Earth science curriculum tailored to fit wavering fundamentalists

While you could argue this for science in the 21st century, it's not true of the birth of modern science in the 17th century. Bacon, Kepler, and Galileo, were all devout theists. As the early scientific enterprise grew, the early scientists (or "virtuosi" in the parlance of 17th century England) tended to be not only theists, but Christians. And not only Christians, but Protestants. And not only Protestants, but Puritans, with theological views similar to those that you yourself hold. As Ian Barbour has written (Ian G. Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 48):

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Without belittling advances that occurred elsewhere, one can say that seventeenth-century England was the turning point in the history of science, and that the Puritans were its chief agents. Seven out of ten members of the Royal Society were Puritans--a ratio far out of proportion to the population as a whole; most of the virtuosi were active churchmen, and many of the clergy encouraged or themselves took part in scientific pursuits."
  —Ian Barbour

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As Whitehead and others have argued, it was the Christian (especially Puritan) conception of God's unchanging character and God's providence that motivated these early scientists to study God's creation to try to uncover the truths which He had revealed there. But it is the hard sciences (geology, physics, astrophysics) which provide the strongest support for an old earth and an old universe!Edited by kbertsche, : No reason given.

You'll want a formula for the terminal velocity of a particle in a fluid. The equations for fluid dynamics are nonlinear; normal practice is to use a linear approximation based on the "Reynolds number" appropriate to the problem. There are some good explanations of this on Wikipedia (Terminal velocity - Wikipedia, Stokes' law - Wikipedia), but it would probably be easier to work from a chart or plot of terminal velocity vs particle size and density.

I would view plants as a reservoir. Their growth pulls CO2 out of the atmosphere. Their decay puts most of it back into the atmosphere, but also sequesters a small amount in the soil.For solid information on the carbon cycle, I'd suggest publications of the carbon cycle lab at UCI. As you say, various conflicting YEC claims have been made regarding what a global flood would do to radiocarbon levels. You may just have to find out which particular story your audience accepts and address those specific claims. We know from the calibration curves that there were no abrupt changes in the atmospheric radiocarbon concentrations in the past 45,000 years.I think Gerald Aardsma may have written something on the supposed effect of a global flood on radiocarbon. So far as I know, he is the only YEC who was ever trained at a leading radiocarbon lab and who really understands radiocarbon. Because of this, he trusts radiocarbon, and this has led him to some idiosyncratic YEC positions.Edited by kbertsche, : No reason given.

As mentioned in Message 459, The Reynolds number determines which approximation to the nonlinear fluid dynamics equations should be used. Stoke's Law only applies to low Reynolds number situations. For particles in water, this means a diameter << 1 mm. Your marbles are too big for Stoke's law to apply.If you want to scale the particle size up to the size of marbles for a demonstration, and still want Stoke's law to apply, you also will need to scale up the fluid viscosity. Something like sugar syrup, corn syrup, or cooking oil might work.Edited by kbertsche, : No reason given.

Perhaps you mentioned it earlier (or perhaps you don't want to be too specific on a public forum), but what part of what state do you live in? I think you mentioned "the South", but that's a lot of territory. I ask because there are likely some good science labs nearby that you could take your relatives to visit.

Oak Ridge National Lab would be a good field trip for your friends and relatives. There's lots of good science going on there, including the SNS, which is a high power proton linear accelerator.A friend of mine teaches physics at Covenant College (Lookout Mountain, GA). I don't think they have much in the way of labs to visit, but if your SDA group would trust a conservative Presbyterian, maybe he would be willing to talk with them.

I don't think this is much of a factor. Both science and theology are human endeavors, and humans tend to get entrenched and stubborn about ANY position that they hold, whether in science theology, or politics. They tend to be especially stubborn if they've long held a view and taken a public stand on it. Luie's asteroid theory took a decade to become accepted. Some of his vocal critics never did change their mind, and the community just had to wait until they retired.If science reacts faster to mistakes now than in the past, I suspect it's manly because communications is much faster today and information is easier to access. Yes, I think this is true. I think it was due rather to the prevailing culture of the day (the "Zeitgeist") and to the fact that modern science and modern scientific ways of thinking hadn't been born yet.The academic culture of philosophy/science rested heavily on Aristotle and philosophical reasoning. Science was of the armchair variety, with no appreciation for experiment (to be provided by Bacon), for mathematical rigor (to be provided by Kepler), or for abstraction to fundamental principles (to be provided by Galileo). The enlightenment or Reformation had not occurred, and people were not comfortable thinking "outside the box".Many people don't realize it, but Galileo's earliest and strongest opposition came from academia, not from the Church. In fact, the Church encouraged Galileo's early telescope investigations. But the academics had significant pull with the Church, Galileo was very abrasive, and eventually the Church turned against him. (His "Dialogues" didn't help, where his simple-minded "Simplicio" was an allegorical figure of the pope.)An accurate re-telling of Galileo's story might be helpful to your audience. The "scientists" of the day were wrong; based on Aristotle, they declared that the earth must be fixed. The theologians were wrong; they had accepted Aristotelianism and the science of the day, and they interpreted Scripture to fit these. BOTH the scientists and the theologians needed to go back to the drawing board and to re-examine their interpretations.

You've done the math much more carefully than I did. It looks like you did it correctly, your number is consistent with my crude estimates, so I think your answer is right. (My estimates gave me 0.1 - 1 mm for the diameter.)The main difference between the fluids that we have discussed is the viscosity; the density of all these fluids will be fairly similar to that of water. So if you can find a fluid with 10-20x the viscosity of water, you can do the experiment with 1-2 mm diameter spheres. This is reasonable; you could do demonstrations with BBs, lead shot, ball bearings (from Grainger or McMaster-Carr), glass beads (from a craft store), etc.

One of my hobbies in high school was spelunking in the limestone caves of southern Indiana, in the same limestone belt that extends into Kenticky and includes Mammoth Cave. Crawling through these caves, it struck my how ridiculous (or magical) the YEC flood would have been. These caves were deposited in limestone, a sedimentary rock with fossils, which would have been laid down in the flood. Then the limestone had to harden. Then the caves had to be dissolved out by the floodwater. Then the stalactites and stalagmites had to form thousands of times faster than their current growth rate implies (I don't know how a flood could accelerate or even cause speleothem growth?!?). You might ask how the Flood could do all these things.Another example is thick layers of coral (1000 feet or more thick in some coral reefs, I believe). Coral is formed from small living organisms that grow on the skeletons of their ancestors. Trying to accelerate their life cycle and growth rate thousands of times is ridiculous. Thus some YECs deny that these thick coral reefs even exist; they claim that these are just sedimentary deposits (from the Flood?) that LOOK like coral.You can find other examples, with links to lots of supporting details, on the page "100 Reasons the Earth is Old". There are more examples in Dan Wonderly's old (but good) book, "God's Time Records in Ancient Sediments". Dan taught Geology briefly at Grace College until fellow faculty member John Whitcomb got him fired because he was not YEC.

I'd encourage you to try to get some of these folks to read John Lennox' book "Seven Days that Divide the World". Lennox is extremely kind and gentle, is theologically very conservative, and has lots of experience talking with YECs. I'd be interested to see how your group reacts to his book.

You guys might also like Glenn Morton's story, "Why I left young earth creationism". Glenn was trained in geophysics by YECs, went into the petroleum industry, and had to deal with the fact that the geologic evidence did not fit with his YEC training.

Yes, Glenn took his pages down in early 2013. He is tired of the OEC-YEC debate. For the past few years he has been much more interested in the global warming debate. Glenn rejects anthropogenic global warming and is convinced that mainstream science is being used to club dissenters over the head and force them into conformity. He saw his creationist pages being used the same way against YECs, and didn't like this. (Though Glenn is firmly convinced that YEC is wrong, he is a libertarian Texan and believes that parents should have the right to indoctrinate their kids with falsehoods like YEC if they wish.)Glenn's pages were preserved for awhile on another site, but it no longer seems to work: http://erv-faq-for-creationists.wikispaces.com/...spageshomeBut you can always use the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to find his old pages, if you wish.Edited by kbertsche, : No reason given.

Faith, below is an easy-to-understand example that I use in my talk, "How Old Is God's Creation?" I'll try to present it as briefly as possible:1) The "Pacific Plate" is currently moving in a NW direction at about 3.1 inches per year (measured by satellite).
2) Kilauea is an active volcano in Hawaii, on the Pacific Plate.
3) As one travels NW along the Hawaiian Island chain, extending to the Emperor Seamounts which extend toward Japan, one sees a chain of dormant volcanos. Each one dates progressively older (by argon-argon dating, which is a very accurate dating method for igneous rock). Near Japan the date of these volcanos is about 80 million years.
4) We hypothesize that there is a thin "hot spot" in the mantle underneath Kilauea, with the Pacific Plate moving over it. This hot spot has created all of these volcanos over the past 80 million years.
5) Based on this assumption, we can calculate the historical rate and direction of motion of the Pacific Plate. We find that it has moved at a rate of 2.6 to 3.6 inches per year, with a direction varying between NW and WNW. This historical rate of motion nicely brackets the present rate of motion.
6) Thus the Hawaiian Island and Emperor Seamount chain reveals not only an old age for the earth, but also a long history of how things were formed. {BTW, YECs often claim that historical events are not real science because they cannot be repeated. But here is a clear example of a historical event (formation of volcanic islands) that has been repeated many, many times over the past 80 million years.}If you want to claim that tectonic motion did not begin until after the Flood, it seems to me that you only have a couple of directions to go, both of which are problematic for you:
1) you could claim that the rest of the Hawaiian Island and Emperor Seamount chain was not formed by the hypothesized Pacific Plate motion over a hot spot. But if this is so, why the nice linear progression in Ar-Ar dates of the island chains? And why does the apparent historical rate of motion match the present rate? This would mean that God has placed not only a false apparent age, but also a false apparent history in the rocks!
2) you could claim that the Pacific Plate motion in the past was about 30,000 times higher than at present, so that all of these islands could have been formed after the Flood. But you would also have to invoke an "accelerated nuclear decay" (or something equivalent) of about the same factor of 30,000 to explain why the Ar-Ar dates extend back to 80 million years. And you would also have to explain why the Pacific Plate motion slowed down a factor of 30,000 in the recent past, and why the nuclear decay rate slowed a factor of 30,000 to its present value. Not only that, you would have to explain why and how both of these unrelated phenomena changed in lockstep, exactly the same amount and at exactly the same rate, so that when we look at the Ar-Ar dates it appears as if the Pacific Plate has been moving at a fairly constant rate for the past 80 million years. Again, this would mean that God has placed a false apparent history in the rocks.Bottom line: if we are honest with the evidence, we will realize that the record of nature not only gives evidence of age, but also of history. This is very difficult to fit into a YEC view without implying that God was deceptive.

Good question! I have no idea what is normally done for curricula videos. But I can give you some ideas on what is normally done for scholarly writing in both science and theology; I would suggest doing some sort of abbreviated version of these for your videos.Scholarly papers can be written in a number of different styles, all of which are somewhat different. Most of my scientific papers have followed the JACoW style, but their style guide doesn't clearly say anything about references to websites or other electronic resources. Neither does the American Physical Society style guide. In professional scientific publications, websites are rarely if ever referred to.But scholarly papers in the humanities sometimes refer to websites. In the past many disciplines used Chicago or Turabian style, but apparently the most widely used style for the humanities today is APA Style (this is what I used for my most recent seminary papers). Here are the pertinent sections from the APA style guide:

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Citing an Entire Web Site

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It is necessary to list your date of access because web postings are often updated, and information available on one date may no longer be available later. If a URL is required or you chose to include one, be sure to include the complete address for the site. (Note: The following examples do not include a URL because MLA no longer requires a URL to be included.)

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Remember to use n.p. if no publisher name is available and n.d. if no publishing date is given.

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Editor, author, or compiler name (if available). Name of Site. Version number. Name of institution/organization affiliated with the site (sponsor or publisher), date of resource creation (if available). Medium of publication. Date of access.

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The Purdue OWL Family of Sites. The Writing Lab and OWL at Purdue and Purdue U, 2008. Web. 23 Apr. 2008.

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Felluga, Dino. Guide to Literary and Critical Theory. Purdue U, 28 Nov. 2003. Web. 10 May 2006.

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A Page on a Web Site

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For an individual page on a Web site, list the author or alias if known, followed by the information covered above for entire Web sites. Remember to use n.p. if no publisher name is available and n.d. if no publishing date is given.

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"How to Make Vegetarian Chili." eHow. Demand Media, n.d. Web. 24 Feb. 2009.

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For a video curriculum, I would use some sort of abbreviated version of the APA style. At a minimum you should probably include the name of the Wikipedia article (in quotes), the name Wikipedia (in italics), and the date that you accessed Wikipedia. Edited by kbertsche, : No reason given.

FYI, the best descriptions that I've seen on these topics are: The Clockwork Image by Donald MacKay. (Or alternate link). This book is long out of print, but I highly recommended it. The author was a British evangelical Christian, and the book describes science from a Christian perspective. This book contains an extremely good and very understandable multi-chapter description of science. It is probably the best description of science that I have ever seen. If you can pick up a used copy, it might be helpful for both you and your audience.The article "What is Science?" by Helen Quinn, published in Physics Today. Helen is a very good scientist and is interested in science education.