Creationism vs Evolutionism on Quora, IV, still fun

1) Some Fun on Quora, I · 2) Some Fun on Quora, II · 3) Some Linguistics on Quora (III, still fun) · 4) Creationism vs Evolutionism on Quora, IV, still fun · 5) Medieval Related, Mostly, on Quora (part V)

Is jurassic world satanic propaganda?

You mean the film?

I’d say it is more like stupid and ignorant propaganda, insofar as it portrays the Jurassic biotopes as having existed and gone partly extinct 145 million years ago.

“Satanic” I reserve for more depraved things.

My mother is teaching my younger brother creationism. He's a smart kid, and it hurts to hear him learn something so incorrect. What should I do?

• 1 Your mother believes creationism is true and has a right to teach it to children staying at home.
• 2 If she doesn’t forbid it, you can of course offer him evolutionist stuff.

I don’t see any point in fretting over “a smart kid” becoming a creationist. Creationism is not exactly stupid.

Why were feathered dinosaur fossils only found in the last 20 years?

Excuse me, Peter Jefferson*, what exactly is the point of posing ME question on question of this type?

Making me think?

I do that already.

If there is a domain where you think I am NOT thinking, how about taking a debate instead of quizzing me?

* He is the guy who requested I answer on Jurassic World being Satanic propaganda or not! Not the first two.

Did Marmite kill the dinosaurs?

I have a little hunch that the question was posed by a Marmite hater.

As a Marmite liker, I answer : probably not.

I don’t know if dinosaurs react allergically to Marmite, but if they do, Marmite haters might be reptilians. At least we are sure that Marmite, as long as it remains untampered with, will not kill normal men.

How hard is a t.rex skull?

That would depend on whether it was found as bone or in a petrified state.

What was the lifestyle of humans who lived 100,000 years ago?

100,000 years ago is not an extant date.

Also, 100,000 years ago is hardly a dating of skeleta or fossils which is C14 based either, so I don’t know how to tie it in with my creationist C14 recalibration.

I suppose you mean “in the earlier stone age” or of “palaeolithic” even “earlier palaeolithic” - and the answer is we don’t know, beyond fact that men dated as “from then” were found along few and simple tools.

So, we are free to guess according to our general world view on what this means.

If you accept that kind of dates, you will probably also accept that for another 90,000 years men were living as hunter gatherers without attempting agriculture and for another 50,000 years they were lacking in sophistication even for hunters gatherers.

And you will draw your conclusions about their lifestyle based on that. 500 years without agriculture even if lands aren’t taken by more powerful neighbours - fine. But 90,000 years in such a situation - there is sth wrong with you. And you will argue about what lifestyle could have been available to the people there was that sth wrong with.

As I don’t believe these dates, I am free to think the palaeolithic was actually much shorter and a temporary technology lowering. I am free to think the technology of agriculture was temporarily abandoned due to climate and post Flood wetness except for few favoured locations, and that some other technology or resource in connection with building of Tower of Babel was being pursued.

My own view is that Tower of Babel describes a rocket, like those launched at Cape Canaveral. They look like towers and only the top of each “tower” reaches space. But the project was led by a man who was going to try Uranium.

On the other hand, what I identify as “final” building of Tower of Babel as to launching ramp, Göbekli Tepe, was carbon dated to c. 10,000 BC, older stages.

The lifestyle carbon dated to 20,000 BC or 30,000 BC might well be more like the post Flood roaming, before deciding to build a city even in the plains of Mesopotamia (which is what I think Shinar means, and GT is technically Mesopotamia, since East of Euphrates and West of Tigris). But the date 100,000 years ago is simply NOT carbon dated, as far as I know, and therefore it is difficult to insert those finds into any carbon 14 curve.

How do you write a creation myth? What are some tips?

If all you want is a literary exercise, you study those that are there.

If you want people to believe it, that is another question, though the Evolutionist creation myth has proven that Public and Compulsory schooling can be unable to detect a BS Creation Myth if it masquerades as science and at same time be VERY able to foist its positions onto a populace having little learning beside that provided by the school system.

What are some arguments that support the fixity of species?

If you mean complete fixity of species, I don’t think there is one.

If you mean fixed limits on variations of the kinds, I think chromosome numbers going up in mammals would have been one barrier to common descent.

If a person got through MIT (or someplace comparable) with a perfect GPA, but was a 6-day creationist, would he be allowed to graduate?

James Flack

Yes, of course.

There are a few possible courses here.

• 1 They are working in say, computer science or electrical engineering, where being a 6 day creationist has no relevance.
• 2 They’re working in a field such as geology where being a young earth creationist does matter, but can say ’assuming in 4000BC, the world was created in such a way it and everything in it looks exactly as if it is actually 4.5 billion years old’ so compartmentalising their religious beliefs so as not to interfere with their science.
• 3 They are working in geology etc, stick to the YEC position to a degree it does compromise their science, and so fail to get a perfect GPA, therefore removing themselves from consideration for this question.

Myself (HGL)

Why would working in geology and sticking to YEC compromise their science?

The faunal stages seem to not be shown in a column, even if nearly every place you can find rocks in columns, where the strata are associated with faunal stages elsewhere and even if the observation is faulty about sea fauna (and Elasmosaurus comes above a Trilobite, and a YEC has an explanation which does not require them to have lived different amounts of millions of years ago).

The carbon 14 datings can be explained by a raising of the C14 level in the atmosphere. Not a fluctuation, but a radical raising. And one which is finished by 500 BC.

The Ka-Ar method has shown very poor results in Mount St Helens lava.

The longer halflives can have been inaccurately measured as halflives + the methods depend on daughter elements (a case parallel for Ka-Ar).

Distant starlight paradox can be dealt with by assuming Geocentrism, irrelevance of the phenomenon called “annual parallax” and closer stars than currently assumed.

James Flack

Carbon 14 is produced by the action of Cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere- scientists know about fluctuations in this, and allow for them. Nobody has sensibly suggested the order of magnitude shifts you imply. Given we have calibrated C14 levels back to about 8000 BCE, found by measuring C14 levels in Bristlecone pines, and using the tree ring dates to independently date the samples, if such a radical change did occur, (with no known or proposed mechanism for it) then it happened before 8000 BCE.

Potassium Argon ( Ka-Ar) dating is not often used in very young rock samples, and is typically limited to those over 100KA( thousand years). Given Mount St Helens is a young volcano, roughly 40KA old, it’s no surprise that Ka-Ar dating doesn’t work well- it isn’t the right setting for it. I’m not sure what you mean exactly about other radio-dating methods, but they are all vulnerable to false results if not applied properly. A huge amount of effort has gone into finding out the causes of these errors, and figuring out how to minimise them.

If you would care to rephrase the observation about the fossil record so it is easier to understand, I’ll answer it.

A geocentric solar system/galaxy/universe? Really?

Myself (HGL)

“Nobody has sensibly suggested the order of magnitude shifts you imply.”

I have actually suggested it, whether sensibly or not.

Creationists have very clearly suggested it before me.

“Given we have calibrated C14 levels back to about 8000 BCE, found by measuring C14 levels in Bristlecone pines, and using the tree ring dates to independently date the samples, if such a radical change did occur, (with no known or proposed mechanism for it) then it happened before 8000 BCE.”

You are probably overevaluating accuracy of tree ring dating a lot.

“Potassium Argon ( Ka-Ar) dating is not often used in very young rock samples, and is typically limited to those over 100KA( thousand years).”

If Biblical timescale is true, precisely ALL samples are too young for using this method.

“If you would care to rephrase the observation about the fossil record so it is easier to understand, I’ll answer it.”

Vertebrate Jurassic land fauna is not found vertically above Triassic or below Cretaceous, above Permian or below Palaeocene ones.

James Flack

The fossil record is incomplete. For it to be complete, there would have to be perfect conditions for the preservation of fossils all the time for the whole world. The one fundamental assumption of geology is that the same processes operate now as in the past, and looking around the world, and we can see that the conditions for land based fossils to be preserved are much rarer than marine ones.

For a YEC to ‘prove’ a young Earth via gaps in the fossil record, they would need to show there is no long continuous sequence anywhere, land or sea, or that shows the Earth is much older than they claim.

Now, to clear these objections, such as to radio-dating, we are either going to have to reject established and repeatable science, such as the measured half lives of atoms, or accept the world was created in such a way to look old when it was- both of which I laid out in my original answer.

Young Earth Creationism is a faith based position that conflicts with a great deal of science. The ‘A young Earth was created to look old’ position allows a person to maintain their YEC beliefs without ignoring science, and cannot be disproved.

Claiming the Earth is young, and the entire geological record was created in 6000 years has been repeatedly shown to be wrong

Myself (HGL)

"For a YEC to ‘prove’ a young Earth via gaps in the fossil record, they would need to show there is no long continuous sequence anywhere, land or sea,"

First of all, I am not PROVING a young Earth per se, I am REFUTING a supposed proof of an old Earth.

Second, reasonably the condition should be limited to LAND. A YEC can explain why an Elasmosaur is preserved above a Trilobite : during the Flood, the trilobite scavenged on the sea bottom and the Elasmosaur was swimming above that.

THIRD, for land, we are not talking about "gaps". We are in fact, as far as I have as yet been able to ascertain, talking about a complete absence of sequence, even [of] sequences with many gaps. The places I have so far NOT looked into are all petrol related, and therefore the sequence may be subject to issues, since the fossils come up in drill core samples, not get dug out ex situ, and at least one of the petrol related ones, Bonaparte Basin in Australia, is on top of that marine. I suspect the petrol related ones are marine.

"Now, to clear these objections, such as to radio-dating, we are either going to have to reject established and repeatable science, such as the measured half lives of atoms,"

For radiocarbon, the half life is very much not the issue at all. Rising level of C14 is sufficient, along with the demonstrable mathematical workings of a half life, like exponentiality, to account for dating getting very wrong.

For longer half lives, repeatable or not, accurate measuring of half lives is part of the issue, THEN we come to presence of daughter element in samples which are not really daughter element.

Your response is so dishonest as to stagger belief someone actually said that.

"or accept the world was created in such a way to look old"

Nonsense.

Sun, Moon and other planets all come in conjunction with each other and all go through the houses of the stars signs of the ecliptic. An astrologer could as easily claim that Christians rejecting astrology "claim God created the heavens looking like horoscopes". The issue in either case is not how God creates, but how you chose to interpret. In BOTH cases there is a fault in the logic of the method.

"Young Earth Creationism is a faith based position"

So is yours - faith in or syncretism with Western Atheism (which is a dechristianised branch of Protestantism).

"that conflicts with a great deal of science."

Or a great deal of pseudosscience. Evolution conflicts with real one. Like known facts about chromosomes.

"The ‘A young Earth was created to look old’ position allows a person to maintain their YEC beliefs without ignoring science, and cannot be disproved."

The part of "created to look old" is certainly NOT my position. The "science" which maintains Earth looks 4.5 billion years old is pseudoscience and should be ditched. If I am not off, the up to recently best method was U-Pb, and that U-Pb depends on no Pb having been present in sample from start. Also, only a very few samples have, as far as I could ascertain, even so been dated to 4.5 billion years.

"Claiming the Earth is young, and the entire geological record was created in 6000 years has been repeatedly shown to be wrong"

Repeatedly is an allegation. It should be backed up by things like "by whom?" and "in what way?"

Oh, btw, I am Catholic, accept the LXX based chronology of Christmas proclamation, so I agree 6000 years is wrong, because 7215 years is right.

James Flack

If you are a catholic, it is probably worth noting that people such as the last pope have officially denied young earth creationism, and have said genesis is not meant to be taken as a literal scientific document…

[Linking to an international Thelogical Commission headed by Ratzinger
http://catholicbridge.com/downloads/RATZINGER.pdf]

If you believe the earth is 7215 years old, then any chronology that shows a sequence of over 7215 years by definition disproves it. If you won’t accept tree rings, have you heard of Varve chronology? Again, it works by counting annual layers,and there are records going back 10s of thousands of years.

Myself (HGL)

If I still thought Ratzinger had a chance of being Pope (I think that the very document you linked to, when he was under Wojtyla, proves he was heretic before supposed election, which I did not know while on and off accepting him), I’d say “the Pope is NOT infallible every time he sneezes”.

I don’t think varve chronology is actually certain to be annual layers either, whether you speake of ice varves or of mud varves.

In fact the experiment of Guy Berthault proves that mud varves can form very quickly by layering during deposition of sediment.

The varves (of the sedimentary type) being annual are further disproven by “polystrate” (more properly poly-varve) fossils.

Another non-support of your 10s of thousands of years.

James Flack

Having quickly googled Guy Berthault, I can say that if you gave his work as a reference in an Earth science course, you would almost certainly be failed for it. His work was outdated when it was done, full of strawmen, and relied on things long known to be false.

If his work was true, it would single-handedly overturn every principal .

I do not intend to reply further, as I don not believe I can reply to such nonsense without violating BNBR. I note you have a number of YEC creationist blogs, but do not claim to have any advanced education in Earth science.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Sorry, but he documented his claims by footages of what happened.

And as to “strawmen”, well, it may be in relation to the formal claims now actually made along the nowadays made disclaimers about geological column, but it is not a strawman in relation to your proposed varve chronology nor in relation to the claims that would have to be implied if using the actual material as normally used to “prove geological column”.

For instance, if a geologist says “a layer containing a pelycosaur is under a layer containing a dinosaur” and refers to layers correctly traced in stone between one part of N Dakota and another, it is not a strawman to reply that the pelycosaur and the dinosaur may well have been alive contemporaneously, since one layer being on top does NOT prove it is later than the layer below it everywhere along the ridge or series of layers.

And if you reply “but we now claim the upper layer is necessarily newer only on one vertical spot” fine, but that was not what Berthault was facing, and is not what you can use in order to prove a pelycosaur from one end of N Dakota is significantly older than a dinosaur from the other end of it.

And it is interesting that you can say you would fail people for giving a reference you only googled. This can be taken in two ways : you only googled it now, and have decided you would fail anyone using Berthault. Bad, a teacher should check, not just google. OR, you googled it now, and your first impression (but in a case when really examining one you would check further) is that you would have to fail someone for using Berthault. That is another matter.

"without violating BNBR."

Don't know what BNBR is.

"I note you have a number of YEC creationist blogs, but do not claim to have any advanced education in Earth science."

Correct, in any issue where I am out of my depth, I either leave it to others or educate myself "on the spot", but I have no university training in any sciences of the natural type. I am a Latinist.

Also, I don’t know exactly what you mean by “a number of YEC blogs”, I have one specifically YEC blog, and I am also touching on subject on other blogs where it can be relevant (on my main blog, on a controversy blog, on a language specific blog - since my YEC blog is in English - or some few own remarks on my back up blog to Palaeocritti, where the original articles were written by Evolution believers in Earth sciences).

What is the Cretaceous tertiary boundary?

A layer of iridium.

Usually NOT having cretaceous land fauna under it and palaeocene land fauna above it in the same spot.

Why do most fossil records have fragments and gaps?

If by “fossil records” you mean the record of fossils in one place, and when it comes to the land vertebrates, it is more like all fossil records I looked at are JUST records of ONE stage. ONE fauna.

If in a place you find Ceratopsians from the Cretaceous, you may find shrimps or prawns from Palaeocene above them, but you are not finding Palaeocene land mammals above it, nor Permian critters below them.

Calling this “having gaps” is a ludicrous understatement.