YEC's Heat Problem is Not Cooling Off

Faith & Science Conversation
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This is interesting because these are the words of John Baumgardner, who is a central figure in founding of the YEC notion of catastrophic plate tectonics and the Rate Project. Bold mine:

here here’s another question uh uh what challenges does uh this framework of catastrophic plate tectonics face uh that’s that’s an excellent question what are the what are the main challenges the main main problem issues with catastrophic plate tectonics uh uh I I will be rather bold and candid here it’s something I spoke I spoke on about a month ago at the creation research Society annual meeting in and uh uh it it it’s that uh catastrophic PL plate tectonics requires the hand of God actively involved in the in the physics of the flood and uh that that that presents a major problem for for some people it shouldn’t for for believers but it it even for for many Believers that’s a problem and in particular what I pointed out is that the cooling of all of today’s ocean lithosphere uh is simply impossible in the in the biblical uh in the biblical time frame uh you simply do not cool a slab of rock from near its near its melting point to the temperature that the oceanic slabs are today in just a few thousand years uh it’s certainly not a a single year and uh so in my very first paper on catastrophic plate tectonics in 1986 I pointed this out that that uh this is a problem for any any serious model for the flood and it is that of cooling the the ocean floor down uh uh within within the biblical time frame so uh to me it that uh I I mean I try to do my science carefully uh but when I hit something like that which is like a brick wall I I I I find myself saying this this looks like a point at which God intervened.

YouTube - Tectonics of Western North America during the Late Stages of the Biblical Flood

Comments at 1:19:48

Note that it is just the frictional heat from tectonic movement being discussed, not even including the much more problematic accelerated nuclear decay.

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I dont see an issue at all.

This is only a problem for individuals who have this idea that God can create, however, after that has zero physical control over His creation.

Let me put this another way Ron…

  1. Do you honestly believe that Christ raised Himself from the dead?
  2. Do you honestly believe that he ascended into heaven?
  3. Do you honestly believe that He will come again in the clouds of heaven, that every eye will see Him, and that the dead in Christ will be raised again to meet the living innthe air with Him?

None of the above have scientific proofs and yet you accept these but not the miracle of the flood?

Id suggest you have bigger issues to worry about other than plate techtonics…you first need to reconcile the resurrection and second coming with your science demands.

Me personally, i do not have to worry about that…in fact I can ignore it if i want to, without compromising my world view, because miracles are not scientific. TEism cannot do the same because to ignore science erodes the foundation of your world view. That means you have no options…it also means your world view is driven by human observation and hypothesis rather than trusting in God and His Word.

In any case, AIG have an article about this and propose a framework for solving the riddle.

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These claims are miracles and totally untestable.
YEc claims are testable because we have materials and timelines to test and observe. I see the claims in different categories. YEC is fine only if you don’t try to prove it scientifically.

Look at this miraculous claim by mormons about gold plates. But we can replicate the claim and raise much skepticism about it. YEC must survive a similar tests if you want to say it’s scientifically provable.

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From your AiG article (1994), with Baumgardner as a co-author…

Most significantly, we still need to solve the heat problem, and the radiometric dating problem

…and here we are 30 years later, with a concession that there is no natural means to deal with the heat caused just by the friction alone. I would add that there is also no means of powering the work required to overcome that friction to maintain movement.

That leaves a miracle, which by definition is outside any scientific analysis or verification. The problems here are, firstly, the Earth has an ancient and continuous history which has been verified in detail and depth, with no dislocation from a global flood. A second issue is that none of this is in the Bible, which characterizes Noah’s flood as water going up, then water going down. So what is proposed is a geological miracle, which not in the Bible, which is in turn covered up by a thermodynamic miracle, which is also not in the Bible. And associated with all this is a miracle of nuclear physics, which is also not only is not in the Bible, but lacks any conceivable rational purpose.

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its clear from your answer that you do not understand the question I’m putting to you.

All Christians within the standard model of salvation, believe in the death, resurrection, ascension, and second coming of Christ.

Those things are impossible to test scientifically and prove and yet, even TEists believe them to be true.

Given they believe in the miracles of Salvation, despite them being scientifically untestable and indeed impossible, i find it ridiculous that TEists demand that the other biblical miracles must be proven scientifically!

The inconsistency there is mindblowing! TEists are clearly strawplucking only those doctrines that suit their own convenience and do not take scripture as written…they instead tear out the pages they don’t like and cast them aside!

I know when other individuals doctrines are false because the inconsistencies in biblical theology are quickly highlighted…individuals start twisting words of scripture, playing games with reading and comprehension of language, making false statements, ignoring other bible writers who support each others conclusions, and even writing their own bibles/ translations when they simply cannot reconcile their woefully inadequate theology with the ancient texts (as the JW’s and Mormons have done)

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Ron let me ask,

does the earth create new energy for volcanic activity or is that energy already within its own core?

You appear to be making an argument for the creation of new energy there and i see this as a non-issue with the energy being released from within the core…that energy is already contained within the earth and no new energy is created. The cooling issue becomes completely irrelevant because all that heat is already contained within the earth! We are not demanding the gain or loss of energy there…that is what it appears you are demanding in your criticism however (which is an absurd line of criticism given you do not believe in that notion in the first place!).

If God accelerates the pace of cooling so that Noah and his family may actually survive the flood and aftermath, i have absolutely no problem with that…its irrelevant to the narrative. I am pointing out that you have a problem because you cannot accept a God who physically interacts with His own creation and that without his direct hand of control, we would cease to exist. I don’t have any problem with a God who directly keeps us in existence…but you do obviously and so i have to question what you seek as a Christian given that problem you appear to have?

The earth does not need to shed that energy…its is simply transferred. This can either be a natural process or God purposefully enacts an accelerated solution according to his own timeline.

instead of focusing on that which we cannot know (because none of us were there), why don’t you concern yourself with worrying about the very real scientific dilemma at the heart of Christianity…

Christ resurrecting Himself from the dead, ascending into heaven, and then the hundred s of millions of dead bodies coming back to life and ascending into the sky at the Second Coming. These are far more problematic issues for you to concern yourself with as it is far easier to believe in a global flood than it is to believe the miracles that form the model of Salvation!

I should also point out that the notion that knowing science and having the correct science impacts on our salvation is utter nonsense. Satan knows science better than any of us, is he going to be saved with that knowledge? Absolutely not! So science is irrelevant in Salvation, however belief in the gospel and salvation most definitely is. The difference is, we know God because he tells us about himself and his wishes in the Bible.

we must actively choose faith and miracles…not making a choice means kaput. Im happy to believe in the miracles of the bible because of that principle. Given that God wrote his laws on our hearts and in our minds, those who do not actively make a choice will face kaput.

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Adam, I understand your frustration with scientific explanations that are ignorant of God. And why you are frustrated by Christians who believe them, even help develop them.
But what is the point of science? I think a basic, lay-person’s answer is: the study of what makes the natural world tick.

How is this done?

  • Observe what is observable.
  • Turn some of those observations into questions.
  • Make intelligent attempts to answer those questions using what is already accepted as known.
  • Try out these attempted answers in lots of similar and different situations to gain perspective about the applicability of the answers, etc.

The concept of science and how it is carried out are tied to observing nature in the broadest sense, learning what is there and how it works. By definition it is tied to the natural world.

Because science is tied to nature, it isn’t looking for miracles. If the work of the study of the natural world gets stumped on something, the assumption is that there is more to learn about the natural world and how it works. The answer to “Well, how do you explain this?!” might realistically be, “We don’t know yet. But we will keep looking.”

This seems to be a very effective way to find out how things work.

Miracles like Jesus’ resurrection are not scientifically workable, are they? We don’t have a body to examine. Just testimonies of witnesses. Or reports of testimonies of witnesses. Judging these by scientific methods cannot help. Unless the conclusion is that, because there is nothing to observer, nothing happened.

All this to say: If someone is claiming miraculous explanations for things, they aren’t doing science. THey may be applying dogma to what they want to call science, but it isn’t science. And these kinds of non–science do not help us understand our world better. They must describe it as incoherent, inconsistent, random.
Which isn’t how we understand God to be.

So, while nature observed through science can’t help us understand God, we do assume of it things Christians believe about God: coherence, consistency, orderliness.

Things like ID and YEC require that God and nature be incoherent, inconsistent and random.

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Because they are true miracles which have a purpose and, more importantly, leave no physical evidence that can be used to verify they did exist. Think back to the miracles recorded in the NT. Did any leave physical evidence? Did any have eye wittnesses who could testify to them?

See the difference??

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YouTuber physical anthropologist Erika (Gutsick Gibbon) has been pounding on the heat problem for some time; her latest video on the subject is The Death of “Scientific Creationism”?, which in turn shows video from apologist site, Standing For Truth ministries, which featured a YEC guest who put out this candid comment (18:58) Bold is mine…

Accelerated nuclear Decay or 4.5 billion years worth of accelerated nuclear decay. A lot of creationists that believe in that and I don’t believe in accelerated nuclear decay but a lot of them that believe in that will try to throw that into the um, into the whole Noah flood thing because I think it happened at the same time um, but you know I-I think it’s I’ve demonstrated exactly the problem you have with accelerated nuclear decay is that the temperature will keep rising until you get that steady state where you’re releasing as much heat to outer space as you are generating; and so um accelerate the only the only way to make accelerated nuclear decay work is you’d have to have some miraculous heat removal and then now you’ve got to explain why God caused accelerated nuclear decay to happen and then had to miraculously remove the heat. It’s like it doesn’t really make sense I mean why would God do that? I don’t I don’t really see any reason why he would cause accelerated nuclear decay to happen I mean I realize that there’s an issue with radiometric dating and it doesn’t agree with the Bible, and I get that I don’t know what the solution for that is, but it’s not accelerated nuclear decay. That’s my opinion anyways the only way to make accelerated nuclear decay work is you’d have to have some miraculous heat removal and then now you’ve got to explain why God cause accelerated nuclear decay to happen and then had to miraculously remove the heat; and it’s like it doesn’t really make sense I mean why would God do that? I don’t I don’t really see any reason why he would cause accelerated nuclear decay to happen.

I could not have said it better.

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I don’t think other views are demanding scientific proofs. YEC are providing scientific claims that can be tested by others. This is fair and proper just like any other religious claim. Just like the gold plate issue, once you have math and logic you can test the theory.

I think the problem here is category error and also a doctrine foundation error. Many well intentioned Christians believe a literal Gen account is the foundation of christian belief. This is false. Christ is the foundation. That is why I promote a Christocentric creation narrative not a testable scientific one.

regardless, when a christian believes the foundation of the faith is genesis as literally understood they assume any attack on that view crumbles the whole christian enterprise. That is building a house on the sand. Building faith on the rock of Christ is wisdom.

Yec claims the bible can be trusted as the proof of the creation narrative can be observed and tested today. The evidence is not suggesting this. YEC goes to extraordinary lengths to buttress the foundational doctrine of creation/flood as observable and explainable in scientific terms .

That video highlights a religious dogma that is testable. Joseph Smith claimed those plates were a specific size and translated into the book of mormon of 270,000 english words. Those plates are the literal foundation of Mormonism. The video highlights what can happen when religious claims are testable.

1)We know how many words In book of mormon
2)We know how many sq inches of available writing space
3)we have a real problem with the claim

We can run a parallel argument for YEC claim

  1. we know how many animals in world
  2. we know how much cubic feet in ark
  3. We have a problem… which leads down a rabbit trail of other problems
  4. we waste our time arguing and don’t preach the gospel
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I don’t remember if I ever finished Davison’s book, but I liked this part:

The pursuit of natural explanations is often misunderstood as an effort to explain away God, as though natural and God are antonyms. If God created nature, however, natural explanations are merely discoveries of the mechanisms God instituted to govern that creation. In most of science, secular and religious people alike insist that this approach be employed. Consider a chemist mulling over an intractable, multifaceted chemical reaction. After years of study, she submits her findings to a journal stating that a miracle must take place between steps 14 and 15 in the reaction. What Christian would fault the editor for rejecting this manuscript? We fully expect there to be a natural explanation for the reaction, while also fully believing that it is authored by God.

Greg Davisson’s “Friend of Science, Friend of Faith”
02:24:00

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I agree with that Kendel. The trouble is, the entire bible story requires us to believe that those who “believe” (based on faith) will be saved by ascending into heaven and taken out into space…?

Those things are scientifically testable…we know that

  1. Dead bodies that have rotted back to bones cannot be raised back to life

  2. Its impossible for humans to ascend into the sky against gravity.

  3. We cannot remain alive in space because its a vacume containing no air and extreme temperature variations.

The above are all proven scientific facts.

Given the above, Christianity requires blind faith that is contradictory to the scientific evidence. Yet TEism wont accept the blind faith in the miracles as an answer to the dilemmas you see in the Genesis creation account and the flood.

If the present is a window into the past, its also a window into the future!

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If the YEC folk would just come out and say it was out right a miracle (not recorded in the Bible) there would be no argument possible. But for some strange reason while they kind of hint around that miracles are needed to address the multiple heat problems they just refuse to go all in and just claim miraculous events. For that matter, why don’t you? I know one problem is that would doom getting creationism into the public schools.

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@Bill_II anticipated my response.

Christianity requires faith, maybe not entirely blind, that God performed certain miracles, particularly in regard to the resurrection of Jesus. Absolutely no scientific explanation would fit Jesus’ resurrection or Jesus’ resurrection of Lazarus, assuming they really happened as recorded. NT authors knew these events as described were impossible, unbelievable. But they also rely on eyewitness accounts for verification, although we can’t ask them anymore.

There are other faith matters in Christianity that have nothing to do with what happened but the meaning of it. Even eye-witness accounts will not help us here. Science certainly can’t. The Roman soldiers who tortured and mocked Jesus, thew dice for his clothes, surely did not see him as God’s son or the righteous Lamb of God, probably not even after the rumors of resurrection may have come to them.

Can’t be sure about the “location” of Heaven. Outer space doesn’t fit the descriptions we have. Really nothing does. So, at the Ascension, we have no idea where or if in physical space Jesus was after he was out of view. Science can’t help us here at all. Even theology is of little use. Which Christian understanding of Heaven is the right one? That it exists, and it can be reached is something we can only understand from revelation and hope for by faith.

I don’t want just to say, “Genesis is another matter.” But at the same time I think it is. For reasons that have been hashed and rehashed in this Forum. I also acknowledge your point that Christians who accept scientific explanations for the universe* don’t accept miraculous explanations for the two different Genesis creation accounts and the flood as miraculous events. Or not entirely so. Probably depends on who you ask.

Not entirely. I have faith that these strange, ancient stories tell me something I need to know about God and his relationship with the world and people. But they don’t describe historical events as we understand historical events. I have to be satisfied with that, and I can still have faith in God, even when I can’t figure out any connection.

But back to @Bill_II 's point. If Creationists want to say “a miracle occurred” that’s super. The Bible has a lot of them. There is no scientific observation, measuring, hypothesizing or testing of any miracle. Which is the point of the miracle. It defies any known explanation. It exists entirely on God’s terms.

So, as Bill_II pointed out, if YECs can have faith that these things are miracles, what is the sense of all the pseudoscience they perform?

Sometimes. It depends. Sounds a bit deterministic to me. ; )
We are missing significant data about the future, except our family maxim: Something will happen. Can’t get a whole lot more specific. I guess it would be fair to say that if God performed miracles in the past, we expect he will continue into the future. I’m good with that.

*I find terms like Theistic Evolution off-putting. I’m resistant to group labels for a number of reasons. One of which is that each forms a too-limited box to be of use, at least to me. People also often change in their thinking, even in small ways, which makes sharply delineated terms like TE inaccurate quickly.

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Bill i do and have for my entire time on these forums done exactly that.

Whether or notnthere is a cooling issue is a trivial side issue…the bigger picture is a far greater dilemma… that God created from nothing, that a flood deluge cover the earth, that christ resurrected himself and ascended into outer space, that at the Second Coming dead bodies and living will also rise up into the sky and head out into space.

The supposed cooling issue you raise is absolutely insignificant to the bigger picture…surely even you must acknowledge that is a huge stumbling block for your world view given it is anti science?

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In just this thread you have made the following comments which certainly seem to indicate you are trying to find a scientific answer to the flood.

Just declare it a miracle and be done.

Sorry I have no idea what you are saying here. The multiple heat problems are only problems for YEC that want to use science to support a global flood. Hopefully you are aware that I am certainly not YEC.

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Where was there an objection to “the miracle of the Flood”? The objection is to idiotic science fiction invented to support a specific interpretation of the text.

Why do you keep posting this nonsense? It’s a pure invention of yours, it doesn’t come from anyone here and it doesn’t pose a problem for anyone but you.

No one is demanding that, you’re inventing it. The argument is that certain claims about the Bible can be disproven scientifically. And the problem is that YEC insists that the Bible has to be scientifically correct in all aspects – a standard that can’t be found in the Bible.

You’re just making stuff up again.

It’s fascinating that the most vile accusations against other Christians flow from YEC like a flood.

That’s a description of YEC: it can’t reconcile the text with its actual standard of truth, so it makes up all kinds of stories intended to make the text fit their actual standard of truth.

Once again: where does the scripture say it intends to be scientifically and historically accurate? Since that’s the YEC standard, surely it must be easy to find!

And if people make up ridiculous stories like galloping continents, you have no problem with that? You’ve elevated fiction above scripture!

Document or admit you’re lying again.

So? How does that justify ignoring the actual meaning of the text, making up science fiction to justify things the text doesn’t say, and lying about common scientific facts? Unless you have set up science as an idol, why even care about putting scientific explanations on any of the text? Science has no more business being used as a measure of the text than did Aristotelianism in the Middle Ages in the Roman church, so why do it?

No, it isn’t – the evidence against a global flood in science terms would fill an Olympic size swimming pool, but there is no evidence against salvation.
Besides, it isn’t the Flood that is being objected to, it’s the ludicrous attempts to force Genesis to talk science, attempts that drive people away from the Gospel in droves.

But you insist that it is every time you make references that Christians who don’t agree with YEC throw away the Bible or don’t believe Christ or any of the other common YEC assertions. I’ll grant that you’ve improved on that score, but you still do the standard YEC procedure of lying about what others have said and what they believe.

Bingo.

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No they’re not. #1 is something never observed and recorded, but that doesn’t mean it is impossible. Heck, I read a sci-fi story where a resurrection was pulled off using nanobots – and if a physical means of doing it can be envisioned, then it can’t be ruled out.
#2 was invoked against heavier-than-air flight right up to when it was actually done. Science can’t say it’s impossible, it can just say we don’t know of any way to do it.
#3 is another issue of the same kind; that can’t be done by means we have available, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

I certainly don’t believe with “blind faith”! You should listen to some of Dr. John Lennox’s talks on that matter.

If the text said anything about miracles there might be a reason to believe them, but since it doesn’t why should anyone invent miracles that aren’t recorded?
Additionally, given that the Gospels and early Genesis are very different kinds of literature, why should anyone apply the same standards to them?

I can “fix” all the scientific issues with the global flood concept with just one miracle applied in several different ways: God used force fields – one to hold the Ark together and safe, one to protect the surface of the land against the damage a deluge would do to it.
Okay, that still doesn’t make the Ark big enough to hold everything, so a second miracle: just make the Ark bigger on the inside than on the outside without the extra mass involved counting.

No need for galloping continents or geysers firing rocks into space, just some applications of force fields.

I could even justify these biblically: the scriptures already tell us that Christ holds all things together, and a force field would just be a way of holding some things together more firmly.

Wouldn’t fit them . . . yet.

Or don’t accept more than the text actually says.

Especially since it drives people from Christ.

I agree. To me it’s like the silliness of transubstantiation, which came about as an attempt to explain how a miracle happens – via stuffing the text into an Aristotelian mold. I just say it appears that God used evolution, and don’t need any mental gymnastics to get at the how.

It’s not “supposed”, and it’s significant because it makes Christians look stupid.

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Jason Lisle appeared on Donny’s Standing for Truth channel, and his response to the heat problem included this [9:33] :

A lot of the energy could have been dumped to space. There have been, uh, creationist models of hypercanes for example which is like a hurricane but on a much more massive scale hurricanes are very good at dumping heat dumping energy, uh, to space they when a hurricane goes over the ocean the ocean’s temperature drops by 10 degrees and that’s a piddly hurricane imagine a hypercane that’s taking all this energy and dumping it into space. Convection is a great way to move heat quickly. It’s the best way to do it and we think there was a lot of convection during that flood year so there probably were spots on the ocean hot spots that boiled there probably were but as soon as they get to the air and they spray up and then they lose that heat and so on they lose it to space.

Convection is transfer of heat as it is carried away by flow of the material containing the heat. A convection oven recirculates heat by contained movement, material does not leave the system. To remove heat from a system by way of convection, requires that the hot material leave the system. Hurricanes, from category 1 to category whatever a hypercane is supposed to be, are necessarily a feature of the troposphere, and do not come near sending any material into space. While they are highly convective, they redistribute heat from the ocean to the atmosphere and surface, and generally away from the equator towards the poles; none of it escapes. The water, with its temperature and heat of evaporation, falls back as torrential rain.

Space is a vacuum, and therefore not a medium for the transfer of heat from a terrestrial bound system by means of convection or conduction. That leaves taking heat away from Earth by way of radiation. But the amount of heat transfer possible by radiation is proportional to temperature. If more heat is being produced, that must produce a continuous rise in temperature before an equilibrium with radiation is established, meaning the entire Earth would become incandescent hot from the models invoked by flood apologists.

So it is astonishing to me that Lisle, who holds a Ph.D. granted from the well regarded astrophysics program of University of Colorado, Boulder, would speculate ideas that even a high school physics student would recognize as nonsense. All predicated on the idea of accelerated nuclear decay, which enjoys no observational support, and is not in the Bible. What a shameful waste of a life.

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Like this you mean?

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