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Author | Topic: 101 evidences for a young age... | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5925 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
So many PRATTS, so little time (isn't that the definition of the "Gish Gallop"?). Rest assured that I'll get to the "Bunny Blunder" (that one's always good for hilarious laughs), but this one just goes way too far:
quote:Now, the rate that they cite is correct, but the conclusions are completely wrong because they were derived from the original claim. You see, that site or its source had doctored the original claim. Here's the original claim as propagated by that creationist vector, "Dr" Kent Hovind (transcription of his taped seminars as posted at Dr. Hovind's Creation Seminar 1, part b - The Age of the Earth, cont... (1998)): quote:This particular claim originated around 1979 and was apparently created by creationist Walter Brown who had read about a leap second being added about every 18 months and, not understanding what a leap second is about, though that meant that the earth was slowing down at a rate of one second every 18 months. Uh, no, it is that the standard second is from much earlier (in 1820, whose second is the International Standard second) and the earth has slowed down a bit since then, so the mean solar day is not 86,400 standard seconds (SI) long. Just like the revolutionary period of the earth (AKA "one year") is not an equal number of days long, so once every four years the calendar would be one day off, so we have a "leap year" and add a day. Does that mean that the year is slowing down by one day every four years? Of course not! So leap seconds, although used to compensate for the earth's rotation slowing down, do not mean that the earth is slowing down at the rate at which leap seconds are added. DUH? Within a few years, in 1982, that claim was soundly refuted (see "As the World Turns: Can Creationists Keep Time?" at As the World Turns | National Center for Science Education). While Walter Brown is the first example of a deliberately deceptive creationist that I had found (due to his infamous "rattlesnake protein" claim, which still exists as a footnote in his on-line book), even he had the good sense to drop his "leap second" claim after it had been refuted; I could not find any mention of it in his on-line book two decades later. Yet countless other creationists still use it unabated, such as Kent Hovind and Minority Report's chosen website, though that website has chosen to lie about the claim as well. FWIW, I wrote a complete response to this claim which is posted at No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.geocities.com/chastity403/questionevolution/solarsystem.html#A9. In writing that, I took Hovind's version of the claim and researched back through the creationist sources that he himself had cited. I'm "David Wise" among the responses there. Now, Brown and the creationists who followed him gave a rate of the earth's rotation slowing by one second every 12 to 18 months and based their extrapolation on that rate. But that rate is about 18,000 times greater than the actual rate of 2 milliseconds per day per century. That is why Minority Report's cited site is lying. Even though it gives the correct rate at which the earth's rotation is slowing, it then presents false conclusions based on a false rate that is about 18,000 times greater than the actual rate of 2 milliseconds per day per century. The site to which I had responded was questionevolution.com, though the answers to that site are at No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.geocities.com/chastity403/questionevolution/. You see, the author of questionevolution.com had originally invited comments on his postings and originally provided a link to those responses, but when he saw that everybody who had actually studied the subject knew that his claims were pure crap, he removed that link from his site. You see, his main claim was that "evolutionists" had no response to these claims, whereas "evolutionists" have always had responses, a fact that he had to cover up. Amazing how quickly creationists have to become liars in order to support their religion with creationism. So then, how long would the days have been way back when, given the correct rate at which the earth's rotation is slowing down? That site had asked how long the day was 1 billion years ago:
quote: Might I mention that the earth is a solid whereas Jupiter is gaseous. A solid would be far less likely to deform due to rotation than a gas would, so where's your "pancake" (AKA "pizza", depending on which creationist you just happen to reference). Now here's the beauty of it. Do the math and you will find that about 400 million years ago, in the Devonian (Parc national de Miguasha - Parcs nationaux - Spaq), the year would have been 400 days long (in case you didn't know, the current year is 365 days long, 366 days in a leap year). The coral shows that the year back then was indeed 400 days long. Two independent lines of evidence coming together to give the same results. So, (addressing Minority Report here, of course) your cited site gave the actual rate, but then presented the false conclusions of the original false claim whose premises it had chosen to hide. Uh, that's lying! So your religion depends on these claims, so then your religion depends on lies? And this would attract prospective converts to your lying religion ... how? OBTW, I'm a software engineer who for over a decade has been been working on a line of products that use GPS receivers. GPS time is the straight count of seconds since the "beginning of time" on midnight, 06 January 1980; UTC time (what you used to get by calling "time" on the telephone) is GPS time minus the current number of leap seconds, which is currently 15 -- ie, 15 leap seconds have been added since 06 Jan 1980. IOW, I work with leap seconds every day. Another side issue before comes from the "Religious Tolerance" site in Canada, in particular page, "A Failed Attempt to Dialog with Creation Scientists," (Unsuccessful dialog with young-earth creationists about an error) in which the author made a good-will effort to open an honest dialog with creationists. He compiled a list of 15 sites which repeat this false leap-second claim and contacted their webmasters informing them that the claim is false and precisely why. Since this claim is clearly in error, those creationists could not possibly not realize that the claim is false; it's not a difference of opinion nor of interpretation, but rather a clear unambiguous fact. He had hoped that once they saw that the claim was false, they would remove that claim, or at least amend it. He even saw it as a win-win situation, in which we would win by taking a falsehood out of circulation and creationists would win by improving the quality of their material. Unfortunately, he only got a few responses which either refused to accept that the claim is false (without addressing the facts), asked for more information, or simply thanked him for his interest. NONE of the sites made any changes. The author finally had to conclude that meaningful dialog is impossible. So that is the only conclusion that people must reach when trying to deal honestly with creationists. That creationists and their religion are only based on outright lies. Any comment on that, Minority Report? Please keep to the facts. Edited by dwise1, : No reason given. Edited by dwise1, : No reason given.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5925 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
Is it OK if I convert this into a SkepticWiki article? I feel that it deserves a wider audience. I can post it in your name if you like. Or credit you on the talk page. Or set you up an account ... You have my permission. Credit me or not, whichever you like. If you do post it in my name, please ensure that you post it accurately. Also, do you mean my post here or my more complete posting in response to questionevolution.com, the link to which I had included in my post here?
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5925 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
I do not doubt that the claim originated through a genuine misunderstanding of what a leap second was and what it meant -- Brown's references were two internal Air Force publications and a Reader's Digest article. Where the dishonesty comes in is when they continue to use that claim in spite of the truth long after they've been shown, repeatedly, that that claim is wrong and why it's wrong.
In this case, I was amazed at the outright deception being propagated by Don Batten. The conclusions of the claim are from its original form which was based on that genuine misunderstanding of leap seconds. But then either he or his creationist source (I'm sure that it was his source, since he was employing standard creationist scholarship practices of simply repeating other creationists' claims without any attempt to verify them) replaced the wrong rate with the correct one, thus creating a lie since those wrong conclusions have nothing to do with the correct rate. Ironically, Don Batten also wrote an article that was highly critical of Carl Baugh and his obviously bogus creationist claims: What About Carl Baugh? which is reposted by Glen Kuban at No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/paluxy/whatbau.html. He concludes that article with:
quote: Batten demonstrated there that he is fully aware of the detrimental effects of propagating bogus creationist claims. And yet he did not hestitate to do that same with this list of "101 evidences ... ".
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5925 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
quote: Ah yes! The Bunny Blunder! In 1984, a few years after I had started my "creation science" studies, I heard a presentation given by Fred Edwords in which he presented Morris' human population growth claim -- which Henry Morris had presented in his 1961 book, The Genesis Flood, and repeated several more times over the years. When Edwords then gave the model's predicted world population at various times in the ancient past, those figures were found to be ridiculously low. Since Edwords had taken his figures from David Milne's article (Creationists, Population Growth, Bunnies, and the Great Pyramid, Creation/Evolution Issue XIV, Fall 1984, pp. 1-5 -- Creationists, Population Growth, Bunnies, and the Great Pyramid | National Center for Science Education), I will quote from there:
quote: Needless to say, when Edwords presented those figures, it brought down the house, the audience was laughing so hard. The reason why Milne calls this claim "The Bunny Blunder" and why it is wrong is also given in that article:
quote: Now, to be truthful, Milne had arrived at his figures using Morris' rate of population growth and a "Garden of Eden" starting point and initial population, rather than Batten's stated rate and a "Noah's Flood" starting point and population. So we should take those parameters and plug them into the formula and see what the model reveals in that case. The formula for "pure-birth" population growth (as observed in fruit fly jars before the food starts to run out) is: P(n) = P(1 + r)**n where:
Since Batten wrote: "Less than 0.5% p.a. growth from six people 4,500 years ago ... ", our values for those parameters would be:
Now, at this point I wanted to compare the results from Batten's parameters with Milne's results from Morris' parameters, but I immediately ran into a snag. Milne was looking at the results on and before 2500 BCE, whereas Batten is only looking at that date and thereafter. Since 2500 BCE was when the Great Pyramid was built, then instead of it having been built by hand with a world population of 750 (including women and children), Batten offers us a world population of only six. For the dates before 2500 BCE, Batten really offers nothing. Except for an enigma. He has given us a date for The Flood of about 2500 BCE. Since this Flood was supposed to have been so cataclysmic as to completely reshape the surface of the earth and cause near-instantaneous plate movement, how is it that the Great Pyramid and the six pyramids that preceded it and the Sphynx and all those other cities and irrigation works spread out from Crete to the Indus River Valley are still there and did not get destroyed by The Flood? However, here are Batten's predicted populations for various dates, with actual populations for 1 CE on (using Morris' doubling dates) -- you might want to sanity-check them against what was happening in history:
Even without the absolutely ludicrous historical conclusions that this claim would require us to arrive at, we can plainly see that it does not match reality. Ie, it doesn't work. But what I find truly amazing is that Batten had never bothered to check his model, to plug in his parameters and see what results it would give him for this year. Futher Reading:Wikipedia "World Population" at World population - Wikipedia Wikipedia "World Population Estimates" at Estimates of historical world population - Wikipedia Wikipedia "Population growth" at Population growth - Wikipedia Wikipedia "Carrying Capacity" at Carrying capacity - Wikipedia Michael Olnick, An Introduction to Mathematical Models in the Social and Life Sciences, 1978, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co -- over several chapters, develops a model of population growth as it discussed several of the problems inherent in such models; creationists' "Bunny Blunder" is a "pure birth" model, the most navely simplistic and least accurate type of population growth model. Edited by dwise1, : table formatting
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5925 Joined: Member Rating: 5.2 |
To offer an analogy:
Let's say that I have a very accurate postal scale that can measure up to 10 ounces. So when I try to weigh myself on that postal scale, it tells me that I only weigh 10 ounces. So I publish those results and report on all forms that ask for my weight that I weigh 10 ounces and I repeatedly insist that I weigh 10 ounces. Since I am not an idiot, doing that would make me a liar. Those creationists who made and use those C-14 claims are also not idiots.
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