Friday, November 29, 2013
We also have an eye on other things than evolution!
Something different: Biogeocoenosis We have other interests as well!
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
I once had a discussion with YEC Salvador Cordova.
I first ran across the character Salvador Cordova on ARN’s Intelligent Design forum some years ago, he was then, according to himself, a YEC, but claimed that if need be, he might also be comfortable with a middle aged or old earth…
On my suggestion, he bought ‘Life, an Unauthorised Biography’ by palaeontologist Richard Fortey. I pointed him to the page (267) where Fortey writes:
“The Chalk, including all the cliffs from Texas to Dover, the downs that floor much of southern England, the bowl that holds the Paris Basin, all this is made of fossils, the sheer numbers of which boggle arithmetic. Chalk may be a commonplace rock, but it surely is one of the most curious.”
On the same page, the source of this chalk is described:
“minute rosettes of calcium carbonate plates, regularly arranged, like wheels with delicate spokes, or miniscule stony flowers, of which a hundred or so might fit on a pinhead. They are called coccoliths. These are the debris of another single-celled organism, a planktonic ‘algae’. During their life, the coccoliths were secreted by the living cells, many coccoliths to a cell.
I asked Sal if he didn’t think that it would require more than the time available in the context of a young earth to produce such amounts of fossil chalk.
His reply was simply to point out that bacteria have a very high reproduction rate.
I really don’t think that is a valid argument – a biologist may set the record straight.
But that argument made me realize that he was lost to reason and I gave up on him. His outspoken worship of Dembski was (and is) painful to watch. Now it seems like he has been elevated to some sort of sidekick for Dembski, and in his profile on ARN he present himself as ‘scientist’.
Nowadays he is a frequent contributor to Dembski’s blog with absurd claims about things like ‘Perfect architectures which scream design’
They want the ‘Explanatory Filter’ to be some kind of science?
I thought I would make an alternate profile of Sal and searched ARN for documentation of a discussion we had there, but I probably got so frustrated with his nonsense that I deleted the thread. I intended the debate to be about ‘YEC pro or con’s’, but when he (IIRC) in one of his replies used a story about some sort of mysterious event involving a blind girl I realized that for him, faith takes precedence over reason.
Sal:Re: YEC Pro or Con #13112981 - Thu Dec 02 2004 02:58 PM
Thus, even though a point in favor of radiometric dating exists, Creationists do acknowledge a relationship of depth to supposed age, but as you pointed out there are anomalies in concluding that it was because of deposition over time.
Further we have the unfortunate problem that with even reasonable erosion rates, the entire geological column would be wiped out. Several times over......
Therefore from a purely scientific standpoint, there is reason to believe the age to depth relationship could possibly be from an un-accounted for physical phenomenon. That is, in my mind the last major sticking point to YEC.
Me: From a purely scientific standpoint? I don’t have enough question marks on my keyboard….
Sal:
YEC Pros and Cons, Part III #215468 - Mon Nov 22 2004 08:09 PM
This is a continuation of the greatest thread in ARN history (at least in my opinion anyway).
Engineers and Information Technologists: John Wendt, Marc-1961, RBH, Rock, Salvador T. Cordova
The basis for YEC:
1. The existence of an All-Powerful, All-Knowing, Eternal Intelligent Designer is a reasonable conclusion from the laws of physics.
2. Instantaneous formation of Cosmological and Biological features in the universe is more consistent with physical law versus process formation (such as Big Bang plus Darwinian Evolution).
3. Various YEC models can theoretically account for light from distant stars reaching our planet in a short amount of time.
4. One of the mechanisms considered to account for distant starlight is Setterfield's speed of light decay cosmology, and this will result in recalibration of radiometric dates.
5. In addition to the reasonable conclusion of instantaneous formation of various features of the universe, various geological, astrophysical, and biological clocks suggest that, the universe is also young -- less than millions of years, perhaps even thousands of years.
Salvador
In the Pandas Thumb thread ‘Stupid ID statement of the month’ I found Sal nicknamed most appropriately Salzo Panza. May I suggest he is to Dembski what Goebbels was to Hitler, albeit at a less glorious level?
I mean, repeat nonsense often enough, and it certainly will stick in somebody’s mind.
After all, propaganda instead of facts or science is the name of the game for the fundamentalist crowd.
Just look at this:
In http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/1316
S. Cordova writes:
"For example, one could easily conclude a lineage is more fit since it survived. Well, it may have survived simply because it was lucky. Thus, by definition it has a survival advantage because it has the quality of being lucky! See David Raup\’s book: Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck"
On my suggestion, he bought ‘Life, an Unauthorised Biography’ by palaeontologist Richard Fortey. I pointed him to the page (267) where Fortey writes:
“The Chalk, including all the cliffs from Texas to Dover, the downs that floor much of southern England, the bowl that holds the Paris Basin, all this is made of fossils, the sheer numbers of which boggle arithmetic. Chalk may be a commonplace rock, but it surely is one of the most curious.”
On the same page, the source of this chalk is described:
“minute rosettes of calcium carbonate plates, regularly arranged, like wheels with delicate spokes, or miniscule stony flowers, of which a hundred or so might fit on a pinhead. They are called coccoliths. These are the debris of another single-celled organism, a planktonic ‘algae’. During their life, the coccoliths were secreted by the living cells, many coccoliths to a cell.
I asked Sal if he didn’t think that it would require more than the time available in the context of a young earth to produce such amounts of fossil chalk.
His reply was simply to point out that bacteria have a very high reproduction rate.
I really don’t think that is a valid argument – a biologist may set the record straight.
But that argument made me realize that he was lost to reason and I gave up on him. His outspoken worship of Dembski was (and is) painful to watch. Now it seems like he has been elevated to some sort of sidekick for Dembski, and in his profile on ARN he present himself as ‘scientist’.
Nowadays he is a frequent contributor to Dembski’s blog with absurd claims about things like ‘Perfect architectures which scream design’
They want the ‘Explanatory Filter’ to be some kind of science?
I thought I would make an alternate profile of Sal and searched ARN for documentation of a discussion we had there, but I probably got so frustrated with his nonsense that I deleted the thread. I intended the debate to be about ‘YEC pro or con’s’, but when he (IIRC) in one of his replies used a story about some sort of mysterious event involving a blind girl I realized that for him, faith takes precedence over reason.
Sal:Re: YEC Pro or Con #13112981 - Thu Dec 02 2004 02:58 PM
Thus, even though a point in favor of radiometric dating exists, Creationists do acknowledge a relationship of depth to supposed age, but as you pointed out there are anomalies in concluding that it was because of deposition over time.
Further we have the unfortunate problem that with even reasonable erosion rates, the entire geological column would be wiped out. Several times over......
Therefore from a purely scientific standpoint, there is reason to believe the age to depth relationship could possibly be from an un-accounted for physical phenomenon. That is, in my mind the last major sticking point to YEC.
Me: From a purely scientific standpoint? I don’t have enough question marks on my keyboard….
Sal:
YEC Pros and Cons, Part III #215468 - Mon Nov 22 2004 08:09 PM
This is a continuation of the greatest thread in ARN history (at least in my opinion anyway).
Engineers and Information Technologists: John Wendt, Marc-1961, RBH, Rock, Salvador T. Cordova
The basis for YEC:
1. The existence of an All-Powerful, All-Knowing, Eternal Intelligent Designer is a reasonable conclusion from the laws of physics.
2. Instantaneous formation of Cosmological and Biological features in the universe is more consistent with physical law versus process formation (such as Big Bang plus Darwinian Evolution).
3. Various YEC models can theoretically account for light from distant stars reaching our planet in a short amount of time.
4. One of the mechanisms considered to account for distant starlight is Setterfield's speed of light decay cosmology, and this will result in recalibration of radiometric dates.
5. In addition to the reasonable conclusion of instantaneous formation of various features of the universe, various geological, astrophysical, and biological clocks suggest that, the universe is also young -- less than millions of years, perhaps even thousands of years.
Salvador
In the Pandas Thumb thread ‘Stupid ID statement of the month’ I found Sal nicknamed most appropriately Salzo Panza. May I suggest he is to Dembski what Goebbels was to Hitler, albeit at a less glorious level?
I mean, repeat nonsense often enough, and it certainly will stick in somebody’s mind.
After all, propaganda instead of facts or science is the name of the game for the fundamentalist crowd.
Just look at this:
In http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/1316
S. Cordova writes:
"For example, one could easily conclude a lineage is more fit since it survived. Well, it may have survived simply because it was lucky. Thus, by definition it has a survival advantage because it has the quality of being lucky! See David Raup\’s book: Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck"
Monday, November 4, 2013
Facts about radiometric dating methods.
I took the opportunity to clip this from a thread at Pandas Thumb:
you might find this link helpful as it explains the mainstream view of radiometric dating. It is written by a physicist that is also a Christian; the article is posted via ASA which is an organization of Christian scientists.
http://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/wiens.html
you might find this link helpful as it explains the mainstream view of radiometric dating. It is written by a physicist that is also a Christian; the article is posted via ASA which is an organization of Christian scientists.
http://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/wiens.html
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