My Favorite (to date) take down of Creationism.

[_Res Ipsa]

No, I don't throw out anomalies at all. I just don't discount the data and claim that the "real story" is in the anomalies.

So you don't throw out anomalies, instead you toss anomalies. I see, I guess you explained your position to the point where I have nothing less to say.

Why do you insist on misrepresenting my position?

[Guest]

But it really isn't necessary to go through this whole list to see the irrationality of YEC. Gravity and math alone devastatingly refutes YEC "flood geology."

Nothing in the links provided by LittleNipper comes even close to refuting the above simple and devastating rebuttal of flood geology. Nor do any of LittleNippper's provided links come close to effectively refuting or even addressing the evidence of from radiometric dating provided by spotlight. I have to conclude that the links LittleNipper provided are merely further examples of creationist dishonesty and deliberate deception.

Also, any claim that creationism, especially Young Earth Creationism is based on anything other than a fanatical, a priori and irrational presumption of Biblical inerrancy is, in my carefully considered opinion, is nothing but a bold faced lie. This is born out by the Statement of Faith and similar statements and pledges that organizations like Answers In Genesis require their "scientists" to adhere to.

Statement of Faith

In order to preserve the function and integrity of the ministry in its mission to proclaim the absolute truth and authority of Scripture and to provide a biblical role model to our employees, and to the Church, the community, and society at large, it is imperative that all persons employed by the ministry in any capacity, or who serve as volunteers, should abide by and agree to our Statement of Faith, to include the statement on marriage and sexuality, and conduct themselves accordingly.

Section 1: Priorities
•The scientific aspects of creation are important but are secondary in importance to the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ as Sovereign, Creator, Redeemer, and Judge.
•The doctrines of Creator and Creation cannot ultimately be divorced from the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Section 2: Basics
•The 66 books of the Bible are the written Word of God. The Bible is divinely inspired and inerrant throughout. Its assertions are factually true in all the original autographs. It is the supreme authority in everything it teaches. Its authority is not limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes but includes its assertions in such fields as history and science.
•The final guide to the interpretation of Scripture is Scripture itself.
•The account of origins presented in Genesis is a simple but factual presentation of actual events and therefore provides a reliable framework for scientific research into the question of the origin and history of life, mankind, the earth, and the universe.
•The various original life forms (kinds), including mankind, were made by direct creative acts of God. The living descendants of any of the original kinds (apart from man) may represent more than one species today, reflecting the genetic potential within the original kind. Only limited biological changes (including mutational deterioration) have occurred naturally within each kind since creation.
•The great Flood of Genesis was an actual historic event, worldwide (global) in its extent and effect.
•The special creation of Adam (the first man) and Eve (the first woman), and their subsequent fall into sin, is the basis for the necessity of salvation for mankind.
•Death (both physical and spiritual) and bloodshed entered into this world subsequent to and as a direct consequence of man’s sin.

Section 3: Theology
•The Godhead is triune: one God, three Persons—God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
•All mankind are sinners, inherently from Adam and individually (by choice), and are therefore subject to God’s wrath and condemnation.
•Freedom from the penalty and power of sin is available to man only through the sacrificial death and shed blood of Jesus Christ and His complete and bodily resurrection from the dead.
•The Holy Spirit enables the sinner to repent and believe in Jesus Christ.
•The Holy Spirit lives and works in each believer to produce the fruits of righteousness.
•Salvation is a gift received by faith alone in Christ alone and expressed in the individual’s repentance, recognition of the death of Christ as full payment for sin, and acceptance of the risen Christ as Savior, Lord, and God.
•All things necessary for our salvation are expressly set down in Scripture.
•Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary.
•Jesus Christ rose bodily from the dead, ascended to heaven, and is currently seated at the right hand of God the Father, and shall return in person to this earth as Judge of the living and the dead.
•Satan is the personal spiritual adversary of both God and mankind.
•Those who do not believe in Christ are subject to everlasting conscious punishment, but believers enjoy eternal life with God.
•The only legitimate marriage sanctioned by God is the joining of one naturally born man and one naturally born woman in a single, exclusive union, as delineated in Scripture. God intends sexual intimacy to only occur between a man and a woman who are married to each other, and has commanded that no intimate sexual activity be engaged in outside of a marriage between a man and a woman. Any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, pornography, or any attempt to change one’s gender, or disagreement with one’s biological gender, is sinful and offensive to God.
•It is the duty of Christians to regularly attend a local Bible believing church, as portrayed in the New Testament.
•All human life is sacred and begins at conception (defined as the moment of fertilization). The unborn child is a living human being, created in the image of God, and must be respected and protected both before and after birth. The abortion of an unborn child or the active taking of human life through euthanasia constitutes a violation of the sanctity of human life, and is a crime against God and man.

Section 4: General

The following are held by members of the Board of Answers in Genesis to be either consistent with Scripture or implied by Scripture:
•Scripture teaches a recent origin for man and the whole creation, spanning approximately 4,000 years from creation to Christ.
•The days in Genesis do not correspond to geologic ages, but are six [6] consecutive twenty-four [24] hour days of creation.
•The Noachian Flood was a significant geological event and much (but not all) fossiliferous sediment originated at that time.
•The gap theory has no basis in Scripture.
•The view, commonly used to evade the implications or the authority of biblical teaching, that knowledge and/or truth may be divided into secular and religious, is rejected.
•By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record. Of primary importance is the fact that evidence is always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information. [emphasis added]

Creationists' accusation that scientists' conclusions are only a result of bias and refusal to consider any other reasonable alternatives are the very height of hypocrisy!
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA230_1.html

Claim CA230.1:
The conclusions of scientists are based on their preconceptions. They prove only what they assume.
Source:

Oard, Michael J. 2003. Are polar ice sheets only 4500 years old? Impact 361 (July), p. iv. http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=art ... iew&ID=120

Response:
1. The conclusions of scientists are based on evidence, and the evidence remains for all to see. Scientists know that their ideas must stand the scrutiny of other scientists, who may not share their preconceptions. The best way to do this is to make the case strong enough on the basis of the evidence so that preconceptions do not matter. And scientists themselves condemn preconceptions when they see them. (Stephen J. Gould, the most vocal recent crusader against preconceptions in science, was vehemently anticreationism.)

The history of science is filled with scientists accepting ideas contrary to their preconceptions. Examples include the reality of extinctions, the reality of meteors, meteors as causes of mass extinctions, ice ages, continental drift, transposons, bacteria as the cause of ulcers, the nature of prions, and, of course, evolution itself. Scientists are not immune to being sidetracked by their preconceptions, but they ultimately go where the evidence leads.

Scientists make deliberate efforts to remove subjective influences from their evaluation of conclusions; they do a good job, on the whole, of reducing bias. They do such a good job, in fact, that what creationists really object to is the fact that scientists do not interpret evidence according to certain religious preconceptions.


2. The hypocrisy of this charge cannot be overstressed, Creationists state outright that they accept only what they already assume. Consider part of Answers in Genesis' Statement of Faith: "By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record" (AIG n.d.). The Institute for Creation Research has a similar statement of faith (ICR 2000). Creationists admit up front that their preconceptions, in the form of religious convictions, determine their conclusions.

[_spotlight]

I would suggest you reconsider: http://www.icr.org/index.php?action=sub ... odule=home

Reconsider or consider? Would you mind presenting the part where my post is addressed. I am not seeing it. Sorting of radiological isotopes is not possible by a flood, neither is sorting of non-radiological isotopes as presented in the post on chemostratigraphy.

[Guest]

Little Nipper's article mentioned a model built around the idea of the continents separating at the time of the flood. This has been disproved.

GPS measurements of the various rates of motion of tectonic plates confirms radiometric dating! The following are quotes from the article referenced below.

But in this case, YECs can make up any excuse they want for why they don’t believe those dating methods and why the estimates of rates based on them are flawed. It doesn’t matter. In fact, the more problems they say they find with radiometric dating methods, the worse their problem becomes. This is because if the dating methods and rate estimates are bogus, then there should be no correlation with rate estimates based on real-time GPS measurements.

What young earth model would predict that rates based on “bogus” million-year old dates should yield the same rates measured by technology that we have in our cell phones? None. In fact most young earth models include some sort of accelerated plate motions in the past, with plate motions only slowing to their current rates in the past several thousand years.

So, according to current YEC hypotheses, estimates of past plate-movement rates should not equal rates measured in the present. These data falsify the accelerated plate tectonics model of flood geology.

Why would radiometric dating, which supposedly is a useless tool for estimating the true age of the earth by YEC reckoning, provide near-precise estimates of current plate motions, which are confirmed by a completely unrelated form of measurement?

For the YEC hypothesis, they shouldn’t. And yet they do.

The only reasonable explanation for what we see here is that the radiometric dating methods provide faithful estimates of the real ages of the rocks. The GPS data are yet another independent confirmation of the validity of radiometric dating. The fact that radiometric based dates predicted rates that were confirmed later by another method serve to confirm the former method.

This is no conspiracy. Forty years ago, scientists could not have faked the radiometric dating to derive estimates of plate motions that they knew we would find in the future. How could anyone have known that one plate should move 120 mm/year and another one only 2 mm/year? They simply calculated ages, did simple division, and derived a rate. Because no one could have known the modern rate of plate motion, there was no way for any scientists to fudge numbers and bend dates to particular assumptions about rates, as YECs have long claimed. The plate-movement rates are unbiased, and I think we can be reasonably sure that satellite measurements are unbiased recordings of the rates as well. The fact that the dates match one another is very strong confirmation of the constant motion of the plates over long periods of time.

Let me provide another example to further show this is not just some cherry-picked data. Below (Fig. 3) is one additional example that I have used in one of my lectures. It shows the relationship between the distance of an Hawaiian Island or seamount from the active volcano. By dividing the age of the island as determined by radiometric dating by the distance you can estimate the speed at which the pacific plate is moving toward the northwest. This was done more than 40 years ago. In the past decade we have been able to measure the current rate of motion via GPS technology and it is very close to 8.6 cm/year. This is an incredible coincidence if radiometric dating methods are unreliable or if there has been accelerated decay of radionucleotides as some YECs have claimed. Rather than a coincidence these similar estimates are a powerful testimony to the accuracy of plate tectonic models and of the accuracy of radiometric dating techniques.

http://thenaturalhistorian.com/2014/09/ ... ic-dating/

[_Gunnar]

Yes! The more creationists try to explain away the evidence against them, the more they expose their own irrationality, duplicity and/or dishonesty.

[_Gunnar]

Yet another powerful and irrefutable evidence against a Universal Noachian flood is the simple fact that several ancient civilizations, most notably the Sumerians and the Ancient Egyptians, developed systems of writing well before the Biblical date of Noah's flood and produced an unbroken historical record that continued until well after that supposed deluge. This would not have been possible if there had been a universal flood that killed everyone on earth except for 8 people on Noah's mythical ark.

http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=ab33.

Incidentally, this also conclusively proves that the Biblical story that all mankind had only one language before the Tower of Babel is a myth. There is simply no honest or rational way to avoid or deny those conclusions. Invoking the claim of Biblical Inerrancy to counter them is neither rational nor honest.

[_huckelberry]

A long list of canyons!!

I can enjoy reading a few of these high tech arguments, thanks all.

Little Nipper may not read his own links, it is hard to tell what sort of observation comunicates. Many are worth a try.

For me canyons are an illustration of why science and observation are critical to living. I love hiking and am happy to leave trails and signposts behind. Entering the vast space between roads you need guidance systems. I found as a youngster that observing erosion processes provides a key to a map which can always be a help. But you have to listen to that map by observation and seeing the connections.

I have enjoyed hiking the bottom, the sides the tops and the many ridges inbetween, Canyons are like the veins of a leaf. many side tributaries create their own canyons and ridges. It was seeing how every trickle formed a part of a larger pattern which suggest to my mind that this is a long process. Yes a big big gush of water could cut a big gully. That gully does not have the side branches of normal canyons.

On that lists of lots of canyons I recognized at learst three which actually were shaped by great big massive floods from huge lakes. Snake Hells canyon significantly shaped by washout of Lake Bonniville, Clark fork, by the Missoula glacial lake flood,and Columbia gorge which channelled that same flood. In the Columbia gorge the side canyons are chopped off leaving waterfalls because the flood cut so much faster than normal erosion. Clark fork canyon spreads all over North Idaho, eastern Washinton in a spray of shallow miles wide courses. That is a very unusual canyon pattern. Hells Canyon cuts down rapidly to join the much longer and older Salmon river canyon, It is a deep v shape with relatively limited side canyons

By comparing flood created canyons from the normal eleborately branched canyons we can see that most canyons were formed slowly and steadily.
///////////
Explicitly or not spoken, people who believe young earth creationism rely on two huge none time events they believe explains what we see looking like evidence for an old earth. First it is supposed that everything was created as if it was old already , all at once with an as if history which we see as if it happened. Then there was a second miraculous creation of what looks like historical time. People think God disintegrated the earths crust and reformed it with the flood. Again this reforming was done to exactly look like it didn't happen but was the result of many processes over a long time( all actually compressed into a few months)

I am not fond of this pretend time business but I find myself wondering what can be observed about events after the non time moment in the flood. It might not be clear how to identify the post imaginary time commencement.I have thought that if there are significant volcanic deposits on top of the flood sedimentary rocks then the igneous rocks are after. If so in Eastern Washington and Oregon,whole mountain ranges are built of volcanic rock on top of sediments. These post flood formations have been raised up and eroded by both glaciers and rivers into deep canyons. These are canyons which start on a high spot with a different canyon running out the opposite way. No big lakes for lots of water, instead little trickles gather together into small streams cutting deep canyons and forming the leaf vein patterns of long process. Millions of years plainly visible after the flood.

I have bored people to tears and I wanted to jabber on about the Yakima river and Union gap. Its a marvelous tale of time and the river.

[_Franktalk]

Why do you insist on misrepresenting my position?

I am not sure I did. You insist that you consider anomalies yet the orthodox position tosses them. What am I to do? Anomalies by definition do not fit the current theory accepted by orthodox science. Should I instead say you sweep them under a rug?

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/tierr ... /tecto.htm

http://www.newgeology.us/presentation21.html

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 120606.htm

http://users.indigo.net.au/don/nonsense/bottomline.html

http://newpangaeatheory.com/the-enigmas/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_u ... geoscience

[_spotlight]

You insist that you consider anomalies yet the orthodox position tosses them. What am I to do? Anomalies by definition do not fit the current theory accepted by orthodox science. Should I instead say you sweep them under a rug?

Anomalies eventually get resolved Frank. It seems to be another fertile god of the gaps area for you however. When you accept some random pseudoscientific idea based upon your anomalies then the result is that current facts and observations that are the basis for standard scientific theories now become anomalies for your pseudoscientific "theories."

Look at your first link, Plate Tectonics: A Paradigm Under Threat, by David Pratt

Who is this David Pratt?
http://research.easybib.com/research/in ... %22&page=1

There are a couple of other "articles" by David Pratt:

Crop Circles and Their Message
UFO's: The Psychic Dimension

[_Gunnar]

It is good that geologists are continuing to examine and refine their theories about how the surface of the earth is changing and reforming over time. I don't think anyone is claiming they know everything about these processes and how they work. I see the questions about and investigation of the anomalies and evidences listed by the links Franktalk listed as a healthy thing that will eventually lead to a better understanding of what is really happening and how things work. I don't think they cast any legitimate doubt on the radiometric and other evidences that the earth is far, far older than YECs are willing to admit. I agree though, that we probably don't know enough yet to definitively state that we fully understand all the geological processes going on. It shouldn't bother anyone if the theory of plate tectonics is not complete or sure enough to explain everything that we have so far observed. It does seem to be at least a good beginning to explaining much of what has so far been observed.