YECs Will Look At You Dead In The Eyes And Say Something Like This Creature Ate Mostly Plants

[RichardG (Richard Gillett)]

@mitchellmckain

Nothing can be easier to prove from the simple fact that there are so many different religions all contradicting each other.

Religion is not about consensus.

Neither is it about right and wrong.

I guess that is why scientists do not always get it.

Richard

[mitchellmckain (Scientist and Christian)]

@RichardG

Religion is not about consensus.

Consensus plays a big role inside religious organizations.

@RichardG

Neither is it about right and wrong.

right and wrong??? seriously. Religions talk about this more than anybody or anything else.

Or… do you mean to say it is not about accuracy? If so, then I would say… maybe it should not be about accuracy. But more often than not, that is exactly what religious people make it about.

@RichardG

I guess that is why scientists do not always get it.

Plenty of scientists do “get it.” And if they don’t, it is not about either consensus or about accuracy, or about being a scientist either. It is about what can be shown by the measurable evidence. If you equate that to “accuracy” (or right and wrong???) then you are agreeing with the naturalists.

I am reminded of Carl Sagan’s words, “Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder.”

This comes close to what you are claiming about scientists. But this is classic naturalism, not science. Or… you could say it is veridically worthless to science. That makes sense. It is equating science to the totality of reality which is the premise of naturalism.

[RichardG (Richard Gillett)]

@mitchellmckain

@RichardG

I guess that is why scientists do not always get it.

What a ridiculously ignorant thing to say. I shows your irrational hostility to scientists.

First of all, plenty of scientists do “get it.

you are not reading. I said not always, not never.

I have nothing against science or scientists par se.

I cannot say the same for you and organised religion.

You tarnish the whole for a few prominent or well documented fanatics or zealots.

The faithful are not interested in power or indoctrination.

Instead of looking at the leadership or those who want to be heard, you should look at the rank and file, the backroom people on whom the church depends but does not venerate.

Richard

[T_aquaticus (The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)]

@RichardG

Religion is not about consensus.

Neither is it about right and wrong.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be, but history paints quite a different picture.

@RichardG

I guess that is why scientists do not always get it.

30-40% of scientists in the US are religious, the vast majority of whom are Christian. I would strongly suspect that most scientists understand why there isn’t a consensus on religious belief in the human population like there is for scientific conclusions.

For a bit of humor:

Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, “Don’t do it!” He said, “Nobody loves me.” I said, “God loves you. Do you believe in God?”

He said, “Yes.” I said, “Are you a Christian or a Jew?” He said, “A Christian.” I said, “Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?” He said, “Protestant.” I said, “Me, too! What franchise?” He said, “Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?” He said, “Northern Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?”

He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region.” I said, “Me, too!”

Northern Conservative†Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.” I said, “Die, heretic!” And I pushed him over.
–Emo Phillips
The best God joke ever - and it's mine! | Stage | The Guardian

[paleomalacologist (David Campbell)]

Also, the volcanoes (and large volcanoes generally) are made of layer after layer from a huge number of eruptions. There must be time for each one to happen and more magma to build up. Ararat is a stratovolcano.

[mitchellmckain (Scientist and Christian)]

@RichardG

you are not reading. I said not always, not never.

You are quite correct. I didn’t catch that the first time around which is why I went back and fixed this.

[St.Roymond]

@adamjedgar

consistent with the historical record found in the bible via a normal reading of language.

That’s something that YEC just refuses to do, along with refusing to consider context. It’s one big reason I refuse to credit anything from AiG or Creation. com; they claim to adhere to the historical-grammatical method but throw out both aspects on a regular basis.

@rsewell

Grok was in the news lately for getting cozy with Nazi interpretations of history.

Yes, because Musk rewrote the code to implement bias.

@mitchellmckain

I talked to a medical doctor today. And he said one of the hopes of AI for the medical profession is they can correlate a far larger number of cases than any one doctor can experience personally regarding the more rare conditions.

Lawyers say the same thing. And there have been complaints by courts that they are having to resort to AI just to wade through the thousands of citations legal AI will find and make use of.

@paleomalacologist

Adam is mixing up unconnected aspects of glaciers. The dishonest young-earth argument relating to the WWII aircraft is claiming that the airplanes were deeply buried in a few decades, therefore any thickness of ice can be dismissed as forming quickly. It ignores the difference between uncompacted top layers and densely packed deeper layers, as well as the difference between the coastal area where the planes were, with heavy snowfall, versus the ice deserts of interior of Greenland or Antarctica. Of course, it also ignores vast amounts of data on glacier layers and ages.

ChatGPT assessed the depth at which the planes were found as consistent with known meteorology and glacial conditions.

@paleomalacologist

But the way glaciers shaped the land poses other problems for young-earth models. The glacial landforms indicate multiple advances and retreats of glaciers across huge distances.

Yep. One thing we examined in glacial geology class was how to determine from the contents and structure of glacial moraines how often a glacier had retreated and advanced again upslope of a particualr moraine. Such examinations were involved in confirming the reality of “galloping glaciers”, glaciers which undergo surges in advancing but then settle down to more mundane behavior before doing it again.

@paleomalacologist

Glaciers can only form on land - snow doesn’t pile up on water.

Not entirely true, but generally so. We studied some glaciers grounded on sea bottom that had made contact because snow on the water turned to ice which caught more snow which became ice and the bottom of the glacier was pushed down until making contact – weird stuff, and rare.

[St.Roymond]

@paleomalacologist

At least since New Testament times, there was speculation within the church as to whether the age of the earth might be vast

I still get a kick out of the guy who decided the earth was a trillion years old – no scientific basis for it, of course.

@paleomalacologist

But Answers in Genesis prominently claims that the layers in the Grand Canyon were not solid until after the flood.

Which no one who passed a Geology 101 course will do anything but laugh at.

@paleomalacologist

The modern young-earth creation movement is twisting language in order to make the ancient text fit a modern non-biblical world view, namely the idea that the Bible must be speaking scientifically if it is really true.

Amen!

@paleomalacologist

As a result, it has become a false religion in some cases, where salvation is by believing and promoting a young earth rather than by believing in Jesus.

and thus thousands of college kids raised YEC abandon the faith every year because they were never actually taught it.

@adamjedgar

Which half of Genesis would that be? The book starts out with history and continues with said history right through until the end

The first – everything up to Abraham was neither written as history nor has any historical evidence to support it.
Stop lying about what Moses wrote.
And the version I read is the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia except when it’s the Septuagint, though more and more I rely on translations.

@rsewell

@adamjedgar

I have no problem with significant weather events long after the main flood

You do have a problem. Eyewitness history confirms that there was the same pace and degree of weather and climate events in keeping with conventional science, going back to hundreds of years prior to YEC’s flood date.

You are also unable to deal with the specifics of the formations referenced, and resort to hand waving deflections.

Nicely and politely put.

@paleomalacologist

The young-earth claims about Siccar Point jump from “happened rapidly” to “can be done by the flood within the young-earth time frame” without any supporting evidence. But a geologist’s concept of rapid is not the same as ordinary human ideas of rapid.

Excellent point. In geological terms, glaciation is rapid!

@paleomalacologist

A variety of depositions is incompatible with the flood model. You can’t have a flood that is simultaneously moving water around the globe at hundreds of km per hour to produce all the global fluctuations in stable isotopes and also perfectly calm to allow tiny particles to settle out and bury well-preserved fossils. You can’t have the continents zipping around at 70 km/h and the formation of distinct thin layers from individual volcanic eruptions. You can’t have a flood that is salty enough to precipitate evaporite deposits and allows ocean life to survive.

Nice selection of “oops” ideas.

@paleomalacologist

But the model must actually have testable content.

They refuse to test their ideas against the actual text of the scriptures; why expect them to do so with science?

@paleomalacologist

The layers that you claim that post-flood conditions can explain are throughout the entire geologic column; you are leaving nothing for the Flood itself.

That covers what I saw in the Grand Canyon.
.

[St.Roymond]

@T_aquaticus

One thing that stood out to me is the string of volcanos running just inland parallel to the coasts of Oregon and Washington, and also parallel with a subducting tectonic plate.

And those on the map are the “second string”; there’s a whole range of volcanoes from an earlier period.
BTW, I’ve visited eleven of those and climbed four. The views are awesome.

@T_aquaticus

For a bit of humor:

I’ve heard that before with the denominations different. It was told by a pastor to a Bible class; reactions were interesting.

@paleomalacologist

There must be time for each one to happen and more magma to build up.

In volcanology we actually did calculations for minimum times between eruptions for different volcano types. Very rarely are they less than centuries.

[Roy (Roy (Listener twice correct))]

@paleomalacologist

Adam is mixing up unconnected aspects of glaciers. The dishonest young-earth argument relating to the WWII aircraft is claiming that the airplanes were deeply buried in a few decades, therefore any thickness of ice can be dismissed as forming quickly. It ignores the difference between uncompacted top layers and densely packed deeper layers, as well as the difference between the coastal area where the planes were, with heavy snowfall, versus the ice deserts of interior of Greenland or Antarctica. Of course, it also ignores vast amounts of data on glacier layers and ages.

It also ignores the difference between an ice-cap, on which ice and snow accumulate in one place, and a glacier, in which ice and snow move.

The planes weren’t just found 250ft down, they were found a mile from where they landed.

Calculating how long an object has been in a glacier by measuring its depth and comparing that to snowfall is like calculating how long an object has been in a river by measuring its depth and comparing it to rainfall. It doesn’t matter how much rain has fallen if the object has been swept a mile downstream.

[Roy (Roy (Listener twice correct))]

@mitchellmckain

It is nowhere near as boring as hearing this accusation and response over and over again to everyone. Getting things from Google AI is an improvement on his part over copying things from AIG. And his response is more interesting than yours. Your contempt for Google AI and its lack of accuracy is not an informative response to the points Adam was making.

I don’t have contempt for Google AI and other LLM lack of accuracy. I understand how and why they get things wrong, and how they cannot necessarily distinguish factual sources from dubious ones.

I have contempt for people who post the output from Google AI, ChatGPT etc without bothering to check it or sometimes even to read it. Especially if they don’t include the input they used, or (with Google’s AI search) the sources the AI lists.

I have even more contempt for people who post AI-generated output without admitting that they are doing it.

@mitchellmckain

Google AI may get things wrong sometimes but it doesn’t just make things up.

Google AI suffers from the same problems that other AI tools do in that it combines data from multiple sources, many of which are unreliable, sometimes in ways that result in false ‘information’. Here’s an example.

Even the AI search tool has these problems, as I’ve confirmed by searching first for “quotes from socrates writings” and then for “fake socrates quotes” and finding the same quote in both sets of results. Also, the first search result gave no indication whatsoever that we don’t have anything actually written by Socrates.

Google AI has also been criticised for being biased towards racial diversity, even in cases where this is inappropriate.

It may not be as bad as ChatGPT, which produces ‘hallucinatory’ references and citations so often that there is now a database of them, but Google does appear in that database.^[1]

So why Google AI might not ‘make things up’ in the sense that it invents falsehoods completely, not least because it doesn’t have a sense of what ‘truth’ is, it definitely does ‘make things up’ by creating falsehoods from combining unreliable sources.

@mitchellmckain

The question we should be asking is whether scientists use the depth of objects under the ice sheet as a measure of its age and what goes into such calculations. In this Google AI is more informative than this response of yours. I certainly made more progress in understanding the flaws in Adam’s argument by looking at the Google AI responses than by looking at yours.

Scientists sometimes use the number of layers of ice above an object to determine it’s age, and sometimes use radiodating of air trapped in ice bubbles as confirmation.

But what they do not do is use the depth of an object in a moving glacier as an indication of age, because it isn’t one. This is the main flaw in Adam’s argument, and you clearly haven’t understood it at all.

---

1. The court order reference therein makes interesting reading. ↩︎

[Roy (Roy (Listener twice correct))]

@mitchellmckain

Darwin is reported to have made a calculation of erosion rates to say the Weald (in south England) took 300 million years to form, though this calculation was shown to be flawed and thus removed in the final copy of Origin of the Species. To be sure he was looking for some way to justify the amount of time needed for his principles of evolution to work.

If you actually read what he wrote you’d see he was justifying his claims about the paucity of the fossil record.

@mitchellmckain

So… in other words. Roy would do much better to point out the possibility of bias (as well as lack of accuracy) in using Google IA rather than complain it is wasting everyone’s time with the false assumption Google IA is going to give the same response to everyone.

I don’t expect you to even try to support your false claim about a false assumption.

[T_aquaticus (The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)]

@Roy

But what they do not do is use the depth of an object in a moving glacier as an indication of age, because it isn’t one. This is the main flaw in Adam’s argument, and you clearly haven’t understood it at all.

The other main problem is that the glacier is close to coast of Greenland where the climate is different than the interior of the island. Glaciers can easily produce multiple visible layers in a single year, but this doesn’t happen in the interior of the island where snowfall is much lower and temperatures are much colder and more stable. There’s a reason scientists chose those specific sites in the interior of Greenland to measure annual events. If the ice closer to the coast was a viable option they most certainly would have chosen them instead of the very hard to reach and remote interior of Greenland.

[paleomalacologist (David Campbell)]

Another major problem with the YEC claims about Siccar Point is that they ignore all the layers elsewhere that have to fit in the time between the Silurian tilted beds underneath and the upper Devonian overlying flat beds.

[DeaconKenNY (Kenneth David Swenson)]

@paleomalacologist

“…The Grand Canyon is a popular topic of young-earth claims, but actually checking the data shows that the young-earth claims are untrue. Some of the rock layers show unambiguous evidence of being solid and eroded before the next layer was deposited, such as karst…”

My favorite comeback when a YEC brings up the fact that the entire depth of the Grand Canyon was formed in less than a year. If this were a random event, and God didn’t pull a “Bob Ross” and decide “…let me put a canyon right over there…” Then there should be similar canyon formations spread all over the globe, and of the same depth.

[adamjedgar (adam james edgar)]

@rsewell

Flood geology is incoherent, and as consistency is necessary for agreement, YEC will never get its act together

And yet given that claim of yours, the notion that the flood of Noah in the bible was local is even less coherant…because no matter which way you want to read it, the fact is the narrative simply doesnt support such a claim.

It clearly uses global descriptors in Gemesis 6 such as:

5 The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.

6 The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth,

7 So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground

11 Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence

17 I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish.

A christian has to either take the narrative as written or claim its untrue.

A claim that the global narrative wasnt real is a claim that what Moses wrote is alao untrue.

If what Moses wrote is untrue, then either God didnt reveal it to him or there is in fact no God, No salvation (christ died for a self proclaimed delusion), amd Christianity is pointless (because atheism says morailty is a result of Darwinian evolutionary social experimentation.

[Bill_II]

@adamjedgar

A christian has to either take the narrative as written or claim its untrue.

Nice false dichotomy there. There is a third option, the message is true but not as literal history.

[St.Roymond]

@adamjedgar

the notion that the flood of Noah in the bible was local is even less coherant…because no matter which way you want to read it, the fact is the narrative simply doesnt support such a claim.

The narrative, in context, makes that claim: it says the flood came upon the known world.

To get a global flood you have to rewrite the text, in the vocabulary, the grammar, the context, and the regular use of language.

@adamjedgar

A christian has to either take the narrative as written or claim its untrue.

I take it as written – an event that covered the known world. Because that’s what it says.