Perhaps…. But I still hold them accountable because anyone with even a 12th grade education should have taken enough biology and geology to understand when something is being discussed that’s just not lining up with the scientific consensus and then knowing that double check from credible sources. There is no excuse in my opinion for adults to push young earth creationism.
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- What have you got against Free Will and Poor Judgement?
If you really want to know I’m simply sick and tired of adults with 6th grade science understanding making up the bulk of places like the Bible Belt and filling up chats and places like IG with trollish behavior driving thousands and thousands of teens and young adults away. I meet dozens and dozens of ex christians that are great people and they hate god because of people who believe in things like hell as a place of eternal conscious torment, and they make young adults feel like they have to reject science or God and they just keep popping out more and more kids who don’t care about the environment, don’t care about real science and instead they care about things like “ celebrating Halloween is satanic and horror movies are satanic and evolution is Satan and evolutionists and queers will burn forever in hell fire and so on. All all young earth creationist are also conservatives and so on. There are outliers, but those outliers are just that. Far and between outliers.
For me, I think young earth creationism’s foundation is hatred and stupidity. I think teachers that teach it at public schools should be fired and I think teachers at private school that teaches it should be the reason their school loses accreditation. Once they shrivel up to the size of flat earthers, I won’t ever really have to think about them. But until then, it’s a major and serious blight to humanity.
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What irritates me is that they generally do so with only a fifth-grade Sunday School flannel-board level of understanding if the scriptures. They talk about relying on the Bible when what they actually rely on is their own views as imposed on and justified by the Bible.
Personally I consider those people to be giving Satan worship by surrendering a day to him that isn’t his! It’s All Saints Eve, so why aren’t they taking it captive by sending their kids out, and going themselves, as various saints?
I used to get “Dungeons and Dragons is satanic” right up until one of my players became a Christian because of playing in my game – that really shredded some people’s minds.
I’d say Egotism rather than hatred – it relies on the assumption that they can understand the Bible without doing even the basic necessary homework. That’s just arrogant.
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- And I say neither egotism nor hatred. I think Tania Lombrozo is on to something: It’s the chronological story telling in Genesis.
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I like this answer. It doesn’t make sense, but it shows a lively imagination and intelligence.
It honestly seems that their struggles are mine–I tended to criticize evolutionists unfairly, as “others,” to some extent, prior to realizing I was wrong. I have the same tendency now, towards those who believed as I do. I feel the same toward other people I don’t understand–but I’m wrong. It seems it is really those who display understanding and a listening ear, who realize that everyone has a different background, that stick out. It is really hard.
Thanks.
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So Erik, are you a Seventh Day Adventist?
I am calvinist. My response was to paleomalacologist. The mechanism that he describes is a perpetual motion machine. Nice but not real.
Thanks for the info. Fun fact: This thread and most of the other YEC-based threads around here were started by a Sabbath-keeping Seventh Day Adventist who believes in Free Will, “Sleeping Souls after death”, annihilation instead of Hell,the Arminian view of Atonement, the Investigative Judgement, and thinks all non-sabbath Day worshipers interpret their Bible incorrectly. It should be interesting to see how well you two dance together.
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How do flow under gravity and dissolution and re-deposition require perpetual motion machine-style breaking of physical laws?
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Echoing @Paraleptopecten’s response. Or more succinctly, huh?
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It’s a perpetual motion machinestyle breaking of physical laws when one suggests that bacteria eat salt, penetrate salt rock and simultaniously leave not any trace behind, did not modify physical or chemical composition on its way. That means that the bacteria had no metabolism while digging and “ eating”.
Where did the statements after “eat salt, penetrate salt rock” come from in the other quote? I don’t see anything about leaving no trace and not modifying the salt. What the first quote proposes is holes getting squished back shut by the rock dissolving and recrystallizing, or flowing; and both of those are happening constantly in salt deposits.
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You can find the statement above (written by your familymember?):
And the suggestion that bacteria "eat their way into the rock without leaving a trace behind " did I read from the sentence:
Maybe, I overinterpreted this last sentence.
I disagree that inside a huge mass of halite, there is constantly dissolving, recrystallization and flowing. No doubt that these processes are present at some time and some place, but in studying halite, at many times, the original patterns of deposition are easily recognized. When patterns show that halite had flowed, it is mostly recognized that flowing of salt had occurred long, long ago.
That’s impossible, as you can clearly imagine. I regard my belief as closely related to and I read books with appreciation of Augustine, Calvin and Herman Bavinck.
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I come from a Reformed Church in America (RCA) and Christian Reformed (CRC) Dutch background–the leaders of Biologos (Haarsmas) and many others are quite Calvinist (though I currently attend a Baptist church with Calvinist leanings; though I tend to be more Arminian, myself). It’s interesting to see how much confluence there is among the various traditions. It’d be interesting to see, in the spirit of the Pentecostal interview earlier on “Language of God,” and Dr Lamoureux, what gifts the various perspectives can bring to understanding the world, science and the Bible.
For example, a video series the Haarsmas produced was originally geared to the Reformed perspective, I think. I think you could bring some good insight.
Thanks.
Although it’s slow and often deep in the ground, and so not easy to watch, halite does indeed flow with constant recrystallization. The flow of halite is in fact quite important in petroleum exploration. Salt domes form as diapirs - a mass of salt under pressure bulges and pushes its way up, bending and breaking through overlying layers. The bent up edge of a permeable sedimentary layer right next to the salt makes a good place to trap oil or gas.
Water interacting with halite will produce dissolution and recrystallization as well. These processes are ongoing. For example, reports of wood and insects found in salt in the Himalayan region suggested that the layers were geologically relatively younger, but other evidence pointed to the salt being far older than wood or insects. Further examination showed that the wood and insects were modern contamination. Depending on how gradual the processes are, recrystallization can preserve original structures.
Of course, bacteria can’t live on salt alone, but salt is easily dissolved and low in hardness, so it does not seem like making a hole in salt would be too hard; various bacteria can make holes into stronger rocks. Thus, they aren’t literally eating the salt in a metabolic sense but eating into it as one might describe acid eating into a surface. Probably the desiccating action of salt would be the biggest problem, rather than the strength of the salt, for an organism trying to burrow into it. Because of salt’s solubility and tendency to flow, the holes made by anything tunneling into it would easily re-fill. It’s somewhat similar to a challenge of ultradeep drilling - if you take your drill out, the rock will squash back together and close the hole (assuming that the drill is strong enough to not get squashed). The long-term convection in the mantle is another example of rock squashing and flowing, though that’s not halite.
Bacteria are ubiquitous. Making absolutely certain that bacteria didn’t manage to get on any of the equipment or blow into a sample from the air or otherwise get in is extremely difficult in any situation.
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Thank you for this discussion. I like to share the arguments. May be, we can both learn from them.
That’s true. To my knowledge, the halite is part of the trap, since it’s impermeable for the oil or gas. That’s the same reason why salt cavernes are used for storage of gas.
I don’t know this reference. Could you give it? it’s really interesting. Especially, how deep they have been found in the halite.
I think that they have a really strong case for saying that the bacteria were in situ. I am not geologist but only veterinary microbiologist. We culture regularly bacteria from different sites of animals after necropsy, to make a diagnosis of the disease that caused death. We must always be aware of contamination. However, in our team, we have pathologists. They do gross examination and microscopic examination of the tissues. When we only culture bacteria and we see no tissue reaction, we think that the bacteria could be contamination. However, when I have a pure culture of a relevant bacterium and the pathologists sees bacteria in characteristics positions trapped in the tissue including tissue reaction, we have a really strong case that this bacterium was originally present and caused the disease and death of the animal. The same applies to bacteria in salt. I have seen publications with microscopic pictures of the bacteria in situ. They were typical halobacteria (salt loving), were pure, were inside the saltrock in cubic structures, because of the crystal structure of NaCl. Metabolic staining showed that they were alive.
I don’t think that desiccation is a major problem for these bacteria, since they are specialized for that. However, high presure of temperature can be a problem. For what I know of bacteria making holes in structures, they do it by metabolizing the matrix. However, what metabolism should be applied to halite? The nice thing with living bacteria is, that we can study their behaviour as it is now. I see publications of migration within trapped fluid inclusions in salt, but not of the trapped fluid inclusions in salt themselves. I know, they can flow as part of the large flowpattern on huge geological scale, but I think that this is mostly laminar flow and doesn’t regularly transport material from the surface to the core of the halite.
Yes, the salt deposit is generally relatively impermeable to oil and gas and thus forms part of the trap. Here’s one paper talking about complexities in flowing salt: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040195121001712
Diapirs and Salt Domes The Mechanism of Formation. (Conference) | OSTI.GOV discusses the behavior of salt deposits, though a little more proofreading is needed (e.g., “pinched-off diapers” is rather different from diapirs). Flow can be quite complex over a long period of time with various interactions between the salt and its surroundings.
An unfamiliar claim with a familiar outcome - Peaceful Science has a bit on the Salt Range material being contamination, not original to the deposit. I’ve seen more detailed information, but don’t quickly find the reference.
Various bacteria are able to make holes in rock, creating a space to live in rather than using the rock nutritionally.
Drying out is one of the best ways to preserve DNA, so salt is one of the better settings to look for pretty ancient survival of nucleic acids. However, it would be necessary to distinguish between modern contamination, long-scale survival of a population of bacteria in the fluid in a salt deposit, and actual survival of individual bacteria. Better research and documentation is needed to elucidate the details of the situation.
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