Hello from a RIT graduate & my past experiences with nutty stuff at RIT
Brendan Ryan
with an astronomy minor. I may come back for graduate school
sometimes. I have had a lot of experience with Christians at RIT,
especially deaf ones during my five years at RIT. I was a Christian
during my freshman year and wasn't after that.
One time, a creationist named Jay Wile visited IVCF. He has a Ph.d in
nuclear chemistry from the University of Rochester. His Powerpoint
presentation was on the age of the Earth. There were a lot of little
kids older people present because he also writes science homeschooling
materials for creationists. His site has handouts from his
presentations here http://www.apologiaonline.com/conf/
There's one for his age of Earth presentation and another one on
evolution. There's a streaming video of him giving those two
presentations at MCC here http://videoserver.monroecc.edu/production/videocontent.htm
One thing he talked about during his age of Earth presentation was the
magnetic field of Earth and the other planets coming into existence
because his god made the planets as balls of water and then hocus
pocused them into rock and metal. He said that this 'theory' predicted
the strength of Uranus' magnetic field before Voyager 2 measured it
and that dynamo theory got it wrong. He gave zero evidence for this
hocus pocusing besides a verse from a certain ancient book and nothing
on how it might have taken place. He also has no figures for those
predictions. Anyone could've guessed the order of magnitude for Uranus
and Neptune's fields.
He also said that dynamo theory predicts a magnetic field for Mars
and none for Mercury. Then he claims that Mars has none and Mercury
has one, therefore it is wrong. Actually, Mars has local magnetic
fields and Mercury does have one plus is very dense suggesting that it
used to be more massive. He also says that dynamo theory says that if
a planet or moon has a magnetic field, they will always have one.
That's insane because as the planet cools down, the dynamo will run
down. He majorly misrepresents dynamo theory. To boot, the site he
linked to about this has a chart showing how they think the planets'
magnetic fields decay. The chart shows Venus with a pretty strong
magnetic field in the present. Guess they don't now that none had been
measured despite many probes being sent there. The site also predicts
that the present magnetic field of Mercury is weaker now than the last
time we visited the planet in the 1970s. The first MESSENGER flyby is
coming up so we'll see. :)
Another major misrepresentation he does is about radioactive decay. He
uses artificial examples of sped up radioactive decays to claim that
radioactive decay isn't constant. What he doesn't tell people is that
decays that depend on electron capture can be affected by affecting
the electrons. Decays used for dating are not those sorts of decays.
He also claims that the amount of helium in zircon crystals means that
decays happened faster in the past, making things appear older. Yeah,
if that happened, the world would've been a cooked up radioactive
wasteland. He also gives those usual silly creationist listings of
things from hundreds of millions of years ago having young dates by
carbon 14 measurements. A nuclear chemist Ph.d should know that carbon
14 dating can't be used for such long time periods.
At the end, he concluded that the Earth was 9000 years old. Yeah he
mentioned dating by tree rings. But he failed to mention that adding
dead trees and comparing their ring widths to find overlaps in their
records allows us to go back further than 9000 years.
I've downloaded the sample chapters of the homeschooling stuff
available on his site. Some of the stuff disgusts me, especially the
astronomy sample chapter on the sun, so I plan to write reviews of
those samples.
Another time, a Christian NTID student told me that the Earth had two
north poles and that since like poles repealed, the Earth should
explode, but it doesn't, therefore his holy book's god had to be
holding it together. He said that he saw it on Discovery channel. I
guess he thinks that the rotational poles are magnetic. He also liked
to tell me that science failed because of stuff like nukes. I asked
him why he used technology and went to RIT. He said he likes to take
advantage of those products anyway. Guess that he'd consider violent
Christians, like the Crusaders, Not True Christians.
Another crazy NTID Christian who later transferred to Gallaudet told
me that the Milky Way somehow caused the big bang. His reading
abilities aren't too good. Another thing he did on an IVCF camping
trip was to call a camping fire the Holy Ghost, put his boot-clad feet
into it and stand on the campfire platform twice. They pulled him off
and told him that it wasn't the Holy Ghost and that he'd make IVCF and
RIT look bad if he fell into the fire.
I also know yet another NTID Christian who went to a CCC presentation
on Halloween and the speaker warned people against magic spooky Satan
stuff. Somehow, the Christian got the idea that all magic tricks, even
simple ones taught in kiddie books are all evil Satanic black magic.
He and I knew a Christian CS major who liked to do magic tricks and
called them illusions. He tried to explain the difference between
illusions and Satanic black magic, but the first Christian won't
listen and hated the second one for being an evil Satanic black
magician.
EJ Lennon
RIT Skeptics
If you do come back for grad school, please feel free to stop by an RIT skeptics meeting.
Wow, it certainly looks like you've done a lot of reading about the Young Earth Creationist's claims.
It seems like there there is a trend among creationists (young or old earth) to misunderstand the concept of predictability in science, and to make ex post facto applications to preexisting texts so that they can claim prediction.
Unfortunately the public (even at RIT) isn't well enough educated about science to sift dishonest, ill-informed, or erroneous claims from ones that constitute good science.
"They pulled him off and told him that it wasn't the Holy Ghost and that he'd make IVCF and RIT look bad if he fell into the fire."
RIT Skeptics
large population because of a few anecdotes about a statistically
insignificant portion of that population is what is known as a Fallacy
of Composition.
Brendan Ryan
the Wile presentation and said he thought the Earth was old, when my
3rd Christian roomie thought the presentation was good because he was
a CS major without the education to see why it sucked.
That reminds me of a major screwup in Wile's sample chapter for
astronomy. He says that stellar models predict that the sun was dimmer
billions of years ago, therefore Earth would be too cold for life
therefore it had to be young. He leaves completely unstated the
inorganic carbon cycle between atmospheric carbon dioxide and carbon
sinks such as limestone and the evidence for large scale Precambrian
ice ages.
He also said that the sun worked by nuclear fusion, yet gave no
explanation where the sun's heavy elements like oxygen or iron came
from. It takes way more than his 9000-year age of the universe for
there to be more than one generation of stars to give future star
generations heavier elements or even a small fraction of any stellar
lifetime. I'd love to see that creationist's explanation of the
existence of supernovae remains, which require the existence of
massive stars living for a million years or so before the supernovae.
The CS major Christian who does magic tricks also was at the camping
trip where the other one stood over the fire. After that happened, he
talked to that guy to try to understand why it happened.
The creationist homeschooling stuff reminds me that the CS major
Christian also was homeschooled by his preacher parents until high
school, then he went to a deaf school. So when he took physics
classes, he asked me for help and didn't know that 'c' was applicable
to electromagnetic waves other than visible light.
The strange thing about the anti-magic Christian is that he loves
Harry Potter. He even wrote his own versions of books six and seven
before the real ones came out. He also read all of the Narina and Left
Behind books. I wonder if he would read His Dark Materials. He
probably will because he was interested in my boxed copies of the
trilogy that I haven't gotten to yet. I told him that it was like
Narina. He also had a Halloween party dressed up as an evil king in
Perkins last year with themed food I helped to make, including
eyeballs, witch fingers and a jelly heart full of red syrup.
The two worst Christians I've met at RIT was a leeching one and a
depressed one. The leeching one took thousands of dollars from many
people in several states, including several thousand dollars from
people on campus such as the anti-magic Christian.
She only got $35 out of me by taking me and some friends out for a
ride. She said she was going to a Christian bookstore. I haven't seen
one before so I wanted to see how bad it was, so I got on the ride. In
the middle of the ride, she changed to going to a Walmart and got an
oil change and a new air filter. Then she forced me to pay $35 for
that because she had no money on her. I won't have gone if I had known
she was going to do that. People had told me that I should have used
the money to get a taxi back to RIT, leaving her at Walmart to be
arrested for thief of services. I didn't know she could have been
arrested for that, so I paid. I did get the $35 back at least a year
later after others yelled at her to pay them back.
I did get to see the Christian bookstore another time with different
people and yeah, it has nothing but Christian stuff, including stuff
on spiritual warfare.
The leeching Christian wasn't even a student at RIT, but was one at
MCC. She and two other Christians, both from RIT, including a RA, once
came to my room saying that they wanted to talk about something
downstairs. So I went with them to the first floor then they tried to
convert me. I wanted to get away from them, so I faked it. But they
treated me as a 'baby Christian' even if I had gone to Catholic church
and Sunday school for seven years. So I told my third Christian roomie
the truth because the news had spread to him and I knew he won't kill
me for that. The people I know at IVCF and CCC don't' count Catholics
as real Christians.
The depressed Christian was the worst one. Last year, I lived in a
Perkins apartment with the anti-magic Christian to get out of the
dorms, which we were sick of after living there for four years. I
didn't know he was anti-magic at first, so I wasn't afraid to live
with him. In September, we met the depressed Christian at the
Christian bookstore when I got to visit it, but she didn't seem
depressed at the time.
Then in the spring, she started causing trouble at the apartment by
crying for hours and hours about silly little things she was selfish
about, like wearing one of my roomie's shirts without his permission
and about how many pieces of cake people should get at his birthday
party. She said she was like that because her foreign family didn't
know English or sign language and treated her badly. She also stayed
at the apartment for too many nights, making us sick of her. She also
made the mistake of telling my roomie that she was banned in some
manner from campus.
So we called Public Safety when she was not there, then they confirmed
that she wasn't allowed in the dorms or apartments because of stupid
stuff she did as a student long ago and getting dragged to a mental
hospital.
She ended up coming back to bother us again and even tried to break up
my roomie and his girlfriend to get him for herself, which failed.
They caught her on camera bothering us in the SDC so she got her ban
extended in some way. Last May, she even tried to block us and others
from going out to a restaurant by nearly crashing her car into the
ones we were in, then followed us downtown to the restaurant. That was
after she said she wanted to die in a car crash because of us not
bending to her will. My roomie still is in the same apartment this
year. The depressed Christian went back there this September, so she
got PS called on her and banned from the entire campus under threat of
arrest for trespass.
She also did stuff like say she was going to hell, cut herself and
even starve herself for a month until passing out and being
hospitalized. My roomie from last year and a Christian RIT staff
member even talked about taking her to their church to get demons
cleaned out of her. I hope that doesn't backfire on them. I'm sure it
would because the depressed one Accepted Jesus twice and still did
crappy stuff. We also blocked her on aim, yahoo, msn and Facebook.
So, I think I've seen the whole spectrum of Christians from the sane
to the insane. The most sane one was my second Christian roomie, who I
had in my freshman year. We would stay up for hours talking about
stuff like putting tv and movie characters into fights to see who
wins. I've never laughed so hard. He was also the one who showed me
the Brick Testament and introduced me to funny porn pictures when I
was still a Christian.
AcidRain64
this afternoon.
Welcome to the group!