Creationist Baumgardner: one of the top mainstream mantle/plate tectonics simulators!

UCLA, Los Alomos, funded by NASA, arguably the best mainstream plate tectonics simulation code, commented on in New Scientist!And he believes that plate tectonics all happened quickly during the flood. http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/212.asp

EdgeI fully support Baumgardners approach. I really do believe that Scripture can guide us on issues of historical geology. But that wont stop me admitting if our approach fails dismally.I had been planning on finding out who some of these guys really were but hadn't got around to it.I was pleased to discover Baumgardner's mainstream-ness because I myself am a mainstream sceintist who will probably remain that way too.For me having someone like Baumgardner gives me confidence that our POV is in the right ballpark. It confirms to me that the nay-sayers have as much of an agenda as we do. That's how I think about it.

R. PlanetI took it as implicit that NASA didn't use Baumgardner's spped up versions! AIG could have been clearer for the uninitiated - I agree. All of us knew that implicitly though.I also have to use evolutionary terminology in my mainstream publications (homology etc). In my lectures I call (distant) homology as 'homology/taxonomic realtionships'. That is how I get around the problem in my field. I can't see any way of Baumgardner getting arond using 'millions of years' in his work and still get published. I don't have a problem with Baumgardner doing that. The prevailing model and bias is a reality. I and he are obviously realists.

R. PlanetI wont deny that the reporting in some creationist books may incorrectly suggest that Baumgardner's catastrophics is accepted mainstream. But it is true that his computer model is widely recognized as very good. In what way he gets his runaway subduction from it is unknown to me but I can imagine that he tweaks parameters, some quite different from current values, and shows that you can get a runaway effect. For us that tweaking of eg mantle temperatures comes from acclerated radiodecay for example.Correct - I avoid discussing whether the homology/taxonomic relationships are due to common descent (except if we are talking closely related species - within families or genera). These are advanced courses I teach and the students already believe in common descent so they don't need more of it from a creationist! That is one of the few points where my scientific framework for life on earth actually effects the way I teach. But it makes no difference to 99.5% of what I teach.Ethics? Not really. I'm not going to get on a creationist soap box on every paper I publish. I want my work to be judged for it's scientific validity in the relevant field which is not evolutionary. There is only one paper I have published which could be construed to be on an evolutionary topic and I and my collaborators speculated on the convergent or otherwise origin of a protein fold - and it just happened to be completely consistent with creation or evolution.

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[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 07-19-2002]

Baumgardner is like me - a mainstream scientist during the day and a covert creationist at night! (I am more covert than he is.) We are forced into it. From every indication I can get Baumgardner seems to be a very well respected mainstream scientist. In 1997 he was still working at Los Alomos - I have no idea what he is doing now.The nay-sayer agenda is automatic naturalism.

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[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 07-19-2002]

EdgeYes runaway subduction is our standard model. We think it is in the ballpark. You can rule it out if you want but that's like ruling out Schrodinger becasue his equaiton didn't account for spin. It is early days, runaway subduction is a hint in the right direction. It's not the be all and end all.If you weren't so antagonistic instead you would use the boiling away as a constraint on the model and say - oops - maybe not all of the oceran floor was subducted, perhaps it happened over decades etc etc. Your approach is very much overly simplistic. We already know the whole shebang wasn't completed until after the tower of Babel. I would not insert plate tectonics into a one year period like you are trying to force us to do. That gives time for the energy to disipate not even mentioning errors in the estimate of the energy.

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[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 07-21-2002]

EdgeThose points raised on talk.origins are clearly very antgonistic and seem to have the same over simplification bias. I'm not a geophysicist. Has Baumgardner ever rebutted?

R. Planet True - but I wouldn't be suprprised if he has tenure - my bread and butter depends on my getting the next grant currently!

wjI plan to study Joe's details and how exreme and unrealistic these viscosities are. Whatever the case Baumgardner is a mainstream geologists of excellent repute. Maybe Baumgardner is preperared to push his model to an extreme becasue he suspects that something extreme generated this effect (eg accelerated decay). I can guarentee that he will not require multiple 'miracles'.From my mainstream readings I am aware that nobody can model the detials of plate tectonics very well and that Baumgardner is at the top of the pack of those who play this game. In his spare time he has prodded his work in a creationists direction and I certainly do not expect it to be flawless.

I haven't got into the maths yet wj.I personally suspect that the miracle will be an impulse of radioheating. Sure, God also prepared Noah for that mission on the ark. It was the world's most amazing adventure ever. I love the Apollo program but Noah was bigger even though earth bound.

^ Yes Baumgardner hasn't played the academic game as you and I are, true. But there is a lot of good long-term work that goes on at these institutes where the publicaiton records are frequently not what we would call stunning. A lot of these places do on-going development and operational work to the detriment of their publication records. Becasue they are not caught up in the game they do not necesarily send of a manuscript everytime they put 2 and 2 together like we do.[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 08-07-2002]

^ Venus is vaugely suggestive of Baumgardnert's thesis - I doubt it was his killer point or his only point!

Well, my thread title has theword 'simulator' in it Joe. He is responsible for one of the world's best tectonic simulation engines.[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 08-15-2002]

JoeHow can I possibly disentangle Baumgardner's contributions from that of his co-authors?! And why belittle computational contributions? I am a theoretical/computational biologist and I will defend my work as genuine science any day anyone wants to take me on!Baumgardner is a demonstratably well respected simulator of plate tectonics. Do you really disagree with that?[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 08-18-2002]

Randy et alI've explained that our confidence in Scripture comes from outside of science. We have hints of how mainstream sceince has got it wrong and how the flood etc may have happened but we are not claiming to have all of the answers.