in message <37590D65...@no.hlk.spam.hj.se>...
> >
> > :>Ussher (1650) "Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti"
> > :>
> > :
> > :I was hoping you might have something relevant to dendrochronology. If you
> > :are going to cite dating arguments from over 300 years ago, would you expect
> > :them to be accurate? Evolutionists gripe if creationists use a quote that is
> > :30 years old!
> >
> > If the data set never changed, evolutionists would be wrong to gripe.
> > Ussher's analysis is based on lineages as given in the Holy Bible.
>
> approximation.
I heard somewhere that it was a two part equation
Ussher used. Part one was the "Adam to Noah" part
of Genesis, and the second part was when a certain
Biblical king died, and the passage that was used
went something like "And king "X" (I cannot recall
his name) died "n" years after the Flood of
Noah." The other part (so I guess it was a three
part equation) is that the king *did exist*, and
his death is a matter of record, "c" number of
years BC (external from the citation of the
Bible.)
(Which in no way validates the entire line of
reasoning as to the age of the earth.)
>
> > If you think the Book of Mormon adds new relevant information, perhaps
> > Ussher is out of date.
>
> Interesting, but I've not seen anyone address that issue. The Jaredites have
> been associated by some with the olmecs.
>
> Best regards,
> Charles dowis
>
Boikat
may...@andrews.edu
Sverker Johansson <l...@no.hlk.spam.hj.se> wrote:
> Dave Woetzel wrote:
>
> > Shane D. Killian wrote in message <375AF7FD...@vnet.net>...
> > >His main assumption was that the average human age was over 400
years.
> > >It was the only way he could make it fit anything believable.
> > >
> > The average human age is irrelevant. What counts is the timespan
between
> > generations.
>
> True. But since the timespan between generations is given as several
> centuries in various places in the Bible, Shane's point follows.
> Unless we're talking stored frozen sperm, so that men beget
> sons 400 years after they died... :->
Shane's comment was rather odd. I'm not sure if Dave was just remarking
about this, or, OTOH, if it actually bothers him that the patriarchs
were supposed to have lived to such great ages.
--vince
may...@andrews.edu
The Hebrew word translated "begat" can mean "became the ancestor of."
Theoretically, these genealogies could be stretched out for millions of
years, but creationists, for some reason, are reluctant to do that. I
think they think this would involve departing too far from the intent
of the text. But personally, I don't think they should be allowed to
shift the number by more than 10% before they diverge from the original
intent of the authors (which would put 10,000 years out of reach for
them, and force them to postulate a problematically late date for the
Flood, i.e., post-dating the earliest written records).
may...@andrews.edu
Ken Cox <k...@lucent.com> wrote:
> cdo...@my-deja.com wrote:
> > The Bible does not give a complete genealogy -- "descended
from....." could
> > be skipping several generations.
>
> X was N years old when Y was born", followed shortly by "And Y
> was M years old when Z was born". It doesn't matter if there
> were unnamed people between X and Y or between Y and Z -- you
> still have to say that there were (N+M) years between the birth
> of X and of Z, if "literalism" is to mean anything.
No, no, Ken, this is utterly wrong. Go back and think about it some
more, keeping in mind that the scientific data refute creationism (a
statement which is not to mock anyone here at t.o.).
may...@andrews.edu
cdo...@my-deja.com wrote:
> A few comments from the peanut gallery.
>
> In article <slrn7ljnbg...@elaine31.Stanford.EDU>,
> ad...@stanford.edu.XX (Adam Noel Harris) wrote:
> > Dave Woetzel <dwoe...@juno.com> wrote:
> > :
> > :Sverker Johansson wrote in message
<37590D65...@no.hlk.spam.hj.se>...
> >
> > :>Ussher (1650) "Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti"
> > :>
> > :
> > :I was hoping you might have something relevant to
dendrochronology. If you
> > :are going to cite dating arguments from over 300 years ago, would
you expect
> > :them to be accurate? Evolutionists gripe if creationists use a
quote that is
> > :30 years old!
> >
> > If the data set never changed, evolutionists would be wrong to
gripe.
> > Ussher's analysis is based on lineages as given in the Holy Bible.
>
could
> be skipping several generations.
It might be complete. We can't say, for sure. Only creationists must
assume that it's necessarily incomplete.
> Ussher is giving a "spit in the wind"
> approximation.
What do you mean by "spit in the wind" approximation?
> > If you think the Book of Mormon adds new relevant information,
perhaps
> > Ussher is out of date.
>
> Interesting, but I've not seen anyone address that issue.
That's good, since Adam was just kidding about this part.
> The Jaredites have
> been associated by some with the olmecs.
The Jaredites are a completely mythical group of people, fabricated by
Joseph Smith, based on ideas involving the "Ten Lost Tribes of Israel"
which were then (i.e., the mid 19th century) fashionable, but which
have, for good reasons, of course, long since fallen into disrepute.
may...@andrews.edu
"Dave Woetzel" <dwoe...@juno.com> wrote:
snip
>Would
> you
> >> prefer instead to be compared to the ancient intelligentsia that
occupied
> >> Mars Hill (Acts17:21) and spent their time debating every new turn
of
> >> philosophy and knowledge? That comparison also occurred to me.
I think our data set is slightly better now than it was then :-)
> >Like I said, allusions to Biblical "skeptics" does
> >not impress or intimidate me. Shake your bones
> >and beads at someone else.
>
> Come on, Boikat. You aren't normally wound so tight. Loosen up.
Nobody is
> trying to "intimidate you" here. You're taking yourself too
seriously (or
> perhaps you have a guilty conscience after the last long weekend?)
Read the
> Acts citation, it doesn't even mention "skeptics."
Interesting little exchange there, probably informative in some way
about the psychology of atheism.
snip
> >
> >No, it was just another misapplication of the
> >data. Again, what does the magnetic fields of
> >other planets have to do with the age of the earth
> >or solar system?
>
> What data are you claiming he is misapplying? His post was pretty
> straightforward..."Presence of magnetic fields around solar system
bodies
> (Mercury, Jupiter's moon Ganymede, Neptune, Uranus) without an obvious
> internal dynamo." What is unclear here? He argues that these
decaying
> fields should have decayed out of existence if these planets were
billions
> of years old.
I remember this. E.g., back in '89, when the Voyager spacecraft were
passing Neptune, they had these "ICR impact" articles claiming that
creationist theories had correctly predicted Neptune's magnetic
strength. Don't know what ever became of these claims; but I do recall
that they were based on an extension of Thomas Barne's thoroughly
discredited "free-decay" theory of the earth's magnetic field.
snip
> >> >Curious you should continue to harp on the Red
> >> >Crag stuff, which is still within the age range of
> >> >H.h. Your only comment on the last thing I had to
> >> >say about that was that if the tools were from
> >> >H.h, then that would be bad for the "Out of
> >> >Africa" theory.
There is no evidence for _Homo habilis_ in the vicinity of the Red Crag
formation, AFAIK. It sounds like modern contamination to me.
> >
> >And in that particular case, did I not say that it
> >could be conceivably possible that the artifacts
> >were genuine, and that it could have possibly been
> >due to a small group of H h.'s that had left
> >africa for some reason long before the main "out
> >of Africa" dispersal?
>
> Come on Boikat! If huge flint industries were already underway in
Britain
> at the time pithecine were just supposed to be evolving into earliest
> habilis in Africa, don't you think that stretches the current
paradigm just
> a bit?
I think we would recognize the handiwork of a _H. habilis_ if we saw
it. Boikat's idea is, of course, pure speculation. The best evidence,
as far as I can tell, is that Ameghino's crew of laborers was not of
the highest quality, and that some mistakes may have crept into their
work.
Dave Woetzel
Kevin R. Henke wrote in message <7jepjd$fth$1...@news.uky.edu>...
But why not just copy the salutation in the first epistle? Why insert this
anomaly that would cause some (Asia Minor Christians in particular) who were
less aware of the character and details of Peter's life to question the
authorship right away? Remember the recipients and audience for these
letters were not the inhabitants of Palestine.
>4. Christian earnestness (Remember that Christianity was NOT in vogue.
>Would one so acquainted with the precious truths of the faith
>deliberately
>forge the name of an apostle?)
>
>KRH: You bet! The author would want to use the name of someone whose
>opinion was highly respected by the Christians, like Peter, and
>someone who was regarded by non-Christians as an appropriate
>spokesperson for Christianity, like Peter.
Possible. However, he is unsparing in his denunciation of false teachers,
corrupters of the faith and perverters of truth. He recounts the fall of
angels and the destruction of Balaam as examples of the doom that will
befall those who sin against the truth and live in crime. Yet if the writer
was not Peter, he was guilty of the most flagrant dishonesty. Why risk his
life for what he knew in his heart to be untrue?
>5. Relation to Apostles (there is an apostolic spirit here…an
>acquaintance
>with Paul’s work, particularly the epistles receiving wide circulation
>[Col
>4:16], and a concern for purity. Unlike “Gospel of Peter” or
>“Apocalypse of
>Peter,” it contains nothing novel, romantic, or anachronistic.)
>6. Autobiographical details (II Peter 1:16-18, 19-21, 3:1)
>
>KRH: The author definitely plagerized Jude. He probably had copies of
>other New Testament books, like Matthew, Mark and Luke.
This definitive statement is quite clearly untrue. *Some* who have argued
for II Peter being forged have made this case (most notably Professor
Chase). However, most scholars believe Jude was written later. See below
>7. Quoted by Jude (One of the highest authorities, Zahn, argues with
>great
>force in support of the view that Peter is older and is quoted by Jude
>in
>_Introduction to the O.T_ vol. II, p. 289.)
>
>KRH: Most critics argue that Jude is older. IF 2 Peter is from the
>1st century, I think it would be difficult to tell which was older.
>Nevertheless, either Jude copied 2 Peter or 2 Peter copied Jude.
Dr. Henke uses careful language that can leave the wrong impression. Most
"critics" might argue that Jude is older; however, most *scholars* certainly
do not. It is akin to claiming that most creationists do not place any
credence in Big Bang Theory. Merely giving the opinion of the critics only
tells half the story.
Salmon, Warfield, Zahn and many other biblical scholars of varying religious
backgrounds have argued that II Peter is abundantly referenced in the 2nd
century. There is some evidence from the 1st century as well (though it
only appears to quote passages and does not reference the book by name). In
the end Zahn has been recognized by leading expositors as presenting the
most compelling case in regard to this controversy. He argues...
a. Jude cites from writings other than Scripture on multiple occasions
while Peter scarcely quotes any source. It is far more likely from the
nature of the books and style of writing that Jude is citing Peter.
b. Peter predicts the advent of the false teachers (see 2:1 and others) and
all his verbs are in the future tense. Jude consistently writes about the
same false teachers having come and warns the readers to earnestly fight
against them (3-4).
c. Jude twice refers to certain sources of information touching these
enemies, with which his reader were acquainted 1) a non-scriptural
reference, and 2) the prediction of Peter in II Peter 3:3. He then
specifically urges his readers to remember the words which the apostles had
spoken and proceeds to quote from II Peter at length.
d. Chronology gives the priority to Peter (who died between 63-67 AD). The
vast majority of recent interpreters date the epistle of Jude at 75-80 AD.
There is no doubt that it was written after the death of Jerus in 70AD. It
follows that Jude cited Peter. Moreover, it makes it less likely that a
forger would present a epistle some ten years after the death of Peter.
(Zahn, NT II, 238ff)
>For further reading, in addition to _ISBE_, see _Unger’s Bible
>Dictionary_,
>1957, pp. 851-852, and _Wycliffe Commentary_, 1971, pp. 986-988.
>
>On a more personal, anecdotal note; II Peter has always been one of my
>favorite books. It was the third chapter of this epistle that changed
>my
>life as a young science student struggling with uniformitarianism.
>The book
>seems particularly appropriate in this modern age of popular
>skepticism.
>1:18-21 yield important insight into the nature of inspiration.
>Chapter two
>is a pertinent exhortation against apostasy and false teachers. Often
>I
>have gone back to contemplate again II Peter 3:9-12. No passage has
>been
>more powerful for keeping my focus straight. As one reflects on the
>short-lived nature of material concerns which will all be burned up in
>a
>nuclear meltdown of God’s judgment, the importance of spiritual
>concerns
>becomes apparent anew.
>
>KRH: Just remember that geologists have believed in actualism and not
>Lyell Uniformitarianism for some time now.
However, this is irrelevant to the authenticity of Peter.
Dave
Dave Woetzel
>> >Like I said, allusions to Biblical "skeptics" does
>> >not impress or intimidate me. Shake your bones
>> >and beads at someone else.
>>
>> Come on, Boikat. You aren't normally wound so tight. Loosen up. Nobody
is
>> trying to "intimidate you" here. You're taking yourself too seriously
(or
>> perhaps you have a guilty conscience after the last long weekend?) Read
the
>> Acts citation, it doesn't even mention "skeptics."
>
>Who cares, and why did you even bring it up?
I was just contrasting your post and Henke's. Anything wrong with that?
>> >
>> >How? In what way does it qualify as "supporting
>> >evidence"?
>>
>> It was mostly used in relation to the flood as I state below.
>
>Same question. Why does lack of wood fragments
>from the Bristlecone pine present evidence for a
>flood? Because there are no fragments? How does
>that equal "flood" and not the limits of the
>durability of the wood?
*Read* below! The argument that refers to the flood was in relation to
their being only *one* generation of these ancient trees. (It has nothing
to do with the fossil trees that could have been buried in the Flood.)
Since, they are still growing and aging nicely, it is reasonable to assume
they will live for many centuries more. Yet in multiple locations the stand
of ancient timbers that is *living* only goes back to a reasonable date for
the flood.
>This is the forum where they were presented.
<big snip>
Ever read *any* creationist book, just to try and understand what you are
debating against?
I'll check your response and then move on to other stuff.
Regards,
Dave
Kevin R. Henke
may...@andrews.edu wrote in message <7jhrod$7au$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>...
snip
>Would
> you
> >> prefer instead to be compared to the ancient intelligentsia that
occupied
> >> Mars Hill (Acts17:21) and spent their time debating every new
turn
of
> >> philosophy and knowledge? That comparison also occurred to me.
I think our data set is slightly better now than it was then :-)
> >Like I said, allusions to Biblical "skeptics" does
> >not impress or intimidate me. Shake your bones
> >and beads at someone else.
>
> Come on, Boikat. You aren't normally wound so tight. Loosen up.
Nobody is
> trying to "intimidate you" here. You're taking yourself too
seriously (or
> perhaps you have a guilty conscience after the last long weekend?)
Read the
> Acts citation, it doesn't even mention "skeptics."
Interesting little exchange there, probably informative in some way
about the psychology of atheism.
snip
> >
> >No, it was just another misapplication of the
> >data. Again, what does the magnetic fields of
> >other planets have to do with the age of the earth
> >or solar system?
>
> What data are you claiming he is misapplying? His post was pretty
> straightforward..."Presence of magnetic fields around solar system
bodies
> (Mercury, Jupiter's moon Ganymede, Neptune, Uranus) without an
obvious
> internal dynamo." What is unclear here? He argues that these
decaying
> fields should have decayed out of existence if these planets were
billions
> of years old.
I remember this. E.g., back in '89, when the Voyager spacecraft were
passing Neptune, they had these "ICR impact" articles claiming that
creationist theories had correctly predicted Neptune's magnetic
strength. Don't know what ever became of these claims; but I do recall
that they were based on an extension of Thomas Barne's thoroughly
discredited "free-decay" theory of the earth's magnetic field.
KRH: Humphreys claimed to have used his "creation model"
to predict the strength of Neptune's magnetic field. A critic
of creationism (I can't recall the name) stated that Humphreys'
"prediction" was no better than plotting the masses of the
planets on a graph with magnetic field strength on the other
axis and reading off a value for Neptune.
snip
> >> >Curious you should continue to harp on the Red
> >> >Crag stuff, which is still within the age range of
> >> >H.h. Your only comment on the last thing I had to
> >> >say about that was that if the tools were from
> >> >H.h, then that would be bad for the "Out of
> >> >Africa" theory.
There is no evidence for _Homo habilis_ in the vicinity of the Red
Crag
formation, AFAIK. It sounds like modern contamination to me.
> >
> >And in that particular case, did I not say that it
> >could be conceivably possible that the artifacts
> >were genuine, and that it could have possibly been
> >due to a small group of H h.'s that had left
> >africa for some reason long before the main "out
> >of Africa" dispersal?
>
> Come on Boikat! If huge flint industries were already underway in
Britain
> at the time pithecine were just supposed to be evolving into
earliest
> habilis in Africa, don't you think that stretches the current
paradigm just
> a bit?
I think we would recognize the handiwork of a _H. habilis_ if we saw
cdo...@my-deja.com
may...@andrews.edu wrote:
snip
> > The Bible does not give a complete genealogy -- "descended from....."
> could
> > be skipping several generations.
>
> It might be complete. We can't say, for sure. Only creationists must
> assume that it's necessarily incomplete.
Why do you say that? I do not believe in the "young earth", nor in
traditional creationism.
>
> > Ussher is giving a "spit in the wind"
> > approximation.
>
> What do you mean by "spit in the wind" approximation?
If you want to know the direction of the wind and its speed..........
>
> > > If you think the Book of Mormon adds new relevant information,
> perhaps
> > > Ussher is out of date.
> >
> > Interesting, but I've not seen anyone address that issue.
>
> That's good, since Adam was just kidding about this part.
But I'm serious.
>
> > The Jaredites have
> > been associated by some with the olmecs.
>
> The Jaredites are a completely mythical group of people, fabricated by
> Joseph Smith, based on ideas involving the "Ten Lost Tribes of Israel"
Sigh.
This displays your total ignorance of the Book of Mormon. the Jaredites had
nothing to do with Israel -- having lived millenia *before* Abraham. They
had absolutely nothing to do with the "lost 10 tribes". And the BOM itself
has nothing to do with those tribes either.
Sigh, will the ignorant never cease pretending that they are knowing?
> which were then (i.e., the mid 19th century) fashionable, but which
> have, for good reasons, of course, long since fallen into disrepute.
And this theory abt the origin of the BOM has fallen into disrepute as well.
Best regards,
Charles dowis
Kevin R. Henke
Dave Woetzel wrote in message <07b6d114501...@csi.com>...
KRH: Peter may have authored the first letter. Since he knew his
audience,
he may not have needed to add any details about his life. The forger
of
2 Peter had to pass himself off as Peter. How would he do that? By
adding details that he knew about Peter's life. By the way, some have
argued that 2 Peter 3:2 is a slip up by the forger, he used the past
tense and the use of the third person for the apostles:
"Remember what was said in the past by the holy prophets and the
command of the Lord and Saviour GIVEN by your apostles."
KRH: These critics argue that if Peter really wrote this letter, he
would
have said:
"... that the other apostles and I GIVE to you."
KRH: However, I think that this is a weak argument for the forgery
hypothesis.
>4. Christian earnestness (Remember that Christianity was NOT in
vogue.
>Would one so acquainted with the precious truths of the faith
>deliberately
>forge the name of an apostle?)
>
>KRH: You bet! The author would want to use the name of someone whose
>opinion was highly respected by the Christians, like Peter, and
>someone who was regarded by non-Christians as an appropriate
>spokesperson for Christianity, like Peter.
Possible. However, he is unsparing in his denunciation of false
teachers,
corrupters of the faith and perverters of truth. He recounts the fall
of
angels and the destruction of Balaam as examples of the doom that will
befall those who sin against the truth and live in crime. Yet if the
writer
was not Peter, he was guilty of the most flagrant dishonesty. Why
risk his
life for what he knew in his heart to be untrue?
KRH: People that are dedicated to a religious or political cause are
often full of hypocrisy. They feel because their side is right, they
can
do the very things that they denounce their enemies for doing.
>5. Relation to Apostles (there is an apostolic spirit here…an
>acquaintance
>with Paul’s work, particularly the epistles receiving wide
circulation
>[Col
>4:16], and a concern for purity. Unlike “Gospel of Peter” or
>“Apocalypse of
>Peter,” it contains nothing novel, romantic, or anachronistic.)
>6. Autobiographical details (II Peter 1:16-18, 19-21, 3:1)
>
>KRH: The author definitely plagerized Jude. He probably had copies
of
>other New Testament books, like Matthew, Mark and Luke.
This definitive statement is quite clearly untrue. *Some* who have
argued
for II Peter being forged have made this case (most notably Professor
Chase). However, most scholars believe Jude was written later. See
below
KRH: Actually, most liberal and Catholic scholars believe 2 Peter is
older
than Jude. See: "New Jerusalem Bible, p. 1993-1994. Nevertheless,
many
of the 2nd century Church Fathers had access to most of the New
Testament books, there's no reason why the author of 2 Peter didn't
have the same access.
>7. Quoted by Jude (One of the highest authorities, Zahn, argues with
>great
>force in support of the view that Peter is older and is quoted by
Jude
>in
>_Introduction to the O.T_ vol. II, p. 289.)
>
>KRH: Most critics argue that Jude is older. IF 2 Peter is from the
>1st century, I think it would be difficult to tell which was older.
>Nevertheless, either Jude copied 2 Peter or 2 Peter copied Jude.
Dr. Henke uses careful language that can leave the wrong impression.
Most
"critics" might argue that Jude is older; however, most *scholars*
certainly
do not. It is akin to claiming that most creationists do not place
any
credence in Big Bang Theory. Merely giving the opinion of the critics
only
tells half the story.
KRH: Since when are Biblical critics not scholars?
Salmon, Warfield, Zahn and many other biblical scholars of varying
religious
backgrounds have argued that II Peter is abundantly referenced in the
2nd
century. There is some evidence from the 1st century as well (though
it
only appears to quote passages and does not reference the book by
name). In
the end Zahn has been recognized by leading expositors as presenting
the
most compelling case in regard to this controversy. He argues...
a. Jude cites from writings other than Scripture on multiple
occasions
while Peter scarcely quotes any source.
KRH: What do you mean? 2 Peter plagerizes Jude and
quotes from Matthew (2 Peter 1:17), Proverbs 26:11 (2 Peter
2:22), Psalm 90:4 (2 Peter 3:8), etc.
It is far more likely from the
nature of the books and style of writing that Jude is citing Peter.
KRH: You may be right. Roman Catholic and liberal scholars/critics
just don't agree with you.
Sverker Johansson
> Sverker Johansson wrote in message <375BBC17...@no.hlk.spam.hj.se>...
> >Dave Woetzel wrote:
> >
> >> Shane D. Killian wrote in message <375AF7FD...@vnet.net>...
> >> >His main assumption was that the average human age was over 400 years.
> >> >It was the only way he could make it fit anything believable.
> >> >
> >> The average human age is irrelevant. What counts is the timespan between
> >> generations.
> >
> >True. But since the timespan between generations is given as several
> >centuries in various places in the Bible, Shane's point follows.
> >Unless we're talking stored frozen sperm, so that men beget
> >sons 400 years after they died... :->
>
> Sverker, you seem to completely miss the point you just agreed to. Do you
> understand the difference between "age" and "intergenerational timespan?"
Yes, I understand the difference.
> If you do, kindly show me some of the places in the Bible where "the
> timespan between generations is given as several
> centuries." (And don't try to extricate yourself with Genesis 5:32.)
So what's wrong with Gen 5:32? It says, without straining the
interpretation, that the timespan between Noah's generation, and his
sons' generation is 500 years. This implies that Noah's life span is more
than 500 years.
Every second verse in that chapter says
something similar (although most timespans are just around 100 years).
The fact the the guys then go on living for another half millennium or
more is irrelevant, but it does say that they are abnormally old when they
beget their sons.
Ken Cox
> Ken Cox <k...@lucent.com> wrote:
> > It doesn't matter. The genealogies are all of the formula, "And
> > X was N years old when Y was born", followed shortly by "And Y
> > was M years old when Z was born". It doesn't matter if there
> > were unnamed people between X and Y or between Y and Z -- you
> > still have to say that there were (N+M) years between the birth
> > of X and of Z, if "literalism" is to mean anything.
> No, no, Ken, this is utterly wrong. Go back and think about it some
> more, keeping in mind that the scientific data refute creationism (a
> statement which is not to mock anyone here at t.o.).
You may want to check the thread history. We got into this from
the Usher calculations. My position is not that the genealogies
are strictly father-son, or for that matter accurate; it is that
any Usher-type computation can only be based on adding up those
numbers.
For example, you have to say from Genesis 5 that Cainan was born
195 years after Seth, because the text *says* the time from Seth
to Enos was 105 years and that from Enos to Cainan was 90 years.
It doesn't matter (repeating myself above) if Enos was actually
Seth's great-grandson and Cainan was the same to Enos -- we are
given two spans, and literalism demands adding them to determine
the total span.
--
Ken Cox k...@research.bell-labs.com
Ken Cox
> If you do, kindly show me some of the places in the Bible where "the
> timespan between generations is given as several centuries." (And
> don't try to extricate yourself with Genesis 5:32.)
Interesting method of debate, there. "Go on, show me where the Bible
says X. And you can't use verse Y:Z where the Bible does say X."
Do you have some interpretation of Genesis 5:32 such that it doesn't
say that Noah was 500 years old when his three sons were born?
--
Ken Cox k...@research.bell-labs.com
Dave Woetzel
Sverker Johansson wrote in message <375D0FD7...@no.hlk.spam.hj.se>...
>Dave Woetzel wrote:
>
>> Sverker Johansson wrote in message
<375BBC17...@no.hlk.spam.hj.se>...
>> >Dave Woetzel wrote:
>> >
>> >> Shane D. Killian wrote in message <375AF7FD...@vnet.net>...
>> >> >His main assumption was that the average human age was over 400
years.
>> >> >It was the only way he could make it fit anything believable.
>> >> >
>> >> The average human age is irrelevant. What counts is the timespan
between
>> >> generations.
>> >
>> >True. But since the timespan between generations is given as several
>> >centuries in various places in the Bible, Shane's point follows.
>> >Unless we're talking stored frozen sperm, so that men beget
>> >sons 400 years after they died... :->
>>
>> Sverker, you seem to completely miss the point you just agreed to. Do
you
>> understand the difference between "age" and "intergenerational timespan?"
>
>Yes, I understand the difference.
>
>> timespan between generations is given as several
>> centuries." (And don't try to extricate yourself with Genesis 5:32.)
>
>interpretation, that the timespan between Noah's generation, and his
>sons' generation is 500 years. This implies that Noah's life span is more
>than 500 years.
Noah is an exception to the rule (and I was well aware of him in advance).
But you can't state: "the timespan between generations is given as several
centuries in various places in the Bible" based on one exception in one
verse in the Bible. I am not aware of any others. To the best of my
knowledge, nobody else even went to 200 (much less several centuries). If
you know something I don't, I'd be interested.
>Every second verse in that chapter says
>something similar (although most timespans are just around 100 years).
>The fact the the guys then go on living for another half millennium or
>more is irrelevant, but it does say that they are abnormally old when they
>beget their sons.
Abnormally old is an understatement. Check out Methusaleh (5:27) who lived
nearly a millennium!
Dave
Ken Cox
> Noah is an exception to the rule (and I was well aware of him in advance).
> But you can't state: "the timespan between generations is given as several
> centuries in various places in the Bible" based on one exception in one
> verse in the Bible. I am not aware of any others. To the best of my
> knowledge, nobody else even went to 200 (much less several centuries).
Well, if you're going to drop down to that level of pickiness, then
it depends on how you count centuries. I'm sure (sarcasm alert) that
Sverker meant to count them the same way Jesus' three days in the
tomb are counted -- that is, all or part of a century counts as a
century.
Then in addition to Noah's three kids after he was 500, we are told
that Adam was 130, Jared was 162, Methuselah 187, and Lamech 182 when
they had their respective sons in the Genesis 5 account -- so each
was well into his second century when he had the named son. We are
also told that each of them, as well as the ones who had their named
sons at younger ages (like 90, or 70, or 65) then lived several more
centuries and had more children during their life.
--
Ken Cox k...@research.bell-labs.com
mcoo...@my-deja.com
For the didacts in our audience here are the numbers
Name Age at birth of first son Age at death
Adam* 130 930
Seth 105 912
Enosh 90 905
Kenan 70 910
Mahalel 65 895
Jared 162 962
Enoch 65 365
Methusaleh 187 969
Lamech 182 777
Noah 500 950
Shem 100 600
Arphaxal 35 438
Shelah 30 433
Eber 34 464
Peleg 30 239
Reu 32 239
Serug 30 230
Nahor 29 148
Well, ok, so Seth was not Adam’s first son. But he was the great great
great great great great great grandfather to Noah.