Creation scientists put up easily destroyed arguments all the time, actually.
BTW, what is the evidence for the “canopy” theory?
You’d be surprised. When I saw Kent Hovind speak, one of his major arguments was easily destroyed by the existence of tectonic forces. He claims to have been a science teacher for a number of years, yet he seemed completely unaware of the idea of tectonic plates.
So, at least one major proponent of Creationism really is so stupid as to produce a theory that can be very easily destroyed.
Why do you say this? I mean, your entire knowledge of creation and evolution is some half-remembered video.
Essentially all serious scientists working in the relevant fields think that creationism is absolute hooey. I have a PhD, and I work as a molecular biologist, and I’m here to tell you that there’s a mountain of evidence for evolution. Evolution is as well proven as the atomic theory, and creationism just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
And yet, you think that you know better than all those people who have made this subject their life’s work. What qualifies you to make that judgement? You saw a video? You haven’t even bothered to hear the evolutionists’ position in their own words!
You actually think that geologists, biologists, etc. are so stupid that all you have to do to knock down the entirety of mainstream science is to point out that marine fossils have been found on mountaintops, or to claim (falsely) that human and dinosaur fossils have been seen together. But if someone should point out a flaw in what you saw in your video? Well, we’d better realize that the guys who made the video are really smart- and never mind that some of their claims are so embarassingly wrong that even the Institute for Creation Research has distanced itself from them.
The fact of the matter is that creationism depends on the fact that most creationists never bother to hear the evolutionists’ side. That way, the people who make the videos can present arguments that would fall apart like a house of cards if someone mentioned things like the greenhouse effect- because they know that most of the time, people like you won’t hear about the greenhouse effect. Plus, they can lie all they want. Anyone in this thread can tell you that lying is part and parcel of how the creationist establishment fools people into believing creationism. Here’s just one webpage with some examples:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/icr-whoppers.html
Look, I don’t expect you to believe me just because I say so. But I think you owe it to yourself, and to God, to look at both sides of the debate. Just bear in mind that there are a lot of people on the SDMB who will tell you that they used to be creationists just like you, and now they are evolutionists, because they finally realized just how thoroughly they were being lied to.
NF124, a few observations:
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Several of the things you mention have been addressed/debunked earlier in this thread. You would be wise to read them, if only to know what the counter-argument is.
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That you are able (if you are able) to discredit evolution is completely irrelevant to the strength of Creationism. That one is faulty does not therefore mean the other is valid any more than my saying “it’s not an apple” means it MUST be an orange.
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For you to win the challenge posted in the OP, you must do more than say “Second, (and you can do research into this because I don’t know the numbers),”. The burden of proof rests solely on you (and quite frankly, were I a creationist I wouldn’t want an evolutionist to go looking for evidence to support my theory;)). This means that you must provide the “specific evidence that different kinds of animals were created seperately rather than all evolving from a common biological origin. This request also includes a request for a definition of “kinds,” as this is the term used in Genesis.”, to quote Diogenes. As others have said, merely posting disagreement with evolutionary theory is irrelevant to this discussion.
In addition to the greenhouse effect, there is the weight of the water to consider. If a mere 10% of the total water (assuming Mr. Ararat were covered) was in the canopy then surface atmospheric pressure would be over 1000 psi and the temperature would have to be something over 500[sup]o[/sup]F in order to keep the water in the form of vapor . The air would be compressed to a layer less than 100 ft. thick.
Morris, of the Institute for Creation Research, and John C. Whitcomb wrote a book, The Genesis Flood in which they assumed that only 30 meters (100ft) of liquid water was contained in the canopy. The rest came from the “fountains of the deep.”
That much water has the same weight as the present atmosphere so the pre-flood surface pressure was 2 atmospheres. The canopy-air junction was at an elevation of about 10000 ft. and the pressure there was 1 atmosphere. In order to keep the water as a vapor the temperature at the junction would have to be 212[sup]o[/sup]F or higher. They assumed a surface temperature of about 80[sup]o[/sup] and did a lot of arm waving to show how this temperature inversion could be maintained for an indefinite time between the creation and the flood.
The authors sort of ignored the radiation toward the earth from a spherical surface less than two miles away at the temperature of boiling water.
The idea of such a vapor canopy has been so thoroughly discredited by scientific analysis that it is astonishing to see it brought up.
In fact, it’s been so thoroughly discredited that creation scientists consider it to be a political liability. Since 1990 or so I’ve only seen it in JW publications, so far as I know.
I am not as learned on this subject as Ben and David, but if you still believe in the water canopy and think people could live under it, try something my cooking teacher told the class NOT to do, pull out a VERY hot pan out of the over with a wet oven mit.* So you don’t have to, if you use common sence you will realize the hot pan will heat the water and burn you rather quickly. Not the best example but a realistic experiment anyone could try, but shouldn’t unless they want to get burned.
*(disclaimor, if you actually try this, don’t blame me I told you what would happen)
Just a correction to an egregious misstatement I made in this section. The height of water assumed by Morris and Whitcomb was 30 ft, not 30 meters. In point of fact it was 10 meters or 33 ft. which, as any student of high school physics knows, balances a pressure of one atmosphere.
Sorry about that.
This is going to be a somewhat OT pedantic nitpick of an historical detail, but anyway …
Kelvin never proposed such a mechanism. Indeed everybody in the period realised that so simplistic a model wasn’t going to work. This was because it would only give a solar lifetime of a few thousand years, when the debate was already about whether the sun and earth were merely tens of millions of years old or hundreds of them. Instead, he had a model incorporating a number of effects: primarily the infall of an hypothesised supply of meteorites, but also contraction and an initially high temperature. For example, he wrote to George Darwin in 1886 thus:
The classic account of the whole debate is Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth by Joe Burchfield (Chicago, 1975, 1990; the quote is on page 42).
Further to David’s article, it’s perhaps worth noting that in the period Eddy was very fruitful in questioning various assumptions about the constancy of the sun, realising that such issues could be newly addressed with the improved techniques of the day. The particular Eddy and Boornazian paper (it’s ‘Secular decrease in the solar diameter, 1863-1953’ Bull.Am.Astr.Soc 11:437) used historical data from Greenwich. In the days when GMT was fixed by astronomical observation, one of the daily tasks was timing how long the sun took to cross the meridian, the moment at which it was centred across it being defined as noon. The claim was that this showed that the solar disc was getting smaller over the whole series of observations. Now this sort of observation just involves a transit telescope and a good stopwatch, but it’s notoriously difficult to get right. Indeed this was one of the classic cases where people began to understand experimental errors in the 19th century. In the case of Greenwich, both the instrument and the observers had changed over the course of the series and so comparing measurements from different periods was intrinsically suspect.
Much of the research that the subsequent controversy prompted involved people going back to other historical records and using them in clever ways to extract estimates for the solar diameter at different times. There’s a graph in F. Richard Stephenson’s old Scientific American article on historical eclipses that nicely summarises what was known from such research in 1982. No evidence of shrinkage.
Um … not to be rude, but how could someone with even the most basic understanding of seasons (unless Creationists are similarly contending that seasons didn’t exist until the five billionth day or whatever, one after Noah’s Ark found dry land) manage to hold to the previously-noted capony theory? I mean, granted you’re not going to get a lot of snow near the equator, but there are going to be differences substantial enough to effect some sort of significant fluctuation in the canopy such that the system is destabilized. I’d think, too, that it’d utterly throw off even amateur attempts at astronomy (angle of refraction and all that).
Not having the time or patience to wade through (heh) bunk creationism “science”, do any of you who have read the relevant material (or as much as you were reasonably able to stomach) recall these issues being brought up, or was the whole idea so theoretically fragile that the authors couldn’t?
There’s one other slight problem with the canopy theory. You can calculate the energy that would be released when all the water in the canopy fell to earth from a great height - basically the potential energy in the canopy turning to kinetic energy. That would incinerate everything on the earth not already incinerated by the greenhouse effect.
nodope4us there is a very simple reason why creationists offer lame hypotheses. Their primary goal is to defend the inerrancy of the Bible, not to find the truth. The video you saw was pure propaganda, neither science nor a reasoned argument.
Voyager, when you said “The video YOU saw” were you still talking to me or someone else?
i know the theories on evolution im saying that if a fish like creature started to grow leg like appendages and moved on the land it would die and the DNA for the legs would be lost since the dead creature wouldn’t be able to reproduce. animals need certain sets of traits to survive out of their original envoronment and if they dont have them all (like methods to breath and move and stay moist) they will die.
The argument is still flawed because:
-Legs are not useful solely for creatures that dwell on land (after all, lobsters have legs)
-Legs are not essential for creatures that dwell on land, particulary if they only do so for briefl spells.
Furthemore the kind of traits that make the transition from water to land more ‘do-able’ caould arise individually for other reasons - again, there is no reason why the transition from water to land need be regarded as a sudden one.
Arguments of irreducible complexity are most often based on lack of imagination, or unwillingness to exercise it.
And how will the beginnings of limbs cause the creature to die? And you also realize that by the time the creature does move out on land, it will have traits which would allow it to do so.
As for your second sentence, I would recommend you look up the term “exaptation”.
No. No, you don’t.