BibleBelted

galiel,

I agree that it is pointless to argue with some people if you only seek to convince them; but on a public forum the arguments are informative to the lurkers and others who are honestly confused or searching for answers. I've learned a great deal myself this way, and I appreciate the efforts of the real scientists on this board and others who have taken the time to educate others, like me, who fell asleep in high school science classes but now would like to actually learn something.

And just for the record . . I like you, I really like you.

Clutch

Galiel,

You suck.

Nah, just kidding. I wonder the same thing, sometimes. But against all hope, you do hear occasionally from people who explain that the cumulative effect of witnessing such debunkings (even if they did not participate in the debates themselves) contributed to their rejection of theism/supernaturalism/anti-science, whatever.

I rarely have the patience to do it myself, but I appreciate the quite outstanding efforts of the scigirls and Oolongs of the world. I accept that they will never affect the radically closed-minded and dishonest Vander -- uh, I mean, theists out there. But the lurker effect may be much more worthwhile.

But of course there's room to disagree, depending on (inter alia) one's view of the diminishing marginal returns on such efforts.

Clutch

The moon's rotation, btw, is my favourite example of how idiotic ID is. How amazing it is that the moon orbits the Earth and rotates on its own axis at precisely the rates that ensure that we only ever see one side of it! Stunning! That couldn't be an accident; the probabilities of it happening by "chance" are outrageously low. It must have been by design.

Er... as long as you're ignorant of the relevant laws and facts. Once you know them, it is not at all surprising; indeed, it is nomologically predictable. ID = God of the Gaps.

Dark Jedi

You kiss your mother with that mouth?



<shudder> I could almost picture him popping up to ask that question.

Were he to pose that query to me, I would reply:

"Did your grandparents have sex?
How do you know, were you there?"

Show the absurdity of discrediting evidence based on personal witness.

wehappyfew

Dark Jedi,

The sodium YEC argument is very poor, and this example is worse than most. All you have to do in this case is ask...

"where does the 5 ppm sodium in river water come from?"

The answer is a lot of it comes directly from sea salt carried by rain. Tiny droplets of ocean spray picked up by the wind make excellent condensation sites for rain. Without the tiny droplet of sea salt, the rain drop would not condense.

Another large part of river sodium is dissolved evaporites. These were preciptated in restricted basins which allowed ocean water to flow in, but not out, thus concentrating the salt until it precipitates. The Mediterranean Sea has up to 3,000 meters of salt on the bottom from the Miocene, when the Straits of Gibralter closed up partially. The Med evaporated completely dozens of times over a several hundred thousand year span.

Part three to the answer is the fact that much of the dissolved sodium comes from chemical erosion of rock that have been recycled by plate tectonics. Sodium is incorporated into basalts at mid-ocean ridges, which then get subducted, partially melted, and the magma becomes new rocks on land, which are the source of some of that sodium. It's part of a cycle.

The short answer is that the sodium-into-the-ocean is not a one way process. If you want more details, I can dig up some good websites and references.

Tom Ames

If you can stomach reading ISCID, check out Dembski's (apparently serious) <a href="http://www.iscid.org/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=6;t=000182" target="_blank">response to a similar question</a>.

Albion

Oh, yes, I've heard it said about individual scientists; it's just that when it's pointed out that science is a collaborative effort and different disciplines interact and that all disciplines of science contain a lot of people who consider themselves Christians (even if they don't count as True Christians to YECers) and who would blow the whistle on the Great Atheist Conspiracy and that hence this charge covers hundreds of thousands of people, I've found that they usually back off. They revert to the rather weak position that all these atheists want to deny God so badly that they overinterpret their results without really meaning to do any harm. It usually isn't all that hard to get them to demonstrate (if not actually admit) they don't have a clue about how science research works in the real world.

Coragyps

I have seen, but am too lazy to look up right now, the argument that truly kills the "sodium in the ocean" crap. The amount of aluminum supplied to the ocean by rivers is enough to give the current concentration in a single century. This would indicate that creationists believe that the Earth was created while Victoria was still Queen, and after Darwin had already died. So Darwinism is obviously a construction of that old mean Debbil, and is false. QED.

Dark Jedi

Very nice rebuttal. May I use it intact, with credit to source?

wehappyfew

Of course.

Give us the URL of the debate and I'll follow up with an additional $.03 worth.