One question I have for biblical literalists in general, particularly those who hold to Moses writing Genesis, is why, if Genesis is what holds it all together, does the rest of the Old Testament ignore it? No references are made to Adam and Eve or original sin, until post- exilic writings not in the Protestant canon. Not really looking for an answer here, but it is a curious inconsistency.
Have you personally been incinerated by a thermonuclear warhead? Well then, I guess they do not exist. After all, those would require scientists to actually have accurate values for nuclear physics, which you personally have not experienced.
Now that is some piece of eisegesis! The Bible does not discuss dinosaurs at all. Not old. Not recent. Not living. Not in Genesis or Job.
I’m curious. Why do you bother? There is no evidence which would convince you that the earth is old or spherical. Based on your commitment to exclusive Biblical literalism by your interpretation, there is no reason you have to accept that dinosaur fossils are even real. You are free to live in the first millennium BC, Many here have worked in science and technology, and know that the process leads to generally reliable and trustworthy results. Nobody is going to unknow what they know to be true by all that is rational, so I am not sure what it is you are attempting to accomplish.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
224
How does this mean that we’re not heliocentric? Do the sun (does that burn by nuclear fusion? How far away is it? How large?), moon (which must be the same size as the sun as that’s what it looks like, yes?) and stars roll on the inner curve (what about the Medicean Stars?)? All at the same distance? Why is the ocean of Heaven, above the raqia, blue? Or is the raqia itself blue, except at night? No, no, no, that’s silly. It’s still the same blue at night if it’s pigmented but the sun’s rolled out of sight. How does it do that? If we’re all on a flat surface, a plate? Under a blue bowl? Or there must be another atmosphere above it (the heavenly ocean) as that’s what colours the ocean by reflection, but in that case by transmission. But heaven above the raqia has no light, or we’d see it at night. Or is the raqia actually opaque and a nice shade of cerulean lit up by the marble of the sun rolling in the bowl. Does gravity switch between here and the things in the sky? So we stay down and so do they? In opposite directions?
And what does this have to do with the good news of the revelation of God in Christ?
This is really starting to bother me. Where is New Zealand? On the plate? How does the sun shine on it and not shine on us on the same flat plate? I watch the sun roll up the side of the bowl as it goes down and sets, whatever that means, and it starts shining on New Zealand. What shape is the bowl again? Is it a tunnel? It’s not actually going up the bowl as it goes down, it’s going away at the same height it always is and grows as it does to look the same size? Or what? But then it just sinks. Where?
No, that has mud in it that takes days to settle out of still water. And consists of multiple layers, here is an example: a clayy limestone (with rare dinosaur bones) at the bottom, a very hard calcitic limestone in the middle, and a shell-sand on top. The middle layer had to turn into limestone before the top, because percolating groundwater is by far the most common (and fastest) way to turn shell-rich sand into limestone (and thus, deposits tend to turn into limestone top-down).
And have personally observed exactly the same patterns.
Yes, but not often: Glycymeris americana is incredibly common (I probably have about 20000 of them) in the recent down to the Waccamaw, but is non-existent in any lower deposits. Chespecten is large and common in the Yorktown, but is unknown in any deposits above it. Global planktonic foraminifera are even more specific, and are a standard way of correlating faunas across basins.
No, they aren’t exactly publicized widely (or easy to find), but as an example, Creseis shells are needle-shaped and will break if one sets one’s finger on them (they are pelagic, so a strong shell is not that important). Most shells on the beach are broken, and many of the ones present (busyconids, Mercenaria, etc.) are very sturdy shells.
And the problem is not sediment going on top of them, the problem is water transport: if there is much of any current where they are, these things will get picked up off the bottom, banged around (and destroyed in the process), and then set down.
As I have said, most of these deposits contain more than one of the following: distinct layers that had to finish being deposited before the next one started, mud that requires very still water for a long time to settle, and fragile shells or mold of them. None of those can be deposited rapidly.
Radiometric decays release energy, if the rate of decay goes up a lot (and nothing else changes), then the amount of energy released would as well. That energy is going to mostly (since it is inside earth) end up as heat, and if one works through the rate of decay needed:
That problem can be fixed by decreasing atomic binding energy (which would increase radiometric decay rates and decrease the decay energy at the same rate), however, the binding energy would have to decrease so much that atomic nuclei would get ripped apart by the repulsion of the protons.
Decay products have less mass. There are no exceptions. That is what drives radioactive decay. The law of conservation of mass and energy says that mass never just disappears, it can only transformed into energy. There is no scientifically conceivable way to get from mass A to lower mass B without the release of heat. That is the basis of all nuclear weapons and why a kettle boils when plugged into electricity sourced from a nuclear power plant. None of this technology would be achieved if we did not understand the conservation of mass and energy, and a fundamental physical principle called symmetry.
Speeded up radioactive decay is not scientific, and it is not in the Bible either. So what support does it have?
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
227
Because he’s a scientist. You can’t because you’re a biblicist. They have mutually exclusive epistemologies.
Essentially, YEC’s must cram in 4.5-4.8 billion years of heat release (from radioactive decay, continental drift, mineral cementation, volcanism and impact events) into the 40-365 days that is Noah’s Flood, as they blame it’s catastrophic nature for many of the phenomena we see today. This is enough heat to boil off the oceans over 25 times over and vaporize the crust an additional dozen or so times. As you can imagine, this is a whole lot of hot.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
230
Look, God just magics it all away. Where’s your faith? Nothing is impossible with God marimba.
Where did Jesus confirm that mankind was recently created, and where did Jesus claim that they were poofed into being instead of being created through evolution?
After those marine deposits were formed, a massive meteor struck the Earth and threw molten bedrock into the air. Any free argon in the rock boils out when the rock is in its molten state. As it falls back down to Earth if solidifies again, forming tear dropped shape tektites:
These tektites fall down on the buried marine organisms forming a layer of tektites. Those tektites also contain Potassium-40 which is decays over time, to the tune of 1.25 billion years. It decays into Argon-40. Therefore, we can measure the time since the tektite solidified as it fell through the air because we can measure both the 40K and 40Ar in the rock. When we do this, we find that these sediments are 10’s of millions of years old.
This is exactly the case for the K/T boundary in and around the US. The tektites are from the Chicxulub impact in what is today the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. We know when this extinction event happened because it left us the evidence.
All the overwhelming evidence from every science shows that creationism is not just a rejection of evolution and the science of biology. YEC is a rejection of all the sciences - geology, chemistry, and physics as well.
The physiography of Albuquerque is controlled by a diverse group of geologic features, each with a unique origin. Most of the high mountain country lies along a north-south line which bisects the state. This physiographic demarcation is formed by the Rio Grande Rift, a great fracture in the earth’s surface which extends more than 450 miles from Leadville, Colo., to Las Cruces, N.M. The Rift was formed by down-dropping of a large block of the earth’s crust, yielding an elongated trough bounded on either side by mountains. The fractures in the crust along which this downward motion occurred are called faults, and many small earthquakes along these faults tell us that the Rift is still actively evolving. These faults are important pipelines for rising heat from the hot interior of the earth. This heat is transported by liquid rock, called magma, which produces volcanoes at the surface along the edges of the Rift, and by heated fluids, which produce hot springs and other manifestations of geothermal energy along the Rift margins. This down-dropped block also provides a low spot in the topography for streams and rivers to flow, such as the Rio Grande, which follows the Rift from Del Norte, Colo., to Las Cruces.
Albuquerque lies in the central part of the Rio Grande Rift. The faulted western margin of the Rift lies along the Rio Puerco, approximately 20 miles west of the Civic Center. The eastern edge of the rift lies at the base of the Sandia Mountains.
Edit: (Source)
The top of the mountain is layers of sedimentary rock laid down like a cake during alternate periods of shallow ocean and sandy desert. (Seen on the left.) Tiny aquatic fossils can be spotted in the rocks near the peak. Where are the larger Permian fossils that should be on top of that? Turns out, those upper layers slid off like a cake tilted too far. The larger fossils are all slumped together in rocks and boulders at the bottom of the mountain’s eastern side.
Beautiful and interesting area. I remember a similar view to that from Coronado National Monument a couple of years ago. The Rio Grande also carved out Santa Elena canyon in the Big Bend area of Texas. It is sort of interesting to see this little river by the roadside, drive to the park and see the towering walls up to 1500 feet height of the canyon in between, carved by the river over the eons as the limestone faulted and was gradually lifted, with the river cutting the slot as the walls rose, Again a testament to deep time. Santa Elena Canyon - Big Bend National Park (U.S. National Park Service)
