Can we really Believe the Creator's Word?

""Obviously" the point of Adam and Eve being created as "adults" shows "age" that is "needed" for the starting conditions to be successful."

And why are the starting conditions that I interpret as evidence of great age needed for the first life to be successful? The careful ratios of radioactive elements that show great age. Better yet, all the cosmic evidence for great age. How does making a pair of galaxies billions of light years away appear to have been colliding for hundreds of thousands of years help life here on earth?

"Rather - by the Creator's account time has passed and it has been at a somewhat uniform rate - aside from the flood. So going back 4500 years to the flood you would "expect" to see signs of steady state erosion."

Bob, it is not just that we have seen erosion. In your scenario, we would expect all of the volcanoes to show basically the same amount of erosion if most of the erosion were caused by the same event. We do not. We see differing amouns of erosion in a specific pattern. So the erosion must have been over time and not the result of a one time event. The data shows it. So you would need to compress 70 million years of mountain building and erosion into "4500 years" you said. Can you show anywhere today where either shield volcanoes can build at a sufficient rate (without boiling off the oceans trying to build over 100 of these things in a short period of time) to get volcanoes as big as we see (don't forget that most of them, even the 10000 footers, are underwater so they are HUGE) or to erode volcanic rock that quickly? You can't.

"What is "not apparent" is how you hope to "predict" or "account for" the rapid geologic changes that occur at the flood and shortly following it."

Fine, show us the physical evidence for the rapid changes and where enough heat came from rapidly enough to make that much rock and where that heat was then disippated to without violating rules of heat transfer and without boiling the oceans. Your assertion, your serve.

"Let's assume that we have a steady-state uniform progression extending back at the same rate that we see geologic processes occuring today"

You are free to give us evidence of rapid changes that you think save your position.

Again, you have basically denied evidence you do not like. You cannot show that any other scenario fits what we see better than the geologists interpretation.

"The "details" are that science today is forced to admit NON-uniformity in the expansion of the universe from the zero point."

And why do you think this is a problem?

"The "details" are that science is forced to admit that space ITSELF is spreading out like a curtain unfolding NOT having the energy dissipation wave form inversely proportional to the square of the distance as predicted in a classic explosion wave form from a "big bang"!"

Your whole premise is faulty. The BB is NOT an explosion. There is nothing for it to explode into. It is the expansion of space itself.

I don't know why I waste my time with the following, but here goes. Do you realize that it is thought that samall variations in the early universe are responsible for the large scale structure we see today? Scientists think that the very early universe vibrated with basically great sound waves. These waves would have created areas of compression and rarification that would be the differences in density that gave rise to later structure. Recently, we have been able to make high quality images of the CMB. You know what, the patterns show sound waves. Plotting the temperture deviation and angular frequency of the pattern and you get a large peak at the fundamental frequency of the young universe with smaller peaks at all of the overtones of this fundamental frequency. The sizes were predicted ahead of time due to inflation. The observations matched. Now, if you take the structure seen in the CMB and compare it to the the distribution of matter in the visible universe. When you plot it, you find that the distribution EXACTLY matches that shown in the CMB. This is extradinary proof of inflation. But I am sure you will deny this. "Creation science" does not have the ability to make such predictions that can be proven or disproven. As you show over and over, it refuses to tie itself down to anything so that you can claim that any set of data supports your assertions. But you are never quite able to actually demonstrate this. Your just happy to deny all the evidence around you.

"In the Creator's account (had you paid attention to the details of the text AS IF they were trustworthy)He states that He made TWO GREAT LIGHTS on day 4. "

Oh Bob. Still staying away from your literal reading. I believe the account forms earth on the third day, verse 9, and ade the stars on the fourth day, verse 14. So now that you are denying science and the Bible, what is your third way.

"I have never argued that the stars are the same age as the earth."

You said you had no problem if the stars were older when the literal reading shows that they were younger.

"In responding to your speculation that "SINCE God used DNA as the code for living organisms - THEN complex life forms evolved from simple ones" -"

I already showed you you have underestimated the detail of the evidence if this is what you think.

"A more "Speculative" position could hardly be imagined. Asked why the thumb is on the same side of the hand between Apes and humans "WHY because we all came from apes of course"??"

More speculative than ALL of the primate "kinds" got this exact same mutation and spread it through their entire populations? Hardly. And this evidence is not presented in a vacuum. It is presented along side all of the other genetic, physical, and fossil evidence that shows it to be true. If it were the ONLY piece of evidence, then you might be right. In context, it is a cog in a great wheel of evidence.

"And yet the Creator's CLEAR statement that God FORMED man in His own image"

You really think that means physical image? Then you really are missing the point in trying to maintain your literal interpretation and providing us with a demonstration of the problems with such. It is our soul that makes us in the image of God, not ten fingers and ten toes.

"Hello!! You have conveniently "Forgotten" the "modification with descent" argument that claims to "aggregate new genetic data into the DNA sequence" such that organism GAIN genetic information over time."

What part of modification is unclear? The DNA that codes for a wolf is no longer there. The DNA for a poodle has been selected for. Speaking more generally, when things evolve, it is not normally because some new piece of DNA has appeared alongside the old, it is because the old has been changed into something new. (I had to do that in general terms because the case of dogs is a little different. Here the certain traits in the natural variability within wolves have been selected for. The time frame is too short for much of it to have been from actual mutation, though some traits would be expected to be from mutation. As these traits get repeatedly selected for, the genes for the other traits are selected against and removed from the gene pool. The gene pool of poodles no longer contains the same diversity as that of wolves. It is one reason pure breeds more often have health problems. The variation is no longer there to get a wolf.)

"Are you reading this?

Are you paying attention to the points?"

Yes, now identify the fallacies I am using. Point out what I said, how it was a fallacy, and which fallacy it was. You accuse. You prove.

"Test case - go back to your Hawaiian island example and SHOW how rapid one-time geologic changes are "shown" by the story you tried to tell?"

I do not need it to tell the story. But if you want to get into it, there are catastrophes in the geologic record of Hawaii. Many large landslides for example. Geologists have no proble looking at the debris are concluding correctly that it was the result of a catestrophic landslide. They do not try to explain the debris in some long term, slow process as you imply.

"River delta sedimentation rates CHANGE as the river ages. NEW river formation would involve high impact turbidity currents massively impacting sedimentation rates of the delta AND YET all major river deltas of the earth - show a "start" point less than 6000 years old EVEN if we do NOT account for rapid deposition during start up as would be "expected"."

Bob, you have been repeatedly shown how your river delta problem is false. It gets boring after a while. BUt you need to show that river deltas from differently today than they did in the past if you want to use this as proof against uniformatarianism.

Bob, you managed to ignore all the evidence I presented. Congrats on that. I am still waiting for why primates and apes share all the things I suggested. That is a lot of one time events all tied together. Common descent predicts such things. Created "kinds" would be expected to predict the opposite, yet we find it. Explain again the vitamin C and the LTRs and the other shared mutations. Why don't you go after the whole twin nested heirarchy? Maybe because the facts support it?

 

See Bob, it says "lights in the heavens" on day four and then seperately says "the two great lights" two verses later, just as I pointed out to you. So stars on day four. Now you say I am wrong on this. Insult me even. Why don't you quote and show me on what day the stars were formed since you insist I am wrong on this.

"Now let me ask you a question - what causes the phenomina that we call "evening and morning"?"

Hmmm. Good question. Evening is just before the sun sets, morning is just after the sun rises. This is caused by the rotation of the earth in relation to the sun. Your literal reading has at least THREE mornings and evenings before there is even a sun to give us mornings and evenings. Maybe a fouth sunless morning on the fourth day. Strange thing in something meant to be literal. But, I imagine that you will not let this get in your way, either.

 

As usual, you ignore the questions. No sun for those first threee mornings and evenings. How could you have a morning and an evening. You are so intent to save your earlier comment that the stars may be older than the earth that you again insult my intelligence but do not bother to quote me the verse where the stars are actually created. That would be the KEY part if you are trying to prove me wrong.

 

"AS in CHANGE the Poodel into a wolf. Exactly "

Bob

Do you have a clue how evolution actually works? Is this poodle to wolf strawman the best objection you have? Just where in any peice of evolutionary science do you get the idea that this should be possible?

"Instead of "having" to wait for a stray beta or alpha particle to hit something - instead of having to wait for that "chance meeting" of two "lucky donors" - humans "make it happen" - no need to wait a billion years."

Selective breeding can only make use of the variablity that is already there. With mutation and natural selection, novel traits can be created and selected for.

This brings us to another problem with your model I predict you will ignore. Since all our wolves and bog breeds had to have come from one wolf pair, where did all that variety come from? There could have been at most only four copies of each gene. You deny the power of evolution, information is only lost, so you have no ability to generate the variation we see within species today.

And while we are the subject of genetics, you still are avoiding the questions I have posed to you. Why do all the primates share that vitamin C mutation exactly? How did it happen that the same mutation befell them all and got spread to all their members while no other "kinds" have that problem? What about all the other shared mutations? How did those same viral LTRs get in all the apes at the same place? For that matter, why do most humans share the exact same set of LTRS if several percent of the DNA has been added to by viral LTRs in only a few thousand years?

 

"Your ignorance about WHY God needed Adam to be an adult capable of plucking fruit and eating for himself is NOT a kind of "proof" that the Creator's account is "wrong"."

So your reasoning is that since Adam had to be created as an adult to pick fruit, the entire universe had to have been created with the results of 13 billion years of history. I don't get it.

"Wrong. The ratios don't "show great age" unless you can (in some god-like way) state what you know to be the "starting conditions" that you most extrapolate back to. Since you don't HAVE that data - you are stuck pretending that you do."

It gets boring pointing out to you that some methods of dating do not requitre that knowledge and that these methods have verified the accuracy of those few methods that do. Sigh. But please keep ignroing that.

"The point remains (that you seem to continually ignore so far) that you don't have any "data" showing what God needed for a living viable system - much less the amount of daughter product He needed to have in the earth's crust as a starting condition."

You'll have to prove that assertion. How does the ratio of these daughter elements deep in rocks affect life?

"Hmmm let me guess... "THAT" is the great "reason" for rejecting the Creator's Genesis 1-2:4 "account"???"

As I keep pointing out to you when you build such strawmen, it is not one piece of evidence. It is how the whole thing fits together. The great structures in space that can only be formed through hundreds of millions of years of gravitational interaction are but one small part. The CMB predictions that match up with reality are but another. Where are your predictions from "creation science" that we can test?

"True IF we knew that ONLY ONE geological event has occured in the past 6000 years."

Then lay your evidence out. I have. You can only deny it.

"The 70 million years "is not there"."

Who exactly are you quoting with "is not there". [sic]

Anyhow, I have put before you a compelling argument for the history. The differing ages based on dating and erosion. I am still trying to figure out what your objection to this is. You offer no evidence to challenge to standard model for the Hawaiian islands.

"I love it! You claim to know how many volcanoes it takes to boil the ocean!!"

Well, I have to admit that when I ran the numbers, I exaggerated a bit. There is enough heat to do some serious heating of the water, but not quite enough to provide the latent heat to actually evaporate them.

But you do not seem to understand what you are asking to have happened. Generate enough heat to have melted enough rock to form the mountains. Pour that much magma out and build it into what look like slowly built shield volcanoes. Move the hotspot rapidly enough to make the chain. Cool all that magma without violating any physical laws of heat transfer and in a way that makes crystals that cannot actually form in that length of time. Now you have to start eroding all these things back down. We have no examples of volcanic mountains eroding this quickly, but you'll still assert that it is so. You even have to carefully erode each one to the west more than the last one. But I am sure you will assert that some unknown event(s) was able to do this and yet leave evidence that it was done over millions of years.

"The Hawaiian Islands. The Marshall Islands. The mountain ranges of the American content, the Grand Canyon, the progress of the river deltas for all major rivers on the planet,"

Yes, Bob, give us your evidence for rapid change on all of these. It should be fun. You have not even been able to show us the Hawaiian islands formed rapidly yet you have the hubris to list them here.

 

Bob

Morning and evening are based on the sun rising and setting. To use another light source, you are further abandoning your literal interpretaion.

You still have not told me when the stars were created. The 14th verse seems to capture it for me. Not you I see. Bob, I am willing to let you out of this. I have admitted mistakes before. Today even. But, if not...

http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-c020.html

"According to Genesis, the sun, moon, and stars were made on the fourth day of the creation week."

http://members.aol.com/steamdoc/writings/fourth.html

"The Fourth Day takes its title from Genesis 1:14-19, the account of “the fourth day” of God’s creative work, in which “he made the stars also.”

http://www.all-creatures.org/book/book-creation6.html

"In these verses God defines the second heaven, and He creates the sun, moon and stars."

You are even going against your fellow YECers here. This is fairly simple reading comprehension, "but you seem to be having some trouble with it."

 

Why would it have to be made "massively radioactive?"

YOu claim to have all these problems with dating. Let's get back to the Hawaii example. If there is such a problem with dating, why is their such a strong linear relationship between the measured age and the distance from the currently erupting volcanoes? There should be no such relationship able to be drawn if dating were such a problem.

 

No. Again you reduce what I said to a strawman of what I said. I asked why distant galaxies would be required to show such age. The example I gave was colliding galaxies. They show hundreds of millions or even billions of years of gravitational interaction. How does this help the situation on earth?

I also gave you the example of the CMB. The very fine details of what we see in the CMB fall precisely where inflationary theory predicted. Why is this so if the BB did not happen and why is such fine tuning required for life on earth?

 

Why is the ICR still out promoting this garbage.

There has been plenty of evidence since the "study" that showed shrinkage to show that the sun is not shinking. Many studies have shown no shrinkage at all. Here is a good, RECENT paper. Brown, T M & Christensen-Dalsgaard, J (1998) 'Accurate determination of the solar photospheric radius', http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/9803131

The neutrino "problem" is laughable. Physicists have shown through a very ingeneous set of experiments that neutrinos change type. The "missing" neutrinos were because only a specific type was neing looked for. This type is actually the kind created in the sun but by the time they arrive here a significant number have changed into another type.

The oscillation is based on very old data and is not supported with modern theories. O'Brien (1998) 'Long-term Solar Oscillations and the Age of the Sun', Reports of the National Center for Science Education 18 (5): 6-10, http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/rncse_content/vol18/5066_longterm_solar_oscillations_a_12_30_1899.asp

The lithium and beryllium data is actually profound evidnece for a MATURE star. Brun & Turck-Chieze & Zahn (1998) 'Macroscopic processes in the solar interior', http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/9807090 A young star would show different amounts of the these two elements than what the sun has. It takes age to get what we have. I predict you will fall back to an appearance of age for the sun since these "young sun" arguments are fundamentally wrong.