mercredi 23 juillet 2014

Who is the Creator?

Fair point, but not exactly the point of this blog. I have two other blogs for that:



If the point is in particular "why not Allah, as described in the Qoran?" - Turkey has been second among my readers on this blog this week, after Ukraine and foillowed by United States - I have no separate blog about Muslims and their religion. I have however dealt with it here:

Answering a Muslim who asked "If Jesus was [=is] GOD ..."

And here:

A Gerald Smith on the theme of "Great Apostasy" and "Restored Gospel" - answered

The first of which answers a Muslim objection, the second of states my objection to Islam / Mormonism / Protestantism.

And since the last of this weeks top ten was from India, I will not withhold what I think about Mahabharata:

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : ... on Mahabharata
http://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2014/04/on-mahabharata.html


Or about Krishna's and Romulus' (or Odin's) claims to divinity:

somewhere else : When a Certain So Called Learning Affirms We Deified Christ Because We Loved Him ...
http://notontimsblogroundhere.blogspot.com/2014/07/when-certain-so-called-learning-affirms.html


As you see, there is lots on my other blogs too.

The reason I give this reply into thin air is I think there might have been a reason for my seeing this blogpost of CMI:

Could recent creation be true, but not Christianity?
Responding to a person who believes in recent creation, but not in the Bible’s message of salvation
Published: 12 September 2009(GMT+10)
http://creation.com/who-is-the-creator


Not specifying whether the reason, after the curiosity I presume as ultimate reason, and before this hitting my attention, passed by/through/over:

  • Decent (except for stupid choice of intentions!) Christian prayer;
  • Sacrilegious intentions of Masses said for a too specific - but not specified by me - intention about me;
  • Unlawful kabbalah;
  • Hypnosis (I was this morning aware of having been left by someone whom I did not catch being there, and my reloadable copy card was missing);
  • or Hypersensitive Empathy with silent, mostly absent, people developed by my years of solitude.


But I can specify that I also saw Russia and Ukraine on the visitors statistics of top ten, so here is for those East of the 1054 Schism:

Trento - Philaret (Catechisms)
[comparison between catechisms so far very incomplete, some other pages too]
http://trentophilaret.blogspot.com


And here:

Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Is Romanides accurate?, Was Romanides accurate? Bis! Not very much at all!, Linguistics for Romanides: Greek, Latin, Patois

deretour : Mystagogy posts certainly false allegation on St Robert Bellarmine, Pseudoquote identified. What De Romano Pontifice, book IV, chapter V really says (quote) [scroll down, there is text, though top is empty], Further faults of fact in the Mystagogy post

Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Was Peter the Aleut a Martyr?

So, just because something about my religious position is not specifically defended on this blog, does not mean I have no logical defense for it, but most often I have defended it elsewhere.

I have every right to say I know who the Creator is. Or which Church He founded on Ascension Day and Pentecost or Holy Thursday or Resurrection evening, or what tradition he founded by giving the first of the Church a forty day crashcourse on OT exegesis. The guys who pretend this were some kind of irrational jumping to conclusions, sentimentality, sensationalism, wilfulness, pathology, demonic illusion or so on, on my part, have no right to the kind of persecution they have been perpetrating.

And persecution it is.

Yesterday I had posted about Gaza. When I left the Library Marguérite Audoux and later the City district town hall for Third City district of Paris and tried to beg for money for food, the silent reproach was extremely palpable, alms were withheld until the shop had closed, and I was hungry for hours more. This is not at all the first time, not even rare, that after I post something which is impopular with Jews, Muslims, Gay Community or other minorities cherished by the left, or sometimes the left as such, I am targetted by this kind of silent reproach. What happened afterwards is a matter for a blogpost in its own right - if I write it.

But I actually thought the reproach this time (plus the final alms actually given by a probable secular Jew) was due to my comments under this blogpost of another writer:

The TOF Spot : Homelessness and Freedom of the Will
http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/06/homelessness-and-freedom-of-will.html


You see, my hard sayings about those preparing collective (not necessarily tax financed) solutions for the homeless, they are not impopular for the first time.

One thing is for sure about the Creator, He is not one to require alms receivers to take gratitude to merely human benefactors to proportions of divine adoration or of magisterial status. I do not have to become a Muslim because a Muslim gives me bread. I do not have to become a Jew because a Jewish family gives me matzot (they were not red, in case anyone wonders), I do not have to give my life to Christ because a Pentecostal gives me to eat, as if I hadn't already done that. I do not have to refrain from criticising homeless shelters as the most general solution and better than direct monetary alms, because I take breakfast in some of them, now and again or even pretty often. I do not have to take another job than writing because someone who gives me money and pretends he doesn't know I write, or pretends he doesn't know my blog, or pretends he doesn't know how my general licence would work for someone trying to reprint it on my conditions. God did not create them to be might hunters of men like Nimrod, and God did not create me to be their slave.

Even if homeless shelter personnel would after and because of that be willing to stamp me as a fanatic.** Before public or before other usagers - and through those selected to hear it all in discretion, to lots of others as well.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Bpi, Georges Pompidou
St Apollinaris of Ravenna***
23-VII-2014

* On this particular computer, the T is lacking. I supplement it using ASCII-Code. If in html I use T , then, in the text you see, I get T. And to make & and ; show rather than add up to make a T with the number symbol and number 84, I used their ASCII-Code values too: & = &, &#59; = 59. But I do not like that this is weeks since this computer started having this problem (no problem for lower case "t", so it is not the keyboard!) at the library of Georges Pompidou in Paris. "This" meaning previous one, on which I started the message. Now I changed to another one.

** My mother has, for that matter, been harrassed by personnel of psychiatry for being a Young Earth Creationist. That is the kind of secular fanaticism you see in Sweden, and one reason I left the country in 2004. Friends remaining there are often relieved to be outside. And no, that is not at all limited to people of whom you could say "he's a case" or "she's a case".

*** Ravennae natalis sancti Apollinaris Episcopi, qui, ab Apostolo Petro Romae ordinatus et Ravennam missus, pro fide Christi diversas et multiplices poenas perpessus est; postea, Evangelium in Aemilia praedicans, plurimos ab idolorum cultu revocavit; tandem, Ravennam reversus, gloriosum martyrium, sub Vespasiano Caesare, complevit.

jeudi 17 juillet 2014

Well, how about Mark Isaak? Too lazy to do his homework?

1) Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Dating History (with Some Help from AronRa), 2) Creation vs. Evolution : Well, how about Mark Isaak? Too lazy to do his homework?, 3) Challenge for Fellow Young Earth Creationists, 4) Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : ... on AronRa's very poetic An Archaeological Moment in Time (plus something on "credentialism")

He seems to be, as much as AronRa, one really campaigning on the opposite team. He wrote more than one of the so called rebuttals of Creationist claims on Talkorigins Site. Here is one about Carbon Dating:

Claim CD011.1:
Carbon dating is based on the atmospheric C-14/C-12 ratio, but that ratio varies. Thus the carbon dating method is not valid.
Source:
Morris, Henry M. 1985. Scientific Creationism. Green Forest, AR: Master Books, pp. 162-166.
Response:
The variability of the C-14/C-12 ratio, and the need for calibration, has been recognized since 1969 (Dickin 1995, 364-366). Calibration is possible by analyzing the C-14 content of items dated by independent methods. Dendrochronology (age dating by counting tree rings) has been used to calibrate C-14/C-12 ratios back more than 11,000 years before the present (Becker and Kromer 1993; Becker et al. 1991). C-14 dating has been calibrated back more than 30,000 years by using uranium-thorium dating of corals (Bard et al. 1990; Edwards et al. 1993), to 45,000 yeas ago by using U-Th dates of glacial lake varve sediments (Kitagawa and van der Plicht 1998), and to 50,000 years ago using ocean cores from the Cariaco Basin which have been calibrated to the annual layers of the Greenland Ice Sheet (Hughen et al. 2004).


"The variability of the C-14/C-12 ratio, and the need for calibration, has been recognized since 1969 (Dickin 1995, 364-366)."

Ah, but has it been recognised at its due extent or minimised?

One really must come to different conclusions about this variability within time span concerned depending on choice of Old Earth or Creationism.

The C-14/C-12 ratio basically stays the same due to two opposing processes. C-14 is added all the time through cosmic radiation hitting atmosphere. C-14 is also depleted all the time due to decay. Now decay is proportional to C-14 already present, cosmic radiation is independent of it. If it is assumed to have been constant (and one school of Creation Science - including Kent Hovind - thinks more radiation started hitting us after Flood, that being part of explanation of more rapid aging of man) and C-14 is assumed to have been absent from initial atmosphere, then the two processes would initially (or according to Hovind: initially after Flood) have been in favour of a buildup. That is one assumption one could do.

It seems simpler than saying there was much more C-14 to start with and C-14 has been decaying quicker than cosmic radiation has been replacing it - unless you assume cosmic radiation has decreased.

It is definitely, as is the either theory, simpler than assuming C-14 was always the same, since there is not any unitary cause for the ratio.

Now, the possibility of such a build-up phase having happened very definitely has very diverse consequences for a Creationist and an Old Earther. To the Old Earther such a build-up phase is irrelevant to dating, it must have happened so many billions of years ago that the C-14 from then has definitely gone away, this would definitely be one doubt not to raise.

All variations of the C-14/C-12 ratio would be minor fluctuations which would need minor calibrations as readjustments. Not having read Dickin, A. P. 1995. Radiogenic Isotope Geology, Cambridge University Press, and not knowing who recognised what in 1969, I still feel confident to guess that a Creationist brought up the issue about initial build-up, and then in 1969 someone else - the one cited by Dickin - recognises the issue of minor fluctuations needing calibration.

Sorry, but these issues, though both can be described as related to variability of the C-14/C-12 ratio, since not related to same kind of variability of it, are not same issue. And saying the minor issue has been adressed does not guarantee the major one has been adressed too.

The fact is, I go through the creationist claims answered by Mark Isaak, all through CD011.1 to CD011.6, I do not find this major issue is ever at all recognised as a separate issue, let alone answered as such a one. Sloppy, Mark Isaak. I haven't specifically read Henry Morris' book from 1985. I do not know if this major issue is covered in the pages 162 - 166, or if it was only covered in the next section, omitted from Mark Isaak's citation, like if it was pages 166 (last paragraph) to 167 (not cited at all). I would seriously not be surprised if such was the honesty of Mark Isaak.

I have read From Nothing to Nature by Edgar Andrews, and in it the initial build-up problem for C-14 dating is definitely a major point in the chapter about "clocks". Since my Swedish translation of it was prior to 1985, more like 1980, my twelfth birthday, or perhaps available earlier, and since English originals tend to be somewhat older than Swedish translations, of any book, except those where a Swedish original is older than an English translation (but unlike Astrid Lindgren, Edgar Andrews would not know Swedish, he's an Englishman), I am very sure the argument was well known among Creationists by 1985, and I would be disappointed if Henry Morris had omitted it.

With a man like Mark Isaak, I would not be disappointed if after reading this argument in Morris, he refused to state it clearly before refuting it, and preferred to hide it in a more general argument (also made!) which was less hard to refute in favour of the knowability of C-14 dates older than creation that Mark Isaak advocates.
"Calibration is possible by analyzing the C-14 content of items dated by independent methods."

That is indeed how and why I accept the calibration of the method for historically dated objects and then objects contemporary to those. However, I do not count the coffin of Pharao Djoser as certainly dated correctly historically, and therefore I do not count C-14 measures as proof an object is as old as standard Egyptology counts Pharao Djoser as being. I would count the destruction of Persepolis as sufficiently well dated by writings about the wars and generals involved, and therefore as giving correct calibrations, if an object is found that can be tied to time of destruction.

For non-historically datable or historically more disputably datable objects used for calibration, especially older than that, I count the calibration as untrustworthy and therefore the timelines as squeezable, as far as Biblical Chronology requires.
"Dendrochronology (age dating by counting tree rings) has been used to calibrate C-14/C-12 ratios back more than 11,000 years before the present (Becker and Kromer 1993; Becker et al. 1991)."

The funny, or sad, part is that lines of dendrochronology are not continuous 11 millennia BP, and that claims of dendro going back so far use C-14 as calibration method for key samples.
"C-14 dating has been calibrated back more than 30,000 years by using uranium-thorium dating of corals (Bard et al. 1990; Edwards et al. 1993),"

Except that Uranium-Thorium is untrustworthy. It is definitely not comparable to destruction of Persepolis.
"[...] and to 50,000 years ago using ocean cores from the Cariaco Basin which have been calibrated to the annual layers of the Greenland Ice Sheet (Hughen et al. 2004)."

The so called "annual layers" have not been proven to be annual. It is definitely not comparable to destruction of Persepolis.
"to 45,000 yeas ago by using U-Th dates of glacial lake varve sediments (Kitagawa and van der Plicht 1998), [...]"

Here it seems the "varve sediments" - a variant of "annual layers" - have been fallaciously used to calibrate both Uranium Thorium, possibly and certainly C-14. Once again NOT comparable to destruction of Persepolis for calibration of C-14.


I will select parts of his rebuttals from the following 5 as well.

2.) "The dates come from different mammoths. The reference cited by Brown and cribbed by Hovind likely refers only to a Fairbanks mammoth, which Brown also mentions (Péwé 1975, 30). The 15,380 and 21,300 BP dates come from separate mammoths, and it is noted that the 21,300 date is invalid because it comes from a hide soaked in glycerin. It is uncertain what is Brown's source for the 29,500 and 44,000 dates."

Soaking in glycerin would add organic material (glycerin being organic) and therefore add C-14. It would make for a date too young, whereas it is the older date which Mark Isaak explains like this. As to how many mammoths the different dates come from, one or two, I have word against word, and so far Kent Hovind has better credibility with me than Mark Isaak has.
3.) "The article discussed the potential errors that the presence of "dead carbon" would introduce into the dating of mollusks. For example, carbon dioxide in the water can partially come from Paleozoic limestone, which lacks carbon-14. As a result, the carbon dioxide in the water is deficient in carbon-14 relative to the atmosphere, and mollusks living in the water build shells that give apparent dates older than they really are. This is a type of "reservoir effect." [....] In cases where corrections for presence of dead carbon cannot be made, such dates are readily recognized as erroneous and can be safely disregarded."

Kent Hovind was hardly disputing it could be explained as a reservoir effect. But rather saying scientists may underestimate reservoir effects in using the method. Rather than discrediting Hovind as abusing his scientific source, this answer discredits Mark Isaak, as poopooing Kent Hovind for his being to the point.

As to limestone lacking C-14 that should go for anything from Palaeozoic, if true.

Non-carbon datable things have been carbondated. OK, dates involve dates "before Creation", but irreconcilable with the dates given for "palaeozoic periods" in standard chronology.

The point about presence of dead carbon giving dates that are easily recognised as erroneous is in fact an admission of another of Kent Hovind's points: dates obtained are not all agreeing with each other and therefore retained, they are disagreeing with each other and some are dismissed.
3 b) "Other materials, such as wood, charcoal, bone, and hide, would remain unaffected by this type of reservoir effect. If found with shells in the same layer, these materials could be dated to determine if shells are locally affected by the reservoir effect and, if so, how much their radiocarbon dates have been skewed by it."

As a fail proof method this presupposes it is always assiduously applied. No one can always be thinking of everything. Some reports are less read than others and so less probable to get corrections for blunders, even if glaring.

And replacing post-publication refutals so much with pre-publication "peer review" actual screening is a way of making the problem worse.

Now, I have actually heard no Creationist making a specific creationist claim about a specific fossil from fact that standard scientists failed to detect dead carbon.

I have however as recently as today seen a creationist state that precisely wood (which is presumably without this reservoir effect) has been found in Permian layers and dated much younger:

"However, fossilized wood was extracted from Oligocene rock formations alleged to be c. 30 million years old (myo). Yet the wood appeared fresh, and indeed would still easily burn, as demonstrated in the pages of this book. In another example, wood was extracted from a tree buried in Permian (pre-dinosaur) layers presumed to be around 290 myo. If the tree was buried in layers that surrounded it, and the layers were dated to 290 myo then the tree would logically be the same date. However, the wood was sent to the University of Georgia in the US for carbon-14 dating and came back with an age of 48,160 years. They can’t both be right, because they differ by a factor of ~6,000."

Flood Fossils
A stunning new book with family friendly, groundbreaking creationist research will excite many
[book by Vance Nelson]
review by Gary Bates
Published: 17 July 2014 (GMT+10)
http://creation.com/flood-fossils-book


The wood can hardly have had too much C-14 for the 290 millions of years because of reservoir effect. It can however have had too little for a date straight within Biblical Chronology because of initial build-up problem. The one Mark Isaak, like so many other evolutionists, fails to adress.
4.) "[Citing Wakefield:] Radiocarbon analysis of specimens obtained from mummified seals in southern Victoria Land has yielded ages ranging from 615 to 4,600 years. However, Antarctica sea water has significantly lower carbon-14 activity than that accepted as the world standard. [own words:] This is the well-known reservoir effect [...] well known by scientists, who work hard to understand the limitations of their tools. It is explained, for example, in Faure (1986) and Higham (n.d.). Contrary to creationist propaganda, limitations of a tool do not invalidate the tool."

It does insofar as there could be undetected limitations of it. In this case Antarctica sea water has significantly lower carbon-14, that is detected. But how many places or biotopes have had undetected reservoir effects?

Contrary to evolutionist propaganda, the glaring misdates, like Antarctic seal or mollusks, are, though a good way to catch attention, not the main creationist objection about carbon-14. Initial/post-Flood build-up in atmosphere, radically changing the C-14/C-12 ratio, is, and it is not adressed by Mark Isaak.
5.) is subdivided acc. to three answers given:
1° "It is doubtful that the sample was even wood. Snelling was not even sure what the sample was. Nor could the staff at Geochron tell what the sample was (Walker 2000). It may not even have retained any of its original carbon. Using carbon dating was pointless from the start since it would inevitably give meaningless results."

I am unable to check the text, since the link to Tas Walker's article is broken.

However, other samples are pretty certainly wood. Like the "30 million year old oligocene wood".
2° "The sample was porous, making it likely that it would have absorbed organic carbon from the groundwater. It was probably this contaminating carbon that produced the date. Another possibility is that some 14C was created in situ by natural radioactivity in the surrounding rocks (Hunt 2002)."

Students of the shroud of Turin will note this with interest. In that example the contamination is not a theoretic possibility, but a practical certainty. Once a fire broke out, and instead of water, oil was used to extinguish it. If the fire was small, and the cold quantity of vegetable oil big enough, the extinguishing duly took place, but there was organic contamination. Dito with accumulations of soot.

In the more general case, and the specific one here studied, if taken at face value, Mark Isaak admits a basic unreliability of all datings.

The contamination from groundwater would not a verified fact, since an alternative explanation was given. But even without being anywhere near a detectable certainty it suddenly becomes likely when one has to save the millions of years.
3° "Furthermore, 33,720 years is still significantly older than the age which many creationists, Snelling included, ascribe to the earth, and there are no plausible sources of error to make the age younger than 33,000 years. "

That is forgetting, overlooking or being totally ignorant of previously mentioned initial/post-Flood build-up problem, when it comes to what the ratio between carbon-14 and carbon-12 may have been, while the wood was alive and absorbing atmospheric carbon through the carbon dioxide.
6.) "New 14C is formed from background radiation, such as radioactivity in the surrounding rocks. In some cases, 14C from the atmosphere can contaminate a sample. A few processes that can add "modern" 14C to coal are:

  • Sulfur bacteria, which commonly grow in coal.
  • Secondary carbonates from groundwater that form on fracture surfaces.
  • Whewellite, a carbon-containing mineral, that often forms as coal weathers.


Minute amounts of contamination from these sources can cause apparent ages around 50,000 years, which is near the limit of the maximum age that carbon dating can measure. "

The one explanation very carefully NOT studied along with the impressive list is of course that oil and carbon formed during flood, 2957 BC, and that the ages considerably higher than 5000 years BP are due to carbon-14 in atmosphere still being in build-up and very far below the present one.


Can it be that Mark Isaak has some kind of bias against this explanation?

Let us see what his page leads to except TalkOrigins site. For instance:

Problems with a Global Flood
Second Edition
by Mark Isaak
Copyright © 1998
[Last Update: November 16, 1998]
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html


I may already have come across this one. But My earlier refutataions were on other details, we shall just look at the first one:

Wood is not the best material for shipbuilding. It is not enough that a ship be built to hold together; it must also be sturdy enough that the changing stresses don't open gaps in its hull. Wood is simply not strong enough to prevent separation between the joints, especially in the heavy seas that the Ark would have encountered. The longest wooden ships in modern seas are about 300 feet, and these require reinforcing with iron straps and leak so badly they must be constantly pumped. The ark was 450 feet long [ Gen. 6:15]. Could an ark that size be made seaworthy?


Two points:

1) especially in the heavy seas that the Ark would have encountered.

As Kent Hovind is asking: "where was it going?" It was just floating and so it was not encountering any heavy seas. It was drifting with them.

2) The longest wooden ships in modern seas are about 300 feet, and these require reinforcing with iron straps and leak so badly they must be constantly pumped.

This condition is of course for ships, that are actually, unlike the Ark, not drifting with the heavy seas, but encountering them.

And yet this is fully 2/3 of the dimensions of the Ark, that did not have to stand the test of navigation and of encountering any seas.

Mark Isaak, if you are as sloppy as this, keep it up! It is a pleasure to refute one who does half ones job for one!

But seriously, his article has been refuted by Jonathan Sarfati, Mark Isaak courteously linking, and Sarfati's refutation has in its turn found, if not a refutation at least an answer by Kevin Henke (Mark Isaak also courteously links). So we will see what Sarfati and Henke have to say.

The TrueOrigin Archive : Problems with a Global Flood?
(a rebuttal of Mark Isaak’s “Problems with a Global Flood” FAQ in the Talk.Origins Archive)
© 1998 J. Sarfati & Creation Ministries International. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.trueorigin.org/arkdefen.asp


After quoting verbatim same passage, Sarfati replies:

Answer: This argument is often parroted, but is just as bogus as the others. The Ark was built for stability, not movement. A flat-bottomed barge like the Ark wouldn’t have problems with sag. If the lower deck were made of logs, four layers deep, it would have been very sturdy. If they were teak logs, especially specially treated by being buried for a while, the ark would have been especially seaworthy. Woodmorappe points this out too, and much more, so Isaak is dishonest to ignore that. Korean naval architects have confirmed that a barge with the Ark’s dimensions would have optimal stability. They concluded that if the wood were only 30 cm thick, it could have navigated sea conditions with waves higher than 30 m (S.W. Hong et al., “Safety investigation of Noah’s Ark in a Seaway”, CEN Technical Journal 8(1):26–36, 1994. All the co-authors are on the staff of the Korea Research Institute of Ships and Ocean Engineering, Taijon.)


Now what did Henke reply to this?

[More Nonsense on "True.Origins" / Greene's Creationism Truth Filter]
Yahoo!
Sorry, the GeoCities web site you were trying to reach is no longer available.
GeoCities has closed, but there's a lot more to explore on Yahoo!
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Thebes/7755/henke/krh-floodnonsense.html


GeoCities, like MSNGroups, have, sadly, closed.

Now, Sarfati seems to have noted another sloppiness in Mark Isaak, he claims Mark Isaak attributes a flat earth to the Bible, and quite correctly states that the passage - Daniel 4 - is a dream vision of a Pagan king, not a Biblical map of the Earth. Even if it were, "ends of the Earth" would not necessarily mean a flat earth, it would as easily denote the end rims of the continents forming the whole called the Old World - on the globe.

As that dream is mentioned, and as it includes the verse:

The tree was great and strong: and the height thereof reached unto heaven: the sight thereof was even to the ends of all the earth.

I think it might be worth mentioning the idea that modern space craft and some related aspects can be as Tower of Babel like and Judgement worthy before God, as a certain "tree" called Nebuchadnessar. Or even more.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St Alexius of Rome
17-VII-2014

Update, 13-VIII, St Hippolytus' Day:

If Mark Isaak hasn't dealt with the major C-14 difficulty, another man on TalkOrigins has.

How Good Are Those Young-Earth Arguments?
A Close Look at Dr. Hovind's List of Young-Earth Arguments and Other Claims
by Dave E. Matson
Copyright © 1994-2002
Dr. Hovind (R1): The atmospheric C-14 is presently only 1/3 of the way to an equilibrium value which will be reached in 30,000 years. This nullifies the carbon-14 method as well as demonstrating that the earth is less than 10,000 years old.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/hovind/howgood-c14.html


Matson's resumé of the argument is this one, pretty correct:

Henry Morris argued that if we started filling up our empty barrel it would take 30,000 years to reach the equilibrium point. Thus, he concluded, if our Earth were older than 30,000 years the incoming water should just equal the water leaking out. That is, the equilibrium point should have long since been reached given the present rate of carbon-14 production and the old age of the earth. The next step in Henry Morris' argument was to show that the water level in our barrel analogy was not in equilibrium, that considerably more water was coming in than leaking out. To that end, he quoted some authorities, including Richard Lingenfelter. Having accomplished that, Morris concluded that the barrel was still in the process of being filled up and that, given the present rate of water coming in and leaking out, the filling process began only 10,000 years ago.


His answer is:

It's a great argument except for one, little thing. The water is not coming out of the hose at a steady rate as our model assumed! Sometimes it slows down to a trickle so that much more water is leaking out the barrel than is coming in; sometimes it goes full blast so that a lot more water is coming into the barrel than is leaking out. Thus, the mere fact that the present rate of water coming in exceeds that of the water leaking out cannot be extrapolated back to a starting time. And, that destroys the entire argument.


My answer: it may not be a proven fact that C-14 levels are still rising - nor is it a proven fact that the cause of rising C-14 in the atmosphere is fluctuating, so that no projection at all can be made backward.

It seems that since C-14 levels have been observed, they have been rising, but that is not for very long.

However, the argument is even without proven factuality, just as a theoretical possibility, enough to give a non-sequitur about assurance about very old (pre-Creation) carbon ages. Thus, the argument is better as a refutation of one old earth argument, than as a positive young earth argument in its own right./HGL

mercredi 2 juillet 2014

Rats from Upper Palaeocene - Means What?

1) Geology Revisited, 2) Rats from Upper Palaeocene - Means What?

Paula Weston:

Encyclopædia Britannica claims the earliest known rodents come from the upper Paleocene (supposedly about 57 million years ago) of North America, yet it admits these animals ‘had already acquired all of the diagnostic features of the order.’ In other words, these ‘early’ animals were easily recognizable as rodents.


Rats: no evolution!
by Paula Weston
http://creation.com/rats-no-evolution


As I forgot her credit on the previous one, here it is:

Kangaroo rats
by Paula Weston
http://creation.com/kangaroo-rats


Today I am not delving into any further articles, just into (at least mainly) that one paragraph.

If the claim is "the earliest rodents are from Upper Palaeocene" that reads as (I suppose the info is already outdated) "we have found more recent rodents in [making example up] Miocene and Oligocene, but no older rodents in Cretaceous or Jurassic".

I am not sure there have been no rodents found in Cretaceous since that article was written, but the point is that if Palaeocene, Miocene, Oligocene, on the one hand, and Cretaceous, Jurassic on the other hand are not ordered on a time scale, the real reading is of course "we have found rodents in some types of fossil biotopes, but not in others."

Rats are on the evolutionist view an indicator of age Palaeocene to "later" biotopes. Triceratops of Cretaceous or perhaps "earlier back to" Jurassic biotopes.

If Rats and Triceratops were ever to be found together (perhaps it has happened since article of Enc. Brit. was written), a palaeontologist who believes that Palaeocene, Cretaceous, and the rest of them, are time periods, would have three choices:

  • 1) Rodents being older than thought. Like from Cretaceous on. (I think this might be what has taken place after such or roughly similar finds, so that "small mammals" - that could mean rodents - have now been documented "since" the Cretaceous).

  • 2) Triceratops hanging on longer than thought. Logically this would be as possible, but palaeontologists would be wary of this kind of thing. Pal Ul Don is supposed to be Edgar Rice Burrough's SciFi/Fantasy land, not sth one could really come across. Cryptozoologists would not be against this for this reason, but they are hardly ever asked on their opinion when it comes to geochronology.

  • 3) Misplaced fossils. A Classic. Find a hammer deep down incrusted in coal that is supposed to be from Carboniferous or sth, and oh boy, are they eager to say "it must have fallen down from miners later on". Even if that is either:

    • a) problematic in explanation for the incrusting which would have been abnormally fast, if fossilisation and such like processes take as long as they claim, OR

    • b) problematic in proving of the long ages of other things, if incrusting and suchlike processes take as short as the "misplaced coal miner's hammer" theory would have it.


The fourth choice - which they systematically avoid - is saying that Palaeocene and Cretaceous were never different time periods anyway. Because if all the fossil Lagerstätten from all these "time labels" are simultaneous, oh boy are we back at solid proof for Noah's Flood.

Actually, I am delving into another paragraph of that essay of hers:

Comprising 50% of all mammal species, rodents should be prolific in the fossil record, and evolutionists should expect to find numerous examples of transitional species. ...


Did you just hear that?

Comprising 50% of all mammal species, rodents ... OK, rodents are among only themselves, 50% of all mammalian species? But how many different kinds are rodents? Here we have a situation which gives added feasibility to Noah's Ark. How many pairs of rodents were there on board? Half the number of the mammals on board, or far fewer? Rodents are pretty unique among mammals when it comes to speciation through varied chromosome numbers. I hold - against P. Z. Myers - that even they can only vary it downwards. But this is one key to understanding how Noah's Ark could float and was not a crowded prison train or slaughterhouse train or slave ship leaving half the inmates dead before arrival.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Bpi, Georges Pompidou
Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
to Elisabeth

2-VII-2014

Update 12/VII/2014:

On this video, Kent Hovind spends much time talking on how sorting happened in the flood:

The Kent Hovind Creation Seminar (6 of 7): The Hovind Theory
Kent Hovind OFFICIAL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfffRl4RT4s


The irony is he cites a man who said fossils aren't that much sorted. Precisely what I was saying here./HGL