Peanut Gallery for the Keys/RAZD Debate

I don't see why RAZD should have all the fun in the Creation Museum Age of the Earth is False (Simple and RAZD)(Simple and RAZD)[/color](KEYS and RAZD)[/color]< !--UE--> thread, so I'm starting up this peanut gallery thread to follow the action. I'll try to only touch on points RAZD hasn't hit, and I'll begin at Keys Message 14: Keys is not claiming that it's possible to lay down tree rings in very short time periods today. He's claiming that the universe was different in the past and that processes occurred at a much faster rate. It doesn't really matter how much evidence RAZD presents for dendrochronology, Keys response will always be the same: RAZD cannot know that the physical laws we're familiar with today were the same in the past, and therefore processes must have taken place at an accelerated rate because it is consistent with the Bible.This is a religious view unsupported by any evidence, and there is copious evidence that the physical laws have not changed to any noticeable degree in the last few billion years, so of course they could not have changed in the last 10,000 years, either. If Keys is arguing religiously then I don't think there's much point in continuing the discussion - he'll just continue dismissing all the evidence because it's incompatible with an old Earth as represented in the Bible.An alternative approach to tackling this subject with Keys might be to avoid saying that the world *is* ancient, but rather just examining the evidence. RAZD could say to Keys, "Okay, the Earth is young because the Bible says so, but approaching this from a scientific perspective, what are the problems you can identify with the evidence I've presented so far for an ancient Earth, and what positive evidence can you present for a young Earth?" The position of science is that unless there is evidence to the contrary, physical laws are the same everywhere throughout time and space. Keys is taking the position that there is no evidence that physical laws were the same in the past as today.The problem with this position is that there is a huge amount of evidence that physical laws haven't changed over billion years, and RAZD has noted some of it, pointing out that the Bible doesn't record anyone noticing accelerated processes. In fact, the Bible doesn't say anything about accelerated processes, because they are not a Biblical position but a creationist one. It is one of the explanations creationists advance for the lack of accord between the Bible and real world evidence.It's amusing to imagine what a world of accelerated processes would have been like. The premise, as I understand it, is that everything but people moved at an accelerated rate. Cain could could have planted grain in the morning and harvested it that evening. The sheep in Abel's flocks would have mated in the morning and had lambs during lunch. Trees would have grown from twig to adulthood in a single day, and one could sit and watch them. Somehow the flow of sap would start and stop a hundred times a day, the breadth of the tree trunk would visibly increase, along with the underlying root system, and thrust aside the ground. The leaves would sprout to fullness in just a second, rest there for a minute, then turn brown and fall to the ground, and this would repeat many times per hour. Resting under a tree would be dangerous because one would risk bombardment by acorns and being buried under leaves. Within an hour the tree would die, and within a day bacteria and insects and animals would have weakened it, it would fall over, and then decay to dust. Ah, it must have been an exciting time.The manic rate of growth would have presented other significant problems, for there would have been far too many plants and animals all living at the same time. Keys can't claim that animals didn't have a new brood everyday and that new trees didn't grow everyday, because we know how much life has to have existed from the fossil record. If it wasn't all growth all the time at huge rates, then there would be much less life recorded in the fossil record. So Keys is forced to claim that not only were rates accelerated in the past, but that the amount of life living simultaneously was immensely greater. Slow footed man would have been overrun.Any animal carrying out it's entire life cycle in a mere day needs to move extremely fast. A sheep would have to denude an entire meadow in a single minute in order to sustain itself (which isn't a problem for the grass which is also growing at an accelerated rate). Other animals would also have to have moved extremely fast. A wolf capable of catching such a sheep must also have moved extremely fast. But this presents a problem for man. Why would a wolf chase a fast moving sheep when there's a human sitting right there who seems frozen in time and therefore completely defenseless.It isn't just the processes of life that had to be accelerated, of course, but all processes. One has to contemplate the incongruity of a lamb growing into a sheep in just a few minutes while Abel watched and aged barely at all. This would mean the sheep needed food and water for all it's growth, which means it would have had to eat and excrete much faster. The grass had to grow much faster, the nutrients in the soil had to be replenished much faster, and it had to rain all the time. Bees would have flown much faster, as fast as bullets, in order to pollinate enough flowers and get back to the hive in order to produce enough honey for the next minute's generation, only to repeat the process again a minute later. Wind-borne pollen would have had little time to be distributed unless the winds had been very strong, so it must have been extremely windy, maybe around 100 mph, all the time. But it was also raining all the time, which would have drenched the pollen to the ground, introducing an interesting problem for wind-borne pollen distribution. Or did the rain and wind alternate by the minute?And of course it isn't just macro processes that would need to be accelerated but micro processes as well. Water would have to seep into the ground much faster so that the constant rain didn't flood the world. The osmotic processes that draw sap up trees would have been much faster. Cells would have replicated faster. Bacteria and viruses would have carried out their life cycles much faster, huge bacterial colonies forming in mere seconds instead of days, introducing another problem for people. With bacteria and viruses and parasites operating at such a fast rate, they would have almost instantly overwhelmed the defenses of any human they came in contact with, since humans were the only things in the known universe moving at the normal rate.I've just spent many words examining an idea that is ludicrous on its face, because creationists make this "accelerated processes" proposal all the time without thinking through any of the implications. As long as they hear the explanation and don't think any further than "Oh, okay," then it might seem reasonable to them, but it is so full of significant problems that even the merest examination shows it to be ridiculous and impossible. And what's even more ridiculous is that creationists cite it as Biblically supported when accelerated processes don't appear anywhere in the Bible, and such things have never been recorded historically by any civilization anywhere. The evidence for it in any form whatsoever is completely absent. Except that when we look far out into space we are no longer looking at the present. When we look at the moon we see it as it was about 1.5 seconds ago. When we look at the sun we see it as it was about 8 minutes ago. When we look at Alpha Centauri, the nearest star after the sun, we see it as it was 4.4 years ago. When we look at the Lagoon nebula we see it as it was about 4000 years ago. When we look at the Crab nebula we see it as it was about 6000 years ago. And when we look at the Andromeda galaxy we see it as it was about 2.5 million years ago. And analysis of the light from distant stars and nebulas and galaxies reveals that the physical governing them at those times and places are identical to the physical laws here on earth.In other words, physical laws have not changed noticeably anywhere in the universe over the past few billion years. It's hard to understand why Keys believes the evidence fits. The evidence we have says physical laws in the past were the same as today.--Percy

While Keys makes occasional claims that the evidence is on his side, he hasn't as yet said what that evidence is, and one has to wonder how important evidence is in driving his views. Does he accept the Biblical account because he thinks the evidence supports it? If that's the case then convincing him that the evidence does not support it will be a function of his level of denial.Or does he accept the Biblical account no matter what the evidence? If this is the case then presenting him evidence won't have any effect.There were a couple comments about how great fast might be the accelerated processes Keys mentions but never describes. Before radiometric dating geologists already believed that the earth had to be at least hundreds of millions of years old, and this before plate tectonics. Even back when geologists believed the continents were largely static they had already collected a large enough record of geological change to require hundreds of millions of years.According to a quick Internet search, the first trees appeared about 360 million years ago. If just for the sake of argument and simplicity we assume that modern trees only first appeared around 150 million years ago, and that we have fossil evidence of this that doesn't require radiometric dating, then Keys has to fit 150 million years worth of trees growing and dieing into just 1500 years. The ratio is 100,000 to 1. So if your average tree lives, say, 500 years (just to be generous to Keys) then before the flood a tree would have had to carry out its entire life cycle in just 2 days.That means it would grow to roughly its full size in the first 5 hours of life, and over the 2 days of its life leaves would grow and fall 500 times, necessary for creating the 500 rings. That means fall would occur for the trees every 6 minutes.One wonders what tree sap must have been like back then. In order to pump sap up the trees at a rate necessary to grow all the leaves in just a few seconds, it could not have been the viscous sticky liquid we know today. Even if back then it flowed as easily as water it would have been a difficult pumping task - we're talking fire hose velocities here.And about bees, if bees were accelerated at the same rate, and if we assume that bees on their way to and from the nest fly at the rate of 10 feet/second, then accelerating bees by the same amount means that they would have to fly at 1 million feet per second, which is almost 200 miles per second or almost 700,000 miles/hour. Any bee striking you would be instantly fatal. Note that even if I'm off by a factor of a thousand, 700 miles/hour is about 500 feet/second, the speed your average rifle fires a bullet. And speaking of bullet speeds and thinking about sap again, how would bullet-speed mosquitoes ever become embedded in the ancient water-like sap to create the ancient-mosquitoes-trapped-in-amber fossils that we find today?Fitting all the geological events known to science into a Biblical time scale is even more difficult. The Allegheny Mountains, now a very ancient mountain range worn down to a shadow of its former self, were preceded by an even more magnificent mountain range from around a billion years ago now all but gone except for the silt and sediments its erosion left behind. If these geological events were crammed not into a billion years but into 1500, then a mountain range with 3 and 4 mile high mountains rose in just a few decades at most, then was worn down to nubs in just a thousand years, then another nearly-as-large mountain range rose in its place in just a few decades, and then was warn down to perhaps half its height in perhaps a few hundred years.With mountain ranges rising and falling at such great rates, one wouldn't have wanted to live anywhere near their shadow with such immense tectonic and erosive events taking place. I assume the near constant rain of the period necessary to foster the growth of billions of years of life living nearly simultaneously must have been what wore the mountains down so quickly, though it seems hardly enough. Odd that the Biblical accounts, written by a civilization well aware of the nearby mountain range that includes Ararat, never mention the immensely quick comings and goings of any mountain ranges.--Percy

Here are some comments on Keys' Message 19.At this point it is becoming clear that Keys really does have only one argument. It doesn't really matter what explanations and evidence RAZD submits for consideration, Keys will always reply, in effect, "You don't know what conditions and physical laws were like back then."Hopefully at some point Keys will realize that his argument goes both ways. If it's really impossible to know what conditions were like before 2500 BC, then he can't know that they were different.Unfortunately for Keys, and as I mentioned earlier in this thread, we do have evidence for what conditions were like back then, and for much further back than 2500 BC.In response to RAZD's point about tree rings correlating with ¹⁴C dating, Keys responds: This is a new one to me. Usually creationists argue that ¹⁴C dating is invalid, but Keys is arguing that the carbon in ancient trees did not build up through growth, but through some other process that he describes a bit further on: So Keys is proposing that trees might have manufactured their own carbon? Which would require nuclear fission or fusion? Which would have produced radioactive byproducts lethal to life? And trees manufactured this carbon in a way that correlated perfectly with the tree rings? We have evidence that cosmic rays (charged atomic nuclei) exist everywhere throughout the universe, since collisions of cosmic rays with the atoms in interstellar gas and nebula produce gamma rays which we can detect. We know that there were cosmic rays thousands and millions and billions of years ago.Keys wants the discussion to include God and Bible and the supernatural, but without citations from the Bible and without evidence, he's just making stuff up, and in the end he's practicing neither Christianity nor science, just fantasy.--Percy

Most of Simple's Message 31 can be summed up as, "I don't believe you, prove it!" Simple presents no evidence of his own. His position seems to be, "I don't know, and you don't, either."To his credit, Simple does spend some time attempting to address the radiocarbon dating of tree rings, but if he understands how radiocarbon dating works then it isn't apparent to me. The problem that RAZD has submitted for Simple's consideration is that the ¹⁴C/¹²C ratio in each tree ring yields an age consistent with that indicated by counting tree rings. This would seem to put the kibosh on the possibility of many tree rings forming in a single year. To rebut RAZD's data, Simple needs to find a mechanism that changes ¹⁴C concentrations in strict concert with tree ring formation, but he doesn't seem to understand that. He also seems unaware that RAZD is now adding correlations with dating data from other sources, and Simple seems unaware that with each new piece of correlated dating data that his explanatory task becomes astronomically more difficult. The only thing that keeps Simple going is that he doesn't understand the arguments being made.I close with a list of Simple's most brilliant rebuttals: My advice to Simple is to only reply to the arguments and data he understands, or if he understands them to provide actual evidence and/or argument in rebuttal. Rebuttals like "So???" and "How impressive" do nothing to advance the discussion.--Percy

I've been holding off adding more comments to this thread because I haven't been able to make sense out of most of what Simple has been saying. I find RAZD's most recent post to be the culmination of increasingly intemperate comments, though who could blame him. Simple doesn't understand the implications of the concordance of evidence that RAZD has presented and so is blissfully unaware that his position has been shot dead, and so he marches confidently on as if nothing is amiss. Bloody weird to watch.The goal was never to convince Simple. That's probably not possible. The goal was to present the two positions side-by-side so that people find it easy to assess their validity. With the apparent exception of Simple, anyone would have no trouble understanding RAZD's evidence and arguments, whether they agreed with them or not. But other than the part about "Things were different before the flood," I'm not sure even Simple understands what his position is. I don't think he's presented a coherent position, and even those who agree with him about pre-flood conditions would be unable to find any evidence or derive any rationale from what Simple has posted so far.--Percy

I'm sure RAZD will address this when he responds to Simple's latest post, Message 56, but in the meantime here's what the article ('Sterile neutrinos' laid to rest - for now) is really saying.A set of experiments performed at Los Alamos between 1993 and 1998 appeared to indicate that muon antineutrinos could flip into electron antineutrinos after traveling about 30 meters. For this to happen would require the existence of something they termed the "sterile neutrino", which doesn't fit the standard model.They dismantled the experiment and set up a more accurate one which detected no such neutrino flipping even after 500 meters. The need for a "sterile neutrino" went away, and the standard model remained intact (for now).Simple's misinterpretation was in thinking that this has anything to do with some neutrinos from the Sun flipping on their way to the earth. The finding that some neutrinos can flip while traveling 93 million miles was never in doubt. This fact had been established by a completely different set of experiments.The lack of sufficient numbers of neutrinos from the sun used to be cited by creationists as indicating that scientists didn't really understand the nuclear processes taking place in the sun. The missing neutrinos were found a few years ago when it was discovered that some of the neutrinos generated by the sun's nuclear processes can flip to a different neutrino type on their way to the earth, and this other neutrino type wasn't one that our instruments were set up to detect. Once we modified the instrumentation, there the missing neutrinos were. And once again, this finding was never cast into doubt by any of the work related to the hypothetical "sterile neutrino".--Percy

Simple's latest reply is Message 66.Here's a good question, one that should have been answered before the debate started: how does one have a meaningful debate when both scientific and Biblical evidence are given equal weight?I'm not going to try to answer that question, but I do have a comment. If scientific evidence carries equal weight with implications drawn from the Bible, only a stalemate is possible.I'm not sure what Simple means when he keeps repeating that RAZD can't prove anything, and that his position is just a bunch of assumptions. If by this he means that RAZD can't demonstrate that his claims are inescapable and unassailable facts, then I agree, and so would RAZD. RAZD can only show that his positions are supported by evidence. That's what the process of science attempts to do.By the same token, Simple cannot demonstrate that his own claims are inescapable and unassailable, but unlike RAZD, he cannot support his position with evidence. This is the key difference that others have noted but that I think RAZD has failed to exploit. Having provided more than sufficient evidence in support his position, RAZD can now move on to drawing attention to the dramatic lack of evidence from Simple, and to inquiring of Simple as to its whereabouts.Simple's evidence will boil down to faith and the Bible, and to those for whom this is a persuasive argument nothing more can be said. Certainly providing more evidence to ignore isn't going to change any minds. I think this is why so many of us have concluded that there's little justification for continuing this debate.If Simple's arguments in his last message make sense, I was no more able to figure them out than I have been in the past, but I will note a few things of a factual nature.First, the article Simple cites, Supernova's light curve baffles scientists - supernova 1987A, is from the October 19, 1991, issue of Science News. I believe supernova 1987A is still a mystery today 16 years later, but we do understand far more now than we did then.Second, though Simple doesn't provide a citation, his next excerpt comes from Variable Star Of The Month - March, 2001: Supernova 1987A, an article at the website of the American Association of Variable Star Observers. This article is from about six years ago, and reflects the greatly improved understanding we have of 1987A in the 10 years since the 1991 Science News article.Simple makes it difficult to tell which are his own words and which are excerpts from the article, but his excerpt contains two errors, and the errors are the article's, not Simple's.

1. The half life of ⁵⁶Ni is 6 days, not 7.
   ​
2. The half life of ⁵⁶Co is 77 days, not 111.

I don't know why Simple thinks these excerpts support his position - he doesn't make that clear.--Percy

RAZD has posted a response (Message 67), and it includes some good arguments, but I want to focus on his rebuttal of what Simple cited from the 1991 article Supernova's light curve baffles scientists - supernova 1987A. Simple's excerpt included speculations about ⁵⁷Co, and RAZD rebutted it, but I don't think there's any point to doing that because I doubt very much that Simple understood the article.Simple cited that article because he believes it supports his contention that science is all wet when it tries to analyze events from long ago and far away. Not understanding science, he thinks that scientific mysteries and changes in scientific opinions indicate that science is invalid for studying certain things, especially distant, ancient events. But stories like that about supernova 1987A are nearly perfect illustrations of the nature of scientific discovery, where we were very puzzled back in 1991, had learned much more by 2001, and by 2004 we understood the reasons for the previously unexplained drop off in visible light. The need for the speculated neutron star back in 1991, the fact that it hadn't been found being something Simple had complained about, had disappeared by 2004.On the frontiers of science there will always be puzzles and mysteries, and reporters and authors will always seek out the unusual, because the reading public seeks novelty. Simple will always have a wealth of things we don't understand to offer up as examples proving that, in his mind, science is bogus, but that to everyone else only indicate what was already obvious, that we don't know everything and we never will. Science has never promised instant answers to all questions, which is what Simple seems to want. All science does is ensure that we know more than yesterday but not as much as tomorrow, and it's ironic that Simple chose an example in supernova 1987A that makes this so very clear.--Percy

I agree. There's no point in continuing to add to the pile of ignored evidence.You ask this question: Not possible in my opinion. RAZD should recognize that the debate is essentially over, that it was never actually a debate in the first place, and should instead simply offer a short summary noting that Simple hasn't been able to offer any evidence to support his claims.--Percy

Simple's most recent reply is Message 76.Simple should be credited for his efforts to muster evidence for his position, but whereas before he offered an article from 1991, now he's offering one from 1988, less than a year after the discovery of supernova 1987A. Even less was known in 1988 than in 1991. He seems to believe that speculations offered in 1988 in some way invalidate the data gathered since that time, as well as the conclusions based upon that data. I think we can all agree with this. Simple's arguments are now following two tracks. One track, and it's the right track, is when he attempts to argue that evidence has been misinterpreted and actually points to a young universe. The problem with this approach is that he hasn't found any such evidence yet.But the other track is just, "The universe was different back then, in whatever ways necessary for the Biblical account to be true."--Percy