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Damn, now I get lumped in with this lame ass thread?
I don't really care who you are, even if you are probably Joe Chalupa.I have 50 dollars that says he can't guess who I am!
you and the other 50 trolls that have roamed this thread have brought nothing to the discussion...
but keep on slapping yourselves on the back with your troll posts. This thread was ready to die any way.
Damn, now I get lumped in with this lame ass thread?
To the simplest approximation, Earth's continental crust is a floating aggregate on the planet's surface that is first attracted to subduction zones and, upon arrival, thickened by mountain building (then producing some extension). Thickened regions are thinned again by erosion. A comparison between 65 Ma and the present shows that the modern state is significantly more mountainous. An estimated average continental elevation increase relative to average ocean floor depth of about 54 m and sea level decrease relative to the ocean floor of about 102 m add up to a 156-m increase of continent elevation over sea level since 65 Ma. Both are affected most strongly by the roughly 1.7% continent surface area decrease caused by Cenozoic mountain building. This includes contributions from erosion. Volumes of sediments in deltas and submarine fans indicate an average thickness of 371 m deposited globally in the ocean basins since 65 Ma. This relatively large change of continent area over a short span of Earth history has significant consequences. Extrapolating, if continent area change exceeded 5% in the past, either severe erosion or flooded continents occurred. If continent elevation (freeboard) remains at the present value of a few hundred meters, the past continent-ocean area ratio might have been quite different, depending on earlier volumes of continental crust and water. We conclude that, along with the ages of ocean basins, continental crustal thickening exerts a first-order control on the global sea level over hundreds of million years.Continents are eroding at a rate which would bring them to sea level in less than 14 million years. Inasmuch as the continents are anything but flat, the earth cannot be billions of years old. (27.5 x 109 tons sediment/year are lost to the oceans by erosion; the present mass of the continents above sea level is 383 x 1015 tons.)
In other words, its actually thicker than it used to be. Or did you forget that the core of this rock that we live on is molten and can deposit new minerals on the surface at any given time?
The incredible pressure found in oil and gas wells indicates they have been there less than 15,000 years. (Presumably, the oil or gas would have escaped long before then.)
Um, it does escape. Geologists (some anyway) have long known that natural oil seeps occur, and have occurred as long as the Earth's sediments have been generating oil and gas. Oil fields leak their hydrocarbons to the surface, whether on land or beneath the oceans. Hydrocarbons are less dense than rocks and the water they contain, so the oil and gas is continually trying to escape to the surface. Eventually, given enough time, it all does.
Oil and gas do a lot of migrating, and the oil ac ulated in a given reservoir may have recently migrated there from another reservoir. Thus, a given pool of oil may or may not have been there for millions and millions of years. A recent geological shift in the rocks might also increase the leakage of the primary oil pool, which had been hitherto sealed for millions of years. Thus, the mere existence of leaky trapping rocks does not prove that a pool of oil and gas was recently created.
The primary migration of oil from 1 to 5 kilometers deep in the earth, where it is produced under a combination of pressure and heat acting on organic matter, probably goes hand in hand with water migration. Certainly, oil and water are often found together, the oil floating on top of the water within permeable rock. The water is squeezed out as the source sediment experiences more and more pressure. Thus, it may interest you to know how fast water migrates down there.
Some idea of the extremely slow speed of fluid motion to be expected can be gained by considering the movement of ground water at shallow depths in dense clays, classed as "impermeable." Under a moderate hydraulic gradient and a reasonable value of permeability for clay, we come up with flow speeds of ground water on the order of 2 to 3 million years per kilometer [3.2 to 4.8 million years per mile]. Yet the permeability of source shales of petroleum is rated at only one-thousandth as great as for clays tested in the surface environment (Wszolek and Burlingame, 1978, p. 573).
(Strahler, 1987, p.237)
Thus, the primary migration of oil from its place of origin will take far longer than the mere 6000 years or so creationists allow for the age of the earth. Creationists have tried to dance around that figure by quoting special cases of secondary migration or by simple smoke screen tactics, but the problem remains (Strahler, 1987, pp.237-238).
Wrong. The earth's rotation IS slowing, but at a rate of about 0.005 seconds per year per year. This extrapolates to the earth having a fourteen-hour day 4.6 billion years ago, which is entirely possible.The earth's rotation is slowing down, meaning that the earth can't be older than a few million years.
The rate at which the earth is slowing today is higher than average because the present rate of spin is in resonance with the back-and-forth movement of the oceans.
Fossil rugose corals preserve daily and yearly growth patterns and show that the day was about 22 hours long 370 million years ago, in rough agreement with the 22.7 hours predicted from a constant rate of slowing (Scrutton 1964; Wells 1963).
In the case of the Atlantic Ocean, the sediment varies in thickness. The thinnest sediment is near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge where new sea floor is currently being generated. That is to say, sediment thickness there is zero. The thickest sediment hugs the continental margins, which certainly have more than a few thousand years of ac ulation. Try around 150 million year's worth! Funny, that the measured rate of sea floor spreading, when extrapolated backwards in time, gives the same age for the Atlantic sea floor as does radiometric dating. Funny, how the sediment gets thicker and thicker as one moves away from the sea floor spreading zone! That is, the farther we get from the Mid-Atlantic ridge the thicker the sediment tends to get; that thickness correlates with increased age of the sea floor as determined by radiometric dating as well as the known rate at which the Atlantic is widening. (Funny, how Dr. Hovind always comes up with "a few thousand years" no matter what we are looking at!)Given the rate of sediment transport into the ocean by the world's rivers, the ocean basins should have a much thicker layer of sediment than they actually have. Only a small amount of sediment is on the ocean floor, indicating a few thousand years of ac ulation. This embarrassing fact explains why the continental drift theory is vitally important to those who worship evolution. (The present influx of sediment into the oceans is 27.5 x 109 tons per year; the present mass of sediment in the oceans is 820 x 1015 tons. That yields 30 million years.)
Here is another interesting but little known fact. Mathematical calculations done by Dan McKenzie in 1967 indicated that an ocean floor, spreading at a few inches per year from a rift which adds new material, would cool and contract. It would sink deeper into the mantle as it contracted. "The process is so undeviating that there is a striking relationship between the age of the sea floor and the depth of water covering it." (Miller, 1983, p.122)
John Sclater and his students at Scripps Ins ution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California, put McKenzie's theory to the test in 1971. They gathered up every scrap of data on the age and depth of the Pacific sea floor. McKenzie's theory was confirmed! The increasing depths of the older portions of the Pacific floor were a result of thermal contraction. Plate tectonics even explains the basic facts about the depth of the Pacific!
That's bad news for those creationists who believe that the earth's plates did some dancing after Noah's flood. In the few thousand years that creationists have to play around with, there is not enough time for a growing ocean plate to cool down.
Dr. Hovind, who supports that theory, is assuming that salt cannot be removed from the oceans. The more sophisticated creationists, such as Melvin Cook, know better than to make that assumption. Here's what Cook had to say:Given the rate of salt influx to the oceans, they should be much saltier than they are if the earth were billions of years old.
The validity of the application of total salt in the ocean in the determination of age turned out to have a very simple answer in the fact shown by Goldschmidt (1954) that it is in steady state and therefore useless as a means of determining the age of the oceans. [Cook, 1966, p.73]
(Dalrymple, 1984, pp.115-116)
Thus, salt is being removed from the oceans as quickly as it is being added by the world's rivers. Consequently, no age can be calculated, save a minimum age based upon an assumption of initial salt content. There is no comfort here for the young-earth creationist.
Yes, and by the same reasoning 8 germs could populate every cubic inch of available living space on Earth to the tune of 1 million strong in less than a week! That is, if we allow for a generous die-off rate such that the fourth generation has about 40 germs instead of 128, and if we assume that the population divides every hour, each and every cubic inch of living space on the earth (from 100 feet below ground to a mile above) would have 1 million germs after 158 generations. I guess, by creationist reckoning, the earth must be a week old! If it were a few thousand years old, the germ population would have gone through the roof!The current population of Earth (5.5 billion) could easily be generated from 8 people in less than 4000 years. If the earth were really billions of years old, the human population would have gone through the roof!
Yes, given unlimited living space, an inexhaustible supply of food, a good deal of luck in the early stages, and a high motivation to travel while having more kids than is practical, eight people
could probably populate the earth in a few thousand years. Eight germs could do it in less than a week. Eight bunny rabbits would fall somewhere in between. Eight cats would give us yet another figure. What do any of these figures have to do with the age of the earth? Nothing! What do these figures have to do with actual growth rates? Absolutely nothing!
The human exponential growth rate of the last few hundred years is possible only because of technology. When our ability to stay one jump ahead of starvation and disease fails, when our resources are finally squandered, then you'll see a dramatic change in that growth rate! It will no longer be exponential; it will be disastrous!
When man lived in scattered tribal groups, which is what he did for 99% of his history, the net human population growth was zero most of the time, just as it is for animals today. Animal populations, especially small animals such as rabbits or mice, often undergo cycles of boom and bust but their net growth is zero. No permanent increase in population can be sustained unless it is supported by a permanent change in the environment. Such a change might include the loss of a predator due to the colonization of new territory, a permanent increase in the food supply due to climatic change or a change in dietary habits, or a variety of other factors. In the case of man, hunting technology, the development of agriculture, and the use of fossil fuels have played major roles. After a favorable change in the environment, a population of animals (or people) may record a permanent jump before leveling off at a zero net growth again. Thus, the growth rate, before technology intervened in a major way, necessarily involved a series of plateaus where the population was in approximate equilibrium with the environment. No doubt, many tribal groups died out. Anthropologists can cite several examples of early human or near-human species, side branches on our evolutionary tree, which left no descendants. There was no assurance that early man would even survive. When favorable changes did occur, large jumps between plateau levels would likely have been exponential. Indeed, the human exponential growth rate of the last 300 years or so can be thought of as one long jump to a new plateau, which has been raised artificially high by technology. Those who imagine that eight people gave rise to everyone living today according to a simple exponential growth curve have demonstrated an inability to think things through.
Bring on some more if you wish. , Ive got one better. Here's a few more answers to some of your, and Dr. Hovind's, other silly assumptions.^ Feel free to touch base on any of the statements above...
The shrinking-sun argument contains two errors. The worst, by far, is the assumption that if the sun is shrinking today, then it has always been shrinking!The sun is shrinking at 5 feet/hour which limits the earth-sun relationship to less than 5 million years.
That's a little like watching the tide go out and concluding that the water level must have fallen at that rate since the earth began. Therefore, working backwards, much of the land must have been under water a few weeks ago! Since careful inspection shows no signs of such a flood, the earth can't be older than a few weeks!
Obviously, we cannot extend a rate willy-nilly. We do need to know something about the system under study. Tides come and go. No one familiar with tides would assume that the rate of water going out is constant over weeks of time! Just as obvious, at least to the experts, our sun could not have been continuously shrinking over millions of years as described by some creationists. Such a view totally ignores the known forces at work within our sun. Infinitely more likely is the possibility that our sun might alternate between small periods of shrinking and small periods of expansion, a kind of oscillation. Indeed, some scientists believe there may be an 80-day cycle of slight shrinking and expanding.
In its formative years, before our sun's core became hot and dense enough to ignite the fusion process and, as a result, check the gravitational collapse, our sun did do some prolonged shrinking. Billions of years from now the depletion of the sun's hydrogen will upset the sun's internal balance, and the sun will again undergo some long term changes. But, that has absolutely nothing to do with the shrinking-sun argument above, which attempts to prove that the solar system is less than 5 million years old.
To sum up our first point, the shrinking-sun argument rests squarely on a naive extension of a rate measured over a relatively short period of time. It's the type of blunder one might find in a high school science project.
An ad hoc attempt to prop up this naive extrapolation boldly declares that our sun is really getting its energy from gravitational collapse alone! An ongoing gravitational collapse of the sun, called the Helmholtz (or Kelvin-Helmholtz) contraction, was the best that scientists could come up with before nuclear fusion was discovered. The heat liberated from vast quan ies of falling matter would be enough to make the sun shine. Then nuclear fusion was discovered. The discovery of nuclear fusion (and the realization that the sun's core had the density and temperature to initiate and sustain nuclear fusion) made it clear since the 1930s that the thermonuclear-fusion process was responsible for the sun's energy. Thermonuclear-fusion would soon stop any Helmholtz contraction. Aside from totally ignoring the last 60 years of solar science, this ad hoc argument also ignores the massive evidence relating to ancient climates. (A much larger sun in our recent geological past would have had a noticeable effect on the climate.) The creationist advocates of the Helmholtz contraction argue that their idea rules out the possibility of past geological ages. Just the opposite is true! The evidence for ancient climates, spanning millions of years, is massive and well do ented; it rules out this ad hoc use of the Helmholtz contraction.
Blunder number two is the unwarranted assumption that the rate of shrinkage reported by Eddy and Boornazian is an established fact. Far from it! The rate of shrinkage was published as an abstract to further scientific discussion, not as a polished paper. Certain creationists nevertheless pounced upon it as though it were the Holy Grail. Before long, serious flaws in its methodology turned up and the data has since been discredited; the full text of their study was never published. It is instructive to note how creationist authors became fixated on that one point even though several studies at the time (or shortly thereafter) drew completely different conclusions.
Some creationists, such as Walter Brown, have tried to pump new life into the argument by quoting additional sources (Lippard, 1990, p.25), but only in vain. In Brown's case, two of the three sources offered were obsolete, and the third actually undercut his position! (Lippard, 1990, p.25). In a rebuttal to Lippard, Walter Brown offered no new studies to back up his "feeling" that the sun is undergoing a small, but continuous shrinkage (Brown, 1990, pp.45-46).
Brown, in his debate with Lippard, then dodged into the missing-neutrino problem in a vain effort to turn it into evidence for his position. (Neutrinos are subatomic particles with no electric charge and little or no mass. They are important here as a calculated by-product of the thermonuclear-fusion process in the sun. The vast majority of neutrinos pass effortlessly through the earth and are, therefore, extremely hard to detect.) To make his case, Brown must demonstrate that the "missing" neutrinos are due to a corresponding lack of nuclear fusion, and that the sun's current output of energy is due, in large part, to gravitational collapse. (A prolonged gravitational collapse of the sun is impossible once the thermonuclear-fusion process gets rolling. A creationist might argue that the coexistence of nuclear fusion and a Helmholtz contraction implies a young sun on its way to equilibrium. However, that would be a very tough row to hoe in that possible oscillations in the sun's diameter and other phenomena unrelated to a true Helmholtz contraction must be ruled out. Thus, Brown's motive for undermining the thermonuclear-fusion process by way of the missing-neutrino problem.)
As there are several possible solutions to the missing-neutrino problem (Lippard, 1990a, p.32), Brown's scenario is an extremely tall order. Even if it were proved that there is a serious deficiency in solar nuclear fusion, that being the cause of the low neutrino count, Brown would still have to prove that the situation was permanent. It could be a temporary glitch or even part of some complex cycle. Thus, any attempt at the present time to use the missing-neutrino problem as support for a shrinking sun is wholly misguided. Furthermore, invoking a Helmholtz contraction in place of thermonuclear fusion is subject to all of the problems listed above.
It was in 1979 that astronomers John Eddy and Aram Boornazian presented their paper and published its abstract: "Secular Decrease in the Solar Diameter, 1836-1953." In the April 1980 issue of ICR's Impact series (Impact #82), Russell Akridge picked up the report and naively extended the shrinkage rate of 5 feet/hour into the indefinite past. As that soon led to an impossible situation, he concluded that the earth was much less than 20 million years old. Soon, Walter Brown, Thomas Barnes, Henry Morris, Hilton Hinderliter, James Hanson, and other creationists were in on the act, and the shrinking-sun argument became a creationist legend. A number of studies have not found any evidence for a continuous shrinking of the sun. Leslie Morrison, for example, drawing on Edmund Halley's observations of the solar eclipse of 1715, concluded that there is no evidence that the sun is shrinking. His findings were reported in the January, 1988 issue of Gemini (no.18, pp.6-8). Gemini is the official journal of the Royal Greenwich Observatory.
Thomas Barnes, Walter Brown, and Henry Morris used the argument for several years after the original report by Eddy and Boornazian was discredited (Van Till, 1986). I guess a lot of creationists still haven't gotten the word. In his debate with Dr. Paul Hilpman, on June 15, 1992 at the Royal Hall of the University of Missouri, Dr. Hovind applied the obsolete, shrinking-sun argument.
Isolated from the corrective of continuing professional investigation and evaluation, the 'creation-science' community continues to employ this unwarranted extrapolation of a discredited report as 'scientific evidence' for a young Earth.
(Van Till, 1986, p.17)
That was true in 1986 and is true today; it will be true for years to come. "Scientific" creationism lives like the proverbial ostrich with its head buried in the sand; it has no effective mechanism to weed out error.
An outstanding study by H. Van Till (Van Till et al, 1988, pp.47-65) beautifully contrasts the sober scientific handling of the findings of John Eddy and Aram Boornazian (who advanced the scientific claim that the sun was shrinking) with the reckless, speculative spin put on it by the "scientific" creationists. The reader might also consult pages 29-39 where Van Till gives us an excellent feeling for what scientific competence, integrity, and judgment are all about. After reading that, one understands why "scientific" creationists are rarely published in the refereed scientific journals.
There. I've even provided you the books and what pages you can read all this from. In other words, I can copy and paste just as well as you can.
The most amazing thing about the cosmic dust argument is that it is still being used! It has coasted along on obsolete evidence, and nothing but obsolete evidence, for the last 25 years!! It nicely illustrates how creationists borrow from each other and never do any outside reading.Given the rate at which cosmic dust ac ulates, 4.5 billion years would have produced a layer on the moon much deeper than observed. By implication, the earth is also young.
The obsolescence of this argument has been brought out in numerous debates and published in countless books, journals, and newsletters. It can be discovered by anyone who exercises his or her library card. It's not a state secret! What does it take to get through to the creationist brain??
The earliest use of the cosmic dust argument that Van Till (Van Till et al, 1988) could find was in an article by Harold Slusher, which was published in the June 1971 issue of Creation Research Society Quarterly. Slusher made several blunders which are handed down in the "scientific" creationist literature to this very day. In 1974 the cosmic dust argument received its big kick-off from Henry Morris' book, Scientific Creationism. Morris quoted an article by Hans Pettersson in the February 1960 issue of Scientific American. Pettersson's upper estimate for the influx of cosmic dust, a figure he considered risky, was based on particles he collected from two filtration units in the Hawaiian Islands. One was located near the summit of Mauna Loa, Hawaii, and the other near the observatory on Haleakala, Maui. He came up with 39,150 tons/day. Pettersson actually favored a figure about two-thirds less, and he warned his readers that the true figure could be much lower still. Further work was planned in Switzerland.
This caution seems to have been lost on Henry Morris, who may have been relying on Slusher's work, and he ignored Pettersson's preferred value in favor of his highest estimate. By the time the Impact insert #110 of Acts & Facts (August 1982) came out, sporting as it did a collection of young-earth claims, the reader was being told that just prior to the manned, moon landing scientists were worried about a thick layer of dust. (Again, we have echoes of Slusher's article.) Of course, the sea of cosmic dust did not materialize, and the Impact article claimed a victory for creation science which supports a young moon without much cosmic dust. Steven Shore shows that this entire scenario is wrongheaded. Let's get a proper perspective on history:
In a conference held in late 1963, on the Lunar Surface Layer, McCracken and Dublin state that
"The lunar surface layer thus formed would, therefore, consist of a mixture of lunar material and interplanetary material (primarily of cometary origin) from 10 cm to 1 m thick. The low value for the accretion rate for the small particles is not adequate to produce large scale dust erosion or to form deep layers of dust on the moon, for the flux has probably remained fairly constant during the past several billion years." (p. 204)
(Shore, 1984, p.34)
In 1965, a conference was held on the nature of the lunar surface. The basic conclusion of this conference was that both from the optical properties of the scattering of sunlight observed from the Earth, and from the early Ranger photographs, there was no evidence for an extensive dust layer.
(Shore, 1984, p.34)
Thus, several years before men landed on the moon there was a general feeling that our astronauts would not be greeted by vast layers of cosmic dust. Although direct confirmation was not yet at hand, thus allowing a few dissenting opinions, few scientists expected even as much as three feet of cosmic dust on the moon. In May 1966 Surveyor I had landed on the moon, thus putting an end to any lingering doubts about a manned landing sinking in dust.
The cosmic dust argument was already obsolete by the time Henry Morris included it in his book, Scientific Creationism. It was already obsolete when Harold Slusher wrote his article three years earlier.
Since the late 1960s, much better and more direct measurements of the meteoritic influx to the Earth have been available from satellite penetration data. In a comprehensive review article, Dohnanyi [1972, Icarus 17: 1-48] showed that the mass of meteoritic material impinging on the Earth is only about 22,000 tons per year [60 tons/day]... Other recent estimates of the mass of interplanetary matter reaching the Earth from space, based on satellite-borne detectors, range from about 11,000 to 18,000 tons per year (67) [30-49 tons/day]; estimates based on the cosmic-dust content of deep-sea sediment are comparable (e.g., 11, 103).
(Dalrymple, 1984, p.109)
Thus, we have good satellite data from the late 1960s in addition to estimates from deep-sea sediment content, the latter going back to at least 1968 and yielding comparable figures. Satellite data goes back even further. On August 9-13, 1965 a symposium on meteor orbits and dust was sponsored by NASA and the Smithsonian Ins ute (Van Till et al, 1988, p.70). Results from the early microphone-type dust detectors (recording clicks as bits of space dust struck at high speeds) were compared with penetration detectors (which recorded holes punched in thin foil). At the time there was no clear explanation as to why the former method gave such higher counts, sometimes as much as a 100 times that of the penetration detectors. Shortly afterwards it was learned that the microphone-type detectors also picked up spacecraft noises due to thermal expansion and contraction as well as effects caused by solar flares and cosmic rays. Even so, those early detectors gave results which were 10 to 100 times smaller than Pettersson's figure.
Dohnanyi's figure of 60 tons/day includes everything from slowly settling dust to the average input of meteorites.
Dohnanyi's figure for the moon (2 x 10-9 grams/square centimeter per year) yields 2.3 tons/day. In 4.5 billion years a layer of about one and a half inches of cosmic dust would ac ulate on the moon. (On the moon, of course, a ton would weigh much less. We're actually talking about a mass that would weigh 2.3 tons on Earth.)
In his book Age of the Cosmos, published in 1980, Harold Slusher devoted a chapter to the amount of space dust raining down on the earth. He dwells on Pettersson's 1960 figure of 39,000 tons/day and even produces a 1967 figure which gives a whopping 700,000 tons/day! Alan Hayward, a respected physicist and Bible-believing Christian, felt it necessary to make the following observation:
To write like that in 1980 was inexcusable. The two sources he quotes were dated 1960 and 1967--hopelessly out of date in a fast-changing area of science. They merely provide estimates of what the influx of meteoritic dust might possibly be.
But we no longer have to rely on estimates. A paper, published four years before Slusher's book, described how the amount of meteoritic dust in space has now been measured, with detectors mounted on satellites.
(Hayward, 1985, pp.142-143)
Hayward was referring to a July 1976 article by D. W. Hughes, published in the New Scientist, which gave a figure of 48 tons/day--enough to cover the earth with about 1.5 inches of dust during the earth's lifetime! It's nearly a 1000 times smaller than Pettersson's figure, and it utterly destroys the cosmic dust argument.
Because of the incredible amount of space junk orbiting the earth, modern estimates of incoming dust have become more difficult. However, with the 1990 retrieval of the Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF) satellite, which spent nearly six years in orbit, possibly the clearest figure yet is now available for the influx of space dust.
In the October 22, 1993, Science, Stanley G. Love and Donald E. Brownlee (University of Washington) describe their analysis of 761 small impact craters found on some of LDEF's aluminum-alloy plates. These surfaces continuously faced spaceward while the satellite was in orbit. ...As the researcher explain, this location was superbly suited for their study. It was largely protected from orbital debris and secondary impacts from collisions elsewhere on the satellite, and in pointing
outward it also sampled a variety of interplanetary directions as LDEF orbited the Earth.
(Sky & Telescope, March 1994, p.13)
The article goes on to explain that dust particles as small as 35 trillionths of an ounce (10-9 grams) were detected. Love and Brownlee concluded that each year the earth collects about 40,000 metric tons (121 tons/day) which is a bit higher than the less direct figures given above. The results are "comparable to rates crudely calculated from the long-term ac ulation of the rare element iridium in sea sediment and Antarctic ice."
Thus, the very latest, and possibly the best, cosmic dust influx measurement dooms the creationist argument once again. (How many strikes does it take before you're out in creationland? Answer: Who knows? They play by no rules and have no referees.) In summary, the general scientific consensus, going back to the 1960s, has been borne out by numerous measurements during the last 25 years.
Perhaps these constant reminders about obsolete data finally got to Henry Morris. Yet, he did not drop the cosmic dust argument like a hot potato, as one might expect. To the contrary, his second edition of Scientific Creationism (1985) expanded his footnote reference to Pettersson to suggest that a much more recent source from NASA gave an even larger influx of dust! The reader was referred to: "G.S. Hawkins, Ed., Meteor Orbits and Dust, published by NASA, 1976" (Wheeler, 1987, p.14). Thus, Morris appeared to have an unimpeachable source which was even more recent than Dohnanyi's figure!
Frank Lovell, suspecting that years of direct measurement from space (supported by sea floor studies) could not be that wrong, smelling a rat as it were, checked up on the source. It turned out that the actual date was 1967! The digits had been reversed (Wheeler, 1987, pp.14-15). Furthermore, the figure quoted by Morris (200 million tons of dust each year) was not given in the original source! It was a calculation based on the original source, done by an unnamed "creationist physicist" who botched it! The unsuspecting reader would have assumed that the rate had the official blessing of NASA. Astronomer Larry W. Esposito had some choice words concerning this incredible fiasco by Henry Morris:
...the work is incorrectly cited, outdated, from a non-referenced symposium publication, based on unreliable data. The calculation multiplies together unrelated numbers: the product of these factors is not a reliable estimation of the current cosmic dust deposition rate.
(Wheeler, 1987, p.15)
Wheeler and Lovell were party to another strange, creationist tale of reversed digits! They had written a letter to a religious magazine, Concern, published in Louisville, Kentucky, and had criticized an article which had used Pettersson's obsolete figure for cosmic dust influx. Concern published that letter along with a reply from the author of the original article. The author stated that Richard Bliss (a member of the Ins ute for Creation Research) had written the following to him in a letter:
It seems that we have estimates on meteor dust deposition, based on various assumptions, of the total volume of incoming meteoritic material ranging from 800,000 to 1 x 106 tons per day. You can get this information from the following sources:
1. Space Handbook, Astronautics and its Applications by R.W. Beucherin and staff of the Rand Corporation, Random House, NY 1959.
2. Nazarove, I.N. Rocket and Satellite Investigations of Meteors presented at the fifth meeting of the COMITE Speciale De I'annee Geophysique International, Moscow, August 1985.
(Wheeler, 1987, p.15)
The first source was even more obsolete than Pettersson's, but the second one was dated 1985. In response to a query, Bliss said that he got the figures from Harold Slusher, also of ICR. Several attempts to get through to Slusher failed.
Finally it occurred to us that the date cited for this reference, like that of Morris, might be incorrect. The International Geophysical Year ("I'annee Geophysique International") was 1957-1958, and I found in Nature [182:294 (1958)] that the fifth meeting of the Special Committee was held in Moscow in July-August 1958, and that it included a symposium on the rocket and satellite program; this obviously was the source of Slusher's reference.
(Wheeler, 1987, p.15)
Thus, we have a second case of inverted digits! A complaint about obsolete data was answered with data even more obsolete!! The average reader, of course, would never have guessed that the citation was bogus.
Thus, creationism carried its obsolete banner ever forward. In 1989, Walter Brown came out with the 5th edition of his booklet In the Beginning. He was no longer quoting Pettersson as was the case in older editions. Nevertheless, he calculated that in 4.6 billion years 2,000 feet of dust should have ac ulated on the moon.
Brown says his figure is based on data from two sources, Stuart R. Taylor's Lunar Science: A Post-Apollo View (New York: Pergamon Press, 1975, p.92) and David W. Hughes's "The Changing Micrometeoroid Flux" (Nature 251(379-380), 4 October 1974). Hughes gives no basis for any calculation.
(Schadewald, 1990, p.16)
As for Taylor's paper, Schadewald identifies the appropriate distribution equation, makes use of the calculus and shows that even if we extend the range of particles way beyond what was actually detected we would get a layer of dust only 1 inch deep! Schadewald was left wondering where Brown got his 2000 feet of dust! Perhaps, he mused, Brown had moon dust in his eyes when he made that calculation.
I shouldn't tease Dr. Brown since I blew the initial calculations before correcting myself! The equation which Schadewald uses (from Taylor) is:
log(N) = -1.62 - 1.16 log(m)
N is the number of bodies with masses greater than m, which impact a square kilometer of moon per year. The density of the dust is given as 3 grams/cubic centimeter. It does make a difference which units one uses for mass. The context of Schadewald's article suggests that the proper mass units are grams (not kilograms), and a little playing around with the equation makes that reasonably clear. If one erroneously uses kilograms and integrates N(m) over a range of 10-16 kilograms to 1020 kilograms, a figure of 2259 feet of dust may be obtained for a period of 4.6 billion years. Possibly something like that happened in Dr. Brown's calculation. (By the way, if you are not familiar with mathematics, just hop over these little diversions. I dive into the mathematics, at times, to give the more able reader the finer points. You don't need them to get the general drift.)
If I understand the equation properly, a straightforward integration of N(m) is not the most precise method, but it does yield a good approximation to the answers I got. For a mass range of 100Kg to 1000Kg I calculate that 4.6 billion years would deposit a layer of dust 0.107mm (4 thousandths of an inch) thick. For a mass range of 100gms to 1000Kg I get 0.79mm. However, in extending the calculation to extremes, from 10-13 grams to 1023 grams, I came up with 26.4cm (10.4 inches) instead of 2.5cm which Schadewald got. The point is that you wouldn't even get 10.4 inches of dust in 4.6 billion years, being that the formula is not accurate for these extreme ranges. Attempts to inflate this value further, by going to even greater ranges, is simply an abuse of the formula and proves nothing.
Neither the above formula, when properly used, nor actual measurements made in space offer anything close to the huge amounts of cosmic dust needed in this young-earth argument. Of course, a little thing like that would never stop those creationists from circulating it!
Today, armies of creationists, such as Dr. Hovind, carry forth the banner of the cosmic dust argument, and some of them are still using Pettersson's 1960 calculations! As for Dr. Hovind, he seems to have written a new chapter altogether! In his June 15, 1992 debate with Dr. Hilpman in the Royal Hall of the University of Missouri, Dr. Hovid calmly stated that scientists had predicted that 182 feet of cosmic dust would be found on the moon based on an ac ulation of 1 inch every 10,000 years. I played that video segment three times to make sure I had it right! Had he checked those figures he would have found that they represent two different rates, that of 4144 tons/day and a whopping 872,798 tons/day! Compare either figure to the 2.3 tons/day given by Dohnanyi which was based on actual measurements made in space. The cosmic dust argument, having been obsolete for 25 years, has now entered the realm of comedy! Perhaps, I should have said "tragedy" since this is the kind of nonsense creationists want to teach our children.
Did I say "want to teach"? It may interest you to know that a sixth-grade science textbook Observing God's World, published by A Beka Book Publications in 1978, made use of the cosmic dust argument! (Van Till et al, 1988, p.78). It was probably written for one of those private, "Christian" schools which don't teach evolution. I certainly hope that none of our public schools have sunk that low! There's something rotten about foisting such sleazy garbage on children who look to their teachers for knowledge.
For an excellent study of this moon dust argument, read Clarence Menninga (Van Till et al, 1988, pp.67-82). If you do, you will find that there are still more blunders associated with this infamous creationist argument!
A few young-earth creationists do show signs of acute embarrassment, and in them there is some light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. Some of them are trying to set up a review process to weed out errors in the creationist literature. However, I'm afraid that when the last of the bath water is thrown out, no baby will be found!
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Should I keep going? I can do this all damn day if you want.
Last edited by phyzik; 05-28-2009 at 09:01 AM.
To the simplest approximation, Earth's continental crust is a floating aggregate on the planet's surface that is first attracted to subduction zones and, upon arrival, thickened by mountain building (then producing some extension). Thickened regions are thinned again by erosion. A comparison between 65 Ma and the present shows that the modern state is significantly more mountainous. An estimated average continental elevation increase relative to average ocean floor depth of about 54 m and sea level decrease relative to the ocean floor of about 102 m add up to a 156-m increase of continent elevation over sea level since 65 Ma. Both are affected most strongly by the roughly 1.7% continent surface area decrease caused by Cenozoic mountain building. This includes contributions from erosion. Volumes of sediments in deltas and submarine fans indicate an average thickness of 371 m deposited globally in the ocean basins since 65 Ma. This relatively large change of continent area over a short span of Earth history has significant consequences. Extrapolating, if continent area change exceeded 5% in the past, either severe erosion or flooded continents occurred. If continent elevation (freeboard) remains at the present value of a few hundred meters, the past continent-ocean area ratio might have been quite different, depending on earlier volumes of continental crust and water. We conclude that, along with the ages of ocean basins, continental crustal thickening exerts a first-order control on the global sea level over hundreds of million years.
In other words, its actually thicker than it used to be. Or did you forget that the core of this rock that we live on is molten and can deposit new minerals on the surface at any given time?
Um, it does escape. Geologists (some anyway) have long known that natural oil seeps occur, and have occurred as long as the Earth's sediments have been generating oil and gas. Oil fields leak their hydrocarbons to the surface, whether on land or beneath the oceans. Hydrocarbons are less dense than rocks and the water they contain, so the oil and gas is continually trying to escape to the surface. Eventually, given enough time, it all does. what, do you really think it just stays there locked in a little bubble underground?
Wrong. The earth's rotation IS slowing, but at a rate of about 0.005 seconds per year per year. This extrapolates to the earth having a fourteen-hour day 4.6 billion years ago, which is entirely possible.
The rate at which the earth is slowing today is higher than average because the present rate of spin is in resonance with the back-and-forth movement of the oceans.
Fossil rugose corals preserve daily and yearly growth patterns and show that the day was about 22 hours long 370 million years ago, in rough agreement with the 22.7 hours predicted from a constant rate of slowing (Scrutton 1964; Wells 1963).
In the case of the Atlantic Ocean, the sediment varies in thickness. The thinnest sediment is near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge where new sea floor is currently being generated. That is to say, sediment thickness there is zero. The thickest sediment hugs the continental margins, which certainly have more than a few thousand years of ac ulation. Try around 150 million year's worth! Funny, that the measured rate of sea floor spreading, when extrapolated backwards in time, gives the same age for the Atlantic sea floor as does radiometric dating. Funny, how the sediment gets thicker and thicker as one moves away from the sea floor spreading zone! That is, the farther we get from the Mid-Atlantic ridge the thicker the sediment tends to get; that thickness correlates with increased age of the sea floor as determined by radiometric dating as well as the known rate at which the Atlantic is widening. (Funny, how Dr. Hovind always comes up with "a few thousand years" no matter what we are looking at!)
Here is another interesting but little known fact. Mathematical calculations done by Dan McKenzie in 1967 indicated that an ocean floor, spreading at a few inches per year from a rift which adds new material, would cool and contract. It would sink deeper into the mantle as it contracted. "The process is so undeviating that there is a striking relationship between the age of the sea floor and the depth of water covering it." (Miller, 1983, p.122)
John Sclater and his students at Scripps Ins ution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California, put McKenzie's theory to the test in 1971. They gathered up every scrap of data on the age and depth of the Pacific sea floor. McKenzie's theory was confirmed! The increasing depths of the older portions of the Pacific floor were a result of thermal contraction. Plate tectonics even explains the basic facts about the depth of the Pacific!
That's bad news for those creationists who believe that the earth's plates did some dancing after Noah's flood. In the few thousand years that creationists have to play around with, there is not enough time for a growing ocean plate to cool down.
Dr. Hovind, who supports that theory, is assuming that salt cannot be removed from the oceans. The more sophisticated creationists, such as Melvin Cook, know better than to make that assumption. Here's what Cook had to say:
The validity of the application of total salt in the ocean in the determination of age turned out to have a very simple answer in the fact shown by Goldschmidt (1954) that it is in steady state and therefore useless as a means of determining the age of the oceans. [Cook, 1966, p.73]
(Dalrymple, 1984, pp.115-116)
Thus, salt is being removed from the oceans as quickly as it is being added by the world's rivers. Consequently, no age can be calculated, save a minimum age based upon an assumption of initial salt content. There is no comfort here for the young-earth creationist.
Yes, and by the same reasoning 8 germs could populate every cubic inch of available living space on Earth to the tune of 1 million strong in less than a week! That is, if we allow for a generous die-off rate such that the fourth generation has about 40 germs instead of 128, and if we assume that the population divides every hour, each and every cubic inch of living space on the earth (from 100 feet below ground to a mile above) would have 1 million germs after 158 generations. I guess, by creationist reckoning, the earth must be a week old! If it were a few thousand years old, the germ population would have gone through the roof!
Yes, given unlimited living space, an inexhaustible supply of food, a good deal of luck in the early stages, and a high motivation to travel while having more kids than is practical, eight people
could probably populate the earth in a few thousand years. Eight germs could do it in less than a week. Eight bunny rabbits would fall somewhere in between. Eight cats would give us yet another figure. What do any of these figures have to do with the age of the earth? Nothing! What do these figures have to do with actual growth rates? Absolutely nothing!
The human exponential growth rate of the last few hundred years is possible only because of technology. When our ability to stay one jump ahead of starvation and disease fails, when our resources are finally squandered, then you'll see a dramatic change in that growth rate! It will no longer be exponential; it will be disastrous!
When man lived in scattered tribal groups, which is what he did for 99% of his history, the net human population growth was zero most of the time, just as it is for animals today. Animal populations, especially small animals such as rabbits or mice, often undergo cycles of boom and bust but their net growth is zero. No permanent increase in population can be sustained unless it is supported by a permanent change in the environment. Such a change might include the loss of a predator due to the colonization of new territory, a permanent increase in the food supply due to climatic change or a change in dietary habits, or a variety of other factors. In the case of man, hunting technology, the development of agriculture, and the use of fossil fuels have played major roles. After a favorable change in the environment, a population of animals (or people) may record a permanent jump before leveling off at a zero net growth again. Thus, the growth rate, before technology intervened in a major way, necessarily involved a series of plateaus where the population was in approximate equilibrium with the environment. No doubt, many tribal groups died out. Anthropologists can cite several examples of early human or near-human species, side branches on our evolutionary tree, which left no descendants. There was no assurance that early man would even survive. When favorable changes did occur, large jumps between plateau levels would likely have been exponential. Indeed, the human exponential growth rate of the last 300 years or so can be thought of as one long jump to a new plateau, which has been raised artificially high by technology. Those who imagine that eight people gave rise to everyone living today according to a simple exponential growth curve have demonstrated an inability to think things through.
Bring on some more if you wish. , Ive got one better. Here's a few more answers to some of your, and Dr. Hovind's, other silly assumptions.
The shrinking-sun argument contains two errors. The worst, by far, is the assumption that if the sun is shrinking today, then it has always been shrinking!
That's a little like watching the tide go out and concluding that the water level must have fallen at that rate since the earth began. Therefore, working backwards, much of the land must have been under water a few weeks ago! Since careful inspection shows no signs of such a flood, the earth can't be older than a few weeks!
Obviously, we cannot extend a rate willy-nilly. We do need to know something about the system under study. Tides come and go. No one familiar with tides would assume that the rate of water going out is constant over weeks of time! Just as obvious, at least to the experts, our sun could not have been continuously shrinking over millions of years as described by some creationists. Such a view totally ignores the known forces at work within our sun. Infinitely more likely is the possibility that our sun might alternate between small periods of shrinking and small periods of expansion, a kind of oscillation. Indeed, some scientists believe there may be an 80-day cycle of slight shrinking and expanding.
In its formative years, before our sun's core became hot and dense enough to ignite the fusion process and, as a result, check the gravitational collapse, our sun did do some prolonged shrinking. Billions of years from now the depletion of the sun's hydrogen will upset the sun's internal balance, and the sun will again undergo some long term changes. But, that has absolutely nothing to do with the shrinking-sun argument above, which attempts to prove that the solar system is less than 5 million years old.
To sum up our first point, the shrinking-sun argument rests squarely on a naive extension of a rate measured over a relatively short period of time. It's the type of blunder one might find in a high school science project.
An ad hoc attempt to prop up this naive extrapolation boldly declares that our sun is really getting its energy from gravitational collapse alone! An ongoing gravitational collapse of the sun, called the Helmholtz (or Kelvin-Helmholtz) contraction, was the best that scientists could come up with before nuclear fusion was discovered. The heat liberated from vast quan ies of falling matter would be enough to make the sun shine. Then nuclear fusion was discovered. The discovery of nuclear fusion (and the realization that the sun's core had the density and temperature to initiate and sustain nuclear fusion) made it clear since the 1930s that the thermonuclear-fusion process was responsible for the sun's energy. Thermonuclear-fusion would soon stop any Helmholtz contraction. Aside from totally ignoring the last 60 years of solar science, this ad hoc argument also ignores the massive evidence relating to ancient climates. (A much larger sun in our recent geological past would have had a noticeable effect on the climate.) The creationist advocates of the Helmholtz contraction argue that their idea rules out the possibility of past geological ages. Just the opposite is true! The evidence for ancient climates, spanning millions of years, is massive and well do ented; it rules out this ad hoc use of the Helmholtz contraction.
Blunder number two is the unwarranted assumption that the rate of shrinkage reported by Eddy and Boornazian is an established fact. Far from it! The rate of shrinkage was published as an abstract to further scientific discussion, not as a polished paper. Certain creationists nevertheless pounced upon it as though it were the Holy Grail. Before long, serious flaws in its methodology turned up and the data has since been discredited; the full text of their study was never published. It is instructive to note how creationist authors became fixated on that one point even though several studies at the time (or shortly thereafter) drew completely different conclusions.
Some creationists, such as Walter Brown, have tried to pump new life into the argument by quoting additional sources (Lippard, 1990, p.25), but only in vain. In Brown's case, two of the three sources offered were obsolete, and the third actually undercut his position! (Lippard, 1990, p.25). In a rebuttal to Lippard, Walter Brown offered no new studies to back up his "feeling" that the sun is undergoing a small, but continuous shrinkage (Brown, 1990, pp.45-46).
Some creationists, such as Walter Brown, have tried to pump new life into the argument by quoting additional sources (Lippard, 1990, p.25), but only in vain. In Brown's case, two of the three sources offered were obsolete, and the third actually undercut his position! (Lippard, 1990, p.25). In a rebuttal to Lippard, Walter Brown offered no new studies to back up his "feeling" that the sun is undergoing a small, but continuous shrinkage (Brown, 1990, pp.45-46).
Brown, in his debate with Lippard, then dodged into the missing-neutrino problem in a vain effort to turn it into evidence for his position. (Neutrinos are subatomic particles with no electric charge and little or no mass. They are important here as a calculated by-product of the thermonuclear-fusion process in the sun. The vast majority of neutrinos pass effortlessly through the earth and are, therefore, extremely hard to detect.) To make his case, Brown must demonstrate that the "missing" neutrinos are due to a corresponding lack of nuclear fusion, and that the sun's current output of energy is due, in large part, to gravitational collapse. (A prolonged gravitational collapse of the sun is impossible once the thermonuclear-fusion process gets rolling. A creationist might argue that the coexistence of nuclear fusion and a Helmholtz contraction implies a young sun on its way to equilibrium. However, that would be a very tough row to hoe in that possible oscillations in the sun's diameter and other phenomena unrelated to a true Helmholtz contraction must be ruled out. Thus, Brown's motive for undermining the thermonuclear-fusion process by way of the missing-neutrino problem.)
As there are several possible solutions to the missing-neutrino problem (Lippard, 1990a, p.32), Brown's scenario is an extremely tall order. Even if it were proved that there is a serious deficiency in solar nuclear fusion, that being the cause of the low neutrino count, Brown would still have to prove that the situation was permanent. It could be a temporary glitch or even part of some complex cycle. Thus, any attempt at the present time to use the missing-neutrino problem as support for a shrinking sun is wholly misguided. Furthermore, invoking a Helmholtz contraction in place of thermonuclear fusion is subject to all of the problems listed above.
It was in 1979 that astronomers John Eddy and Aram Boornazian presented their paper and published its abstract: "Secular Decrease in the Solar Diameter, 1836-1953." In the April 1980 issue of ICR's Impact series (Impact #82), Russell Akridge picked up the report and naively extended the shrinkage rate of 5 feet/hour into the indefinite past. As that soon led to an impossible situation, he concluded that the earth was much less than 20 million years old. Soon, Walter Brown, Thomas Barnes, Henry Morris, Hilton Hinderliter, James Hanson, and other creationists were in on the act, and the shrinking-sun argument became a creationist legend. A number of studies have not found any evidence for a continuous shrinking of the sun. Leslie Morrison, for example, drawing on Edmund Halley's observations of the solar eclipse of 1715, concluded that there is no evidence that the sun is shrinking. His findings were reported in the January, 1988 issue of Gemini (no.18, pp.6-8). Gemini is the official journal of the Royal Greenwich Observatory.
Thomas Barnes, Walter Brown, and Henry Morris used the argument for several years after the original report by Eddy and Boornazian was discredited (Van Till, 1986). I guess a lot of creationists still haven't gotten the word. In his debate with Dr. Paul Hilpman, on June 15, 1992 at the Royal Hall of the University of Missouri, Dr. Hovind applied the obsolete, shrinking-sun argument.
Isolated from the corrective of continuing professional investigation and evaluation, the 'creation-science' community continues to employ this unwarranted extrapolation of a discredited report as 'scientific evidence' for a young Earth.
(Van Till, 1986, p.17)
That was true in 1986 and is true today; it will be true for years to come. "Scientific" creationism lives like the proverbial ostrich with its head buried in the sand; it has no effective mechanism to weed out error.
An outstanding study by H. Van Till (Van Till et al, 1988, pp.47-65) beautifully contrasts the sober scientific handling of the findings of John Eddy and Aram Boornazian (who advanced the scientific claim that the sun was shrinking) with the reckless, speculative spin put on it by the "scientific" creationists. The reader might also consult pages 29-39 where Van Till gives us an excellent feeling for what scientific competence, integrity, and judgment are all about. After reading that, one understands why "scientific" creationists are rarely published in the refereed scientific journals.
There. I've even provided you the books and what pages you can read all this from. In other words, I can copy and paste just as well as you can.
The most amazing thing about the cosmic dust argument is that it is still being used! It has coasted along on obsolete evidence, and nothing but obsolete evidence, for the last 25 years!! It nicely illustrates how creationists borrow from each other and never do any outside reading.
The obsolescence of this argument has been brought out in numerous debates and published in countless books, journals, and newsletters. It can be discovered by anyone who exercises his or her library card. It's not a state secret! What does it take to get through to the creationist brain??
The earliest use of the cosmic dust argument that Van Till (Van Till et al, 1988) could find was in an article by Harold Slusher, which was published in the June 1971 issue of Creation Research Society Quarterly. Slusher made several blunders which are handed down in the "scientific" creationist literature to this very day. In 1974 the cosmic dust argument received its big kick-off from Henry Morris' book, Scientific Creationism. Morris quoted an article by Hans Pettersson in the February 1960 issue of Scientific American. Pettersson's upper estimate for the influx of cosmic dust, a figure he considered risky, was based on particles he collected from two filtration units in the Hawaiian Islands. One was located near the summit of Mauna Loa, Hawaii, and the other near the observatory on Haleakala, Maui. He came up with 39,150 tons/day. Pettersson actually favored a figure about two-thirds less, and he warned his readers that the true figure could be much lower still. Further work was planned in Switzerland.
This caution seems to have been lost on Henry Morris, who may have been relying on Slusher's work, and he ignored Pettersson's preferred value in favor of his highest estimate. By the time the Impact insert #110 of Acts & Facts (August 1982) came out, sporting as it did a collection of young-earth claims, the reader was being told that just prior to the manned, moon landing scientists were worried about a thick layer of dust. (Again, we have echoes of Slusher's article.) Of course, the sea of cosmic dust did not materialize, and the Impact article claimed a victory for creation science which supports a young moon without much cosmic dust. Steven Shore shows that this entire scenario is wrongheaded. Let's get a proper perspective on history:
In a conference held in late 1963, on the Lunar Surface Layer, McCracken and Dublin state that
"The lunar surface layer thus formed would, therefore, consist of a mixture of lunar material and interplanetary material (primarily of cometary origin) from 10 cm to 1 m thick. The low value for the accretion rate for the small particles is not adequate to produce large scale dust erosion or to form deep layers of dust on the moon, for the flux has probably remained fairly constant during the past several billion years." (p. 204)
(Shore, 1984, p.34)
In 1965, a conference was held on the nature of the lunar surface. The basic conclusion of this conference was that both from the optical properties of the scattering of sunlight observed from the Earth, and from the early Ranger photographs, there was no evidence for an extensive dust layer.
(Shore, 1984, p.34)
Thus, several years before men landed on the moon there was a general feeling that our astronauts would not be greeted by vast layers of cosmic dust. Although direct confirmation was not yet at hand, thus allowing a few dissenting opinions, few scientists expected even as much as three feet of cosmic dust on the moon. In May 1966 Surveyor I had landed on the moon, thus putting an end to any lingering doubts about a manned landing sinking in dust.
The cosmic dust argument was already obsolete by the time Henry Morris included it in his book, Scientific Creationism. It was already obsolete when Harold Slusher wrote his article three years earlier.
Since the late 1960s, much better and more direct measurements of the meteoritic influx to the Earth have been available from satellite penetration data. In a comprehensive review article, Dohnanyi [1972, Icarus 17: 1-48] showed that the mass of meteoritic material impinging on the Earth is only about 22,000 tons per year [60 tons/day]... Other recent estimates of the mass of interplanetary matter reaching the Earth from space, based on satellite-borne detectors, range from about 11,000 to 18,000 tons per year (67) [30-49 tons/day]; estimates based on the cosmic-dust content of deep-sea sediment are comparable (e.g., 11, 103).
(Dalrymple, 1984, p.109)
Thus, we have good satellite data from the late 1960s in addition to estimates from deep-sea sediment content, the latter going back to at least 1968 and yielding comparable figures. Satellite data goes back even further. On August 9-13, 1965 a symposium on meteor orbits and dust was sponsored by NASA and the Smithsonian Ins ute (Van Till et al, 1988, p.70). Results from the early microphone-type dust detectors (recording clicks as bits of space dust struck at high speeds) were compared with penetration detectors (which recorded holes punched in thin foil). At the time there was no clear explanation as to why the former method gave such higher counts, sometimes as much as a 100 times that of the penetration detectors. Shortly afterwards it was learned that the microphone-type detectors also picked up spacecraft noises due to thermal expansion and contraction as well as effects caused by solar flares and cosmic rays. Even so, those early detectors gave results which were 10 to 100 times smaller than Pettersson's figure.
Dohnanyi's figure of 60 tons/day includes everything from slowly settling dust to the average input of meteorites.
Dohnanyi's figure for the moon (2 x 10-9 grams/square centimeter per year) yields 2.3 tons/day. In 4.5 billion years a layer of about one and a half inches of cosmic dust would ac ulate on the moon. (On the moon, of course, a ton would weigh much less. We're actually talking about a mass that would weigh 2.3 tons on Earth.)
In his book Age of the Cosmos, published in 1980, Harold Slusher devoted a chapter to the amount of space dust raining down on the earth. He dwells on Pettersson's 1960 figure of 39,000 tons/day and even produces a 1967 figure which gives a whopping 700,000 tons/day! Alan Hayward, a respected physicist and Bible-believing Christian, felt it necessary to make the following observation:
To write like that in 1980 was inexcusable. The two sources he quotes were dated 1960 and 1967--hopelessly out of date in a fast-changing area of science. They merely provide estimates of what the influx of meteoritic dust might possibly be.
But we no longer have to rely on estimates. A paper, published four years before Slusher's book, described how the amount of meteoritic dust in space has now been measured, with detectors mounted on satellites.
(Hayward, 1985, pp.142-143)
Hayward was referring to a July 1976 article by D. W. Hughes, published in the New Scientist, which gave a figure of 48 tons/day--enough to cover the earth with about 1.5 inches of dust during the earth's lifetime! It's nearly a 1000 times smaller than Pettersson's figure, and it utterly destroys the cosmic dust argument.
Because of the incredible amount of space junk orbiting the earth, modern estimates of incoming dust have become more difficult. However, with the 1990 retrieval of the Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF) satellite, which spent nearly six years in orbit, possibly the clearest figure yet is now available for the influx of space dust.
In the October 22, 1993, Science, Stanley G. Love and Donald E. Brownlee (University of Washington) describe their analysis of 761 small impact craters found on some of LDEF's aluminum-alloy plates. These surfaces continuously faced spaceward while the satellite was in orbit. ...As the researcher explain, this location was superbly suited for their study. It was largely protected from orbital debris and secondary impacts from collisions elsewhere on the satellite, and in pointing
outward it also sampled a variety of interplanetary directions as LDEF orbited the Earth.
(Sky & Telescope, March 1994, p.13)
The article goes on to explain that dust particles as small as 35 trillionths of an ounce (10-9 grams) were detected. Love and Brownlee concluded that each year the earth collects about 40,000 metric tons (121 tons/day) which is a bit higher than the less direct figures given above. The results are "comparable to rates crudely calculated from the long-term ac ulation of the rare element iridium in sea sediment and Antarctic ice."
Thus, the very latest, and possibly the best, cosmic dust influx measurement dooms the creationist argument once again. (How many strikes does it take before you're out in creationland? Answer: Who knows? They play by no rules and have no referees.) In summary, the general scientific consensus, going back to the 1960s, has been borne out by numerous measurements during the last 25 years.
Perhaps these constant reminders about obsolete data finally got to Henry Morris. Yet, he did not drop the cosmic dust argument like a hot potato, as one might expect. To the contrary, his second edition of Scientific Creationism (1985) expanded his footnote reference to Pettersson to suggest that a much more recent source from NASA gave an even larger influx of dust! The reader was referred to: "G.S. Hawkins, Ed., Meteor Orbits and Dust, published by NASA, 1976" (Wheeler, 1987, p.14). Thus, Morris appeared to have an unimpeachable source which was even more recent than Dohnanyi's figure!
Frank Lovell, suspecting that years of direct measurement from space (supported by sea floor studies) could not be that wrong, smelling a rat as it were, checked up on the source. It turned out that the actual date was 1967! The digits had been reversed (Wheeler, 1987, pp.14-15). Furthermore, the figure quoted by Morris (200 million tons of dust each year) was not given in the original source! It was a calculation based on the original source, done by an unnamed "creationist physicist" who botched it! The unsuspecting reader would have assumed that the rate had the official blessing of NASA. Astronomer Larry W. Esposito had some choice words concerning this incredible fiasco by Henry Morris:
...the work is incorrectly cited, outdated, from a non-referenced symposium publication, based on unreliable data. The calculation multiplies together unrelated numbers: the product of these factors is not a reliable estimation of the current cosmic dust deposition rate.
(Wheeler, 1987, p.15)
Wheeler and Lovell were party to another strange, creationist tale of reversed digits! They had written a letter to a religious magazine, Concern, published in Louisville, Kentucky, and had criticized an article which had used Pettersson's obsolete figure for cosmic dust influx. Concern published that letter along with a reply from the author of the original article. The author stated that Richard Bliss (a member of the Ins ute for Creation Research) had written the following to him in a letter:
It seems that we have estimates on meteor dust deposition, based on various assumptions, of the total volume of incoming meteoritic material ranging from 800,000 to 1 x 106 tons per day. You can get this information from the following sources:
1. Space Handbook, Astronautics and its Applications by R.W. Beucherin and staff of the Rand Corporation, Random House, NY 1959.
2. Nazarove, I.N. Rocket and Satellite Investigations of Meteors presented at the fifth meeting of the COMITE Speciale De I'annee Geophysique International, Moscow, August 1985.
(Wheeler, 1987, p.15)
The first source was even more obsolete than Pettersson's, but the second one was dated 1985. In response to a query, Bliss said that he got the figures from Harold Slusher, also of ICR. Several attempts to get through to Slusher failed.
Finally it occurred to us that the date cited for this reference, like that of Morris, might be incorrect. The International Geophysical Year ("I'annee Geophysique International") was 1957-1958, and I found in Nature [182:294 (1958)] that the fifth meeting of the Special Committee was held in Moscow in July-August 1958, and that it included a symposium on the rocket and satellite program; this obviously was the source of Slusher's reference.
(Wheeler, 1987, p.15)
Thus, we have a second case of inverted digits! A complaint about obsolete data was answered with data even more obsolete!! The average reader, of course, would never have guessed that the citation was bogus.
Thus, creationism carried its obsolete banner ever forward. In 1989, Walter Brown came out with the 5th edition of his booklet In the Beginning. He was no longer quoting Pettersson as was the case in older editions. Nevertheless, he calculated that in 4.6 billion years 2,000 feet of dust should have ac ulated on the moon.
Brown says his figure is based on data from two sources, Stuart R. Taylor's Lunar Science: A Post-Apollo View (New York: Pergamon Press, 1975, p.92) and David W. Hughes's "The Changing Micrometeoroid Flux" (Nature 251(379-380), 4 October 1974). Hughes gives no basis for any calculation.
(Schadewald, 1990, p.16)
As for Taylor's paper, Schadewald identifies the appropriate distribution equation, makes use of the calculus and shows that even if we extend the range of particles way beyond what was actually detected we would get a layer of dust only 1 inch deep! Schadewald was left wondering where Brown got his 2000 feet of dust! Perhaps, he mused, Brown had moon dust in his eyes when he made that calculation.
I shouldn't tease Dr. Brown since I blew the initial calculations before correcting myself! The equation which Schadewald uses (from Taylor) is:
log(N) = -1.62 - 1.16 log(m)
N is the number of bodies with masses greater than m, which impact a square kilometer of moon per year. The density of the dust is given as 3 grams/cubic centimeter. It does make a difference which units one uses for mass. The context of Schadewald's article suggests that the proper mass units are grams (not kilograms), and a little playing around with the equation makes that reasonably clear. If one erroneously uses kilograms and integrates N(m) over a range of 10-16 kilograms to 1020 kilograms, a figure of 2259 feet of dust may be obtained for a period of 4.6 billion years. Possibly something like that happened in Dr. Brown's calculation. (By the way, if you are not familiar with mathematics, just hop over these little diversions. I dive into the mathematics, at times, to give the more able reader the finer points. You don't need them to get the general drift.)
If I understand the equation properly, a straightforward integration of N(m) is not the most precise method, but it does yield a good approximation to the answers I got. For a mass range of 100Kg to 1000Kg I calculate that 4.6 billion years would deposit a layer of dust 0.107mm (4 thousandths of an inch) thick. For a mass range of 100gms to 1000Kg I get 0.79mm. However, in extending the calculation to extremes, from 10-13 grams to 1023 grams, I came up with 26.4cm (10.4 inches) instead of 2.5cm which Schadewald got. The point is that you wouldn't even get 10.4 inches of dust in 4.6 billion years, being that the formula is not accurate for these extreme ranges. Attempts to inflate this value further, by going to even greater ranges, is simply an abuse of the formula and proves nothing.
Neither the above formula, when properly used, nor actual measurements made in space offer anything close to the huge amounts of cosmic dust needed in this young-earth argument. Of course, a little thing like that would never stop those creationists from circulating it!
Today, armies of creationists, such as Dr. Hovind, carry forth the banner of the cosmic dust argument, and some of them are still using Pettersson's 1960 calculations! As for Dr. Hovind, he seems to have written a new chapter altogether! In his June 15, 1992 debate with Dr. Hilpman in the Royal Hall of the University of Missouri, Dr. Hovid calmly stated that scientists had predicted that 182 feet of cosmic dust would be found on the moon based on an ac ulation of 1 inch every 10,000 years. I played that video segment three times to make sure I had it right! Had he checked those figures he would have found that they represent two different rates, that of 4144 tons/day and a whopping 872,798 tons/day! Compare either figure to the 2.3 tons/day given by Dohnanyi which was based on actual measurements made in space. The cosmic dust argument, having been obsolete for 25 years, has now entered the realm of comedy! Perhaps, I should have said "tragedy" since this is the kind of nonsense creationists want to teach our children.
Did I say "want to teach"? It may interest you to know that a sixth-grade science textbook Observing God's World, published by A Beka Book Publications in 1978, made use of the cosmic dust argument! (Van Till et al, 1988, p.78). It was probably written for one of those private, "Christian" schools which don't teach evolution. I certainly hope that none of our public schools have sunk that low! There's something rotten about foisting such sleazy garbage on children who look to their teachers for knowledge.
For an excellent study of this moon dust argument, read Clarence Menninga (Van Till et al, 1988, pp.67-82). If you do, you will find that there are still more blunders associated with this infamous creationist argument!
A few young-earth creationists do show signs of acute embarrassment, and in them there is some light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. Some of them are trying to set up a review process to weed out errors in the creationist literature. However, I'm afraid that when the last of the bath water is thrown out, no baby will be found!
-------------------------------------------------------
Should I keep going? I can do this all damn day if you want.
Yes don't stop, but wait until the Power Hour reads before you go any further.
Thank you for your adult replies your one of the few reasons I am still reading this topic. Blake on the other hand with all his troll hunter persona is becoming a pain in the ass troll himself. He has yet to address any of the issues put to him.
phyzik. Nice work.
you're either a lazy ass, or you're just doing your usual trolling.
it's really not hard to find the answers to those young earth questions if you really wanted to find them.
my guess is you don't.
It would be easier to read if you didn't have to quote a whole damn page. Just saying.
I believe the earth is billions of years old. Okay, I'm out before Blake has a cow.
Sorry but I am at work and I can only surf the net every 15 minutes, don't take it as being lazy or scared. Trust me the young earth crowd has more unanswered questions than the Darwin loving misguided crowd has.
you're either a lazy ass, or you're just doing your usual trolling.
it's really not hard to find the answers to those young earth questions if you really wanted to find them.
my guess is you don't.
If this man wants to have a copy and paste war i will win and in a huge way!
At work?Sorry but I am at work and I can only surf the net every 15 minutes, don't take it as being lazy or scared. Trust me the young earth crowd has more unanswered questions than the Darwin loving misguided crowd has.
If this man wants to have a copy and paste war i will win and in a huge way!
The quoting serves a purpose in case he decides to edit his questions. We still have the original draft.
You also think your oldest daughter will finish collage drug free with no drinking and no sex. Your just in denial like many others!I believe the earth is billions of years old.
I am not sure if that fits in with his evolution chart, maybe he will have a fish or a monkey!Okay, I'm out before Blake has a cow.
The science is out there peeps. It isn't hard to understand.
talkorigins takes each of mouse's "thought out" young earth questions/dilemmas that are stunningly worded exactly the same as his and debunks each one of them almost in order.Young-earth "proof" #2: Given the rate at which cosmic dust ac ulates, 4.5 billion years would have produced a layer on the moon much deeper than observed. By implication, the earth is also young.
2. The most amazing thing about the cosmic dust argument is that it is still being used! It has coasted along on obsolete evidence, and nothing but obsolete evidence, for the last 25 years!! It nicely illustrates how creationists borrow from each other and never do any outside reading.
The obsolescence of this argument has been brought out in numerous debates and published in countless books, journals, and newsletters. It can be discovered by anyone who exercises his or her library card. It's not a state secret! What does it take to get through to the creationist brain??
The earliest use of the cosmic dust argument that Van Till (Van Till et al, 1988) could find was ..................................... [more]"
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/hovi...ea.html#proof2
amazingly enough, phyzik's answer seems to be worded almost exactly the same as what talkorigins has. what a freak coincidence.
too much.
I've never said such things about my oldest daughter. You are just in denial of scientific facts.The quoting serves a purpose in case he decides to edit his questions. We still have the original draft.
You also think your oldest daughter will finish collage drug free with no drinking and no sex. Your just in denial like many others!
I am not sure if that fits in with his evolution chart, maybe he will have a fish or a monkey!
Oh, and you got a job?
yeah, I found that page and saw each quote of his was exactly the same so I just copied and pastedtalkorigins takes each of mouse's "thought out" young earth questions/dilemmas that are stunningly worded exactly the same as his and debunks each one of them almost in order.
amazingly enough, phyzik's answer seems to be worded almost exactly the same as what talkorigins has. what a freak coincidence.
too much.
what ever he pastes in here, there will be an answer for it on talkorigins. thats why I said I could do this all day.
which is why he is also either just trolling for the of it or a lazy ass.what ever he pastes in here, there will be an answer for it on talkorigins. thats why I said I could do this all day.
sitting here waiting for a cow troll.
so none of the other trolls in this thread are yours?
If you believe the earth is a billion, then you obviously don't believe in the literal version of Genesis, correct?
I still have not seem more than 3 mouse trolls. The rest are Chalupa's.
Wrong. You think like Bigzak does.
Well, I do believe in God but I don't believe that a "day" in biblical terms means 24 hours but yeah, I guess you could say that.sitting here waiting for a cow troll.
so none of the other trolls in this thread are yours?
If you believe the earth is a billion, then you obviously don't believe in the literal version of Genesis, correct?
Bigzak!
thanks, I couldn't remember the name of the other troll maker.
the other troll I thought might be you was probably bigzak.
hunting trolls can be fun, kids.
just curious, how long do you believe a day to be in "biblical terms"?
how about a year in "biblical terms"?
I have no idea and in all honesty that has never been a big issue for me.
Then according to your own words the earth should be as thick as the Sun given it had 4 Billion years to get thicker. You see how the 4 Billion fantasy comes back to bite that ass?
Dude 4 billion years is not enough time? How much time you need?Um, it does escape. Geologists (some anyway) have long known that natural oil seeps occur, and have occurred as long as the Earth's sediments have been generating oil and gas. Oil fields leak their hydrocarbons to the surface, whether on land or beneath the oceans. Hydrocarbons are less dense than rocks and the water they contain, so the oil and gas is continually trying to escape to the surface. Eventually, given enough time, it all does.
Then how come that theory doesn't work with fossils? Maybe Fossils move also and can be dated earlier or later than they had been?Oil and gas do a lot of migrating, and the oil ac ulated in a given reservoir may have recently migrated there from another reservoir. Thus, a given pool of oil may or may not have been there for millions and millions of years. A recent geological shift in the rocks might also increase the leakage of the primary oil pool, which had been hitherto sealed for millions of years. Thus, the mere existence of leaky trapping rocks does not prove that a pool of oil and gas was recently created.
You really want me to believe a huge pool of Oil under Iraq could have once been under Cleveland Ohio? Dude I am not sure where you get your facts from but give me the link in case I need a good laugh.
Hey I am with you on the oil and water thing. I just don't agree with it being there for over 4 Billion , years.The primary migration of oil from 1 to 5 kilometers deep in the earth, where it is produced under a combination of pressure and heat acting on organic matter, probably goes hand in hand with water migration. Certainly, oil and water are often found together, the oil floating on top of the water within permeable rock. The water is squeezed out as the source sediment experiences more and more pressure. Thus, it may interest you to know how fast water migrates down there.
It sounds to me like we both have evidence either way about the oil and pressure I say we call it a draw and move on to the hard to debunk information. tuSome idea of the extremely slow speed of fluid motion to be expected can be gained by considering the movement of ground water at shallow depths in dense clays, classed as "impermeable." Under a moderate hydraulic gradient and a reasonable value of permeability for clay, we come up with flow speeds of ground water on the order of 2 to 3 million years per kilometer [3.2 to 4.8 million years per mile]. Yet the permeability of source shales of petroleum is rated at only one-thousandth as great as for clays tested in the surface environment (Wszolek and Burlingame, 1978, p. 573).
(Strahler, 1987, p.237)
Thus, the primary migration of oil from its place of origin will take far longer than the mere 6000 years or so creationists allow for the age of the earth. Creationists have tried to dance around that figure by quoting special cases of secondary migration or by simple smoke screen tactics, but the problem remains (Strahler, 1987, pp.237-238).
Show me how 4 Billion years at 0.005 seconds per year is not a contradiction in itself. Do the math. And who is to say 0.005 is correct?Wrong. The earth's rotation IS slowing, but at a rate of about 0.005 seconds per year per year. This extrapolates to the earth having a fourteen-hour day 4.6 billion years ago, which is entirely possible.
The rate at which the earth is slowing today is higher than average because the present rate of spin is in resonance with the back-and-forth movement of the oceans.
Also....as the earth’s rotation is slowing down, the moon is gradually receding from earth about 2 inches a year. At that rate, 1 million years ago the moon would have been so close to the earth that it would have fallen into our planet because of the gravitational pull. Also the moon would have been so close that the tides on earth would have been much higher, and would have eroded away the continents and destroyed life.
Is this an answer to my Coral reef question?Fossil rugose corals preserve daily and yearly growth patterns and show that the day was about 22 hours long 370 million years ago, in rough agreement with the 22.7 hours predicted from a constant rate of slowing (Scrutton 1964; Wells 1963).
It has been proven time and time again, radiometric dating has to many flaws I would find another source for your explanations.In the case of the Atlantic Ocean, the sediment varies in thickness. The thinnest sediment is near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge where new sea floor is currently being generated. That is to say, sediment thickness there is zero. The thickest sediment hugs the continental margins, which certainly have more than a few thousand years of ac ulation. Try around 150 million year's worth! Funny, that the measured rate of sea floor spreading, when extrapolated backwards in time, gives the same age for the Atlantic sea floor as does radiometric dating. Funny, how the sediment gets thicker and thicker as one moves away from the sea floor spreading zone! That is, the farther we get from the Mid-Atlantic ridge the thicker the sediment tends to get; that thickness correlates with increased age of the sea floor as determined byradiometric dating as well as the known rate at which the Atlantic is widening.
If he thinks the Earth is thousands of years old what else is he going say?(Funny, how Dr. Hovind always comes up with "a few thousand years" no matter what we are looking at!)
Do you even know who Dan McKenzie is? The man has been put to shame in every debate topics.Here is another interesting but little known fact. Mathematical calculations done by Dan McKenzie in 1967 indicated that an ocean floor, spreading at a few inches per year from a rift which adds new material, would cool and contract. It would sink deeper into the mantle as it contracted. "The process is so undeviating that there is a striking relationship between the age of the sea floor and the depth of water covering it." (Miller, 1983, p.122)
There are just as many professors and scientist all over the globe that have done their own testing none which have been proven either way do you really want to copy and paste every thing some atheist says he discovered?John Sclater and his students at Scripps Ins ution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California, put McKenzie's theory to the test in 1971. They gathered up every scrap of data on the age and depth of the Pacific sea floor. McKenzie's theory was confirmed! The increasing depths of the older portions of the Pacific floor were a result of thermal contraction. Plate tectonics even explains the basic facts about the depth of the Pacific!
Dr. Hovind, who supports that theory, is assuming that salt cannot be removed from the oceans. The more sophisticated creationists, such as Melvin Cook, know better than to make that assumption. Here's what Cook had to say:
The validity of the application of total salt in the ocean in the determination of age turned out to have a very simple answer in the fact shown by Goldschmidt (1954) that it is in steady state and therefore useless as a means of determining the age of the oceans. [Cook, 1966, p.73]
(Dalrymple, 1984, pp.115-116)
Thus, salt is being removed from the oceans as quickly as it is being added by the world's rivers. Consequently, no age can be calculated, save a minimum age based upon an assumption of initial salt content. There is no comfort here for the young-earth creationist.
Now your cherry picking which creationist you quote so that you sound like your right. The bottom-line is 4 billion years is to far away to know what took place and you know it.
Yes, and by the same reasoning 8 germs could populate every cubic inch of available living space on Earth to the tune of 1 million strong in less than a week! That is, if we allow for a generous die-off rate such that the fourth generation has about 40 germs instead of 128, and if we assume that the population divides every hour, each and every cubic inch of living space on the earth (from 100 feet below ground to a mile above) would have 1 million germs after 158 generations. I guess, by creationist reckoning, the earth must be a week old! If it were a few thousand years old, the germ population would have gone through the roof!
Yes, given unlimited living space, an inexhaustible supply of food, a good deal of luck in the early stages, and a high motivation to travel while having more kids than is practical, eight people
could probably populate the earth in a few thousand years. Eight germs could do it in less than a week. Eight bunny rabbits would fall somewhere in between. Eight cats would give us yet another figure. What do any of these figures have to do with the age of the earth? Nothing! What do these figures have to do with actual growth rates? Absolutely nothing!
4 Billion years of people having sex show me the people? You have no solid evidence.
The human exponential growth rate of the last few hundred years is possible only because of technology.If you think lack of food and disease can keep a population from booming then you haven't seen any of the feed the children in Africa commercials.When our ability to stay one jump ahead of starvation and disease fails, when our resources are finally squandered, then you'll see a dramatic change in that growth rate! It will no longer be exponential; it will be disastrous!
That was just a long way of saying you really don't have an answer to where the 4 Billion years of people having sex every day went to?When man lived in scattered tribal groups, which is what he did for 99% of his history, the net human population growth was zero most of the time, just as it is for animals today. Animal populations, especially small animals such as rabbits or mice, often undergo cycles of boom and bust but their net growth is zero. No permanent increase in population can be sustained unless it is supported by a permanent change in the environment. Such a change might include the loss of a predator due to the colonization of new territory, a permanent increase in the food supply due to climatic change or a change in dietary habits, or a variety of other factors. In the case of man, hunting technology, the development of agriculture, and the use of fossil fuels have played major roles. After a favorable change in the environment, a population of animals (or people) may record a permanent jump before leveling off at a zero net growth again. Thus, the growth rate, before technology intervened in a major way, necessarily involved a series of plateaus where the population was in approximate equilibrium with the environment. No doubt, many tribal groups died out. Anthropologists can cite several examples of early human or near-human species, side branches on our evolutionary tree, which left no descendants. There was no assurance that early man would even survive. When favorable changes did occur, large jumps between plateau levels would likely have been exponential. Indeed, the human exponential growth rate of the last 300 years or so can be thought of as one long jump to a new plateau, which has been raised artificially high by technology. Those who imagine that eight people gave rise to everyone living today according to a simple exponential growth curve have demonstrated an inability to think things through.
Your speculating at best.
I am not here to defend Dr. Hovind, and why must you call his science silly? You know how silly you sound talking about how your great great grandfather was a tadpole?Bring on some more if you wish. , Ive got one better. Here's a few more answers to some of your, and Dr. Hovind's, other silly assumptions.
And I am sure you know what it was doing 4 Billion years ago! I like how your billion year old theories hold water but mine don't. When you say something that is happening today you show me how its proff of what has been happening for millions of years. When I show you something that is happening now you say [b]"that doesn't mean it happened long ago"The shrinking-sun argument contains two errors. The worst, by far, is the assumption that if the sun is shrinking today, then it has always been shrinking!
Your starting to get real bias with your weak comebacks.
And going to the zoo shows you really only took 200 years to evolve?That's a little like watching the tide go out and concluding that the water level must have fallen at that rate since the earth began. Therefore, working backwards, much of the land must have been under water a few weeks ago! Since careful inspection shows no signs of such a flood, the earth can't be older than a few weeks!
what kind of Tpark funnel cake response was that?
Now multiply it by 4 Billion yearsObviously, we cannot extend a rate willy-nilly. We do need to know something about the system under study. Tides come and go. No one familiar with tides would assume that the rate of water going out is constant over weeks of time! Just as obvious, at least to the experts, our sun could not have been continuously shrinking over millions of years as described by some creationists. Such a view totally ignores the known forces at work within our sun. Infinitely more likely is the possibility that our sun might alternate between small periods of shrinking and small periods of expansion, a kind of oscillation. Indeed, some scientists believe there may be an 80-day cycle of slight shrinking and expanding.
And your carbon 14 hit or miss technique doesn't prove 4 billion years so we both are speculating.In its formative years, before our sun's core became hot and dense enough to ignite the fusion process and, as a result, check the gravitational collapse, our sun did do some prolonged shrinking. Billions of years from now the depletion of the sun's hydrogen will upset the sun's internal balance, and the sun will again undergo some long term changes. But, that has absolutely nothing to do with the shrinking-sun argument above, which attempts to prove that the solar system is less than 5 million years old.
The same high schools that teaches Evolution as fact? Why would you go there and pull out the High School card? Now you look like a brain washed one sided desperate person. You was doing good when you gave your personal opinions.To sum up our first point, the shrinking-sun argument rests squarely on a naive extension of a rate measured over a relatively short period of time. It's the type of blunder one might find in a high school science project.
Ps: I also was told in high school if I got a boner during gym class I was Gay that doesn't make it true.
An ad hoc attempt to prop up this naive extrapolation boldly declares that our sun is really getting its energy from gravitational collapse alone! An ongoing gravitational collapse of the sun, called the Helmholtz (or Kelvin-Helmholtz) contraction, was the best that scientists could come up with before nuclear fusion was discovered. The heat liberated from vast quan ies of falling matter would be enough to make the sun shine. Then nuclear fusion was discovered. The discovery of nuclear fusion (and the realization that the sun's core had the density and temperature to initiate and sustain nuclear fusion) made it clear since the 1930s that the thermonuclear-fusion process was responsible for the sun's energy. Thermonuclear-fusion would soon stop any Helmholtz contraction. Aside from totally ignoring the last 60 years of solar science, this ad hoc argument also ignores the massive evidence relating to ancient climates. (A much larger sun in our recent geological past would have had a noticeable effect on the climate.) The creationist advocates of the Helmholtz contraction argue that their idea rules out the possibility of past geological ages. Just the opposite is true! The evidence for ancient climates, spanning millions of years, is massive and well do ented; it rules out this ad hoc use of the Helmholtz contraction.
Blunder number two is the unwarranted assumption that the rate of shrinkage reported by Eddy and Boornazian is an established fact. Far from it! The rate of shrinkage was published as an abstract to further scientific discussion, not as a polished paper. Certain creationists nevertheless pounced upon it as though it were the Holy Grail. Before long, serious flaws in its methodology turned up and the data has since been discredited; the full text of their study was never published. It is instructive to note how creationist authors became fixated on that one point even though several studies at the time (or shortly thereafter) drew completely different conclusions.
Some creationists, such as Walter Brown, have tried to pump new life into the argument by quoting additional sources (Lippard, 1990, p.25), but only in vain. In Brown's case, two of the three sources offered were obsolete, and the third actually undercut his position! (Lippard, 1990, p.25). In a rebuttal to Lippard, Walter Brown offered no new studies to back up his "feeling" that the sun is undergoing a small, but continuous shrinkage (Brown, 1990, pp.45-46).
Brown, in his debate with Lippard, then dodged into the missing-neutrino problem in a vain effort to turn it into evidence for his position. (Neutrinos are subatomic particles with no electric charge and little or no mass. They are important here as a calculated by-product of the thermonuclear-fusion process in the sun. The vast majority of neutrinos pass effortlessly through the earth and are, therefore, extremely hard to detect.) To make his case, Brown must demonstrate that the "missing" neutrinos are due to a corresponding lack of nuclear fusion, and that the sun's current output of energy is due, in large part, to gravitational collapse. (A prolonged gravitational collapse of the sun is impossible once the thermonuclear-fusion process gets rolling. A creationist might argue that the coexistence of nuclear fusion and a Helmholtz contraction implies a young sun on its way to equilibrium. However, that would be a very tough row to hoe in that possible oscillations in the sun's diameter and other phenomena unrelated to a true Helmholtz contraction must be ruled out. Thus, Brown's motive for undermining the thermonuclear-fusion process by way of the missing-neutrino problem.)
As there are several possible solutions to the missing-neutrino problem (Lippard, 1990a, p.32), Brown's scenario is an extremely tall order. Even if it were proved that there is a serious deficiency in solar nuclear fusion, that being the cause of the low neutrino count, Brown would still have to prove that the situation was permanent. It could be a temporary glitch or even part of some complex cycle. Thus, any attempt at the present time to use the missing-neutrino problem as support for a shrinking sun is wholly misguided. Furthermore, invoking a Helmholtz contraction in place of thermonuclear fusion is subject to all of the problems listed above.
It was in 1979 that astronomers John Eddy and Aram Boornazian presented their paper and published its abstract: "Secular Decrease in the Solar Diameter, 1836-1953." In the April 1980 issue of ICR's Impact series (Impact #82), Russell Akridge picked up the report and naively extended the shrinkage rate of 5 feet/hour into the indefinite past. As that soon led to an impossible situation, he concluded that the earth was much less than 20 million years old. Soon, Walter Brown, Thomas Barnes, Henry Morris, Hilton Hinderliter, James Hanson, and other creationists were in on the act, and the shrinking-sun argument became a creationist legend. A number of studies have not found any evidence for a continuous shrinking of the sun. Leslie Morrison, for example, drawing on Edmund Halley's observations of the solar eclipse of 1715, concluded that there is no evidence that the sun is shrinking. His findings were reported in the January, 1988 issue of Gemini (no.18, pp.6-8). Gemini is the official journal of the Royal Greenwich Observatory.
Thomas Barnes, Walter Brown, and Henry Morris used the argument for several years after the original report by Eddy and Boornazian was discredited (Van Till, 1986). I guess a lot of creationists still haven't gotten the word. In his debate with Dr. Paul Hilpman, on June 15, 1992 at the Royal Hall of the University of Missouri, Dr. Hovind applied the obsolete, shrinking-sun argument.
Isolated from the corrective of continuing professional investigation and evaluation, the 'creation-science' community continues to employ this unwarranted extrapolation of a discredited report as 'scientific evidence' for a young Earth.
(Van Till, 1986, p.17)
That was true in 1986 and is true today; it will be true for years to come. "Scientific" creationism lives like the proverbial ostrich with its head buried in the sand; it has no effective mechanism to weed out error.
An outstanding study by H. Van Till (Van Till et al, 1988, pp.47-65) beautifully contrasts the sober scientific handling of the findings of John Eddy and Aram Boornazian (who advanced the scientific claim that the sun was shrinking) with the reckless, speculative spin put on it by the "scientific" creationists. The reader might also consult pages 29-39 where Van Till gives us an excellent feeling for what scientific competence, integrity, and judgment are all about. After reading that, one understands why "scientific" creationists are rarely published in the refereed scientific journals.
After reading your quote both sides have flaws and good points, but I didn't see where you proved to me either side was wrong. We both have holes in our theories.
Yes but the difference is I paste to show you why I believe the way I do, You paste to belittle or insult Dr. Hovind and others like him.There. I've even provided you the books and what pages you can read all this from. In other words, I can copy and paste just as well as you can.
There is a huge difference in someone who seeks the truth and someone who just wants to win a debate so they can to look good for others.
The most amazing thing about the cosmic dust argument is that it is still being used! It has coasted along on obsolete evidence, and nothing but obsolete evidence, for the last 25 years!! It nicely illustrates how creationists borrow from each other and never do any outside reading.
The obsolescence of this argument has been brought out in numerous debates and published in countless books, journals, and newsletters. It can be discovered by anyone who exercises his or her library card. It's not a state secret! What does it take to get through to the creationist brain??
Now maybe you know how they feel when you keep using that out dated and debunked geological column and fossil charts.
Im sorry but 4 Billion years of dust doesn't just evaporate and if I am right you guys say the solar system is 20 billion years old?The earliest use of the cosmic dust argument that Van Till (Van Till et al, 1988) could find was in an article by Harold Slusher, which was published in the June 1971 issue of Creation Research Society Quarterly. Slusher made several blunders which are handed down in the "scientific" creationist literature to this very day. In 1974 the cosmic dust argument received its big kick-off from Henry Morris' book, Scientific Creationism. Morris quoted an article by Hans Pettersson in the February 1960 issue of Scientific American. Pettersson's upper estimate for the influx of cosmic dust, a figure he considered risky, was based on particles he collected from two filtration units in the Hawaiian Islands. One was located near the summit of Mauna Loa, Hawaii, and the other near the observatory on Haleakala, Maui. He came up with 39,150 tons/day. Pettersson actually favored a figure about two-thirds less, and he warned his readers that the true figure could be much lower still. Further work was planned in Switzerland.
If any of that was true we would have no sun left and the moon and earth would be touching each other with huge bridge made from dust alone.
I know its hard to imagine but 20 billion years is a long time try waiting 2000 years and you will see my point.
There are just as many quotes that say otherwise.This caution seems to have been lost on Henry Morris, who may have been relying on Slusher's work, and he ignored Pettersson's preferred value in favor of his highest estimate. By the time the Impact insert #110 of Acts & Facts (August 1982) came out, sporting as it did a collection of young-earth claims, the reader was being told that just prior to the manned, moon landing scientists were worried about a thick layer of dust. (Again, we have echoes of Slusher's article.) Of course, the sea of cosmic dust did not materialize, and the Impact article claimed a victory for creation science which supports a young moon without much cosmic dust. Steven Shore shows that this entire scenario is wrongheaded. Let's get a proper perspective on history:
In a conference held in late 1963, on the Lunar Surface Layer, McCracken and Dublin state that
"The lunar surface layer thus formed would, therefore, consist of a mixture of lunar material and interplanetary material (primarily of cometary origin) from 10 cm to 1 m thick. The low value for the accretion rate for the small particles is not adequate to produce large scale dust erosion or to form deep layers of dust on the moon, for the flux has probably remained fairly constant during the past several billion years." (p. 204)
(Shore, 1984, p.34)
In 1965, a conference was held on the nature of the lunar surface. The basic conclusion of this conference was that both from the optical properties of the scattering of sunlight observed from the Earth, and from the early Ranger photographs, there was no evidence for an extensive dust layer.
(Shore, 1984, p.34)
Thus, several years before men landed on the moon there was a general feeling that our astronauts would not be greeted by vast layers of cosmic dust. Although direct confirmation was not yet at hand, thus allowing a few dissenting opinions, few scientists expected even as much as three feet of cosmic dust on the moon. In May 1966 Surveyor I had landed on the moon, thus putting an end to any lingering doubts about a manned landing sinking in dust.
The cosmic dust argument was already obsolete by the time Henry Morris included it in his book, Scientific Creationism. It was already obsolete when Harold Slusher wrote his article three years earlier.
Since the late 1960s, much better and more direct measurements of the meteoritic influx to the Earth have been available from satellite penetration data. In a comprehensive review article, Dohnanyi [1972, Icarus 17: 1-48] showed that the mass of meteoritic material impinging on the Earth is only about 22,000 tons per year [60 tons/day]... Other recent estimates of the mass of interplanetary matter reaching the Earth from space, based on satellite-borne detectors, range from about 11,000 to 18,000 tons per year (67) [30-49 tons/day]; estimates based on the cosmic-dust content of deep-sea sediment are comparable (e.g., 11, 103).
(Dalrymple, 1984, p.109)
Thus, we have good satellite data from the late 1960s in addition to estimates from deep-sea sediment content, the latter going back to at least 1968 and yielding comparable figures. Satellite data goes back even further. On August 9-13, 1965 a symposium on meteor orbits and dust was sponsored by NASA and the Smithsonian Ins ute (Van Till et al, 1988, p.70). Results from the early microphone-type dust detectors (recording clicks as bits of space dust struck at high speeds) were compared with penetration detectors (which recorded holes punched in thin foil). At the time there was no clear explanation as to why the former method gave such higher counts, sometimes as much as a 100 times that of the penetration detectors. Shortly afterwards it was learned that the microphone-type detectors also picked up spacecraft noises due to thermal expansion and contraction as well as effects caused by solar flares and cosmic rays. Even so, those early detectors gave results which were 10 to 100 times smaller than Pettersson's figure.
Dohnanyi's figure of 60 tons/day includes everything from slowly settling dust to the average input of meteorites.
Dohnanyi's figure for the moon (2 x 10-9 grams/square centimeter per year) yields 2.3 tons/day. In 4.5 billion years a layer of about one and a half inches of cosmic dust would ac ulate on the moon. (On the moon, of course, a ton would weigh much less. We're actually talking about a mass that would weigh 2.3 tons on Earth.)
In his book Age of the Cosmos, published in 1980, Harold Slusher devoted a chapter to the amount of space dust raining down on the earth. He dwells on Pettersson's 1960 figure of 39,000 tons/day and even produces a 1967 figure which gives a whopping 700,000 tons/day! Alan Hayward, a respected physicist and Bible-believing Christian, felt it necessary to make the following observation:
To write like that in 1980 was inexcusable. The two sources he quotes were dated 1960 and 1967--hopelessly out of date in a fast-changing area of science. They merely provide estimates of what the influx of meteoritic dust might possibly be.
But we no longer have to rely on estimates. A paper, published four years before Slusher's book, described how the amount of meteoritic dust in space has now been measured, with detectors mounted on satellites.
(Hayward, 1985, pp.142-143)
Hayward was referring to a July 1976 article by D. W. Hughes, published in the New Scientist, which gave a figure of 48 tons/day--enough to cover the earth with about 1.5 inches of dust during the earth's lifetime! It's nearly a 1000 times smaller than Pettersson's figure, and it utterly destroys the cosmic dust argument.
Because of the incredible amount of space junk orbiting the earth, modern estimates of incoming dust have become more difficult. However, with the 1990 retrieval of the Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF) satellite, which spent nearly six years in orbit, possibly the clearest figure yet is now available for the influx of space dust.
In the October 22, 1993, Science, Stanley G. Love and Donald E. Brownlee (University of Washington) describe their analysis of 761 small impact craters found on some of LDEF's aluminum-alloy plates. These surfaces continuously faced spaceward while the satellite was in orbit. ...As the researcher explain, this location was superbly suited for their study. It was largely protected from orbital debris and secondary impacts from collisions elsewhere on the satellite, and in pointing
outward it also sampled a variety of interplanetary directions as LDEF orbited the Earth.
(Sky & Telescope, March 1994, p.13)
The article goes on to explain that dust particles as small as 35 trillionths of an ounce (10-9 grams) were detected. Love and Brownlee concluded that each year the earth collects about 40,000 metric tons (121 tons/day) which is a bit higher than the less direct figures given above. The results are "comparable to rates crudely calculated from the long-term ac ulation of the rare element iridium in sea sediment and Antarctic ice."
Thus, the very latest, and possibly the best, cosmic dust influx measurement dooms the creationist argument once again. (How many strikes does it take before you're out in creationland? Answer: Who knows? They play by no rules and have no referees.) In summary, the general scientific consensus, going back to the 1960s, has been borne out by numerous measurements during the last 25 years.
Perhaps these constant reminders about obsolete data finally got to Henry Morris. Yet, he did not drop the cosmic dust argument like a hot potato, as one might expect. To the contrary, his second edition of Scientific Creationism (1985) expanded his footnote reference to Pettersson to suggest that a much more recent source from NASA gave an even larger influx of dust! The reader was referred to: "G.S. Hawkins, Ed., Meteor Orbits and Dust, published by NASA, 1976" (Wheeler, 1987, p.14). Thus, Morris appeared to have an unimpeachable source which was even more recent than Dohnanyi's figure!
Frank Lovell, suspecting that years of direct measurement from space (supported by sea floor studies) could not be that wrong, smelling a rat as it were, checked up on the source. It turned out that the actual date was 1967! The digits had been reversed (Wheeler, 1987, pp.14-15). Furthermore, the figure quoted by Morris (200 million tons of dust each year) was not given in the original source! It was a calculation based on the original source, done by an unnamed "creationist physicist" who botched it! The unsuspecting reader would have assumed that the rate had the official blessing of NASA. Astronomer Larry W. Esposito had some choice words concerning this incredible fiasco by Henry Morris:
...the work is incorrectly cited, outdated, from a non-referenced symposium publication, based on unreliable data. The calculation multiplies together unrelated numbers: the product of these factors is not a reliable estimation of the current cosmic dust deposition rate.
(Wheeler, 1987, p.15)
Wheeler and Lovell were party to another strange, creationist tale of reversed digits! They had written a letter to a religious magazine, Concern, published in Louisville, Kentucky, and had criticized an article which had used Pettersson's obsolete figure for cosmic dust influx. Concern published that letter along with a reply from the author of the original article. The author stated that Richard Bliss (a member of the Ins ute for Creation Research) had written the following to him in a letter:
It seems that we have estimates on meteor dust deposition, based on various assumptions, of the total volume of incoming meteoritic material ranging from 800,000 to 1 x 106 tons per day. You can get this information from the following sources:
1. Space Handbook, Astronautics and its Applications by R.W. Beucherin and staff of the Rand Corporation, Random House, NY 1959.
2. Nazarove, I.N. Rocket and Satellite Investigations of Meteors presented at the fifth meeting of the COMITE Speciale De I'annee Geophysique International, Moscow, August 1985.
(Wheeler, 1987, p.15)
The first source was even more obsolete than Pettersson's, but the second one was dated 1985. In response to a query, Bliss said that he got the figures from Harold Slusher, also of ICR. Several attempts to get through to Slusher failed.
Finally it occurred to us that the date cited for this reference, like that of Morris, might be incorrect. The International Geophysical Year ("I'annee Geophysique International") was 1957-1958, and I found in Nature [182:294 (1958)] that the fifth meeting of the Special Committee was held in Moscow in July-August 1958, and that it included a symposium on the rocket and satellite program; this obviously was the source of Slusher's reference.
(Wheeler, 1987, p.15)
Thus, we have a second case of inverted digits! A complaint about obsolete data was answered with data even more obsolete!! The average reader, of course, would never have guessed that the citation was bogus.
Thus, creationism carried its obsolete banner ever forward. In 1989, Walter Brown came out with the 5th edition of his booklet In the Beginning. He was no longer quoting Pettersson as was the case in older editions. Nevertheless, he calculated that in 4.6 billion years 2,000 feet of dust should have ac ulated on the moon.
Brown says his figure is based on data from two sources, Stuart R. Taylor's Lunar Science: A Post-Apollo View (New York: Pergamon Press, 1975, p.92) and David W. Hughes's "The Changing Micrometeoroid Flux" (Nature 251(379-380), 4 October 1974). Hughes gives no basis for any calculation.
(Schadewald, 1990, p.16)
As for Taylor's paper, Schadewald identifies the appropriate distribution equation, makes use of the calculus and shows that even if we extend the range of particles way beyond what was actually detected we would get a layer of dust only 1 inch deep! Schadewald was left wondering where Brown got his 2000 feet of dust! Perhaps, he mused, Brown had moon dust in his eyes when he made that calculation.
I shouldn't tease Dr. Brown since I blew the initial calculations before correcting myself! The equation which Schadewald uses (from Taylor) is:
log(N) = -1.62 - 1.16 log(m)
N is the number of bodies with masses greater than m, which impact a square kilometer of moon per year. The density of the dust is given as 3 grams/cubic centimeter. It does make a difference which units one uses for mass. The context of Schadewald's article suggests that the proper mass units are grams (not kilograms), and a little playing around with the equation makes that reasonably clear. If one erroneously uses kilograms and integrates N(m) over a range of 10-16 kilograms to 1020 kilograms, a figure of 2259 feet of dust may be obtained for a period of 4.6 billion years. Possibly something like that happened in Dr. Brown's calculation. (By the way, if you are not familiar with mathematics, just hop over these little diversions. I dive into the mathematics, at times, to give the more able reader the finer points. You don't need them to get the general drift.)
If I understand the equation properly, a straightforward integration of N(m) is not the most precise method, but it does yield a good approximation to the answers I got. For a mass range of 100Kg to 1000Kg I calculate that 4.6 billion years would deposit a layer of dust 0.107mm (4 thousandths of an inch) thick. For a mass range of 100gms to 1000Kg I get 0.79mm. However, in extending the calculation to extremes, from 10-13 grams to 1023 grams, I came up with 26.4cm (10.4 inches) instead of 2.5cm which Schadewald got. The point is that you wouldn't even get 10.4 inches of dust in 4.6 billion years, being that the formula is not accurate for these extreme ranges. Attempts to inflate this value further, by going to even greater ranges, is simply an abuse of the formula and proves nothing.
Neither the above formula, when properly used, nor actual measurements made in space offer anything close to the huge amounts of cosmic dust needed in this young-earth argument. Of course, a little thing like that would never stop those creationists from circulating it!
Today, armies of creationists, such as Dr. Hovind, carry forth the banner of the cosmic dust argument, and some of them are still using Pettersson's 1960 calculations! As for Dr. Hovind, he seems to have written a new chapter altogether! In his June 15, 1992 debate with Dr. Hilpman in the Royal Hall of the University of Missouri, Dr. Hovid calmly stated that scientists had predicted that 182 feet of cosmic dust would be found on the moon based on an ac ulation of 1 inch every 10,000 years. I played that video segment three times to make sure I had it right! Had he checked those figures he would have found that they represent two different rates, that of 4144 tons/day and a whopping 872,798 tons/day! Compare either figure to the 2.3 tons/day given by Dohnanyi which was based on actual measurements made in space. The cosmic dust argument, having been obsolete for 25 years, has now entered the realm of comedy! Perhaps, I should have said "tragedy" since this is the kind of nonsense creationists want to teach our children.
Did I say "want to teach"? It may interest you to know that a sixth-grade science textbook Observing God's World, published by A Beka Book Publications in 1978, made use of the cosmic dust argument! (Van Till et al, 1988, p.78). It was probably written for one of those private, "Christian" schools which don't teach evolution. I certainly hope that none of our public schools have sunk that low! There's something rotten about foisting such sleazy garbage on children who look to their teachers for knowledge.
For an excellent study of this moon dust argument, read Clarence Menninga (Van Till et al, 1988, pp.67-82). If you do, you will find that there are still more blunders associated with this infamous creationist argument!
To be honest I am willing to accept this new evidence and will refrain from using moon dust as a weapon to prove the earth is not 4 billion years old. Something the short fused narrow minded Atheist wont do.
In fact a Creation website has accepted the new evidence.
Moon-dust argument no longer useful
First published:
Creation 15(4):22
September 1993
For years, a common and apparently valid argument for a recent creation was to use uniformitarian assumptions to argue that the amount of dust on the moon was less than 10,000 years’ worth.
In an important paper, geologist Dr Andrew Snelling from Australia’s Creation Science Foundation [now Answers in Genesis], and former Ins ute for Creation Research graduate student Dave Rush, have examined in minute detail all the evidence relating to this argument.1 They have shown that:
- The amount of dust coming annually on to the earth/moon is much smaller than the amount estimated by (noncreationists) Pettersson, on which the argument is usually based.
- Uniformitarian assumptions cannot therefore justifiably be turned against evolutionists to argue for a young age.
- Most NASA scientists, in fact, were convinced before the Apollo landings that there was not much dust likely to be found there.
Interestingly, Snelling and Rush’s research found that anti-creationist critics, in their haste to demolish the argument, had used figures which err greatly in the opposite direction.
For example, theistic evolutionists from Calvin College, after scathingly critiquing creationists for alleged erroneous handling of data, do precisely that and arrive at a figure for moon-dust influx only about one-twentieth of that which should have been correctly concluded from the literature they consulted. 2
The moon-dust argument was easy to understand and explain. Nevertheless, as we have indicated before, creationists as well as evolutionists need to be prepared to re-examine arguments as new and better data emerges.
But in the water itself is the very germ needed to start evolution all over again so the baby is actually in the water it just needs 4 billion years to show up.A few young-earth creationists do show signs of acute embarrassment, and in them there is some light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. Some of them are trying to set up a review process to weed out errors in the creationist literature. However, I'm afraid that when the last of the bath water is thrown out, no baby will be found!
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I rather you post your personal opinions rather than hunt the www for Debunk Dr, Hovind websites.Should I keep going? I can do this all damn day if you want.
You still haven't proved to me the earth is [b]4 Billion[/b/ years old........
Last edited by The Power Hour.; 05-28-2009 at 11:14 AM.
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