Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Valentine Pontifex · 06-12-2003, 05:59 PM

Answers in Genesis has responded quickly:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs...612sapiens.asp

I will place a partial retraction on my previously state position that the find had little implications for creation/evolution. AiG has pointed out that these fossils give the ideas of Hugh Ross problems. They do have a point. Of course Ross's ideas on fossil hominids made even less sense then AiG if one ignores age of the Earth issues.

RBH · 06-12-2003, 06:40 PM

From the AiG article:

Quote:

AiG has consistently shown the fallacies and assumptions in radioisotope dating. For example, we have demonstrated obvious inconsistencies between supposedly infallible methods, such as wood 'dated' at thousands of years old via the radiocarbon method, while encased by lava which was ?dated? by the potassium-argon method as tens of millions of years old (see Q&A: Radiometric dating). So in a biblical framework of history, this Ethiopian find is just one more example of fossil human bones, probably post-Babel and thus post-Flood, and thus nothing to get excited about.

However, the new find will (or at least should) be received with dismay by the 'progressive (long-age) creationist' camp, best typified by Dr Hugh Ross of the ministry Reasons to Believe

Two things strike me. First, of course, is that contrary to Philip Johnson's remark to the effect that 'we'll have a great time debating the age of the earth once Darwinism is vanquished,' in fact blood will flow as the ID big tent is torn to shreds in the internecine wars within it.

Second, Weiland and Sarfati put me in mind of the kind of person I had in mind when I wrote this 15 years ago:

Quote:

Creationist Criticisms of Geological Dating

Imagine that you are standing at some distance east of a tall building. A fence prevents you from getting closer to the building but does not impede your view. Suppose that you want to know the height of the building. What can you do?

Well, first suppose that you see three people standing close to the building in the distance. You can't see them absolutely clearly, but it looks like one is an adult man, one an adult woman, and one a child. You hold up a pencil, marking with your thumbnail the apparent height of the man. Then you carefully move your pencil up the building, one "man-height" at a time, counting the number of "man-heights" tall the building is. You find that it is 53 "man-heights" tall. You assume that the man is 5'10" tall, and multiplying, you estimate that the building is 309 feet high. You repeat the process with the woman, assuming her height to be 5'4". You find the building to be 54 "woman-heights" high, or 288 feet. Repeating the process once again with the child, you find the building to be 77 "child-heights" high. Estimating the child's height at 4'0", you estimate the building's height to be 308 feet. Based on the data gathered so far, you are justified in estimating the building to be between 288 and 309 feet high, or somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 feet.

Now suppose that you notice a man at the top of the building who is periodically dropping what look like bowling balls off the building. Deferring speculation on why he might be dropping the bowling balls, you time how long they take to fall and find that on average they take 4.4 seconds to fall from the top of the building to the ground. Knowing that the distance traveled by objects falling in the earth's gravitational field in a vacuum conforms to the simple equation,

Distance = 16t^2

you calculate that the building is about 310 feet high, your calculation disregarding the effects of air resistance. This makes your estimate slightly inflated, though for bowling balls the effect is very minor. In any case, this is consistent with your earlier estimates and provides independent corroboration for them.

Furthermore, by measuring the time interval between when each bowling ball hits the ground and when you hear the noise of its impact to be a bit less than 1 sec., and knowing that sound travels at about 1,100 feet per second at sea level, you estimate that you are standing about 1000 feet away from the building.

Now the sun is setting behind the building, and just as the building's shadow approaches you, you whip out a foot ruler, hold it upright on the ground, and mark the ruler's shadow length. Measuring from the base of the ruler to your mark, you find the ruler's shadow to be 37" long. Based on the estimate of your distance from the building obtained earlier, simple algebra shows that a 1000' foot long shadow would be cast by a building that is 324 feet tall at that angle of the sun.

At this point you have three quite different and independent methods of estimating the building's height, and they agree that it is in the neighborhood of 300 feet tall, perhaps a bit more but certainly not substantially less. Now a man walks up to you and says, "Your estimates are all wrong! My book says that the building is really only about 1/200 of an inch (0.005 inch) high. All of your measuring methods are terribly flawed and your estimates cannot be believed. The building is actually less than a hundredth of an inch tall! You must ignore your measurements and discard the physics which underlies them." What would you say to him?

This is exactly what the creationists argue. They deny that the several independent methods of estimating the age of geological features are reliable, and argue that they are in fact as much in (coordinated) error as the man denying your estimate of the height of the building. The creationist "young earth" hypothesis says that the estimates of the age of the earth that show it to be on the order of 4.5 billion years old are wildly mistaken, and that the earth is really only about 6,000 or 10,000 or 20,000 years old. In other words, they argue that the best scientific estimates of the age of the earth are off by as much as a factor of 750,000! This is equivalent to arguing that the building you estimated to be 300 feet tall is really only about five-thousandths of an inch tall. Yet they offer absolutely no valid evidence to substantiate this extraordinary claim but only criticize your measurements by saying things like, 'Well, those people may be midgets, and they aren't really standing near the building, and your stopwatch is wildly unreliable, and sound doesn't necessarily travel at 1100 feet per second in the air near the building, and gravity is different near the building, so your measurements are wrong by a factor of 750,000.' This is the precise character of the argument offered by "scientific" creationists. Is it any wonder that most scientists don't waste time and energy refuting creationist claims?

I've learned since then that it's worth putting in the time and energy to refute creationist and IDist claims.

RBH

Nic Tamzek · 06-12-2003, 08:36 PM

You know what's fun, watching creationists of different stripes critique each other:

Quote:

The Rossite flood v geology
As usual, compromise views not only commit hermeneutical assault and battery, they raise more problems than they solve. One major problem is that the geography of Mesopotamia is a half-bowl open to the south. Since the Rossian Flood requires a wall of water 200�300 feet high (The Genesis Question (GQ), pp.159�160), what would hold it up for a year, and stop it flowing out to the Indian Ocean? And then it would have dragged the Ark in the opposite direction to Ararat.

Even at ordinary river drainage speeds of 5�8 km/h (3�5 mph), a flood would drain in well under a year. Furthermore, a 300-foot-high wall of water would have far more potential energy than ordinary rivers. Ross realizes the problem about covering Mt Ararat, so he argues that the �mountains of Ararat� include the foothills. He has a map (GQ:170) showing a 600-foot contour line to indicate where the Ark could have landed (GQ:151). But he fails to explain how a 300-foot-high flood could have levitated the Ark another 300 feet! Since the water flow direction would be towards the south, the Ark would be carried this way till it landed on a beach of Arabia.

Some anti-creationists have pointed out these fallacies in Mesopotamian flood theories in general and Ross�s book GQ in particular. But there is nothing original in these criticisms. Over 40 years ago, Whitcomb and Morris in their classic book, The Genesis Flood, pointed out the fallacy of John Pye Smith�s Mesopotamian flood compromise on essentially the same grounds, e.g. �appealing to the supernatural power of God, as an invisible wall, to hold the Flood within the Near East.�2 They also point out that the first major popularizer of the �day-age� theory, Hugh Miller (1802�1856), realized this problem. But Miller proposed the desperate solution that the Near East sank as fast as the waters arose, so that the Flood could cover Ararat and still be local. He proposed that the Near East sank 400 feet per day, so 16,000 feet in 40 days, and the ocean poured into the resulting basin, covering the mountains inside.3 Then somehow the water drained out of this basin again.

So, while Ross�s compromising Mesopotamian flood theory desperately tries to fit the Bible into modern secular geology, geology is actually one of the nails in its coffin.

Like, the YEC model explains where all of *its* water went...

KC · 06-13-2003, 06:41 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Nic Tamzek
You know what's fun, watching creationists of different stripes critique each other:

I've always wondered how long Catholics like Behe and Moonies like Wells can last in the ID camp.

KC

MrDarwin · 06-13-2003, 07:03 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by RBH
From the AiG article:Two things strike me. First, of course, is that contrary to Philip Johnson's remark to the effect that 'we'll have a great time debating the age of the earth once Darwinism is vanquished,' in fact blood will flow as the ID big tent is torn to shreds in the internecine wars within it.

I like to point out to YECs that in their books both Behe and Johnson have explicitly identified themselves as not young-earth creationists (Behe going even further to state that neither does he have a problem with common descent, it's just the mechanism of change he contests), which makes me wonder why they are embraced so heartily by creationists. It seems to me that the YECs should find them fools for believing in an ancient earth just as much as we find them fools for not believing in evolution.

theyeti · 06-13-2003, 07:53 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by MrDarwin
I like to point out to YECs that in their books both Behe and Johnson have explicitly identified themselves as not young-earth creationists (Behe going even further to state that neither does he have a problem with common descent, it's just the mechanism of change he contests), which makes me wonder why they are embraced so heartily by creationists. It seems to me that the YECs should find them fools for believing in an ancient earth just as much as we find them fools for not believing in evolution.

I should point out however that Johnson is strategically vague when it comes to the age of the Earth. He usually says something to the effect that he "assumes" that the Earth is old for the sake of argument, but he hasn't really looked into it, and that this isn't what the real issue is about anyway. In other words, he knows he has to keep the YECs in the big tent or ID's political aspirations will be shot, so he's careful not to denounce a young Earth as being wrong. (And then there's the high probability that he himself is a YEC.) This is exactly the sort of thing that prevents ID from being a science in any sense: the unwillingness to take a strong stand on the facts of Earth history, or on anything else that could be adjucidated with empirical evidence. The YECs go along with it, presumably, because they realize that ID is their best chance for advancing their agenda.

theyeti

Doubting Didymus · 06-15-2003, 09:25 PM

I have split all the posts that occurred after this point into a new thread, as not one of them was on this topic nor showed any sign of returning there.

The new thread is here:

Magus 55 defends the global flood

06-12-2003, 05:59 PM	#1
Valentine Pontifex Veteran Member Join Date: Jul 2001 Location: Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy Posts: 3,092	AiG on 160K Homo sapiens Answers in Genesis has responded quickly: http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs...612sapiens.asp I will place a partial retraction on my previously state position that the find had little implications for creation/evolution. AiG has pointed out that these fossils give the ideas of Hugh Ross problems. They do have a point. Of course Ross's ideas on fossil hominids made even less sense then AiG if one ignores age of the Earth issues.

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06-15-2003, 09:25 PM	#7
Doubting Didymus Veteran Member Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: East Coast. Australia. Posts: 5,455	I have split all the posts that occurred after this point into a new thread, as not one of them was on this topic nor showed any sign of returning there. The new thread is here: Magus 55 defends the global flood

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