Yes there is a pressure gradient. My point was about whether or not a pressurized system (of any amount of pressure) can exist directly adjacent to a 1 x 10 -11 torr vacuum without a physical barrier separating the two. What say you?
Of course, with the earthâs atmosphere, there is a physical barrier. Gravity.
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10^-11 torr is (I think) well beyond the capabilities of our best vacuum pumps. So it is well within what would be called the purest vacuum we could produce. If you want to quibble and say, well it isnât really a vacuum, then, in that case none of space would qualify either since even intergalactic space is thought to have some few atoms per cubic meter, and interstellar space, magnitudes more than that. But to do that is to rob our common vocabulary of a necessary and useful and accurate-enough word.
Thank you for acknowledging that there isnât anything in the scriptures that would even hint that the days of creation arenât literal - leaving us only the many scriptures that make clear they are.
As for your claim that day without the sun canât be literal, it is a claim that contradicts scripture.
Day One: God created light and separated light from darkness, and named this dark/light cycle (and especially the illuminated portion of it) âdayâ.
Day Four: God created the sun, moon and stars, and placed them into the firmament (which He named âheavenâ) that separates the waters above the firmament from the waters below it.
The first three days of our world required no sun. And in the end?
Revelation 21⌠23And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb⌠25and its gates will never be shut by dayâand there will be no night there.
There will again be day without the sun - just as there was the first three days.
So you keep saying⌠all the while admitting that there is nothing written in the Bible itself to support your claim.
Nothing is âan issueâ for people who can just make any story up on the fly to accommodate any anomaly. So these trees just happened to have been buried rapidly? Well, doesnât the strata in which these trees are found extend for many miles - meaning it was all laid down rapidly? And if that area was laid down rapidly, why not all of our fossil layers?
And itâs not just trees. It is delicate leaves, whales, and even jellyfish. But the point is that Strata A absolutely accumulated over millions of years⌠UNTIL a polystrate fossil is found spanning it. Then, that part (and that part only) must have been laid down rapidly. In other words, polystrate fossils prove that many strata were laid down very rapidly, and only a faith-based belief in deep time uniformitarianism argues that ANY deposit anywhere in the world was laid down over the course of millions of years.
How exactly were these deformation rates assessed? And what does it mean that they were âassessedâ - as opposed to âestablishedâ or âverifiedâ?
Yes I do. Do you understand my argument that you are not using honest and stable weights and measures, rather those which can be adjusted any time the gold actually weighs X, but you are convinced that it should weigh Y?
Then why was she immediately and viciously attacked at first - before the âconsensusâ settled on, âOf course weâve always known that soft tissue can remain intact for millions and even billions of years you stupid YECs!â ? 
The only thing that changes about orbiting material that gets included due to expansion of the event horizon is that it is now inside rather than outside; crossing the event horizon doesnât apply a force to change the orbits. Itâs not so much that âall directions then face the singularityâ (if there is a singularity), itâs that there are no longer any paths that lead away from the singularity; thus the singularity has become for that orbiting matter an inevitability.
Consider a particle of that orbiting matter: when (not if) it collides with another particle, its degrees of freedom are more limited than before because it cannot obtain enough energy from that collision to move to a higher orbit; it can theoretically keep its altitude from the center while changing its orbit, but that is a very small set of the possibilities compared to the ways in which it can be knocked lower â and if it does remain at the same altitude then the particle that struck it is almost certainly going to be kicked into a lower orbit. The singularity has become an event in the particleâs future that cannot be avoided.
The question is why would God speak in human language when there were no humans!
No, because there is no other logical choice: either the worldview of the writer is involved in some finite amount, or it isnât involved at all; this is a simple fact of math â if something is not zero, that includes the set of all non-zero numbers, and the only set left is zero.
The bit about a number only applies in a definite consecutive sequence, which the grammar of the passage does not give.
As for âevening ⌠morningâ, that delineates the time of darkness, not that of light.
What applies to time when it is defined by sun and moon and counted by humans does not necessarily apply when those are not present.
The âequationâ between days and days still works if one kind is divine days. FOr that matter, it still works if one set is Martian days and the other is Earth days!
Thereâs an option you overlook, or perhaps ignore since it has been pointed out before, and thatâs that the first Genesis Creation account is ancient literature that was not written to satisfy people who would rather read a translation like it was their grandfatherâs diary of events he experienced, it is something that has to be read as the ancient literature it is. âMetaphorically/parabolicallyâ are not really even choices on the menu because they really arenât types of ancient near eastern literature.
To understand ancient literature you have to have a grasp of the worldview of the culture in which it was written, and that means the worldview of the writer and his audience. Without such an understanding it isnât possible to do anything but read into a piece of literature what you expect to find.
You should watch this:
He fails to give a full definition of ârestâ but the main point is clear. He gets into a lot more detail here:
As other scholars have noted, he goes a bit overboard on his main point but that doesnât make it wrong.
You offer nothing from scripture to support your position; nowhere does the Bible claim to speak about science, nowhere does it make any assertion that it is in the least interested in conforming to a modern scientific worldview. You just claim that you can interpret ancient literature without any need for study â and that means that youâre just imposing your own opinions on the text, not actually reading the text itself.
If offer the text itself and what it says and what it doesnât. A big one of the latter is that it doesnât say the first days are solar Earth/human days, nor does it say that they were consecutive days â and I refuse to claim about the text anything it does not claim for itself, which you do quite freely.
Youâre right that Genesis isnât metaphor or parable, but that doesnât mean it is what your uninformed opinion claims; it means discovering what kind of literature it is â something Professor John Walton tackles from one side quite well; watch the videos above to get a handle on that aspect. [Itâs also another kind of literature at the same time, though I canât find any videos presenting that.]
Heâs not saying itâs a parable! Heâs using parable as an example of a kind of literature that isnât literal history. There are other kinds, but his point is to note that itâs dishonest to assume that any ancient text, including this one, is what it appears to be to uneducated eyes.
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Yes â the misinterpretation lies in your mind which insists that you can interpret the scriptures without having to actually learn about them. In actuality thereâs lots of room for (mis)interpretation in those words, especially when one refuses to respect it as ancient literature written by an ancient writer to be heard by ancient people who had a far different worldview than we do.
Youâve been given a scriptural reason, actually several, including:
- it wasnât written in English
- it was written as ancient literature
- the ancient writer had a totally different set of types of literature than we have, so it is not any kind of literature we have a clue about without serious education
If you donât consider these facts about the first Genesis Creation account to be scriptural reasons, then you have no grasp of what a scriptural reason is.
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Your argument is completely unsubstantiated. You have not given a single example of a measurement âwhich can be adjusted any time the gold actually weighs X, but you are convinced that it should weigh Yâ as you claim. And no, soft tissue in dinosaur fossils doesnât count because that is primarily qualitative rather than quantitative.
Even if you had given an example, in order to justify your claim that the earth is young, you would need to demonstrate all of the following:
- That the adjustments concerned were by a factor of a million and not just a few percent.
- That there was not a legitimate reason for the adjustments concerned, e.g. accounting for sources of error such as contamination.
- That the adjustments concerned were being applied systematically, right across the board, to all measurements indicating that the earth is old, and not just a tiny handful of them. And bear in mind that there are millions of such measurements, taken using hundreds of different methods.
Itâs called âquality control.â Every novel finding in science has to be scrutinised, challenged, and reproduced by other researchers before it can be accepted. If this werenât the case then you would be granting a free pass to astrology, homeopathy, water divining, feng shui, reading tea leaves, and tobacco companies claiming that smoking is good for you.
The consensus settled on no such thing. The whole point is that the soft tissue hadnât remained intact. It had decayed into ultimately stable end products. Iâve already made this point. Were you actually paying attention?
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That fits the evil scientist vs sanctified mind dichotomy, but the actual story is very different.
Mary Schweitzer made an extraordinary discovery. Science does not presume every purported advance is true until demonstrated otherwise, rather the opposite. There was indeed much debate and justified skepticism that followed her remarkable findings. Anybody who is unduly thin skinned over that discussion should not go into science. A scientist is expected to be able to defend her work. Earning a doctorate involves a formal defense of a thesis. That is in contrast to associating with creationist organizations, which involves signing a statement of faith whereby one does not have to defend anything.
Schweitzer herself stated to Biologos
The scientific response was exactly what it should be: a âwait and seeâ response. I have a lot of respect for the people who wouldnât just immediately accept our results.
As a matter of the record, however, Schweitzerâs work met with a generally fair reception and great interest. She was accepted for publication in well recognized peer reviewed journals. And the response from popular Smithsonian Magazine Dinosaur Shocker was hardly a vicious attack.
Probing a 68-million-year-old T. rex, Mary Schweitzer stumbled upon astonishing signs of life that may radically change our view of the ancient beasts
So Schweitzer herself does not complain that she was viciously attacked by scientists. Who has unfortunately treated her miserably?
Sheâs horrified that some Christians accuse her of hiding the true meaning of her data. âThey treat you really bad,â she says. âThey twist your words and they manipulate your data.â
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LOL
You totally missed the point, which was that you are using a false position for your criteria.
The truth is that âBible onlyâ is not biblical, itâs an artificial limit imposed by humans.
Iâve provided scriptural reason that the days arenât literal, you just donât want to face it.
I donât even know where to begin to straighten it out, especially when your mind is tightly closed to actual science. There are many, many different formation with many different kinds of structures and there are objective ways of determining the ages.
The real problem isyou have a totally subjective approach to things and project that onto science. So you donât get that itâs YECist âscientistsâ that make things up on the fly to try to avoid the truth that God has set before us in Creation.
The rates were tested in labs. How do you test the deformation rate of minerals? You try to deform them, and you measure things with very precise instrumentation.
BTW, the difference between âassessedâ and âestablishedâ is that lab conditions do not precisely match actual geological conditions, so that the rates might be off and the mountains could actually be far older than the lab results would indicate.
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I bumped into a YECer who was insisting that sheâd found actual live cells and anything else was a cover-up.
Are the days in genesis 1 literally days? I would say they are meant to be understood as actual days. Just like the trees there are actually trees and the men and women were actually human and so on.
But the story itself is a myth. Itâs not a historical account with snippets of science. Just like in â The Frankenstein Theory â found footage film the trees in the movie are real trees, the people are actually people playing roles and so on. Itâs still a work of fiction.
So the days to me seem to be actual days, but itâs still within a fictional creation story.
Romans 1:20⌠For since the creation of the world Godâs invisible qualitiesâhis eternal power and divine natureâhave been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
Only one of these statements is rational. A rational mind observes a finely tuned world full of complicated living things that âhave the appearance of having been designed for a purposeâ and concludes that those things were designed for a purpose.
I have it queued. Listen for 30 secondsâŚ
Leslie Stahl: The things Mary was finding⌠pose a radical challenge to the existing rules of science - that organic material canât survive even a million years, let alone 68 million. Mary, Jack and their team published their findings in a series of papers in the journal Science, and were promptly attacked.
Why were they promptly attacked, James?
So nothing there is countering evolution. Itâs just new information. Itâs good that scientists are skeptical. It seems the bulk are on board now.
I wonder if it will persuade any YECist of evolution once we do begin mining genetic material to create a â Dino-chicken â and I also wonder who will see the B class low budget tubi original Jurassic Farm lol.
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This confuses me. Lack of oxygen is a major contributor to altitude sickness. There is allegedly the same percentage of oxygen molecules at higher altitudes, but less of the molecules that make up our atmosphere in general - and therefore less oxygen as well.
But even the 5 PSI at the top of Everest requires not only wall to wall blanket coverage of air molecules, but for them to be packed together so tightly that they are pressing hard upon each other. So where is this âlackâ of air to breathe?
And if there is a place where there were actually voids between the individual air molecules, then you certainly couldnât apply the term âair pressureâ to that place - because there wouldnât even be enough molecules to provide blanket coverage of that area, let alone so much of an overabundance of them that they would all be squishing hard against each other and deforming themselves.
For example, there is a lot more water pressure at the bottom of the ocean than at the top. But that doesnât mean that the uppermost layer of the ocean has voids where there is no H2O, right? The very word âpressureâ requires an area to not only be chock full of molecules - but to be overly full to the point that the molecules are pressing against each other (and the walls of a physical barrier).
And that must then, by necessity, be the case with the peak of Everest. You canât have even 5 PSI unless the entire area is not only saturated with air molecules, but oversaturated to the point that they are all squishing against each other like sardines packed very tightly in a can.
Iâve often wondered if we are just describing it wrong. What if sea level is saturated by with air molecules but zero pressure? Then at 10,000 feet youâd have zero minus 5, meaning not enough molecules to saturate - but floating around with voids in between them. And at Everest it would be zero minus 10 or whatever, meaning even more voids between the individual air molecules we need to breathe correctly.
Any thoughts?
Roughly speaking, water is incompressible because in liquid state the molecules are touching but free to move and jostle around each other. That is why hydraulics are used in back hoes and such. Gases on the other hand, including the atmosphere, are compressible because they are not packed together nor saturated, but ricocheting off each other in every direction. At lower pressures, you can squeeze against that pneumatic force, like with a bicycle tire pump. The density of gases is much less than a substance in liquid state. As density is weight per volume, and the weight is matter of the number of molecules, and gas states are much less dense than liquid states, that means that the number of molecules of air per volume is less. As you climb the mountain the air gets thinner, and there is more and more void between molecules.
Sea level is nominally gage pressure, which when converted to absolute pressure is about 14.7 PSI or 101 kPa; far from saturated.
There will also be âdayâ without the sun in Jesusâ coming kingdom, and therefore no rational reason to assume that âdayâ requires the particular light in the sky that God called the sun - especially when, as you point out, there was no sun until Day four.
So to me itâs odd that you would attempt to correct Godâs own account of how He created our world, armed only with your erroneous and scripturally inaccurate assertion that âlightâ, âeveningâ, âmorningâ and âdayâ are somehow dependent upon one particular light that God placed in the firmament.
Hey Ron, can you offer one single scriptural teaching that makes it abundantly clear that we are not supposed to take the creation account literally? If not, then arenât you just a flawed human being trying to argue with God Himself about the method and timing involved in the world that He created for us?