That does sound very interesting, and from what I have seen of Sandbox, probably hugely entertaining.
It's actually not that entertaining. It’s pretty cool to simulate things, but when you’re trying to calculate with quite a bit of precision the trajectories of thousands of objects backwards in time, at only up to a few days per second (calculation steps), it takes a long time and can get boring quickly. And to be honest, isn’t as accurate as I had wanted, though still more accurate than I had imagined. Good for general models, but definitely not powerful enough for extremely high precision stuff.
The point of the ice cores and tree rings is that you really don't need to make any assumptions at all. Just count the years.
Again, you doing so is assuming that the layers accurately represent (individual) years all the way through, and by doing so you inherently exclude the possibility that the layers were laid down at one time. It’s question begging, and possibly special pleading.
Spectroscopy.
All this stuff.
This specific case.
It's the same as when you are stopped and breathalysed by the police (if that's a thing where you live). You blow into a little tube and the machine fires a beam of infrared radiation through the breath sample at a wavenumber of exactly 1055cm
-1 (I don't know that's the frequency they use, but it would be if I designed it) because absorption of light at that frequency is characteristic of a carbon-oxygen single bond, and the only reason your breath would contain C-O bonds is if you had been drinking alcohol.
So, just do the same technique but through a telescope, and look at the whole IR absorption spectrum for the fingerprint of each of these molecules. Indeed, alcohol is also found in the Sagittarius B2 cloud! If the molecules are being heated they could also give an emission spectrum. Although the BBC article says it's emission in this case, often they take the light coming from a star in the background and see what is being absorbed. Obviously spectra of mixtures are harder to interpret than those of pure samples.
27,000 light years is just over 8000 parsecs.
So according to this, from the Holy Wikipedia,
You should stop calling Wikipedia holy. It is far from it.
the techniques used on Sagittarius B2 would be calibrated using cluster cephids, which are pulsing stars that have a reliable correlation between their luminosity and period of pulsation. If you know the luminosity apparent on earth, and you know the actual luminosity of the star from its pulsation period, you can quite easily work out how far away it is. And, although it doesn't quite feel right saying it, 27,000 light years isn't that far away..! It is within our galaxy, so relatively close…
That wasn’t what I was asking.
How do you know that the light has been traveling for that long, except by assuming that A) the speed of light has been constant (throughout the universe and throughout the entire time), and that B) some external force did not act upon it, for example, to “stretch out the heavens”?
The reason I ask this is that according to my position, when the Bible says “God stretched out the heavens,” a possible meaning of that is that God literally “pulled” the light from the stars to the earth, after creating them on day four to emit light, which He had created on day one, similar to how He, as the Hebrew word in Genesis 1 implies, “pulled” the plants out of the ground (basically accelerating the growth of the plants from seed to fully grown plant).
Stuu: But I do know what DNA differences are, and endogenous retroviruses, and isotope dating,
I don't remember that.
Sorry, I don’t think I was clear enough.
I was specifically referring to “isotope dating” with my comment there. The rest wasn’t part of what I was responding to.
There is no science to be had in 'common design'
To clarify, are you talking about the design itself? Or instead referring to the Designer?
because there is no pattern that demonstrates that.
Assuming the latter above, why do things that have a common designer have to have a common design?
You only have two options left, common ancestry or intentional divine deception.
False dichotomy.
Given how much of science is publicly funded, scientists have a social contract with the public to be impartial.
Considering that scientists need to eat, and generally speaking, all people desire wealth to some extent, if one sees that one will receive more funding by promoting one worldview over another, why do you assume that such would not influence that person to NOT be impartial?
Their job is to apply the principles of science, including the probability of being right, no matter whether they like the outcome or not.
Unfortunately, that’s not the case, currently, and it is simply naïve to think that every scientist everywhere is 100% honest in all his work.
If you haven’t seen it already, I highly recommend you watch “Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed,” with Ben Stein.
Creation scientists are privately funded by fundamentalist Christians.
All of them? or just most of them? Some of them? A few of them?
Because I can tell you right now, it’s not all of them.
They do not have the same social contract with the public,
True, but here’s the problem with that statement:
Their beliefs are that intentionally lying (generally speaking, as there are exceptions which are the topic of another discussion, not this one) is wrong, and that God is displeased with bearing false witness. In other words, their contract is with a higher power, rather than the public.
On the other hand, those who reject the idea of there being a God (or what have you) don’t have the moral obligation to not lie.
The question is raised, who is more honest, generally speaking, a Christian, or an atheist, even considering that there are those on both sides who don’t fit the mold.
theirs is very specifically work tailored for that audience,
Not necessarily.
who demand that the Answers are the ones in Genesis,
Not just Genesis. Throughout the Bible.
no matter what the evidence might have said.
If I haven’t said it before this explicitly, I’ll say it now:
Most of the evidence anti-Creationists claim supports their position is ambiguous at best, with relatively few exceptions.
In addition, I would have to say that there is more unambiguous evidence that supports special creation than there is to support naturalistic origins.
Science is not about whether you like the unambiguous conclusions. I for one, don't like the outcome of Darwin's work. It may be elegant, but it is also blind, brutal and uncaring when it comes to living things. My squeamishness is irrelevant, because it's just a fact that living things have evolved from common ancestry.
Saying it doesn’t make it so.
So a specific challenge here would be for adherents to the hydroplate hypothesis to try to disprove it. What are the big problems with hydroplates?
I think, currently, one of the biggest problems the theory has is the explanation of Oumuamua, which is claimed to be an interstellar object.
However, I was looking at a model of its trajectory in US2, and I have to say, relatively speaking, it’s trajectory carried it darn near center of the solar system. The odds of something like this happening are, pardon the pun, astronomical, if we assume that it did, in fact, come from outside the solar system.
However, a possible (and certainly plausible explanation (certainly to be determined if true or not) is again, that it was launched during the flood, and then eventually was influenced by a TNO’s gravity and got launched on a hyperbolic trajectory that took it past the sun, and which slingshotted it out of the system.
That being said, generally speaking, a theory’s problems are usually any failed predictions.
So, to relate that to Oumuamua, a prediction is that the trajectory will have been modified by a TNO to be hyperbolic, where before such an encounter it would have been in orbit around the sun.
Does Mr. Brown outline this in his book?
All or most of the predictions of the HPT are listed here:
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/FAQ123.html#wp4593915
You might say that the biggest problem with planetary accretion is the angular momentum 'problem'. I disagree, I would say the biggest problem is the one metre problem: accreting small lumps is easy, accreting large lumps into larger ones is easy. My understanding is it is difficult to explain how you get from lumps a few cm across to many metres across.
What should be done if either of those 'problems' is confirmed as resistant to investigation? In the case of the hydroplates I would say that the problems include a large number of assumptions, contradictory physical evidence (for example a major difficulty with the Widmanstatten crystal forms in meteorites,
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/HydroplateOverview9.html#wp27145465
and from recent discussion in this thread, apparently, a difference between uranium abundances in the crust and in meteorites),
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/Radioactivity.html
and a lack of a really good reason to have made that hypothesis in the first place. That is a harsh thing to say perhaps, given the whacky history of scientific discovery, but Mr. Brown has failed to displace plate tectonics from it's large body of evidence, which should be his primary job.
Do we do as Mr. Enyart suggests, and just discard the whole planetary accretion theory and plate tectonics in favour of an alternative model that requires events of much lower probability,
Probability as determined by, what exactly? Isn’t this just question begging?
which match relatively none of the physical evidence?
Because you say so?
Since we have photographs of planetary accretion happening,
Well, no, if you’re referring to that orangey disk photo that was posted earlier, we have photographs of
what is assumed to be planetary accretion happening. Since according to your position, such formations take millions to billions of years to complete, and we (humanity) have only been studying the stars for only a few thousand years, there’s no way to know for certain that such is, in fact, planetary accretion.
and we have continental drift demonstrated by contributions of evidence from many different lines, maybe we should have a go at resolving the 'problems' instead of giving up and invoking a non-explanation of divine intervention.
Which part of the HPT is “divine intervention”? Could you please specify?
The one metre 'problem' should be easy to solve, but apparently isn't. The angular momentum 'problem' looks challenging, but it looks more like a case of teasing out the relative importance of several different factors, each of which is reasonably challenging. So it's complex, but not a killer to planetary accretion. We should not be thinking of zebras when there are still enough horses to explain the sound of hooves.
You seem to be leaving out the possibility that it was the sound of hooves on the ground being played over speakers, rather than actual horses or zebras.
:idunno:
There’s more problems than that.
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/AstroPhysicalSciences.html
RE: Mars Meteorites:
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/Asteroids2.html
As far as I am aware, that's pretty much all there is. Biblical genealogy and a little bit of interpretation of text.
Try this for one description:
https://creation.com/the-date-of-noahs-flood and this
[URL="https://creation.com/biblical...tps://creation.com/biblical-chronogenealogies[/URL].
There are other methods.
Specifically this one:
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/FAQ211.html#wp19592175
Young Earth beliefs in general started with Bishop Ussher adding up ages in biblical genealogies.
Incorrect.
For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it. - Exodus 20:11
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus20:11&version=NKJV
[JESUS]But from the beginning of the creation, God ‘made them male and female.’[/JESUS] - Mark 10:6
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark10:6&version=NKJV
The understanding that the earth is young long predates Ussher, going all the way back to Moses, who is reaffirmed by Jesus.
'Creation science' was started in the 1960s in the US, but there is not nearly as much interest in it in other Western countries.
So what?
If anything, the belief that the earth is older than a few thousand years is what has held back the relevant sciences for so long.
How does something 'not seen' constitute evidence?
Not sure if that was intentional, but you misread what was said.
FAITH is the evidence.
It is evidence of things unseen.
It's not the kind used in science, history or geography, for example.
See 7djengo7’s post above.
Stuu: You could change my view with unambiguous evidence. How would I change your view?
I'm not sure how that would work. There is no unambiguous evidence
Good thing that “unambiguous evidence is not the standard for establishing anything..
God (whether you acknowledge Him or not) says “by the mouth of two or three witnesses shall a matter be established.”
The “two or three” wasn’t Him being uncertain. It was an indication that we should use our brains to ascertain if two witnesses are sufficient or if more is needed.
(And no, before you go there, “witness” does not necessarily mean “eyewitness”.)
If by “a god” you mean “a supernatural being,” then....
Here is unambiguous evidence:
The effect cannot be greater than the cause.
The universe could not have always existed, for there are still stars burning through their fuel reserves. Entropy prevents perpetual motion machines, no matter how complex.
The universe could not have created itself, because in order to create, one must first exist.
Therefore, the only remaining possible explanation (and please, feel free to try to think up a fourth that doesn’t fit within the bounds of the first two) is that a supernatural being brought the universe into existence.
And because life is information based, and because information is not physical, and because
I rather think that is the point, you can't make your god testable, because that denigrates the concept of the need for faith.
False premise.
You might recall how many times absolute, testable claims have been made for the actions of various gods, and when the test has disproved the claim, that so-called god-of-the-gaps has died.
Good thing that’s not my position.
Creation science is a particularly interesting example to me, for two reasons. Firstly, they are honest enough to say that science should be addressed, but they end up making one huge god-of-the-gaps. It would be nice to think also, they were honest enough to admit when a bit of that god has died through disproof.
Again, “god of the gaps” is not my position.
Secondly, with a book full of 'supernatural' events to defend, why bend science out of all recognisable shape to find 'natural' mechanisms?
I think that you’ll find, should you actually do the research, that most of the Bible relatively few miracles (ratio of miracle events to non-miracle events) occurring.
In fact, there were long periods of time where God was completely silent.
Why not just say, Stuu, the flood was a divine intervention so you'll never know by your puny naturalistic science the means by which the world looked that way then, and this way now?
Because that’s not my position, and God doesn’t always use miracles to accomplish tasks. Often, He used forces of nature and men to do things, rather than doing them Himself.
In other words, He uses the tools He created to accomplish tasks, rather than always using His hands.
The bible doesn't even say whether it is possible to see or hear this god.
That’s because the god you argue against doesn’t exist except in your mind.
It helps to know the one true God. Like I said before, the Bible describes God in great detail. One only has to read the Bible to learn about Him. You should try reading it through.
It says in some places that it has been seen and heard, and in other places that this is impossible.
Context is important.
This reminds me of my (not very robust) argument against the existence of a deity. The universe appears beautiful to me.
Then why is it not a possibility that there is One who created it Who is even more beautiful?
Part of that beauty is the innocence of its origins: what you see is what happens when physical principles such as the properties of space-time are played out in practice.
Why do you not think that it was designed that way?
If there is a divine meddler pulling the strings where no one can see, then the universe is not knowable,
Why? and in what way?
and an important part of the beauty is the fact that the universe can be known.
https://americanrtl.org/Einstein
After all, it's quite remarkable that it made something (us) capable of thinking about itself.
Why do you assume that we, beings who are comprised of both physical and non-physical parts (to use the term loosely) could have arisen from a purely physical universe? My point being that there is not one law of physics or chemistry that could in any way give rise to, for example, information or a symbolic logic function. In other words, there are no symbolic logic functions in any of the laws of physics or chemistry, yet information, which is not physical, clearly exists.
Of course things could be either way, but the meddled version is less beautiful for being the deception it must be, and the universe looks far too full of beauty for that.
Beauty is not physical, and therefore cannot originate in something that cannot give rise to anything non-physical.
That's why you pay attention to unambiguous evidence.
There you go with that “unambiguous” bit again.
Evidence is evidence, ambiguous or not.
What you are doing is special pleading, ignoring the evidence against your side because it is not “unambiguous.”
They do know the difference, it is a basic part of the scientific method to remove assumptions
Something which scientists seem to ignore, seeing as they make plenty of assumptions when doing their experiments.
Science makes many mistakes.
I’m glad you admit that such does occur.
Most are never published, but many are.
Seems to me that hiding one’s mistakes does not allow for growth of the scientific community.
Maybe scientists (on both sides) should publish more of their failed results…
Would certainly help everyone be more honest.
There is quite a severe and rude correction mechanism though, in peer review and competition for reputation and prestige.
I’m personally not a fan of peer review.
Science shouldn’t be done on popularity (a contest which is what it has inevitably turned into, which people use to obtain grant money to continue their research and maintain their living standards.
It should be done out of a desire to discover the truth about our universe.
No, I’m not saying that for many scientists this isn’t the goal, but simply that it’s not the primary reason for many to do the science.
If you knew how to disprove plate tectonics, for example, what you should do is explain it to a young geologist so they may benefit from all the prizes and attention.
Good thing it’s been done, but is largely ignored because “creationist.”
Please explore “plate tectonic theory” on this page
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/IntheBeginningIX18.html (Please excuse any broken links. Fixes are in the works, but it’s taking some time as there are other things going on presently).
There could be no more better career boost, to say the least.
Too bad that “consensus” shuns creationist science from gaining traction…
(Because the majority is wicked, and consensus is just an agreement of the majority of people on a topic.
Of course, your passed-on evidence would have to be capable of withstanding the most perishing scrutiny because of the size of the old egos involved in geology.
Good thing truth is not determined by consensus or the size of one’s ego.
And that's what the modern scientific consensus consists of: it is the result of many years of territories fought over, egos played out, constant attempts to tear to shreds any evidence claimed, and occasionally even respectful international cooperation with robust discussion...so eventually the theory is finally agreed because it is logically watertight and based on unambiguous evidence.
That’s just wishful thinking.
Money is plenty of motivation for many, and is probably one of the biggest factors in what science is done and by whom.
[rant] It is also chilling to note that 'public' creationists don't try to give presentations to staff in university geology or biology departments, who have the knowledge to balance out whatever arguments are presented. No, these particular creationists are despicable cowards because they know they will be demonstrated wrong, so instead they have targeted schools with young people unarmed to defend themselves against the torrent of intellectual sewage and sleight-of-hand those particular creationists have made their trade.
At least adults can turn off Bob Enyart's show, or if it's piped into rest homes then the elderly residents can bash the radios with their sticks [/rant]...but I digress.
:blabla:
I know of no example of a creation scientist correcting a mistake in non-creation science. Surely there must be some. Do you know of any?
To answer something you said recently that ties into this regarding predictions creationists have made that were verified in opposition to secular predictions on the same topic...
I can think of two off the top of my head:
The first is the design of the Lunar Lander Module’s feet, which is the design that was kept, but wasn’t actually needed.
A discussion was had in the early stages of designing the LLM about how thick the dust on the surface of the moon was. Even at 1/6th Earth’s gravity, the LLM was heavy enough that if there was any significant amount of dust it would sink into the dust and cause problems. The reasoning was that, based on the model of those who rejected a young earth, the moon should have a deep layer of lunar dust on the surface, but the model of those who believed the earth was young said that there would NOT be a deep layer of dust. If I remember correctly, by the time the matter was settled, it was too late to make any changes, and so the large feet were left on the LLM, and it when it landed, the secular model’s prediction was falsified, that the layer of dust was NOT deep, but extended maybe a few inches in places.
The second is the prediction of the apparent age of especially far away galaxies.
The big bang predicts that when telescopes peer especially far into outer space, they should see only infant galaxies. Why? Because if the universe is 13.8 billion years old, light traveling toward us for 12 billion years would show galaxies as they existed in the early stage of the universe, just after galaxies had begun forming. Instead though, as we have been documenting for two decades, astronomers are repeatedly "startled" and "baffled" (per the journal Science) to see exactly what the big bang predicts should not exist. For many of the most distant (i.e., allegedly "youngest") galaxies look just like the Milky Way and the oldest galaxies that are all around us! Just in time for our 2014 RSR big bang program, the Carnegie Observatories: "discovered 15 [more] massive, mature galaxies located where they shouldn't be: at an average distance of 12 billion light years away from Earth." Such discoveries prove wrong Neil deGrasse Tyson and his claim last week that we creationists cannot not make predictions, as any glance at our RSR Predictions and our confirmed predictions shows. In 2005 a cover story Science News stated, "Imagine peering into a nursery and seeing, among the cooing babies, a few that look like grown men. That's the startling situation that astronomers have stumbled upon as they've looked deep into space and thus back to a time when newborn galaxies filled the cosmos. Some of these babies have turned out to be nearly as massive as the Milky Way and other galactic geezers that have taken billions of years to form." Finally, in 1995, as NASA was preparing to publish their first Hubble Deep Field Image, As a biblical creationist, Bob Enyart predicted that NASA and the entire big bang community of astronomers, physicists and astrophysicists, would all be wrong, because the furthest galaxies would look just like nearby galaxies regarding apparent age. Learn more here (link not working), here, here, here, and here! |
(Working links present on page, fixed link here, broken link noted here)
https://kgov.com/writings/rsrs-big-list
I recommend not doing that. Use unambiguous evidence instead.
Supra: “special pleading”
Stuu: Tell me how the hydroplate hypothesis keeps the Himalayas up?
That’s not what you said.
Please refrain from dishonest wording.
Well, the massive height of the Himalayas and large extent of the Tibetan plain is due to subduction of the Indian tectonic plate under the Eurasian plate. The reason this kind of large-scale, high force action is possible is because tectonic plates are moved across the mantle by convection in magma,
See “plate tectonic theory” in the above link.
which is a sort of liquid that moves at about the rate of fingernail growth, and has reasonable traction as its constitution is a bit like plasticine. In the case of the Indian plate, a faster rate of movement could be due to it being a thinner plate, in turn due to the action of a hotspot, so the details make this a slightly exceptional case. But wayway, crucially the Indian plate has also been dragged under the Eurasian plate by the action of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subduction"]subduction[/URL]
I’m aware of what subduction is.
Could you explain, please, how a plate “dives” underneath another, when such plates are tens of miles thick?
Just a general explanation please, because as far as I can tell, such an event could never happen due to the sheer weight of the plates.
But in Mr. Brown's hypothesis, if I have it right,
Doesn’t seem that you do.
the Himalayas are made of three hydroplates that glided across lubricating water over a matter of hours and pushed each other up at the edges. Perhaps we would agree on this diagram from Wikipedia (which describes plate tectonics, but perhaps hydroplates too):
So my question is, if the Himalayas are the result of hours of collision of water-lubricated sliding plates, even with draining of water, what stopped the hydroplates from being lubricated to slide away from one another again?
Because of a process that lasted for a lot longer than a few hours.
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/IntheBeginningIX18.html
See also “Mid-Atlantic Ridge” and “Mid-Oceanic Ridge” entries here:
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/IntheBeginningIX15.html
We are not talking about trivial amounts of elastic energy stored in the rocks in that collision: the forces acting in the direction opposite to that of the collision are probably too much even for convecting magma to hold up, let along lubricating water, without the effect of the subduction zone pulling on the plate.
See above.
I have another, more theological question about the hydroplates. Why would the god of the Judeo-christian scriptures build in a flood mechanism during the creation of the earth, before the events of Genesis 3?
In case His creation rebelled against Him.
Perhaps this is oversimplifying it a bit, but, “Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
God is smart enough to know how to prepare for events that may or may not happen.
Did this god know already what would go wrong with creation,
No. But He knew it was a possibility.
and what wide-scale slaughter by drowning would be required?
Had man not rebelled, the crisis could have been averted.
The way God designed the earth, including the mechanism by which He could destroy it should man rebel, was such that God would not have to do anything at all, except leave man to his own devices for a period of time.
Or, you can lead a non-believer to the Kool Aid but cannot make him drink?
Ever considered that you’re the one drinking the Kool Aid? Serious question.
Let's not forget the religious motivation of the victims of the Jonestown delusion.
In what way is this relevant to this discussion?
I don't see atheists and agnostics behaving like that, motivated by their non-belief.
Behaving delusionally?
I see it all the time, especially by those who are supposedly at the top of the scientific hierarchy. *cough* Richard Dawkins *cough*