I was just wondering what it was like a hundred years ago. Nobody had a clue as what made for sunshine. They didn’t even know that the Sun - and other stars - was mostly hydrogen. And, while there was the beginnings of understanding about nuclear fission the Sun is powered by nuclear fusion.
There were some guesses that it might come from ordinary combustion, or some other ideas, but how long could that last?
At that time, I can imagine that the theist answer would be something like: this is a case of intelligent design, designed to make life on Earth possible. And what answer could an atheist have given?
And btw, although there were few YECs I those days, one YEC might have pointed out that the Sun could not have lasted more than a few thousand years.
And then there was another question - seemingly totally unrelated at that time - how did the various chemical element come to be, with much more of the elements needed for life?
I don’t know whether there was such a conversation in the early 20th century, or before.
timeline of the knowledge of mankind in evolutionary theory
Google AI
The species Homo sapiens, which includes all modern humans, evolved around 300,000 years ago in Africa. While the earliest fossil evidence of anatomically modern humans dates back to that time, archaeological and behavioral evidence suggests that “behavioral modernity” – the development of complex technology and culture – emerged more recently, between 50,000 and 65,000 years ago
Biblical timeline of mankind
about 6500 years according to the genealogies and historical narratives in the Old testament (patriarchs, prophets, kings, kingdoms etc)
If its taken evolution more than 60,000 years to get us to this point, why would you expect the biblical model to arrive at such a point any sooner?
Logic tells us that if man only started on his created moral journey in the garden of Eden 6500 years ago, then that to me fits well with the notion that our learning curve is quite recent.
Therefore, the often biblically repeated statements about mans learning journey is such that they relied on Gods revelation for such things. There are plenty of biblical statements where patriarchs, prophets, kings, Christ, disciples, apostles received divine revelation about our reality…these were often via dreams/visions and even God talking with them directly (such as Abraham, Moses, Elijah, John the baptist and others at Christs baptism, Apostle Saul/Paul).
I don’t think mankind as a whole actually had that much interest in those questions…if you study Maslow, you will immediately see why, we had far more pressing matters to deal with in those days (ie basic survival):
So rather than asking why or how long the sun might shine, i think they would be more worried about how to fertilise crops, build weapons for defense, and constructing shelters to keep them safe from weather and invasion.
Early followers of Judasim and later Chrisitanity wouldnt have asked about the origins of chemicals any more than you or i would have asked about AI back in the 1970’s. Heck the cars my parents owned back then didnt have heated seats and steering wheels, bluetooth, DVD players, WIFII, automatic high beam headlights, auto start/stop, antilock breaking, active lane assist…thats only 45-50 years ago btw.
The most common explanation for the sun in ancient times was that the sun was some sort of deity. But for some the explanations were not about the sun itself but how it moved through the sky and then it was deities with chariots to move it.
The Abrahamic religions, of course, taught the sun was a creation of a single creator God. Thus the medieval and renaissance times simply thought of the sun as a celestial body and more detailed questions simply waited for more information.
This article sheds a little light on it:
Augustine is one early Christian writer who wrote about the origins of the elements (then thought of as Earth, water, air and fire). Also the 4th century Basil of Caesarea in his “Hexaemeron”.
The term “artificial intelligence” was used by John McCarthy in 1956, and it was discussed, off and on, by several famous names well before 1970s.
But all of that is irrevelant to the point that I was trying to make, which was that some hundred years ago, a YEC, the few of them that they were then, as well as more typical creationists, and perhaps many theists - that they could have pointed to the poverty of scientific ideas about sunshine and the origins of the chemical elements. They could have attributed those to Divine Design. And what could an atheist’s response have been?
BTW, this is not an argument against Intelligent Design.
Thank you for that reference. I am bringing this up because it was just one hundred years ago that it was first demonstrated that the Sun was mostly hydrogen, by the then graduate student Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. (It was mostly ignored at first, having been the work of a mere graduate student - and a woman!) It took some time for nuclear physics to propose nuclear fusion. And then for fusion to account for all of the elements up to iron-nickel, with more complications for the heavier elements.
Augustine got that from the Bible…so my point stands as I made it…divine revelation.
The attempt here to insert evolution into biblical ancients via modern attempts at creating questions they may have asked about chemical compositions, AI, or heated car steering wheels is largely conjecture. If you can find a bible text where a writer asks about those things, by all means, quote it? The main one i can think of is Gods response to Job where the creator talks directly to Job putting a few things straight there. Trouble is, if im not mistaken, most here dont believe the story of Job really happened…its largely considered a mythical tale of morality.
It was as recent as 1997 that YEC Andrew Snelling was casting doubt on fusion as an explanation, to rather buttress the idea that the sun is powered by gravitational collapse, which would be incompatible with an star shining over billions of years.
no one has yet explained all the data on neutrinos. Of course there’s one explanation not considered — perhaps the reason for the critical shortfall is that nuclear reactions are not solely responsible for producing the Sun’s energy. But such an explanation would be tantamount to an admission that we really don’t yet know how the Sun operates, which would clearly be embarrassing. And if we don’t understand how our nearest star operates, how can the astronomers be so sure how all the other stars ‘evolved’ and now operate?
and back in 1989 Snelling wrote in a broadly slanderous article
using the evolutionists’ own uniformitarian assumption of extrapolating this shrinkage rate backwards in time, just as they extrapolate further back 10–15 billion years to the ‘big bang’, only 100 million years ago the sun would have been too large for life to exist on earth!
In 1980, YEC Akridge wrote
all life on the earth must be less than 100 thousand years old. The sun, 20 million years ago, would have been so large that it would have engulfed the earth. The earth cannot be more than 20 million years old. Those dates as upper limits rule out any possibility of evolution requiring hundreds of millions of years.
With the confirmation of neutrino oscillation, creationist hit mute on the shrinking sun argument, with little in the way of reflection on their relationship to science. They were never really curious as to what powered the sun, they just wanted an sciency sounding argument for the precious six thousand years. When that was removed, YEC promptly lost interest, because it was never about understanding nature, but just rhetoric.
you know Ron, it dissapoints me that you are so intent on facilitating little lies in order to earbash someone elses world view…indeed even scientific knowledge.
Why did you not include the following?
[Ed. note: while the argument in this paper was cogent given the information then available, subsequent information has superseded it, meaning that the shortfall problem seems to have been solved. Therefore creationists should no longer use this as an ‘ age’ argument
What really pisses me off about this sort of crap is that evolutionary scientists change their flaming minds about science all the time…a classic example “Piltdown Man”
That cockup when unchallenged for about 5 decades and it is still used in an attempt to promote the missing link even though its a complete fabrication.
Andrew Snelling finding an acceptable solution to the neutrino problem he originally put forward and then updating his dilemma accordingly after just one decade isnt an issue. What it shows is that Creation Science is willing to actively attempt to resolve dilemmas.
I would also like to highlight a further point made by AIG in the above edit…
Casting aside a flawed model is not the same as casting away Scripture.
So if you are thinking that a change in science means the biblical interpretation is wrong, then you are deeply mistaken. Humans do not interpret God or his narrative…he has already used those who wrote the bible to do that for us…that is the entire point of the Bible BTW.
Oh? Perhaps he should be using great big lies instead?
Like this one, maybe:
Piltdown did not go unchallenged for five decades, and it is not still used to promote missing links.
If YEC had any merit its upholders wouldn’t need to post such falsehoods.
100 years is recent enough that people did know a decent amount about the dominant elements in stars–Helium got discovered by looking at solar spectra in the 1890s. So, maybe best make that 200.
Time to get to your library and start digging into those old science periodicals and natural philosophy books. This sounds like a fascinating research project, because people have been writing about these things for a long time.
I am looking forward to reading your full report, when you are done!
1912 to 1953…4 decades and 1 year then and it is still used by the Natural History Museum in London , its stored in their secured vault. Tell me amigo, if its a fabrication, why the need to continue to hold it in a secure vault for the past 70 years and kept so that scientists and researchers can study it? Is it usual for experts to study fraudulent fossils given it was experts who exposed the fraud 70 years ago without the so called expertise that would be gleaned from studying this hoax?
To me the idea keeping a fraud for scientific study is driven by a genuine conviction that the hoax is still part of the missing link(i think we all know why its still there in a secure vault)
190 years ago, Auguste Comte said that we will never know the composition of the stars. It was a couple of decades later that Spectra started to show that the Sun had familiar elements in its composition, hydrogen, yes, and also oxygen and many more. And then, as you note, helium, but they didn’t have any idea what helium was. And there was little known about how much of the elements in makeup of the Sun. Not until Payne-Gaposchkin 1925 was it was shown that the Sun was mostly hydrogen - and it took a while for that to be accepted.
No it was actually doubted from the beginning. Just check Wikipedia.
I gave the dates these articles were written. I indicated that YEC has abandoned the argument when it became untenable. Half of my post was actual quotation. I supplied the links so that the source articles were a click away. There were no lies, little or otherwise.
I prefer not to post walls of text; please read the articles if you want to dig further. But the main reason is because the disclaimer you are referencing was not in Snelling’s original argument, which he should have always known was unsound.
However, yes, I did leave plenty out. I left out the garbage Snelling spewed as data supporting a shrinking sun, and his attack on those who pointed out the flaws. The verdict is in - the sun is not shrinking and is in fact slowly expanding, (although stars may undergo periodic oscillation). Fusion accounts for the energy production. Snelling was not just wrong in his interpretation and conclusion, but more fundamentally in his assessment of the data - a pattern he persists in to this day in regards to geology, physics, and astronomy.
Here is the ironic thing about the YEC argument for gravitational collapse being the reason the sun shines. They happily embraced gravitational collapse for the sun’s present state, even though the sun is in a dynamic equilibrium from fusion, but >still reject< gravitational collapse for the formation of the sun prior to ignition of fusion, which is evidenced by theory and observation. Nothing to do with science, it’s all about the six thousand years.
Both of those are false – it was challenged as soon as it was introduced, and the only reason it still appears in textbooks is as a warning; it isn’t used to “promote” anything.
Wow – that’s some hefty misrepresentation! Yes, it is on display, and according to the Museum it is there to show how scientists occasionally make things up in order to gain a reputation, and how many scientists can by fooled because they trust that others aren’t perpetrating hoaxes.
- It’s a historically important item.
- It demonstrates that some scientists are willing to cheat to gain reputation.
- It’s instructive as to how continued research can/will expose fraud.
All you had to do to get the answer to the question was to actually see what the Natural History Museum actually says about the item!
It was in paleontology class at university! Students, grad students, and other scholars study fraudulent fossils as a way of reminding them to watch for fraud and as examples of how fraud has been carried out.
That’s your conspiracy-theory inclination at work. All you had to do to understand why it is there was to check the Museum’s website.
It’s there in a secure vault because there are collectors who would spend millions to be able to own it.
For the same reason Isaac Newton’s alchemy notes are valued for historical interest. Nobody is going to find a recipe for turning lead to gold. Why is this lost on you?
Utter dino coprolites. No current anthropologist would entertain any such idea.
There are hundreds of studied fossils with transitional features at various stages between ancestral primates and modern man. The concept of a single “missing link” is long out of date.