Where I disagree with Oard

My own contributions to Young Earth creationism are mainly three:

• after seeing a chart over chromosome numbers, and knowing that unlike plants mammals don't make tetraploids (there is one mammals supposed to descend from a tetraploidisation of some strand, perhaps of rodents), and seeing PZM doesn't do geometry too well, I am saying there is no way mammals get increased chromosome numbers over time. In other words, chromosomes and laws of Mendel (which famously Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza felt bad about during his education, him being an evolutionist) means either all placental mammals would have equal numbers of chromosomes, or some strands decreasing since the common ancestor (mice have 22 - 40 chromosomes, I take it the first mouse had 40), or they would have different ancestors (which incidentally is a very minimal approach to the Biblical truth).
  
  Now, instead mammals have widely different numbers of chromosomes, som very far above 48, while 48 is sufficiently typical to be a possible estimate for first mammalian karyotype, so obviously mammals exist that are not descended from that "first mammal". Nor can it be said there are families with a common ancestor with 48 chromosomes, while others, fewer, have one with 96 (say a tetraploid before mammals developed placental immunity against widely differring chromosome numbers), since karyotypes past 48 also occur in most families. Including Primates.
  
  
• Distant starlight problem is a non-problem if angels are moving stars and planets (under a daily movement of Heaven around Earth effected directly by God) and if α Centauri instead of just seeming to move 0.76 arcseconds back and forth each year (due to earth's supposed movement) is actually doing so. Because, if so, the temporally successive triangle involving earth, star, two positions, involves just that one angle and no known side. And the contemporaneous triangle involving earth, sun, star, involves one side and one known angle, but not that known angle. So α Centauri and other stars could be just a bit outside Pluto, or perhaps twice as far from us as the Kuiper Belt, or perhaps a light day or a light week away. And then there is no such thing as "we are observing light that left the star millions of years ago" stuff.
  
  
• AND when it comes to biochronological measures of time, the most common reason they are worthless as evidence against a young earth is where these labels (such as Palaeozoic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic, or within the Mesozoic such as Triassic, Jurassioc and Cretaceous, or within Cretaceous and Palaeocene - the "latest Meso" and "earliest Ceno" Zoic ones - the two labels "around K/P boundary" namely Maastrichtian and Danian) is that they are evidence of the Flood.

Now, this is where I cite Oard's article, I am not getting into his argument for today, you can look that up yourself, dear reader, but about his background on the question:

I will assume the general order of the geological column for the sake of discussion in this article, since many creationists believe the geological column, minus the old ages, represents the order of biblical earth history. I have come to accept that the geological column represents a general order with lots of exceptions. ... I believe every stratigraphic site needs to be evaluated on its own merits. As a result I have often concluded that the Flood/post-Flood boundary is in the early to mid Pleistocene at various locations. However, in other areas, I have found evidence it could be in the Miocene or Pliocene. We cannot trust the radiometric and biostratigraphic dates of the late Cenozoic as being accurate in a relative sense.

Let me save you some trouble Mr Oard ... Every location you find big enough bone graveyards to be from the Flood only, that bone graveyard is from the Flood. If there are shrimps on top of it, those are from the Flood too (meaning fossilised shrimps in the rocks, not such as you can get out of the water and eat). When you start getting things that are purely humus or even sediment but such as can come from post-Flood erosion, no shrimps in the rocks that is, that is your local post-Flood boundary. But if the bone graveyard is so small, that it could be from a much smaller post-Flood disaster and if there are no three or ten yards of vertical trees to stop you from such a conclusion, in the rocks, that is, then such a bonegraveyard could be post-Flood whatever label the palaentologists put on it, basically. Perhaps excluding Permian, if Moschops and some others were OGMs. Like some Nodian or Nephelim (or both) experiment in transgenics. I mean, many features of creatures in Permian fossils of Karoo have a close relation to one mammal - and then you get a saurian or reptilian feature, like eyes and hips that go sideways instead of front for eyes and down for legs. That could be the result of some very evil engineering. But I suppose Ceratopsians and even more so Stegosaurs have existed post-Flood, and thus would be real kinds, recognised as such by Noah and thus by the Holy Ghost inspiring him. And that means "Cretaceous" is useless as a timelabel to distinguish even as generally as pre- from post-Flood biotope. But Cretaceous and even more so an even smaller label (I don't think Maastrichtian would be the right for Ceratopsians, not sure, but labels in that order of finesse) are very fine as descriptions of local fauna before whatever disaster wiped it away from the day of life - which would usually, but not always, be the Flood.

So instead of seeing Palaeozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic as very general timelabels with many exceptions for what was buried when in the Flood, I rather see Barremian and Maastrichtian and Danian and quite a few more as very precise labels on what kind of biotope was buried. I am generally against considering time as a fourth dimension, but this is a case where I would recommend a turning to the spatial dimensions from the so called dimension of time.

If the creationists on CMI were palaeontologists as much as there are geologists, this would probably be perfectly clear.

As it is, it is confused to them because each of these labels also has another meaning, which applies in vertical relations. If any vertical layer has fossils identifiable according to some such label as Barremian, very obviously the layers above and below will in geology and geological just so stories about how the landscape formed, be given names of labels supposedly earlier than Barremian if below, and supposedly later than Barremian if above.

So far, and excepting Grand Canyon and very little else, this is what we find if we look at palaeontology.

That is why I recommend looking at the Evolutionist produced site palaeocritti.com/ while it last, i e up to 2016, at least, and should it, in 2016, shut down, my back up blog for it, the Palaeocritti Blog.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Bpi, Georges Pompidou
The Most Holy Name of Mary
12-IX-2014

Feast info : Festum sanctissimi Nominis beatae Mariae, quod Innocentius Undecimus, Pontifex Maximus, ob insignem victoriam de Turcis, ipsius Virginis praesidio, Vindobonae in Austria reportatam, celebrari jussit.

Martyrologium Romanum : Septembris mensis
http://liturgialatina.org/martyrologium/19.htm

Sites cited for article:

Palaeocritti - a guide to prehistoric animals : By Location‎ > ‎ South Africa
http://www.palaeocritti.com/by-location/south-africa

Palaeocritti Blog
http://palaeocritti.blogspot.com

And the trigger for this article, a few lines in an otherwise very good, probably (beyond my expertise) article by Oard:

CMI : Surficial continental erosion places the Flood/post-Flood boundary in the late Cenozoic
by Michael J. Oard (today)
http://creation.com/flood-boundary-erosion

But "I believe ALL of the Bible is true ..."

Before I really became a Christian, at least before knowing very well the Gospel story, and my own baptism had been delayed "until I could chose for myself" because of different confession of parents, I was open to very many winds of shifting doctrine. For instance, in school, first or second grade, a school teacher who gave us lessons in "religion" had voiced her opinion:

• Genesis/the Bible/First Book of Moses (can't recall which of the words she used, think it was "the Bible") is myth from Adam to Noah.
• Genesis [etc ] is partly myth, partly true history between Noah and Abraham.
• Genesis is true history from Abraham on.

And I believed that. Now, one day my mother had arranged for a Pentecostal to come and visit me and play with me (or technically not a Pentecostal yet perhaps, but one raised by such).

At one point I gave the above résumé, and I am certain I used the word "the Bible".

But he answered: "I believe ALL of the Bible is true."

He never came again. Not sure whether he was forbidden to go to us by his parents after hearing my deficint creed, when it comes to Biblical inerrancy, or whether my grandma - an Atheist and Evolution believer, unlike ma - forbade him to come to us. Or perhaps he just didn't very much like me. I have no memory of disliking him, but I know I was taken aback by the genial simplicity of his words. When you state it that way, the theory of my teacher seems a bit shabbier, like a kind of compromise and shilly-shallying. Or when you have heard someone stating it that way.

But there is another little twist on this. The word "myth". Per se it does not mean "made up story", it means rather simply "story", it is the real Greek word for "story", while the word "story" itself, also Greek, in its original trapping "historia" means "research". A historian was unlike the poets not giving one myth about an event in the past nor conflating different ones into a larger one, but rather comparing the myths, i e versions, about same events, and discussing in some detail the rational reasons to prefer one myth over another in a given case.

One commenter on yesterday's CMI article* stated against the "it is poetry" argument against historicity that Charge of the Light Brigade** was also poetry and it was definitely about a historical event at the Battle of Balaklava on the Crimean.

But - to return to the confusion of termninology behind my already mentioned school teacher's words - not only is this true of narrative poetry set in the recent past, like Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade, or Camões As Lusiadas, or one Greek Tragedian's Persai, it is also true of narrative poetry set in a more remote past, like Homer*** writing around 800 BC (after Assyrians had destroyed remains of Hittite Empire) of events having taken place around 1200 BC°, perhaps before the Hittite Empire even ended.

Ulysses and Paris and Hector°° are often counted as "myth" these days when not only Pagan Greeks, but also most Christians of the Western tradition (even as far east as Greek/Russian Orthodox) have taken rather the view this was historical than that this was pure invention. And Hercules is counted as myth, these days but St Augustine thinks he and Romulus were historical persons.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Bourg la Reine
Transfiguration of Our Lord
6-VIII-2014

* CMI : Christian leaders who uphold Genesis
by Don Batten
Published: 5 August 2014 (GMT+10)
http://creation.com/scholars-uphold-genesis

** By Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

*** Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Homer (again)
http://filolohika.blogspot.com/2013/10/homer-again.html

° Wiki has "Traditional dating: c. 1194–1184 BC; Modern dating: between 1260 and 1240 BC" - I think the traditional date will hold if the modern dating depends on C14, in an atmosphere not yet having our levels of C-14 in relation to C-12, but being close to having them.

°° A case has been made Hector MIGHT have been a fable, intended by Homer to give unity of action as well as showing a more loveable kind of soldier than many of the rest: someone who simply fought for the city he was born to, rather than for swaggering about glory and glutting in acts of cruelty.

Who is the Creator?

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

• General Theism* as well as especially Resurrection of Jesus Christ and thereby His claim to be God:
  
  somewhere else
  http://notontimsblogroundhere.blogspot.com
  
  
• Defense of continuity of the Church He founded, as well as its identification with the Catholic Church over the Centuries, over here:
  
  Great Bishop of Geneva!
  http://greatbishopofgeneva.blogspot.com
  
  
• But I already noted this on the pages on top of each of these blogs:
  
  
  • Apologetics Section
    http://greatbishopofgeneva.blogspot.com/p/apologetics-section.html
    
    
  • Apologetics Section
    http://notontimsblogroundhere.blogspot.com/p/apologetics-section.html
    
    
  • Apologetics Section
    http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/p/apologetics-section.html
  
  
  
• But if you were interested in some other subject, you might look at my other blogs as well, or ask me where I have written about it:
  
  Blogs by same author
  http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/p/blogs-by-same-author.html

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.

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

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

Geology Revisited

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

Read today's artricle on CMI by Paula Weston and came across this statement divided into text and footnote of a fact box:

No-one has found fossils that show a sequence of change from a non–kangaroo-rat ancestor to the kangaroo rats. The only fossils found were clearly already kangaroo rats and these almost certainly formed after the Flood. Fossils exist in rocks designated as ‘Pliocene’, which mostly have the hallmarks of being post-Flood.

This has set me on a little chase on CMI's treatment of the Pliocene. It was not totally fruitless.

Geology indicates the terrestrial Flood/post-Flood boundary is mostly in the Late Cenozoic
by Michael J. Oard
http://creation.com/late-cenozoic-flood-boundary

Jack L., United States, 9 May 2014

Personally I find it very puzzling why creation scientists would use evolutionary names like "Cenozoic" or "K/T boundary". I have to convert these "ages" in my head from 65 million years ago to X thousand years ago, and I can't.

Shaun Doyle responds

Most creationists continue to use those names at least for the sake of established convention. If we did not, it would be practically impossible to communicate with practically any geologist today about any particular rock formation. Of course, when one labels a particular formation 'Jurassic' or 'Pleistocene' it will often raise questions like: do creationists think Jurassic rocks occurred during Noah's Flood or after? Creationists are not united in how to answer such questions. There are a spectrum of views, ranging from seeing little correspondence between geologic column designations and rock record realities to those who see the geologic column reflecting a genuine relative chronology in the rocks. Mike Oard is somewhere near the middle of that spectrum (see The geological column is a general Flood order with many exceptions). This question is the subject of the book The Geologic Column, which provides a helpful overview of the spectrum of views among Flood geologists.

George J., Canada, 9 May 2014

I agree with Jack L's sentiments.

In answer to Shaun's question "do creationists think Jurassic rocks occurred during Noah's Flood or after? ". I ask what is a Jurassic rock? Let's face it, the Jurassic is a fairy land that has no basis in reality, but it can make for a good movie. Why buy into it? A creationist may say he is using it for convenience. Convenience to do what? Discuss with an evolutionist something that the evolutionist then perceives has enough scientific support that even creationists are forced to use such terms. After having used evolutionary terminology to discuss empirical evidence, it does little good for a creationist to then say I don't agree with your model. That's like someone saying this is 2014, and then saying there is no evidence whatsoever that there was a man called Jesus.

I do not agree that, "it would be practically impossible to communicate with practically any geologist today about any particular rock formation. " One would simply do it by referring to the "particular rock formation". It's what would be done anyway, by defining the specific location. If the evolutionist subsequently sticks it into some imaginary layer, that is his choice.

Using evolutionary terms for the layers concedes a point that needs not be in any evolution/creation debate. The title Shaun referred to, "The geological column is a general Flood order with many exceptions" brought to my mind the image of looking at a pot of spaghetti and trying to figure out which noodle was put in first. With worldwide tidal waves depositing, eroding, depositing, etc., should one really be surprised that the "geologic” column may sometimes appear like a pot of spaghetti?

My opinion? This article has two Christians debating when an event happened in an imaginary model.

Shaun Doyle responds

And there are some creationist researchers who agree with you. My point was primarily about communication with deep time geologists; they are hardly going to abandon a model with a 200-year pedigree ultimately built on principles first enunciated by the father of geology Nicolaus Steno, who was a biblical creationist, just because a biblical creationist rejects it wholesale. This becomes all the more pertinent when some biblical creationists accept the basic global validity of the geologic column as a relative chronology, as e.g. Dr John Baumgardner, Dr Marcus Ross, and Dr Andrew Snelling do. Besides, even if the fine gradations of the secular framework are imaginary, there may still be a more general order (e.g. Precambrian-Paleozoic-Mesozoic-Cenozoic-Quaternary) that remains applicable nonetheless. In other words, one doesn't have to affirm every fine gradation of the modern geologic column to assert to a general viability of the basic idea. Therefore, as long as the geologic column remains a popular convention, and especially while it has cogent adherents within the biblical creationist community, it makes sense to have discussions on the rock record with respect to the geologic column idea.

I happen to have a view on this one as well. Readers not new to this blog will know it. I must however first state that it could have had a somewhat fairer treatment from CMI. On one article by Tas Walker I posted a series of comments, and Tas did not publish them, but he did email me and state that he would like to assemble them into one feedback article. He never - so far - came around to it. However, CMI has more or less if not promised at least held out hopes for different ideas getting treated. See here:

CMI is more than happy when creationists embark on research in an attempt to help the creationist cause. Our Journal of Creation seeks to act as a service to the creation community where new ideas can be aired and critiqued and even refined by fellow creation researchers.

Analysis of Walt Brown’s Flood model
by Michael J. Oard
Published: 7 April 2013 (GMT+10)
http://creation.com/hydroplate-theory

Now, I am going to take a few strokes of the pen against Shaun Doyle here. Getting back to the earlier quoted dialogue, of course. And interspersing my comments.

Doyle

Most creationists continue to use those names at least for the sake of established convention. If we did not, it would be practically impossible to communicate with practically any geologist today about any particular rock formation.

Lundahl

I have tried to communicate with geologists - or one named Brian Switek and another one named Darwin (both bloggers) - while using those conventions.

With the difference that I am not accepting they form a CHRONOLOGY, I think they simply form a MAP.

I have not got any very long answers.

Doyle

My point was primarily about communication with deep time geologists;

Lundahl

Oh, one should - insofar as these answer back.

Doyle

they are hardly going to abandon a model with a 200-year pedigree ultimately built on principles first enunciated by the father of geology Nicolaus Steno, who was a biblical creationist, just because a biblical creationist rejects it wholesale.

Lundahl

"Based ultimately" is a large word.

The chronological column of fossil bearing strata is nowhere found (not even in GC, as far as I know, except "on top").

As far as fossil bearing strata are concerned, we have a two dimensional map wrapped around a globe, we do not have a dimension of depth, of one fossil bearing stratum physically above the other one.

Where there are fossil bearing strata (excepting GC) they may be above or below or between non-fossil bearing strata from other periods.

And if the fossil bearing stratum does contain Jurassic type fossils (insofar as they have already elsewhere been identified as such) it will be labelled Jurassic. And a non-fossil stratum below it might be labelled Triassic or Permian or Cambrian or whatever they like, that does not make such a place an attestation of the sequence Jurassic above Triassic or Jurassic above Permian or anything like that. It just means there was something below the Jurassic deposits.

And a non-fossil stratum above it might be called Cretaceous or Palaeocene, or Miocene or anything else that is supposed to come after Jurassic, but if it has no fossils it will not be attesting logically any kind of temporal sequence with Jurassic below Cretaceous or Palaeogene.

Considering that Permian and Miocene are also used for certain types of fossils make it grossly misleading to label non-fossil layers below the Jurassic land fauna layer as Permian or non-fossil layers above it as Miocene.

If a place with one fossil bearing layer were labelled in its successive significant levels: pre-Jurassic, Jurassic, post-Jurassic, if Jurassic was the type, and this was consistently done, if furthermore the difference between land and marine fossil layers were consistently observed, one would normally get vertical series like:

1) a) pre-Jurassic, b) land-Jurassic, c) post-Jurassic
2) a) pre-Permian, b) land-Permian, c) post-Permian
3) a) pre-Cambrian, b) sea-Cambrian (with Trilobites), c) sea-Cretaceous (with Sharks), d) post-Cretaceous.

Grand Canyon is obviously the most detailed version of a nearly only shell-fish based fossil site.

This could very often be reduced very directly to a series like:

4) a) pre-Flood, b) early Flood getting life buried, c) late Flood adding mud.

And this is also basically the real system of Nicolaus Steno.

Doyle

This becomes all the more pertinent when some biblical creationists accept the basic global validity of the geologic column as a relative chronology, as e.g. Dr John Baumgardner, Dr Marcus Ross, and Dr Andrew Snelling do.

Lundahl

My problem with them is they are squeezing a million of years chronology into a one year chronology.

They should by turning it from a chronology to a map.

Any site has marina fauna, whether Jurassic or Pliocene (like - for Pliocene - the whales in Austria), it was sea before the Flood.

Any site has land fauna, whether Permian or Triassic (as in different parts of Karoo), it was land before the Flood.

Doyle

Besides, even if the fine gradations of the secular framework are imaginary, there may still be a more general order (e.g. Precambrian-Paleozoic-Mesozoic-Cenozoic-Quaternary) that remains applicable nonetheless.

Lundahl

In Grand Canyon, we have - except on the very top - a Precambrian to Palaeozoic heap of basically shellfish of diverse kinds. Including huge "Ammonites" or Buck-Horn Shells.

Its "fine gradations" are probably the basis for diverse gradations within Precambrian or Palaeozoic. Its real order is the obvious one of Marine Flood burial order: fish come above shellfish.

Is CMI very likely to take this hint from me? Not while I remain Catholic and Geocentric, as far as our relations have been up to now.

On the Galileo affair, they are content to cite Schirrmacher - a Calvinist "Theologian". I actually thought he was a Catholic, because his accusations about the motives of Catholic Church men were so gross (that they were punishing his attitude rather than his doctrine at the end of the game!) that the Catholics I have seen cite him, I did not think there was a Catholic alive able to cite such a thesis as Schirrmacher's, if Schirrmacher had not been a Catholic.

And of course, my turning "parallax" from geometric indication of distance mapping to angelic choreography is akin to what I am doing here too. And as obviously as I am not changing the conventional angle for proxima Centauri to anything other than 0.76 arc seconds (though that might be only the angle as compared to other stars also moving, that would be one explanation for "negative parallax") I have no interest in changing the labels given for formations by Palaeontologists. I am indeed rather thankful for them. They underline the fact that any given place can usually be described by one single period name - meaning, as already said, that there is one fossil bearing layer, thick or thin.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre University Library
St William of Vercelli
Father of the Hermits of the Mount Virgin
25/VI/2014

Giving Tower of Babel a Fair Hearing

Back in 1996, December, when I was employed as a school teacher in Sysslebäck and demoted from usual lessons due to discipline problems, before I grew a beard, Talk Origins accepted as Post of the Month one post by Gail Davis.

Godless Linguistics!
Post of the Month: December 1996
Gail Davis
http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/dec96.html

It is tongue in cheek. It gives linguistic evolution as a parallel for evolution in the biological sense. Since then two things have happened: the argument has become somewhat of a standard for internet atheist debaters and Talk Origins has not given another linguistic post ever status of post of the month, and I have looked up until 2013. I even found Aron-Ra's formalistic approach on "ape to man evolution" in the process of looking. But not one single other post on linguistic evolution on the post of the month. Nor on site map. Nor on ... yes, there were in fact 3 posts in the index of creationist claims dealing with linguistics.

Index to Creationist Claims
edited by Mark Isaak
Copyright © 2006
[Last update: 5 Nov 2006]
CG: Miscellaneous Anti-Evolution
CG100: Linguistics
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html#CG100

• CG100: Linguistics
  • CG101. Chinese glyph for "ark" is literally "8 mouths."
  • CG110. The first known languages are highly complex.
  • CG111. Why are languages getting less complex?
  
  
  Of these the first is not very related to the subject. I will look at the other two before going back to that old PotM.
  
  
• Claim CG110:
  
  The first known human languages were already very complex. Languages do not show the evolutionary progression we would expect if humans evolved gradually.
  
  
  • Source:
    
    Skjaerlund, David, n.d. Creationism explains human diversity.
    http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0722_Creationism_explains.html
    
    
  • Response:
    
    
    • 1. The first known languages were written languages (else they would not be known). Since most cultures in the world have had no written language, and most people have been illiterate even where written language existed, written language is a poor metric to use to measure language in general. Language had been developing for an unknown period of time before written language evolved.
      
      
    • 2. The earliest known writing is simpler than written languages today. There are very simple, nonlinguistic precursors (no grammar) to cuneiform writing (Coulmas 1989).
  
  
  
• Claim CG111:
  
  If current languages evolved gradually from primitive grunts or noises, earliest languages should be the simplest. But ancient languages such as Latin and Vedic Sanskrit are more complex than modern languages in terms of cases, genders, voices, verb forms, etc.
  
  
  • Source:
    
    Brown, Walt, 1995. In the Beginning: Compelling evidence for creation and the Flood. Phoenix, AZ: Center for Scientific Creation, p. 8.
    
    Reffner, Ken, 2003. Feedback letter (June).
    http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/feedback/jun03.html#f37
    
    
  • Response:
    
    
    • 1. Languages are not becoming less complex overall. They may be simpler in some ways (such as verb endings) but are more complex in others (such as syntax and vocabulary) (Teegarden 2002).
      
      
    • 2. Evolution is not necessarily a uniform progression from simple to complex. Evolution towards simplicity is consistent with both biological and linguistic evolution.
    
    
    
  • Links:
    
    Teegarden, Dave, 2002 (Jan.). Feedback letter.
    http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/feedback/jan02.html#language
    
    
  • References:
    
    1. Teegarden, D., 2002 (see above).
    
    
  • Further Reading:
    
    Croft, William, 2001. Explaining Language Change: An Evolutionary Approach. Harlow, Essex: Longman.

Responding ...

...to their responses

CG 110 resp. 1. The first known languages were written languages (else they would not be known). Since most cultures in the world have had no written language, and most people have been illiterate even where written language existed, written language is a poor metric to use to measure language in general. Language had been developing for an unknown period of time before written language evolved.

Maybe so. But it is the only "metric" we have got.

It is also only very poor if you assume that unwritten happenings cover much longer time before than written history after writing started. But then you could claim it makes it an uncertain metric.

But it is the only metric we have for complexity of past languages.

We have no tape recordings of Cro Magnon man to test if they spoke Biblical Hebrew or Aramaic, an immediate post-Babel language, a known language group's oldest form, or a rudimentary language. In absense if direct evidence, we can rule out rudimentary language since it has never been observed.

resp 2. The earliest known writing is simpler than written languages today. There are very simple, nonlinguistic precursors (no grammar) to cuneiform writing (Coulmas 1989).

Sure. Pure pictograms are not very informative either of the phonemes involved in possible case endings or of the categories that these represent.

So they give us an imperfect rendering of speech, but that does not in the least prove that the speech itself was imperfect.

CG 111 resp. 1. Languages are not becoming less complex overall. They may be simpler in some ways (such as verb endings) but are more complex in others (such as syntax and vocabulary) (Teegarden 2002).

They are so by intelligent restructuring of grammatical strategies. In other words by intelligent design.

And the over all complexity of expression range stays the same.

Or just perhaps devolves a bit. Is it still possible in English to say "Helms too they choose" or not? "They chose helmets too" is less emphatic. I know the point was under debate.

resp. 2. Evolution is not necessarily a uniform progression from simple to complex. Evolution towards simplicity is consistent with both biological and linguistic evolution.

But the point of the countered creationist claim is that an evolution towards linguistic simplicity cannot - on evolutionist views - have started until one first had a linguistic complexity that had somehow evovled from simplicity. Here are the two claims again, and they are closely related:

CG 110

The first known human languages were already very complex. Languages do not show the evolutionary progression we would expect if humans evolved gradually.

CG 111

If current languages evolved gradually from primitive grunts or noises, earliest languages should be the simplest. But ancient languages such as Latin and Vedic Sanskrit are more complex than modern languages in terms of cases, genders, voices, verb forms, etc.

Summing them up

Birds have no grammar in their songs - at least not grammar in a proper linguistic sense. Only man has such. No transitional state between animal and human grammar has been observed.

We do not have the grammar of Pal Ul Don with 400 words lacking pronouns and tenses totally.

Or rather, we do have precisely that grammar - but it was constructed by a man knowing unless I am mistaken both German and English, plus perhaps some Swahili, all of which do have pronouns and do have tenses. What we do not have is a real population using* it without* any further complexity* of grammar.

Similarily Pidgins may lack grammatical features normally found in languages, but are not anywhere a real precursor to real languages. Chomsky has pretended that Creoles are developed from Pidgins, but McWhorter has refuted him on Atlantic English based Creoles stating that the discrepance from European model language grammars are not due to Pidginisation (with limited contact with model language) followed by Creolisation (when children are raised in a Pidgin that becomes a mother tongue), but because Castle slaves in English colonial Castles (in Thirteen Colonies or US they would be called Forts) when told to learn English only relexicalised their mother tongue (or several of them with similar grammars) and when told to teach English to slaves destined for Trans-Atlantic destinations (like St Kitts) only transmitted their mother tongues relexicalised with English vocabulary.*

So, even Pidgins have nowhere served as precursors - at least exclusive such - for Creoles. And Creoles are everywhere observed as having normal complexity.

There is no such thing as a transitional language between monkey communication and human speech. If evolution were true, there must have been, but none such is found, ever.

Now, before I go back to December 1996, Post of the Month, I will take a look at other linguistic resources mentioned. The links to feedback posts do make the point that language overall is not getting simpler, but - in Western Society I would myself add - morphology is. And I would add: with exceptions, like the new Conditional Tense-Mood.

I also skimmed over the book by Croft. Or what was available of it on preview on Amazon. Hypercorrection is in it described as a "mechanism" which pretty well sums up his confusion of concept between voluntary and purely accidental causes. So, back to PotM December 1996.

First comes a diatribe against rock music and its relation to crime - not meant to be taken seriously. Then comes the great parallel between "linguistics" and "evolutionism" ... no doubt meant to indicate that Evolution, including both Macroevolution and Abiogenesis, are as solidly scientific as English descending from Anglo-Saxon. Or perhaps just as solidly scientific as Anglo-Saxon descending from Proto-Germanic descending from Proto-Indo-European ... which is not solidly scientific. Anyway, here come its points, which I will first of all answer with a bit more seriousness than they deserve. Then I will give a hint of what happened after that PotM.

Our public schools have turned away from the source of Truth, to teach our children that our sacred English language has descended from other languages.

The sacred languages are three, and English is not one of them.

Holy Writ shows in the history of its translations that English has had a succession of states so separate as to be for practical puposes different languages. When King Alfred translated 50 psalms into Ænglisc the result was very different from King James or (to mention a better version with same numeration as King Alfred's) Douay Rheims.

Even the other two sacred languages than Hebrew, if not Hebrew itself, had clearly known other states than that in which they were on the Titulus. We have "Rex Iudaeorum" and not "Ioudaiosom". We also have "Basileus ton Ioudaion" and not - again - "Io-da-o-so" (presumable Linear B spelling for "Ioudaiosom").

We have a testimony that one people came from another people, directly, so that when we read in Scripture of peoples not enumerated among the seventy (or seventytwo) original descendants of Noah, we must assume they have come out of some of those originally enumerated among the seventy. Meaning also that language would descend from language.

The poor impressionable youngsters are taught AS A FACT that English words have certain "root words", even though this is only a theory.

The IE (Indo-European) root words as such are not a theory, but a fact. Father is the same word as pater in all probability.

What is only a theory is that all the common root words came from the same language and all the languages from it within the IE language family. Common origin is one of three possibilities of language similarities, the other two being adstrate and superstrate, or in less technical jargon and more understandable words, neighbourhood and common model.

What is also only a theory is that such and such was the form of the original root word in the theoretical IE proto-language. The one for "pater" and "father" has been given both as "p@taar" and as "p@têr" and as "pχtehr" (presumed pronunciation of "pH²teH¹r") depending on who does the reconstruction.

The FACT is, God Almighty created all languages complete when he confused mankind's original language as punishment for our transgression at the tower of Babel.

The fact is that God almighty did so with seventy or seventy two languages at Babel. Since we have lots of more languages and only 32 large language families, we are left to assume that the 32 language families are not all from only one source after Babel, but unless 40 just vanished, at least some of the 32 must be mergers - or incomplete mergers by adstrate, i e neighbourhood - between diverse Babelic languages. And we are also left to assume lots of splits have occurred.

But the atheist/linguists don't want this mentioned in public settings, because it goes against their FAITH, and forces them to face their own accountability.

What neither Atheists in general nor Gail Davis in particular wants mentioned is that Tower of Babel remains an entirely possible scenario. It does not contradict any clear linguistic fact, such as "pater" and "father" being the same word. Of course, Gail Davis just might have written his piece for that precise motive.

So they have BANNED the teaching of Babelism, because they are afraid that it might expose the weakness of their own linguistic ideas. Is this fair? I don't think so. It goes against all that America stands for.

Gail Davis does what he can to ban the Tower of Babel scenario from getting a fair hearing. By lampooning it. Or rather the kind of people he thinks would advocate it.

Therefore, join me in the campaign to have a balanced and fair treatment in public education. All English teachers should be required to include Babelism as a valid alternate theory to Linguisticism, whenever the origins of the English language is discussed.

When getting as far back as IE root language, stating the possibility it was never one single such, but several post-Babelic ones heavily influencing each other through neighbourhood or perhaps also influenced by some contructed lingua franca (like getting very basic morphological grammar from it, leaving aside their previous different grammars, or taking over many words for family members and some but not all for body parts) would be as fair to mention as mentioning a language spoken by the Kurgan people in a time according to modern theories pre-dating the Flood or maybe even Creation.

Oh, of course we can expect opposition from the entrenched vested interests.

Like those that Gail Davis either represents or by sheer thoughtlessness happens to defend.

They will point to certain similarities (i.e. "mother", "madre", "mater") as evidence of the relatedness of various languages.

That Spanish came from Latin is not against the Faith, nor against any part of the evidence. Whether Germanic and Latin came from an earlier same language by a split or converged by incomplete merging from previously less related languages (taking over the "mater" word from the lingua franca if there was such a one) is less certain.

We do know Germans and Romans descend from different sons or grandsons of Japheth who is the relevant son of Noah for Europe (though not solely so for all the IE speaking lands).

One can have taken over the language of the other or both can have exchanged words and taken over such from Nesili (Hittite - as opposed to Hattili/Hattic, which seems to be a Fenno-Ugrian one as clearly as the case would be for Sumerian, if not for Etruscan).

But this is a complete misinterpretation of the evidence. Clearly it is more economical for God to use similar phonic structures to designate similar meanings.

Here the lampooning is more directed at Biological Evolution. Linguistic evolution is only interesting to Gail Davis as a parallel to Biological one.

Of course, God does use similar structures over different kinds for similar purposes. Whether donkeys and horses were originally same kind or not, whether sheep and goats were originally same kind or not, sheep and horses weren't. But God gave both four legs and similar "toenails" and "fingernails" - to cite what structure in man is supposed to be originally same as hooves and cleft hooves.

He also probably used similar genetic codes for achieving the results.

The counterpart in what God did at Babel would be that God gave all languages more or less the same grammatical categories - even if he sometimes exchanged the means for expressing them.

If He meant certain languages to form families, He would have given them some initial similarities in vocabulary too. With a neat phonetic comfort distance between their versions, so as to suggest a demoted borrowing, once the peoples start to get in touch.

Supposing for instance that Germanic soundshift was never an event, but that Germanic represents a Phrygian state of sounds, with a de-satemisation (tch > k, dj > g) making it an overall Centum language, the "b" in "beru" could have been taken over as "φ" in "φερω" - or the reverse - because this was a difference the languages of Lud (ancestor of Lydians and Phrygians) and Javan (ancestor of at least Ionian Greeks) had in the original common glosses.

Therefore, the existence of such similarities PROVES that the various languages must have had the same author.

Logic. A similarity proves common origin. Common author, common ancestor, common model, common neighbourhood are all valid options.

The sentence is of course meant to lampoon the argument about similarities that even evolution believers do not put down to common ancestry (like caffeine in both Cammelia Sinensis and Coffea Coffea or echolocation in dolphins and bats) being proof of a common designer.

Second, a language is a complex thing. The odds that some first speaker could randomly string together a complex series of sounds, and then multiply this by the odds that someone else would UNDERSTAND him, and the probability could be calculated to be less than 1 in 10⁵⁰⁰. That's a one with five hundred zeroes. A statistical impossibility. Obviously, the first language must have a designer: God.

So far linguistics has not answered that one. I have seen a few attempts. One pretty funny such, which I saw in a science book of anthropology in Austria (probably written by someone close to Nazism**, same book says "Aryans" became a beautiful people by selection for beauty) indicated that the first word and phoneme was "φ" as in bilabial f. It meant fire. This is because the phoneme bilabial f is phonetically identic to the sound you make when blowing embers into flames. Man invented fire and then invented language to talk about fire. The sound "φ" was immediately understood as referring to fire. But getting from there to a language ...

Seriously, no evolutionist scenario beats God giving a ready made language to Adam and inviting him to fill in terminological gaps, in this case the names of the kinds of animal.

This is of course an entirely different question than that of why languages do change. And sometimes crossing boundaries into becoming new languages (I have argued elsewhere that this does at least sometimes, as for French adn English, as compared to Latin and West-Saxon, involve crossing boundaries and inventing things like new correspondences between sounds and letters).

Third, there is NO evidence that transitional languages ever existed. What use is half a language? A noun without verbs conveys no meaning!

Indeed, the very point that language does not evolve from brute systems of communication.

Sure, there is middle and old- English. But these are ENGLISH! A complete nontransitional language.

None of these is transitional between bird song and human language, that is for sure.

Obviously Early Middle English (or Old English) is transitional between Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) and Late Middle English (or Middle English).

Chomsky has argued that the (Late) Middle English of Chaucer and Modern English are very much the same language with only minor adjustments.

The point is, there was a transition. The West Saxon model of writing the native speech was lost. The Chaucerian one (which involved adaptations to French spelling, as when "hyll" was respelled "hull" before being respelled "hill" after delabialisation - sorry Chaucer if you already spelled "hill" but whatever you did pronounce with the labial front high vowel you did spell "u", as in French***) was not yet invented and universally accepted. And Orrmulum was written.

We do not deny that micro-linguistics can happen, but this process can create only DIALECTS. There is NO EVIDENCE that a series of random micro-linguistic events can create a WHOLE NEW LANGUAGE.

This is obviously a lmampooning of variation within kinds.

A linguist would not call English a whole new language. He would call it a Germanic dialect. It is as obviously a dialect of same root as Dutch, Frisonic and High German as Aeolic is of same root as Attic.

But the fault of the comparison is that all human languages are in a sense dialects of one language.

All human languages have the same basic grammatic functions. All have same basic semantic distinctions. No two are "similar and dissimilar" like elephant and whale. All pairs have such compatibility of functions as between Great Dane and Chihuahua. Does not make them immediately comrpehensible to each other. It is more comparable to a kind forming band species than to a kind forming just variants all directly interbreeedable.

I'll believe in Macro-linguistics when I see a video tape of a child growing up in an Eskimo village suddenly become fluent in Armenian!

Eskimo - or rather Inuit or Greenlandic - does have the same basic grammar as Armenian.

You only need lots of translations between not just words but also the structures expressing the functions before a man with Inuit mother tongue can be fluent in Armenian.

That is not comparable to the biological presumed example that all land animals have some kind of expression of original five phalangs, because you find them both in frogs and in man. But not in horses or goats, nor in sheep and donkeys.

Obviously Gail Davis is not at all interested in linguistics for its own sake, just as a parallel to Biologic Evolution.

It takes A LOT MORE FAITH to believe in atheistic linguisticism than the truth of Babelism.

Babel was the original diversity of languages.

It could also have originated non-mirculously. We have no record of that, but we have a record of the Tower of Babel.

It is rather God giving Adam a complete language where the Christian scenario is immediately much more comprehensible than the atheist one. But there the atheist one is not linguistics as the word is commonly understood.

Not even reconstructing a common parent language for all 32 large language families would come close to giving us rudimentary languages.

If the so constructed model of a proto-human-language completely lacked the conditional function, neither conjunctions like "if" and "then" nor doubling of the word order for question clauses, that would not mean the proto-human-language the model is meant to construct lacked it any more than the lack of a word for "head" or a word for "hand" in actual proto-IE means that if that language existed it lacked a word for "head" and lacked a word for "hand". It would only mean that the model is incomplete in reconstructing.

So join me in the crusade: Babelism must be included in the public school English curriculum.

There are only two theories which explain the origin of our language: Babelism and Linguisticism. Shouldn't they BOTH be given a fair hearing?

Did you even dream there would come a Creationist with a serious answer to all you said?

Here I am.

What happened after the piece was written?

Obviously, Talk Origins did not do very well in answering linguistic questions. No post on linguistics ever again made it to post of the month.

But there is another and sadder side. The stance taken by Gail Davis, that linguistics is a valid refutation of Creationism, has been taken up again and again. I have been confronted to it twice. Once back before I left Malmö (i e between 2001 and 2004) on Netscape Boards by one dhux. Once much more recently by one Cushla Geary. I will link to both confrontations below. And they are as vociferous as they are nullities in linguistic knowledge.*

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre University Library
Sts Aureus and Justina
of Mayence, killed by Huns
16 / VI / 2014

* The spell check is amusing: "using" gives "usine", "without" gives "Erfurt", "complexity" gives - somewhat more appropriately - "complexité" as well as "vocabulary" giving "vocabulaire". And "grammar" gives "grammage", whatever that is. Not "grammaire" even. And "knockdown" suggested for "knowledge" is not bad either.

** Note that both Nazism and Austrofascism have ties to Austria. And look to Mussolini more or less as a model. This does not make the two the same. Of the two it is Nazism which is more likely to produce para-Evolutionist stuff.

*** It also involved respelling "c" as "ch" in words or word endings like "-ceastre" / "-chester". And "g" as "y" in "geard" / "yard". And so on, after French model. And as "y" was the consonant or the "ig"/"ige" endings, "y" was replaced by "u" for labial front high vowel, so also "ou" / "ow" replaced "u" for labial back high vowel. Meaning French was the model, West Saxon was ignored.

EARLIER CONFRONTATIONS

Assorted retorts : ...on Tower of Babel or language evolution
http://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2008/11/tower-of-babel-or-language-evolution.html

HGL's F.B. writings : Attacked on "Evolution of Languages Disproves Tower of Babel" Subject Again
http://hglsfbwritings.blogspot.com/2014/05/attacked-on-evolution-of-languages.html

I forgot I had already had a confrontation last year on it, but that came back as I saw the short debate with Cushla Geary and her supporters featuring as post n° 8 in one of my series of monographic collections of posts.

On PHRYGIAN

Here are some texts of it, I took a look:
http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/texte/etcs/phrygian/phryg.htm

To me "semon knoumanei" does not look like related to Germanic. I am glad the paragraph in the text above starts "Supposing for instance ...".

Supposing for instance that Germanic soundshift was never an event, but that Germanic represents a Phrygian state of sounds, with a de-satemisation (tch > k, dj > g) making it an overall Centum language, the "b" in "beru" could have been taken over as "φ" in "φερω" - or the reverse - because this was a difference the languages of Lud (ancestor of Lydians and Phrygians) and Javan (ancestor of at least Ionian Greeks) had in the original common glosses.

The scenario is as such plausible, as one of the ways in which a group of basically unrelated langages can have gotten related to each other, and so is the application perhaps of Lydian being one of them, but the application to a short connexion between Phrygian and Germanic is very much less so.

Inscription: 3 (Neo-Phrygian corpus on site)


(Br. 1,1, p.12)

Line: 1	ios ni semon knoumanei kakon a[d]daket
	ΙΟΣ ΝΙ ΣΕΜΟΝ ΚΝΟΥΜΑΝΕΙ ΚΑΚΟΝ Α[Δ]ΔΑΚΕΤ
Line: 2	[deOs ke zemelOs k]/e
	[ΔΕΩΣ ΚΕ ΖΕΜΕΛΩΣ Κ]/Ε
Line: 3	tie tit tetikmenos eitou
	ΤΙΕ ΤΙΤ ΤΕΤΙΚΜΕΝΟΣ ΕΙΤΟΥ

Between Latin and Germanic the number of shared words by far exceeds the total number of words in the Old Phrygian, Mysian and Neo-Phrygian corpus. And it is obviously possible that KAKON has exactly the same meaning as the neighbouring Greek word. For addaket I would guess a connexion to deiknymi and a meaning like "indicate, mean", but I am far from sure. And obviously word forms like tetikmenos or - if it be a genitive - genitives like eitou sound more Greek than anything else. Plus a clearer close connexion to deiknymi for tetikmenos (but it includes the T vs D connexion which is also typical for Germanic - as does the following word). TIT could be identic to the Germanic word THAT which is the same as -TUD in ISTUD.