Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Common Interests Creationism vs Evolution

Uhh that's an easy one to prove.. go plant a tree. Wait ohh 15 years.. cut it down and take a look, you'll see there is a growth ring for each year it existed..

The first 10 or so are the hard ones to see though.. after that.. it's easy. I saw a cross section of one in the Smithsonian, they were claiming someing along the lines of 6,000 years i think. Trust me.. if you saw it. you'd see there were about that many. And no I didn't count them.. but I did take a small section.. count them up.. and then guess at an average growth.. they were definitely in the range.

Well I would like to continue this discussion, but will be unable to participate for the next five days, as I will be in Las Vegas assuring my eternal damnation. When I get back I will be interested in seeing if any of the 8 questions I asked have been answered. Untill then see ya.

ASSVT:

I haven't had much time to post lately - too busy with family. However, I am currently working on answers to your questions.

Have fun in Vegas.

ASSVT:

Problems with Isochrons

and

U-TH-PB Dating - An Example of False Isochrons

1. How did the predators survive after they got off the arc?

In Genesis 1:29-30, the Bible teaches that before the flood all the animals were vegetarians so there was not a problem with, for example, the lion trying to eat the lamb.

2. What about the animals with special dietary requirements?

Sorry, but there is no way I have hard evidence of this, but I would think that Noah knew about these special requirements and would have made extra provisions for them.

3. How did the human population rebound so quickly?

It is relatively easy to calculate the growth rate needed to get today's population from Noah's three sons and their wives, after the Flood. With the Flood at about 4,500 years ago, it needs less than 0.5% per year growth. That's not very much. (The current growth rate of the world population is about 1.7% per year.)

Evolutionists claim that mankind evolved from apes about a million years ago. If the population had grown at just 0.01% per year since then (doubling only every 7,000 years), there would be 1E43 people today.

4. How did 8 people care for anywhere between 8000-20000 animals?

In his well documented book, Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study, John Woodmorappe suggests that far fewer animals would have been transported upon the ark. Woodmorappe credibly demonstrates that as few as 2,000 animals may have been required on the ark.

It is also logical that the animals where young (therefore small). Also, many animals become dormant, lethargic or even hibernate during stormy weather.

5. How did the arc stand up to the worldwide tsunami's that would be created by the theory of plate subduction?

Aren't tsunamis just huge tidal waves? Also, at the point of the plate movement, I don't believe (correct me if I am wrong) there is a large tidal wave. It isn't until the wave gets into shallower water and closer to land that the tidal wave grows to huge proportions. However, lets see how the arc could weather rough seas:

Noah's ark was built only to float, not to sail anywhere. Therefore, Noah's ark need neither giant masts or sails. Therefore it had far less torsional stress. Also, the length-to-width ratio of 6 to 1 is what shipbuilders today often use. This is the best ratio for stability in stormy weather. Although there is no Biblical evidence of this, the ark may have had a "moon-pool" in the center. The larger ships would have a hole in the center of the bottom of the boat with walls extending up into the ship. There are several reasons for this feature:
*It allowed water to go up into the hole as the ship crested waves. This would be needed to relieve strain on longer ships.
*The rising and lowering water acted as a piston to pump fresh air in and out of the ship. This would prevent the buildup of dangerous gasses from all the animals on board.
*The hole was a great place to dump garbage into the ocean without going outside.

6. How did all the plants survive?

Many terrestrial seeds can survive long periods of soaking in various concentrations of salt water (Howe, 1968, CRSQ:105–112). Others could have survived in floating masses. Many could have survived as accidental and planned food stores on the ark.

7. Why do ancient redwoods with ages up to 10,000 years old so no ill effects in there growth rings?

Are you sure they were redwoods?

"Redwoods are the fastest growing softwood tree in the U.S. and often grow 130 feet in 30 years and 170 feet in 50 years, yet the redwood can live to be more than 2,000 years old." REF http://www.sunnyfortuna.com/

A Bristlecone Pine is the Earth's oldest living inhabitant ("Methuselah" at 4,767 years).

allthought you have made some assumptions there, there is still couple more questions:

How did animals get to their current locations? Especially islands.

Was there a mass cross breeding effort by the staff of ark after water settled?

Would it had been impossible for other people to survive? Even if they were fishers and had ships of their own?

those being the main issues..

And you claim the growth rate of humans as an factor. Just as animals in the nature do not have a continuous growth rate neither did early humans. The growth rate was almost stagnant.

But as always anything is possible for an omnipotent god so what's the point of arguing?

I'm sorry to see you people waste your life on something imaginary..all I can hope for is that you have fun with it and don't start drowning your kids because of it.

So why one day would a lion wake up and decide to be a carnivore? It's alot easier to be a herbivore than carnivore. Not to mention, if a lion were a herbivore, it would be alot smaller animal. Have you ever seen a lion up close? 300(for the female) to 500 (male) pounds of solid muscle. Designed from the ground up to chase and take down animals twice it's size, or more! They eat 20 or more pounds of red meat EVERY DAY. Even if you could get the proper nutrition (protien, etc.) out of plants to sustain such a substantial amount of muscle mass, it'd be a ****load of plants! Some of the things you're posting here are very interesting to read, but this is simply absurd.

As far as Noah and his 3 sons and their wives, I have just one question, what about inbreeding? I doubt these people would even understand such a concept. I suppose to help keep the gene pool deep...they could "swap" wives...but wouldn't that be **GASP** a sin!? And For 6 people to repopulate the world (unless Noah got in on the action) completely, means alot of "gettin' busy" and very little of anything else. And even if they could pump out a set of setuplets every 9 months, you have to allow for miscarriages, death of the children at a young age, and, death during childbirth, of mother and child...all of which were common occurances. 3 dead wives and now you have to wait 14 years before the children are of childbearing age....assuming there are even any female children surviving.

The tree's he's talking about are Giant Sequoia's. The biggest trees in the world, all i've been able to find says they generally range from 2-3,000 years old.

Okay, I just started reading this post, and I got through about 1/2 of it, forgive me if I am being redundant. Also, I have a lot of debate to incorporate, so this may be a less than linear response.
I should also not that I am not a particularly religious person, I couldn'ttell you the last time I wnet to church, but as I reread my response, I see that I sound like I am fairely in support of creationism, but really, I just want to lay down some ideas and some facts.

1) The Bible
The bible is a document that presents something of a paradox. While it is absolutely full of historical testamony, it is also not to be taken literally. The result from this paradox is that currently, many people view those who wrote down the bible to be inferior to us because we have modern science to help us comprehend everything. We also discount Any eye witness testimony because it seems very removed and distant from us today. When we read such testimony, it often comes across as unbelievable, and because it lacks a scientific understanding in its explanation, we deem it unbelievable.

2) Man today:
The above is actually an excellent segway into the problem we run into with man presently. We as a species are fairly presumptuous. We feel that we have a good enough understanding of how the world works that we have in many ways mastered it and have the right to do as we wish with it. In fact, I believe somewhere in the bible it is said that god made man master of all the animals and whatever else man wanted. The fact of the matter is that we for all our modern science do not know what we are doing a lot of the time. For instance, calling upon some reading I've been doing recently: in our efforts to make crops more productive (including pesticides, fertiliser, and genetic engineering) we have actually increased the imput to yield ratio of crops. In other words, farming is not as efficient because we have to pour a lot more resources into it to get the yield that we get. Pesticides have actually increased the pest problem by killing the natural enemies of the insects that we were actually trying to get rid of (can you say collateral damage). This has also lead to groundwater pollution, increased cancer rates, and who knows what sort of long term damage to the food chain. Also fertiliser causes farmers to be much less likely use crop rotation methods, alond with this goes the practice of planting two crops in the same field at the same time ie: corn and alfalfa (for example) where the corn would grow tall, and the amfalfa would stay low and keep weeds down while preventing erosion. The point is that because there is a chemical alternative that is far more demanding to produce, produces hasardous byproducts, and is no more efficient than the traditional methods, but is still taunted by science as the answer to our problems, we do it. The same problem has developed with genetic engineering, in Asia, there were hundreds of varieties of rice. Currently because rice is being engineered and bred to produce higher yields per plant there are only 30 prominent varieties currently, this was not a natural process, but I think since variety of species is a basic tennent of Darwinian evolution we can all agree that this unnatural progression is a bad thing. That was somewhat roundabout, but what I am trying to say is that man is currently very busy knowing everything. we think we know the best ways to do many things, and fail to look at the merits of how things were done by our "primitive nacestors" and this mindset predisposes many of us to view the old ways as foolish, or superstitious nonsense.

3) Darwin:
Darwin is an interesting character. He was actually a very devout christian for a large part of his life. He held off publishing "Origin of Species" for I believe nearly ten years because he was afraid of the repercussions it might have in terms of his faith. The factor that made him decide to publish was the death of his young daughter. This was very traumatic to him, he could not understand why god would take away someone so innocent and young. In his struggle to reconcile his faith with the events of his life, he decided to publish his theory. This isn't really part of the argument, but it is some interesting background information.

4) Evolution:
The interesting thing about evolution is that it was presented as a theory. Since then, science haslargely swallowed it whole, and done very little questioning of its origional form. Granted, the question of where man came from is certainly a burning one, that begs at least a rudimentary explanation. There are definately some problems with Darwin's theory though. First of all, that picture in all of our highschool biology text books of the embryos that look nearly the same in their early stages...that was a fake, and currently that is taught at college levels (namely Uconn where I go; which should be noted is a fairly liberal school in many reguards) as a farce that should lead us to question long standing theories. Also, evolution should be a fairly smooth process. Yes, dead ends could certainly occur, but the lines of species that still exist should show a very smooth progression. I understand that fossils are only created under very specific circumstances, but our current fossil record is not a slow curve so much as it is a flight of stairs with distinct species at different levels. Yet another problem, and in my mind this is a big one...is that the process currnently supported as the way life [url=startedhttp://evolutionoftruth.com/evo/evogene.htm...the][url=startedhttp://evolutionoftruth.com/evo/evogene.htm...the][url=startedhttp://evolutionoftruth.com/evo/evogene.htm...the]startedhttp://evolutionoftruth.com/evo/evogene.htm...the[/url][/url][/url] basic elements to make the amino acid bases that create DNA were all swirling around in primordial oceans, and then lightning striles caused reactions creating amino acids which eventually formed primitive single cell organisms, was also recently revisited, and is no longer a promision theory. Given the electricity, the existing elements, and the atmosphere http://www.rps.psu.edu/0101/reflections.html of the Earth at the time, only one amino acid base was created, and the byproduct of this was lots and lots of ammonia, to my knowlege, even chemotrophic bacteria do not survive in ammonia rich environments; and I know I certainly don't like the smell.

5) God
In the traditional christian view, God is all powerful, and all knowing. This presents a problem for us because any time something happens that we do not understand, it become an easy cop out to say that god works in mysterious ways. This explanation eventually gets old, and human nature causes us to want something more. I think that if god does exist, and is all powerful, then certainly there would be a lot of things we could not hope to understand (action at a distance forces for example gravity and magnetism). It would also be feasable that god placed all the fossils on earth, all the evidence as a test of faith. Sounds like a cop-out doesn't it? But all things considered, I think evolution is far from a perfct theory http://emporium.turnpike.net/C/cs/cartoon.htm. I think creationism is also a bit hard to swallow in its entirety.

So what do you all think?

Actually Darwin was forced to publish because another 'naturalist' whose name I forget was about to publish in France. With the EXACT same theory. While his daughter's death did help, the main impetous for his decision was the threat of someone else publishing first. We have the same problem today in the world of science. That's why the press jumps on headlines about "discoveries" when in fact they are no such thing. They are only published experiments that point to a given conclusion. ONLY until the process has been repeated many times is any signifigance given to the claim. At which point the discovery is acknwologed in the scientific community.

That was totally uncalled for.

Think back even to the eighteen hundreds... it was very common to have 8 or ten children.. even if theyall never made it to breeding age, lets say only 4 made it... that would mean a 100 % population growth.. hardly something difficult to imagine..
so noah's sons take their original wive's (no swapping necassary) and have 10 kids each.. "it wasn'ta stretch 100 years ago, so why would it be then.) 2 or even 4 die... that still leaves six left over, replacing the two parents that leaves 4... a 200% population growth, and we are allowing for a 40% stillbirth, or disease, or whatever kill ratio before bearing kids of their own.. population studies show that a very small population growth is required for todays world to be populated. With the answers "we" have given on the population exploision... lets agree to put this arguement aside from your perspective. Their is some assumption in our arguement, granted, but it is reasonable, and we are giving you more than enough, 40% as a benefit of the doubt.. can you agree to this.. then we can put one issue out of the way!