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.
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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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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?
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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.
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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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Because he’s a scientist. You can’t because you’re a biblicist. They have mutually exclusive epistemologies.
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Why would you need to ignore mountains of evidence in order to hold to a specific interpretation of scripture?
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Others have explained to youthe heat problem with YEC. Here’s an entertaining video:
The HEAT Problem: The One Hit Knock Out to Creationism
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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Look, God just magics it all away. Where’s your faith? Nothing is impossible with God marimba.
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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?
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To be more specific this “heat problem” is with a particular YEC attempt to cram all the geology of the earth into the year of Noah’s flood.
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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.
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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.
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After the lowest of them, actually. The upper ones are neogene.
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Yeah but you’re only saying that because it’s only scientificalistical. Only.
I live in view of an interesting example.
The Rio Grande Rift
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)
Here’s a picture of it from the Rio Grande:
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.
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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)
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Although some young earthers (notably George McCready Price) have slandered William Smith as making up an old earth and inventing evidence in favor of it, the reality is that Smith’s combination of being self-taught outside the academic mainstream of geology and his single-minded focus on recognizing layers rather than wondering how they formed meant that he was actually a young-earther while doing much of his work. Eventually a couple of pastors who were friends of his explained how the evidence pointed to an old earth. William Townsend, one of those two pastors, first published a significant chunk of Smith’s data on the pattern of fossils marking different layers in his book The Character of Moses Established for Veracity as an Historian, Recording Events From the Creating to the Deluge (2 vols., 1813-1815). If you can’t figure out from the title of that book that Smith was not challenging prevailing theological views on the age of the earth, you can make a lot of money writing purported history books like The Map that Changed the World or Common-Sense Geology - Simon Winchester’s claims about the history are not remarkably more reliable than Price’s, just changing who is supposedly a hero or villain.
Lyell did not propose an old earth; the fact that geology points to an old earth was established by the mid-1770’s, over two decades before Lyell was born, and suspected over a century before his birth. Lyell’s theology was not particularly sound; like most young-earth and ID claims, his approach was deistic, claiming that God is not involved in things that happen according to scientific laws.
Steno published on common-sense observations about geological layers in the 1660’s; similar ideas were floating around elsewhere at that time (e.g., Hooke) or even earlier (da Vinci wrote such thoughts in his coded notebooks and no one else read them for a few centuries). As people began to look at geological layers, they noticed a few things:
There are a lot of layers.
The same layer can be recognized widely across Europe (and eventually elsewhere).
Many geologic layers look a lot like the layers that we see forming today as sand and mud slowly piles up here and there.
(Unlike one of Galileo’s key arguments for heliocentrism, Steno’s models were correct. They also were generally accepted, even though, like Galileo, Steno was challenging some Aristotelian assumptions, which Voltaire nearly a century later was reluctant to give up.)
The huge number of layers, many of which looked to require a long time to form and none of which seemed to have any definite trace of humans, led to increasing recognition that geology pointed to a very long pre-human history, which the Bible had apparently skipped over as being theologically irrelevant. Even Ussher had allotted some time for the chaos before the seven days, and his efforts (like those of many others) to incorporate all available historical data led directly into the incorporation of geological data into our understanding of the age of the earth. Old earth views were generally accepted as no theological problem. Michael Tuomey, in his 1848 Geology of South Carolina, has a short section discussing how well geology supports the Bible. In particular, geology points back to a beginning, against the indefinite cycles of much deistic speculation. Tuomey also describes young-earth objections to geology as a thing of the past. The first book to publish a series of pictures illustrating earth history through geologic time has a final picture of the beginning of modern time in the Garden of Eden. Atheistic and young-earth claims about old-earth being an attack on religious beliefs are untrue.
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Adam Sedgwick is another interesting person in the history of YEC, or at least flood geology. When he stepped down as chair of the Royal Society (THE scientific organization of its time), he had this to say:
This was in 1831, so its not as if they were all bowing down to the alter of Evolutionism, or some other such silly notion. I’m not sure of Sedgwick’s views on the age of the Earth, but he certainly recognized that a recent global flood just wasn’t evidenced in geology.
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