Creationism vs Evolutionism

[otseng]

OK, give me reasons why evolutionism or creationism is right or wrong.

[otseng]

What I want to ask is how did a cohesive system be arranged after the animals landed in the ark? Wouldn't many of species have become extinct in the struggle to re-establish order?

We know from the fossil record that there existed many animals and plants that are now extinct. And we do not have a full knowledge of all the animals that have existed in the past. I would say that definitely many of the species have become extinct in the struggle to re-establish order. One notable group that did become extinct after the flood was the dinosaurs.

But it's odd. We have layers and layers of earth, each revealing increasing complexity of origins. None of the layers ever have the wrong animals in them for the wrong times.

Actually, that is not true. There are examples of plants and animals that should not be in stratas that they were found in.

The fossil of the Tuatara, an animal now living in New Zealand, was found in the Jurassic deposits (considered to be 150 million years old).

The Neopilina mollusk fossil was found in the Cambrian/Devonian period (280 million years old). And they still exist today.

There are also many examples of old stratas on top of young stratas.

One example is the Heart Mountain Thrust of Wyoming. Paleozoic stratas are on top of Eocene beds (which is considered to be 250 million years younger).

Have you ever seen a jungle so huge? Even still, we don't know exactly how "fossil" fuels are formed. I personally favour the biogenesis theory, but the fact that it's reported the oil is replenishing itself is astonishing.

And it would have to be one huge jungle. And also the whole thing would have had to have been buried rapidly. How can such a huge forest be buried?

Considering almost the entire world is believed to have been once moist and tropic, it's not too much of a stretch.

Continental shift changed everything. The position of land and oceans plays an important part in regulating the temperature of the earth. They store and transport heat around the world. The earth has warmed and cooled for millions of years. The climate now appears to be growing warmer. We may even enter another tropical age if we're lucky. Or a desert one if we're unlucky.

Continental shift can explain the temperature differences? It had to have been more than that. How could it cause the entire world to have a tropical climate?

I'm guessing you don't trust modern dating methods?

I assume you're talking about radioactive dating. Yes, there's a place for it. But it's based on a lot of assumptions. Take C14 dating for example. It assumes that the amount of C14 in the atmosphere has been relatively stable throughout history. But, I believe that C14 was much less prior to the flood. Therefore the dating would be skewed to look much older than it appears.

[Corvus]

What I want to ask is how did a cohesive system be arranged after the animals landed in the ark? Wouldn't many of species have become extinct in the struggle to re-establish order?

We know from the fossil record that there existed many animals and plants that are now extinct. And we do not have a full knowledge of all the animals that have existed in the past. I would say that definitely many of the species have become extinct in the struggle to re-establish order. One notable group that did become extinct after the flood was the dinosaurs.

Seems incredibly inefficient for an act of God. Is there a particular reason why he chose that way? I suppose it explains what the carnivores ate. Not every animal was meant to survive, I guess.

But it's odd. We have layers and layers of earth, each revealing increasing complexity of origins. None of the layers ever have the wrong animals in them for the wrong times.

Actually, that is not true. There are examples of plants and animals that should not be in stratas that they were found in.

The fossil of the Tuatara, an animal now living in New Zealand, was found in the Jurassic deposits (considered to be 150 million years old).

The Neopilina mollusk fossil was found in the Cambrian/Devonian period (280 million years old). And they still exist today.

If they are shown to have existed so long ago, and still exist today, then they simply haven't evolved. The reason might be that they don't need to. In some places on earth, the environment or ecosystem has remained essentially the same. Think of cockroaches. There are over 4,000 different species of cockroach. Most look basically the same as their ancestors.

OR, they may have evolved in ways that aren't immediately obvious. (Immune systems, for example).

There are also many examples of old stratas on top of young stratas.

One example is the Heart Mountain Thrust of Wyoming. Paleozoic stratas are on top of Eocene beds (which is considered to be 250 million years younger).

For reasons as yet undetermined, the entire layer of post-Cambrian strata simply began to glide as a unit southeastward over a bedding surface located immediately under the massive Bighorn dolomite formation of Ordovician age and above the topmost Cambrian formation. This layer detached itself along a vertical breakaway fracture shown at the left. Movement was evidently on a very low downgrade, decling some 650 meters in elevation from the breakaway fracture to the end of the bedding slip zone, a horizontal distance of some 50 km. As the rock sheet traveled, it broke up onto blocks on a succession of vertical tension fractures. The blocks thus became separated by open gaps, in which the bedding plane of gliding (identified as the Heart Mountain fault) was exposed at the surface. Geologists have applied the term "tectonic erosion" to the surface exposure of a fault plane by sliding away of the overlying mass.

-Strahler's Science and Earth History. Chapter 40 page 393:

Have you ever seen a jungle so huge? Even still, we don't know exactly how "fossil" fuels are formed. I personally favour the biogenesis theory, but the fact that it's reported the oil is replenishing itself is astonishing.

And it would have to be one huge jungle. And also the whole thing would have had to have been buried rapidly. How can such a huge forest be buried?

Again, I point to the abiogenic and biogenic arguments for fossil creation to show that this is a subject we'd best leave alone until we're certain of what creates "fossil" fuels.

Buried rapidly? I'm not entirely sure about that. Without researching the subject and finding out how geologists understand the process of biogenisis, I will ask; wouldn't 1 million years of humus do it?

Considering almost the entire world is believed to have been once moist and tropic, it's not too much of a stretch.

Continental shift changed everything. The position of land and oceans plays an important part in regulating the temperature of the earth. They store and transport heat around the world. The earth has warmed and cooled for millions of years. The climate now appears to be growing warmer. We may even enter another tropical age if we're lucky. Or a desert one if we're unlucky.

Continental shift can explain the temperature differences? It had to have been more than that. How could it cause the entire world to have a tropical climate?

Gah, you're going to have to make me look it up, aren't you? I knew I wasn't going to get off the hook that easily. But not right now. I think I've said enough for now.

One final question - what convinced Brown about the hydroplate theory? What facts led him to the hypothesis that the Atlantic ridge was the gateway to the flood and water was under the earth?

[Corvus]

However, what creationists say (I really can't dignify them by calling them 'scientists')..

Actually, the ICR got so irked by this assumption that they even have an entire page listing creationists and their credentials. So there are scientists that are creationists. http://www.icr.org/creationscientists.html

But if you stated that all Creationists are Christian (or Jewish, I suppose), you'd probably be right. I remember someone actually put the challenge to the ICR to come up with a creationist that isn't Christian, or a creationist that wasn't a Christian first. As far as I know, the ICR have failed to do so.

At the very least, the majority of creationists (surely almost to a man) are Christians.

Oh, and otseng, check this out: http://mypage.direct.ca/w/writer/hydro.html

[otseng]

DNA, you missed one of my favorite questions: what the heck did the carnivores eat after they got off the boat? Like, before the vegetarians had a chance to reproduce?

Good question. I've created a new topic to address this.

[Paul]

DeoxyriboNucleicAcid wrote

What I have always wanted to ask an adherent to the Noah's Flood story is which one of the 8 crew carried the malaria bacillus? Which of the animals carried rinderpest? Did Mrs. Noah carry the gonorrhea bacterium? Who drew the short straw and volunteered to catch syphillus? All these microbial creatures must have been carried on the Ark. Everyone must have felt just terrific.

Genesis is essentially a history book written by people with limited knowledge of science. Your questions could best be answered by looking in the archives of ancient science. Unfortunately the ancient scientists were either to dumb to come in out of the rain or they missed the weather prediction big time because they didn’t survive to write about the flood.

Since the Bible doesn’t answer these questions I can only speculate. Perhaps a mosquito on one of the elephants carried malaria. Clearly the rinders carried the rinderpest. Mrs. Noah, Joan of Ark, perhaps had gonorrhea only her OBGYN knew for sure.

Why do you assume every disease known to man or animal had to be carried on the ark? Besides microbes don’t take much room so what’s the problem? You also seem to assume every animal is immediately susceptible to every disease. I had chicken pox as a child and consequently have carried the herpes zoster virus ever since but I have had only one attack of shingles as a result of the herpes zoster virus in 50 years.

I have given some wags (wild ass guesses) on questions about the flood now perhaps DeoxyriboNucleicAcid can give us some insight into the swag (scientific wild ass guess) contained in the statement below.

If it was tectonic movements that took the continents so far from each other (which is quite true) then, had it done so in a rush 4-6,000 years ago there would still be a 1 metre bow-wave circling the globe

The 1 metre implies that someone has actually done calculations to arrive at a number. What is missing is the magnitude of “rush” and estimates of the mass and size of continents. Calculations involving a two-dimensional damped wave in an incompressible fluid are quite a challenge. I would like a reference to the technical paper or book that this estimate came from.

[DeoxyriboNucleicAcid]

Well, I popped in to see what was being said and I find myself irresistably drawn back once more into the evolution/creation fray. I was asked to temper my passion and to refrain from using colourful language when expressing my total distain of creationism. This is difficult for me to do but I will try. Otherwise you would be deprived of my piercing intelligence and rapier-like wit. This would leave me with terrible feelings of guilt and you, dear reader, with one less creature to become righteously indignant about. So for both our benefits I'll finish this thread before evaporating back into the cyberworld from whence I sprang.

Clue wrote

fossils - what specifically about fossils points to an old Earth?

There are no scientists in field who doubt that fossils are ancient, very ancient. If you can find an acredited paleontologist who does hold these medievel beliefs I'd like to shake his hand. It shows great determination to spend years studying, examining all the evidence and still manage to ignore the facts and settle for superstition.

ligh from distant galaxies - read Dr. D Russell Humphreys

When Humphreys talks at churches or creationism seminars, he is introduced as a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories, a respected federal science institution. But Humphreys' conclusions on the age of the Earth are not supported by Sandia. His work in an engineering group responsible for designing bomb fuses is completely unrelated to his creationist activities. And Humphreys doesn't present his young-earth arguments to Sandia colleagues, even though many Sandia programs involve radiometric dating and the age of the Earth. In fact, when a Sandia colleague recently requested his data on problems with radiocarbon dating, Humphreys refused to supply it because it was "non-work related." Humphreys' employment at Sandia certainly does not mean that this prestigious institution endorses his radical views on the age of the Earth.
No ASTRONOMER or COSMOLOGIST agrees with Dr. D Russell Humphreys' peculiar ideas.

I suppose you are talking about radioactive dating.

Let me put this simply: When uranium decays it becomes lead. The half life of uranium is approx 500,000 years. The fact that lead exists at all means that the Earth must be at least 500,000 years old. If you assess how much lead is actually available on the lovely blue planet of hours you can see that it actually equates perfectly to the other evidence for the age of the Earth at around 4.8 billion years

If we were to believe the Evolutionists, we would have to throw out Genesis, and all of the New Testament. If Genesis can't be believed because God couldn't have created the universe in 6 days and Noah's flood never occurred, then the NT can't be trusted either because it quotes from Genesis as if it were the basis for most/all other doctrine.

From the point of view of history or science then Genesis should be thrown out. Really the biblical stories of floods, giants, creation and seas parting were brought to us from the minds of nomadic tribesmen trying to make sense of why they were where they were and how and if they fitted into the great scheme of things. It has no more validity than the Great Rainbow Serpent myth of the Australian Aborigines or the Hindu stories.

Science is far from perfect it gets things wrong and there is occassional fraud. Piltdown is often cited. What is forgotten is that scientific error and fraud is only ever discovered by other scientists not by religionists.

Correcting errors is part of the scientific process and, believe it or not, the ability to be wrong is science's greatest asset. Creationists can't ever be wrong because they allege God says it's right: QED.

But if we took your advice to heart, this also would never have been discovered as fraud. So, we'll probably continue to question what we think is the biggest, most enduring fraud in the sciences today, thank you very much.

I have no idea what you mean by that last paragraph

Paul wrote

Why do you assume every disease known to man or animal had to be carried on the ark? Besides microbes don’t take much room so what’s the problem? You also seem to assume every animal is immediately susceptible to every disease. I had chicken pox as a child and consequently have carried the herpes zoster virus ever since but I have had only one attack of shingles as a result of the herpes zoster virus in 50 years.

In fact I don't assume every disease known to man had to be carried on the Ark. The bible makes the assumption which I believe to be risible. The bible says breeding stocks (it doesn't say 2x2) of all living things were aboard the Ark. Just think how hard the eight crew must have worked clearing out the residue from the estimated 30 million living organisms that they'd have on board (if the bible is to be taken literally).

Corvus said

Actually, the ICR got so irked by this assumption that they even have an entire page listing creationists and their credentials. So there are scientists that are creationists. http://www.icr.org/creationscientists.html

Yeah, I know. If you look at the credentials you see none of them are experts in the relevant fields relating to the evolution/creation debate. Much like Dr. D Russell Humphreys mentioned above. I can only repeat that NO credible peer-reviewed, published scientist in those fields holds these bizzare creationists beliefs.

Oteng said

Deceive? Because you happen to believe that everything is old, so that makes God in the wrong?

I am not saying God is wrong I am saying creationists are. Although I do have grave reservations that there are any supernatural beings or Gods.

Now I do hope I haven't offended anyone personally in my latest outburst. That certainly isn't the intention.

[otseng]

Well, I popped in to see what was being said and I find myself irresistably drawn back once more into the evolution/creation fray.

Glad to see that you couldn't stay away. Welcome back.

[otseng]

One final question - what convinced Brown about the hydroplate theory? What facts led him to the hypothesis that the Atlantic ridge was the gateway to the flood and water was under the earth?

I don't know how he came up with the theory. As for being convinced, he gives many convincing arguments on his website.

[otseng]

Let me put this simply: When uranium decays it becomes lead. The half life of uranium is approx 500,000 years. The fact that lead exists at all means that the Earth must be at least 500,000 years old. If you assess how much lead is actually available on the lovely blue planet of hours you can see that it actually equates perfectly to the other evidence for the age of the Earth at around 4.8 billion years

So are you saying that lead can only from from uranium? And if so, how did uranium itself form?

[DeoxyriboNucleicAcid]

Let me put this simply: When uranium decays it becomes lead. The half life of uranium is approx 500,000 years. The fact that lead exists at all means that the Earth must be at least 500,000 years old. If you assess how much lead is actually available on the lovely blue planet of hours you can see that it actually equates perfectly to the other evidence for the age of the Earth at around 4.8 billion years

So are you saying that lead can only from from uranium? And if so, how did uranium itself form?

Look here--->

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hb ... oc.html#c2

for the most up to date dating methods using Uranium/Lead and potassium/argon dating