Yeah, I've been there when the "Gish Gallop" turns into a Gish stampede. Then on top of that, the forum's non-creationist moderator departed leaving only the creationist moderator who then ran rough-shod over every "evolutionist", suspending them on the slightest pretext.
Still, while we're warned against casting our pearls before swine, at least there's some satisfaction in knowing that it irritates the swine.
Here's a thought: I'll give you a Hovind claim that you can toss to them and ask them what they think of it. Then have them do the math so that they can see for themselves that the claim is dead wrong.
Here's the link to a draft of my page on that claim:
No webpage found at provided URL: http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/solar_mass.html -- I don't recommend linking them to the page because it's still rather rough. When you get down about half-way, you'll have to view the source to make sense of it, which from that point on is mainly notes that I had gathered at that point. I had to post it (without links to it) in a hurry to support discussion of this claim in another forum and I haven't had to time to go back and do it right.
Basically, Hovind tries to support the "shrinking sun" claim by pointing out that the sun is losing 5 million tons of matter every second, which means that 5 billion years ago the sun would have been so massive that it would have sucked the earth in.
Here is the first form of his claim (on my draft page), from a radio interview on Southwest Radio Church,
Welcome - SWRC, 13 Sep 2002 (my transcription taken from the audio at
Page not found - SWRC at 8 minutes 53 seconds into the broadcast):
quote:
For instance, the sun is burning, of course, and it's burning an enormous amount of fuel.
It's losing about 5 million tons every second.
Well, if the earth is billions of years old that creates a problem, because you couldn't go back 5 billion or 20 billion years like they say with the sun constantly getting larger and larger and heavier and heavier.
The sun's gravity would of course become real great and would suck the earth in.
Plus the sun would be bigger and burn the earth up.
It can't possibly be true that it's billions of years old.
The second form is from his seminar tape videos that used to be on his website a few years ago (
not on my draft page, since I didn't find it until afterwards). From Hovind's Seminar tape # 7, Q&A, starting at 0:37:40 and ending at 0:39:54:
quote:
Next question: Is the sun shrinking?
For quite a few years creationists use the argument that the shrinking sun proves the earth is not billions of years old.
I think it is still a valid argument. I do not use it in my seminar -- uh, in my seminar part one about the age of the earth -- , because there are so many other good evidences.
The problem is nobody is positive of what's causing the sun to burn.
There are two theories about what causes the sun to burn.
One theory says the sun is burning by nuclear fusion, in which case it could burn for billions of years and you wouldn't see much change in the diameter, because a small amount of matter produces an enormous amount of heat.
The other theory says the sun is burning by gravitational collapse and is just, you know, burning up -- OK, the pressure produces the heat to keep it burning.
All we know is that we have observed the sun for several hundred years ever since trigonometry was developed and we've observed the sun is shrinking. Both in polar diameter and in equitorial diameter the sun is getting smaller.
Now it does seem to oscillate up and down, you know, it swells and contracts, it swells and contracts, but the overall general trend is towards shrinking.
This is what's observed.
Now if somebody wants to assume that, well, maybe this is just, you know, part of a bigger trend and it used to be getting larger in the past, you can assume that but you don't have scientific data to back it up.
Secondly, it's never been observed, nobody's ever seen this.
And thirdly, you'd got a problem: where's this extra material come from?
All you got to do is step outside and look up. Obviously the sun is burning.
It's losing 5 million tons every second.
You can't just keep losing 5 million tons a second, pretty soon you start to lose weight.
And so the sun is losing this mass -- 5 million tons every second -- which means it used to be larger.
And it used to be more massive.
If you increase the mass of the sun, going backwards in time for several billion years, you start to create a problem with the gravitational balance between the earth and the sun. It's going to suck the earth in and destroy everything.
So those who would like us to believe it's 4.6 billion years old I think have a very serious problem.
I don't know, the shrinking sun might only limit it to a few billions years. I don't know.
But it certainly is obvious the sun is shrinking.
Now, 5 million tons of matter lost every second is a lot of mass. And if you extend that over 5 billion years, then that is a huge amount of mass, something to the order of 10
24 tons. But since the sun's total mass is something to the order of 10
27 tons (off the top of my head; refer to my page for more detailed figures, or else do the math yourself) then that means that the total mass lost in 5 billion years only amounts to a few hundredths of one percent of the sun's total mass. A miniscule amount that would "suck the earth in" by maybe around 100,000 miles. Which is an insignificant distance, since the distance from the earth to the sun varies by about 3 million miles every single year (on 02 January, in the dead of winter, we'll be at perihelion, the point of our orbit that is closest to the sun -- please notice how broiling hot it is outside on that day -- and on 04 July we'll be at aphelion, the farthest distance from the sun -- on that day please go outside and notice how freezing cold it is).
When I tried to get Hovind to clarify this claim and to say what he had figured the ancient sun's mass to have been when he did the math, he did everything he could to avoid answering, even to the point of twice trying to pick a fight with me over my AOL screen name (the same as it is here).
If you post Hovind's claims on that other forum, I'd be curious to know what the response is. Of course, I would post the claims first in order to get the discussion going, then suggest that someone do the math, then present the math to them.
In the original discussion about 5 years ago, I presented my results and one creationist said I had done it wrong, that it was a percentage loss (which it's not; it's arrived at by measuring the sun's energy output per second and then calculating how much mass had to be converted to energy via fusion to account for that energy output -- ironically, Hovind seems to believe that the sun burns by combustion and that combustion results in the annihilation of the fuel being burned). So he wrote a QuickBASIC program to calculate it but ran into programming problems (when his loop counter got too big, BASIC changed it to floating point such that adding 1 no longer changed the value). He refused all help except for my suggestion that he embed his loops in order to keep the control variables small enough. When his program finally ran, his results were even smaller than mine. Now he decided that Hovind must have used a different method, so I suggested that he ask Hovind and gave him Hovind's contact info, assuring him that Hovind really wanted people to call him. But the creationist never would. Actually, I recall that he had contacted Hovind much earlier on and Hovind's response offered no useful information; I'll have to dig through my archives for that one.
{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world. (from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber,
No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)
Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.(Sherlock Holmes in
The Hound of the Baskervilles)
Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield,
Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)
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