# Creationism questions **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [February 11, 2000, 3:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creationism-questions/17837 "2000-02-11T03:27:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 16
**Author:** ![cmkeller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmkeller/32/118_2.png) [@cmkeller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmkeller)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2000, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creationism-questions/17837/301 "2000-03-27T19:44:00Z")
hardcore: > [@](#): > > Then what are the english words for shafan and arneves? These are animals that exist, right? Not some imaginary beasts? Definitely. What are the english words for them? Don’t know. Some rabbis suggest that it might be a rabbit and hyrax, and that the reference to “chewing its cud” really means “chews its food twice”…these animals don’t ruminate like cows, but, after swallowing their food, regurgitate it as pellets and eat it again. Other rabbis think the “cud chewing” term means genuine rumination, and that we just don’t know what animal it refers to (extinct? hidden? who knows.) Certainly it’s not mythical, because what would be the point of forbidding the Jews to eat a mythical animal? As I said, there are plenty of references in the Hebrew Bible to animals, birds and insects whose precise translation we don’t know. JonF: I thought that the O16/O18 concentrations, which only was measured to the 300 m level, were what enabled stuff to be pinned down to a specific year. Chaim Mattis Keller ---
**Author:** ![Gaudere](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e495f1/32.png) [@Gaudere](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gaudere)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2000, 7:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creationism-questions/17837/302 "2000-03-27T19:51:00Z")
Rabbits don’t regurgitate their food. They do have to eat their feces to get certain nutrients. ---
**Author:** ![Sterra](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/8c91f0/32.png) [@Sterra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sterra)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2000, 8:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creationism-questions/17837/303 "2000-03-27T20:27:00Z")
hmm… i only read about 3 pages of this so forgive me if i am repeating something how do evolutionists explain the 2nd laws of thermodynamics. and the actual chance of life appearing is 400E i wont however argue as someone else said. It is folly to suffer the slings and arrows of those bent on changing your mind while keeping theirs closed. (ive argued it on other boards and they went alot more in depth than this one :)) ---
**Author:** ![tracer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tracer/32/20578_2.png) [@tracer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tracer)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2000, 8:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creationism-questions/17837/304 "2000-03-27T20:42:00Z")
Asmodean wrote: > [@](#): > > hmm… i only read about 3 pages of this so forgive me if i am repeating something > > how do evolutionists explain the 2nd laws of thermodynamics. By gently reminding the Creationists, for the 300th time, that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics only applies to **closed systems**. > [@](#): > > and the actual chance of life appearing is 400E I assume that by “400E”, you mean “10-to-the-400th-power against”. This is not the chance of **any** life arising, it’s the chance of any one **specific** lifeform or genome arising. The chance that I would be assigned the **specific** Social Security Number that I actually have is a staggering 1-in-a-billion, or 0.00000001% – but the chance that I would be assigned **a** Social Security Number is 1-in-1, or 100% > [@](#): > > i wont however argue as someone else said. It is folly to suffer the slings and arrows of those bent on changing your mind while keeping theirs closed. Yeah, the slings and arrows of those closed-minded Creationists can get pretty annoying after a while. > [@](#): > > (ive argued it on other boards and they went alot more in depth than this one :)) … which you can tell because, as you mentioned above, you’ve only read the first 3 pages of this? ---
**Author:** ![JonF](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/cab0a1/32.png) [@JonF](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JonF)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2000, 9:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creationism-questions/17837/305 "2000-03-27T21:29:00Z")
> [@](#): > > I thought that the O16/O18 concentrations, which only was measured to the 300 m level, were what enabled stuff to be pinned down to a specific year. That’s not the only thing. For some period they can correlate events (e.g. known volcanic eruptions) with observations in the ice (e.g. volcanic ash). It’s quite possible this timescale doesn’t extend as far back as 4,500 years. But note that they _looked at annual deposit markers for 85,000 years back_. The most likely explanation for what they observed is that the ice sheet has been in existence for longer than that. Some time ago Ben asked how the ice sheet could survive a global flood; ice floats, and the bouyancy of a totally immersed ice sheet would have been tremendous. Assuming that somehow it held on to Greenland, why is there nothing special in the record around 4,500 years ago? Silt deposits? Driftwood? Was _nothing_ deposited on the ice by this flood? * * * jrf ---
**Author:** ![David\_B](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/51bf81/32.png) [@David\_B](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/David_B)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2000, 1:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creationism-questions/17837/306 "2000-03-28T01:32:00Z")
Gaudere said: > [@](#): > > Rabbits don’t regurgitate their food. They do have to eat their feces to get certain nutrients. Thanks for sharing **that** tidbit. You know, I could have lived my entire life without knowing that… * * * “Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is, to my mind, the most beautiful in all of science.” – Susan Blackmore, _The Meme Machine_ ---
**Author:** ![cmkeller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmkeller/32/118_2.png) [@cmkeller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmkeller)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2000, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creationism-questions/17837/307 "2000-03-28T19:38:00Z")
Gaudere: > [@](#): > > Rabbits don’t regurgitate their food. They do have to eat their feces to get certain nutrients. Oops. My bad. What I paraphrased said that rabbits re-ate their consumed food after it was digested, and I assumed it meant “partially digested, then regurgitated” rather than “digested, then ejested.” Perhaps it was just too disgusting for me to think about (and yes, I think that eating BM sounds more disgusting than eating vomit, though at the moment, I can’t rationally thinkn of why). But the error was not in my source, it was in my own interpretation thereof. tracer: > [@](#): > > By gently reminding the Creationists, for the 300th time, that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics only applies to closed systems. Not that I have any intention of pursuing the line of inquiry begun by Asmodean, but isn’t the universe finite? In what way is it an open system, albeit a very large one (assuming that the supernatural does not exist)? JonF: > [@](#): > > Assuming that somehow it held on to Greenland, why is there nothing special in the record around 4,500 years ago? Silt deposits? Driftwood? Was _nothing_ deposited on the ice by this flood? Even if something was, perhaps nothing so extraordinary that it would stand out upon visual inspection. Chaim Mattis Keller ---
**Author:** ![Gaudere](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e495f1/32.png) [@Gaudere](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gaudere)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2000, 7:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creationism-questions/17837/308 "2000-03-28T19:58:00Z")
> [@](#): > > You know, I could have lived my entire life without knowing that… City boy. Don’t think bunnies are so cute, now, do you? I was trying to find out if any other animals besides rabbits exhibit refection (required eating of feces) but I haven’t had any luck. (Bunnies don’t just eat _any_ feces, BTW–they produce “special” ones in the cecum. I will spare you the way you tell the two apart, having probably already gone well into the realm of “things we didn’t want to know”). I also can’t find out what on earth hyrax do that could be construed as “eating again”; they have three sections of their stomach, but every source I’ve run across specifically states that they do not ruminate. ---
**Author:** ![JonF](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/cab0a1/32.png) [@JonF](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JonF)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2000, 8:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creationism-questions/17837/309 "2000-03-28T20:28:00Z")
> [@](#): > > Not that I have any intention of pursuing the line of inquiry begun by Asmodean, but isn’t the universe finite? In what way is it an open system, albeit a very large one (assuming that the supernatural does not exist)? In thermodynamics, “system”, “closed system”, and “open system” are technical terms with precise definitions. In simple language, you pick a system, which can be anything that is convenient. (The Universe is seldom a convenient system). You draw (or imagine) a boundary that completely encloses the system. If nothing important crosses this boundary, the system is closed. If something important crosses this boundary, the system is open. Failure to properly identify the system and its boundary is probably the _most_ common error in first-year theromodynamics. One of many equivalent ways of stating the Second Law is “the entropy of a closed system either remains constant or increases”. If the system is the Earth, or the Earth and the Moon, the system is open. Any boundary you can imagine that does not enclose the Sun is crossed by sunlight. Sunlight is significant. Therefore, the Second Law does **not** forbid entropy decrease in the Earth-alone system. We can analyse the system using the Second Law, but we have to consider the sunlight entering the system as a flux of entropy _leaving_ the system. If the system is the Earth and the Sun, then it is reasonable to consider it as a closed system. However, the entropy of the Earth can still decrease, because the entropy of the Sun increases by the same amouont or more. In practice, more. The Second Law does not prohibit _rearrangement of entropy within the system_. If the system is the Universe, the previous paragraph still applies. > [@](#): > > Even if something was, perhaps nothing so extraordinary that it would stand out upon visual inspection. You haven’t addressed the question of why there is ice to measure at all … and you are assuming that an _extremely close_ visual inspection, using tools specifically designed and set up to detect variations in the ice, on that core and on many others, conducted by many different people, who have been trained to detect variations in the ice, revealed no trace of your flood? I find it far easier to believe that no flood occurred. There’s an interesting discussion at [Waters of the Flood](http://www.reasons.org/resources/apologetics/flood.html). * * * jrf ---
**Author:** ![JonF](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/cab0a1/32.png) [@JonF](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JonF)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2000, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creationism-questions/17837/310 "2000-03-28T20:36:00Z")
> [@](#): > > If the system is the Earth and the Sun, then it is reasonable to consider it as a closed system. Whoops, not so; a lot of sunlight will _leave_ the system, and must be accounted for in any analysis. * * * jrf ---
**Author:** ![cmkeller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmkeller/32/118_2.png) [@cmkeller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmkeller)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2000, 9:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creationism-questions/17837/311 "2000-03-28T21:50:00Z")
Gaudere: > [@](#): > > I also can’t find out what on earth hyrax do that could be construed as “eating again”; they have three sections of their stomach, but every source I’ve run across specifically states that they do not ruminate. That’s exactly what my source (“The Living Torah,” by Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan (of blessed memory)) says, that if the hyrax identification is correct, it’s because of its multiple-stomach system, despite the fact that it does not genuinely ruminate. He also mentions alternate translations of the Hebrew _shafan_ as rock badger, coney, or jerboa (he doesn’t elaborate re: the “cud chewing” of those). JonF: > [@](#): > > If the system is the Universe, the previous paragraph still applies. Gotcha. So, assuming that entropy on Earth has decreased, it can be expected that it is balanced by an increase elsewhere…somewhere. (I don’t want to hijack this thread, but chaos theory is seriously running through my mind right now.) However, I thought Asmodean was talking about the orderliness of the entire universe despite its having supposedly developed randomly from a singularity. Be that as it may, he (I’m sure) can type for himself. > [@](#): > > I find it far easier to believe that no flood occurred. I would too, if not for the testimony of generations of my ancestors. The link you have there is definitely an interesting approach, although as far as I know, not one that’s ever been advances by Jewish scholars. Chaim Mattis Keller ---
**Author:** ![David\_B](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/51bf81/32.png) [@David\_B](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/David_B)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2000, 1:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creationism-questions/17837/312 "2000-03-29T01:21:00Z")
Asmodean said: > [@](#): > > i wont however argue as someone else said. It is folly to suffer the slings and arrows of those bent on changing your mind while keeping theirs closed. ## As opposed to yours, which is so open that you don’t bother to read up on what’s been said, make a standard bogus creationist argument, and then state that you’re not going to talk about it. Hoo-boy, you sure showed us. “Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is, to my mind, the most beautiful in all of science.” – Susan Blackmore, _The Meme Machine_ ---
**Author:** ![David\_B](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/51bf81/32.png) [@David\_B](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/David_B)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2000, 1:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creationism-questions/17837/313 "2000-03-29T01:24:00Z")
Gaudere said: > [@](#): > > Don’t think bunnies are so cute, now, do you? Never did. They dig up the yard like nobody’s business. (Note to self: Add “bunnies” to the list of topics for which I can call Gaudere as a lifeline if I ever get on _Who Wants to Be a Millionaire_.) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creationism-questions/17837.md?page=15)