It would sure be nice to deal with people who would educate themselves about the opposite side [edit]. There is no way one can give full account of a position in places like this. Go read Oard’s book and then come back. You’ll then have a knowledge base to work with.

I am well educated on the evolutionary side as a student of paleontology at the local University. I know the evolutionary viewpoint inside and out. I’ve also read many of the latest anti-creationist books and articles.

I recommend that you be as well educated on the creationist side by reading current creationist publications. Keep up with CRSQ, Answers On-line Journal, Creation Journal, and books published within the last 10 years.

If you don’t have the time or inclination, it will be harder for you to effectively present your case. [selective editing]

Like or Dislike: 0  0

Um, I think the evolutionists are the ones who informed us about ice ages.

You’re mistaken. Evolutionists were not the first ones to propose ice age theories – theories which were around well before Darwin published Origins in 1859.

For example, Andrew Ure (1778-1857) was one of the top chemists of his day with an international reputation as a meticulous scientist, a prolific writer and an effective teacher. But he was also one of those brilliantly versatile men of science in the early 19th century. In 1829 he published A New System of Geology in which he proposed some new theoretical ideas for the reconstruction of earth history, one of which was one of the earliest conceptions of an ice age, which he speculated would have resulted from the Flood. One of the author’s he quoted was Jens Esmark (1763-1839)

Jens Esmark also argued a sequence of worldwide ice ages well before Darwin. In a paper published in 1824, Esmark proposed changes in climate as the cause of those glaciations. He attempted to show that they originated from changes in the Earth’s orbit. Adding to Esmark’s work, Bernhardi, in a 1932 paper, speculated about former polar ice caps reaching as far as the temperate zones around the globe.

http://creation.com/british-scriptural-geologists-in-the-first-half-of-the-nineteenth-century-part-4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jens_Esmark

They have given us more information about ice ages than creationists have and nothing, I repeat nothing, is going to change that. They have no problem with ice ages whatsoever.

They have no problem with ice ages, true. But, they do have a definite problem with the idea of very rapid, even catastrophically sudden, formation and regression. It wasn’t until just a few years ago that scientists began to realize that glacial melts can happen many times more rapidly than they tought possible just 10 years ago – to include the melting of Greenland’s ice-cap as well as the Antarctic ice. No one thought that such rapid melting could ever happen as rapidly as it is taking place today.

http://www.DetectingDesign.com/AncientIce.html

What is it with Adventists suddenly talking a lot about Las Vegas, card games, houses of cards, gambling and betting? I’m bewildered.

It is often a very good way to get important statistical concepts across to those people who don’t usually deal with numbers and the scientific usefulness of statistical odds analysis… like you ; )

Sean Pitman
http://www.DetectingDesign.com

Like or Dislike: 0  0

What is it with Adventists suddenly talking a lot about Las Vegas, card games, houses of cards, gambling and betting? I’m bewildered.

Like or Dislike: 0  0

Mt. Saint Helens taught us a lot about how rapidly things happen during and following a natural catastrophe. It certainly proved how things assumed to require millions of years could occur in a matter of days. So, what exactly is the evolutionists’ problem with said ice age? Are they just afraid that their house of cards will get toppled if they open their eyes to real evidence?

Erik

Like or Dislike: 0  0

So…ice ages are scientifically impossible and therefore could only result from a global supernatural flood. The arctic seas became hot which caused very high precipitation. Then an extreme cold spell came along that made an iceberg out of high elevations and high altitudes, decreased the ocean sea level and dried out the Mediterranean basin. I assume these explanations fit within the 1000 gsaar threshold (geologically supportable argumentative age reasoning) of explanatory complexity

Ice ages are not scientifically impossible. They are certainly consistent with a global catastrophe that involved massive volcanic activity. And, massive meteor impacts may indeed have provided the sudden release of the huge quantities of energy needed to produce the initial catastrophe on a global scale. Also, it is well-known that ice ages would indeed reduce ocean levels quite dramatically – easily below the level needed to maintain water in the Mediterranean basin (which is known to have been dry during the last major ice age).

I fail to see what it is about this scenario that you find so “complex” and unbelievable given the starting premise of a sudden massive release of energy on this planet?… What would you expect to happen? Orderly weather as usual? The whole surface of the planet was broken up by the massive impact that set the whole catastrophe in motion… the aftershocks of which we are still feeling to this day.

Sean Pitman
http://www.DetectingDesign.com

Like or Dislike: 0  0

Like or Dislike: 0  0

Like or Dislike: 0  0

So did the mammoths dies of cold or starvation? Maybe it wasn’t the intolerable cold, perhaps it was too much snowfall that spoiled access to the vegetation they depended on. Unless most or all of the fossils had identifiable food in their mouths or stomachs (I have heard that some did), how could one possibly know?

It really doesn’t matter if they died directly because of the cold or indirectly because of starvation (though I favor the former idea). Either way, the evidence suggests that they, along with millions of other types of animals, died out very suddenly in line with a sudden global cold snap. That’s the key point here. The cold snap would result in a rapid decrease in the ocean’s water level, resulting in an opportunity to dry out the Mediterranean basin…

Sean Pitman
http://www.DetectingDesign.com

Like or Dislike: 0  0

A sudden extreme cold snap is not necessarily related with a cold period causing glaciers to extend down south to Illinois. If all frozen mammoths really died quite exactly at the same time, they all should give the same age when dated with whatever method available. Even if the absolute age was off, the same “radiometric” age for all the mammoths we’re talking about would support your theory.

Obviously, given several hundred years of time before extinction, all mammoths didn’t die at the same time. However, there was a sudden extinction event that killed millions of them at or very near the same time, resulting in extinction.

Beyond this, different parts of the same creature have produced very different radiocarbon dates…

Musk ox muscle was dated at 24,000 years, but hair was dated at 17,000 years. Corrected dates bring the difference in age approximately within the life span of an ox. With sloth cave dung, standard carbon dates of the lower layers suggested less than 2 pellets per year were produced by the sloths. Correcting the dates increased the number to a more realistic 1.4 per day.

R.H. Brown, ‘Correlation of C-14 Age with Real Time,’ Creation Research Society Quarterly, 29:45-47, 1992.

See also:

http://www.grisda.org/origins/17056.htm

Sean Pitman
http://www.DetectingDesign.com

Like or Dislike: 0  0

So did the mammoths dies of cold or starvation? Maybe it wasn’t the intolerable cold, perhaps it was too much snowfall that spoiled access to the vegetation they depended on. Unless most or all of the fossils had identifiable food in their mouths or stomachs (I have heard that some did), how could one possibly know?

Like or Dislike: 0  0