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Old 07-05-2007, 11:40 AM   #221
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Originally Posted by ck1 View Post
The Bible is true because the Bible says so! Not circular at all!
I know this is sarcasm. You know this is sarcasm. My 2 year old nephew knows this is sarcasm. Every rational person knows this is sarcasm. I don't think afdave will recognize this as sarcasm. I'm waiting for afdave to use your quote as evidence that the bible's veracity is evident based on itself.

[Edit:] I took out the reference to $5 bet because I don't bet on irrational people. If someone is rational I could predict fairly well what their response will be. However in this case it is entirely plausible that he will see ck1's statement as sarcasm, not change his logic one iota and still use it as evidence of the bible's veracity. Irrationality knows no bounds.
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Old 07-05-2007, 12:45 PM   #222
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Originally Posted by ck1 View Post
And the other odd claim - the books of the Bible are different and independent sources [...]
Yeah. Because the Council of Nicaea never happened. This is just a lie of atheistic historians.
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Old 07-05-2007, 01:06 PM   #223
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Well, once again, dave (or in this case, I suspect, dave's handlers) sullies the airwaves with undiluted putrefying hogwash.. Once again we have the impossible - accelerated nuclear decay that, had it happened, would have reduced the earth, if not the whole solar system, to a cloud of superheated plasma. We are given the incredibilties of talking snakes and magic fruit. We are offered - yet again!- the odoriferous ordure of helium in zircons, long since shown to total arsewater

And, as always, he demonstrates his complete inability to understand the nature, function and value of cross-calibrations.


Ladies and gentlemen, this isn't plain stupidity. It's an inability to comprehend the wonder, beauty and all-round satisfactoriness of the real world and its cargo of evolved life. And I believe Yeckies like this are envious, for they know they will never feel that glow of achievement felt by scientists when they uncover and explain some tiny process or mechanism of life, adding, infinitesimally maybe, but as part of an inexorable progress, to the web of interlinked knowledge.
No, all they can do is flounder, squawk, lie, evade and distort as they try to avoid the flood of concordant science. Achieve aything? Advance anywhere?
A fundamentalist? None ever has. None ever will.
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Old 07-05-2007, 02:12 PM   #224
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Is Dave's FD post in any way a violation of the rules?

Not addressing CM's questions (consiliance of C14 calibration curves).

That whole last paragraph seemed rushed and like a "train-of-thought" rambling that Dave put together at the last minute.

I'll have to reread that whole thing in the light of the debate rules to see if it holds up to scrutiny.
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Old 07-05-2007, 02:23 PM   #225
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I just checked the Formal Debate thread out.

Dave has posted a post in which he swings full square behind Humphreys and accelerated nuclear decay?

He was roundly trounced on this at RDF, and not just because of the calculations that demonstrate the rampant absurdity of the notion.

One. Humphreys could not even label his rocks correctly. He labelled his source of zircons as a "granodiorite", when any high school geology student could clearly see that it was a gneiss.

Two. Humphreys took old Soviet data and manipulated it to fit his preconceptions. He's been questioned about this repeatedly, and his reponse to date has been to dismiss the questions summarily as "a piffling matter". Dave took the same response at RDF when I brought this up, claiming that my post on the subject was " a dead horse", only for that "dead horse" not only to prove to be alive and kicking, but to be sailing over fences and heading for a place finish at the Grand National, when I discovered that there existed additional complaints of malfeasance on Humphreys' part courtesy of the Sandia National Laboratory, which among other things has good reason to consider whether or not to launch legal action based upon violation of the Establishment Clause in US law.

Three. Humphreys performed his diffusion experiments using a vacuum pump. Which means that he used conditions that bore no relation whatsoever to the conditions extant in geological strata between 750 and 2,000 metres below surface level, where the ambient pressures are between 200 and 1,200 bar. No one is in the LEAST surprised that he got the results he did when he sucked the Helium out of the rocks with a vacuum pump.

Some posts of mine on this topic and related material:

Dave makes a "pfft" comment about Humphreys' assorted misdemeanours;

Reply to Dave's "pfft" comment about Humphreys and his assorted egregious violations of scientific good practice;

Reply to Dave's claim that Humphreys had "rebutted" the claims made against him;

Dissection of Humphrey's paper including a detailed exposure of the nature of the egregious manipulation of data on Humphreys' part;

Dave's summary dismissal of the claims against Humphreys;

Dave describes the case against Humphreys as "a dead horse";

Revelation of ADDITIONAL Humphreys shenanigans courtesy of Sandia National Laboratory;

Recent post taking Dave to task in which he claimed that I was "not rational and not sticking to facts" (which contains additional links to some of the relevant material connected with the above paragraphs).

Quite a trail of disaster for anyone wishing to use Humphreys and his dodgy experiments/manipulated data to support Young Earth Creationism, don't you think?
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Old 07-05-2007, 03:18 PM   #226
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It sure makes one questions afdave's motives when he:

1. Posts the Humphreys Zircon claims (copied verbatim from AIG) at ATBC, where he gets soundly rebutted by a dozen people.

2. C&Ps the exact same argument and posts it at RD.net, where he gets soundly rebutted by another dozen people in exactly the same way.

3. C&Ps the exact same argument for a third consecutive time at IIDB, where he *hopes* no one will have seen his debacle at the other two boards.

Sure doesn't seem like afdave is looking for any kind of discussion or debate, does it? Sure seems like plain old garden variety YEC proselytizing to me.

What's the word for someone who repeatedly spams multiple boards with the identical C&P'd crap, and completely ignores all rebutting evidence? Starts with a T..R..O...
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Old 07-05-2007, 03:47 PM   #227
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Well I started reading Dave's post and ended up just scanning it. I'll look through it in more detail later. Hey ho.

One interesting thing is that having adopted AND he has effectively admitted that Brown's arguments re C14 are rubbish.
 
Old 07-05-2007, 05:33 PM   #228
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And in doing so, has leaped out of the frying pan into the fire BIG time.

At least Brown had sufficient sense to accept invariant nuclear decay, even if the rest of his ideas were wrong. By siding with Humphreys, Dave has moved from siding with ideas that are merely wrong, to siding with ideas that are utterly absurd. But then the mere fact that he still doggedly asserts the literal truth of Genesis, complete with all this flood nonsense, provides ample past precedent for him siding with absurd ideas, so perhaps we should not be too surprised that he's done this. However, what propels this latest development into new realms of absurdity is that there is a LARGE audit trail of past failure with respect to promulgating this idea, which means that if Dave hopes to recycle RATE's combination of incompetence, scientific illiteracy and (in the case of Humphreys) flagrant dishonesty, in the hope that this large audit trail won't follow him, then all he will succeed in doing is once again demonstrating that the creationist "train of thought" is a hopelessly mismatched collection of rolling stock from different line gauges being pushed along a metalled road by a Trabant ... said metalled road in turn winding its way up the side of a mountain with a precipitous drop on one side and loose rocks on the other.
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Old 07-05-2007, 06:48 PM   #229
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Well, Dave has some splainin' to do. He states in the FD post....
Quote:
Originally Posted by AFDave from the FD post
YECs have what I believe will ultimately prove to be the only viable answer:

The Helium was produced in an episode of Accelerated Nuclear Decay (AND Hypothesis) early in the Creation Week before plant and animal life was created. Then the Helium began escaping but has not had enough time to escape completely, hence the high retention percentages observed.
Now some may think Dave is blindly making an association statement from the RATE group at ICR. But actually Dave is on the cutting edge of creation science here. Even Dave's mentor, Dr. Russel Humphreys, makes the following claims about AND.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Humphreys, 2001
Recent experiments commissioned by the RATE project1 indicate that "1.5 billion years" worth of nuclear decay took place in one or more short episodes between 4,000 and 14,000 years ago. The results strongly support our accelerated decay hypothesis, that episodes with billion-fold speed-ups of nuclear decay occurred in the recent past, such as during the Genesis flood, the Fall of Adam, or early Creation week. Such accelerations would shrink the alleged 4.5 billion year radioisotope age of the earth down to the 6,000 years that a straightforward reading of the Bible gives.
http://www.icr.org/article/302/
Quote:
Originally Posted by Humphreys, 2004
Obviously, if radioisotope decay was accelerated, say during the Genesis Flood, then the radioisotope decay "clocks" could never be relied upon to "date" rocks as many millions of years old. To the contrary, the rocks could still only be a few thousand years old.
http://www.icr.org/article/42/
So it seems that Dave has made a stance here that even Dr. Humphreys has not come close to making.

Congratulations Dave on this breakthrough discovery of the placement of the AND event within the biblical timescale. Templeton Prizes for everyone.

But unfortunately it just gets worse for Dave. He STILL cannot explain all the C14 in the atmosphere post flood or even pre flood. He has no model for this. His one chance, R.H.Brown, fundamentally disagrees with AND. So now, I guess, we start all over looking at C14 age dating in the light of RATEs findings.

Just so we're not fooled with the ultimate purpose about RATE, here is the parting appeal from ICR's Dr. Larry Vardiman.
Quote:
Appeal for Prayer
We would appreciate your involvement in this effort. The most important contribution you can make is through prayer. We recognize that this is a monumental task, and we need you to pray that we would have wisdom as we work. For the first two conferences we have started the meetings with devotionals related to David and Goliath. Because David had confidence in God's provision in the past when he dealt with a lion and a bear, he believed God would take care of Goliath. Please pray that we will have such confidence.
http://www.icr.org/article/430/
Now I wonder why Larry would choose THAT subject at a RATE conference?

Hmmmmmm.......
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Old 07-05-2007, 06:59 PM   #230
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Originally Posted by Pantrog View Post
I'm worried for Dave - that last paragraph looks like the textural equivalent of Pressure of Speech. The cognitive dissonance maybe inducing some form of break.
I've noticed it too. I think the dissonance is starting to collapse the compartments that support his logic.

My theory is that he knows the jig is up and is trying to access the strength of conviction that got him into this mess in the first place but there is no safe harbor.

This part of a redemption story usually involves the protagonist descending into some sort of despair. The end of the story is whether they find redemption or whether they become a lost soul. He did it to himself. He obviously needed to make the journey. I don't feel sorry for him. I do have hope but not pity.
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