Infuriating arguments

I've seen that kind of thing before (as have we all), where the creationist or the creationist's creationist source had glommed onto some tidbit of an actual fact and then misconstrued it completely, sometimes by mixing it up with something entirely different, and now the creationist you're talking with is completely convinced of that gross misconstrual.For example, I once got an email from a creationist of high school age who had just been taught in Christian summer camp that the sun loses half its mass every year. My response was to point out several consequences were that to be true and to demonstrate that none of those consequences are found to exist. He ended up realizing that that claim isn't true, plus my searching for some trace of that claim led me to Kent Hovind's infamous solar-mass-loss claim. Now, it is true that the sun loses a lot of mass due to the fusion reaction in its core (about 4.6 million tons per second), though it is miniscule compared to the sun's total mass. It is also true that it is in the sun's core that this fusion reaction, and hence the loss of mass, occurs. It is also true that the sun's core, which accounts for a small part of its volume (either about 1.5% or 15%; I can't remember which), contains half the sun's mass. Somehow, a creationist had gathered those facts and, having no understanding of the science, got it all jumbled up and confused everything together into a claim that the sun loses half its mass every year.So your creationist heard or read about the earth's atmosphere filtering out some of the sun's radiation (eg, the filtering out of a lot of UV light by the ozone layer) and had misconstrued that to mean that it filters out all the radiated energy from the sun; more likely than not, he had heard that from another creationist. In either case, he's understanding of science is so meager that he cannot perform the simplest of tests of that claim to find how mind-bogglingly bogus it is.That the earth is not a closed system is supported not only by the myriad observations of solar energy entering it, but also by the energy leaving it. Here in Southern California we will get our "Santa Ana Winds", strong dry, usually hot, winds which blow in from the desert. During Santa Ana conditions, humidity plummets and the night skies are completely clear. That can make the nights can be much colder than normal through radiation cooling. During the daytime the earth absorbs heat from the sun and then radiates it off at night. Normally, clouds and moisture in the air will reflect part of that heat back down, or at least trap it kind of like a blanket would. But in the clear-sky Santa Ana conditions, there's nothing to stop or trap that heat radiating out and the night is much colder.And, yes, all we can see of anything is the light it either emits or is reflected off of it. But my question is what point or claim your creationist was trying to make based on that simple fact.And I would be tempted to ask, since evolution is just the accumulative results of life doing what life normally does, then if evolution violates the laws of thermodymanics, so would life itself. Which means that the creationist's case is that life cannot possibly exist. I believe we may be able to find a few examples that would contradict that conclusion.

Well, unfortunately that is how Christians roll when they acquire power.Years ago I was on a Yahoo groups forum that had multiple moderators from both sides and everything ran smoothly. Then the moderators started dropping out until all that was left was one single creationist moderator. He became a tyrant who allowed the creationists to post anything and suspend their opponents just for asking a creationist to try to support one of his claims. Earlier this year, I signed onto a Christian-run forum where I was not only suddenly banned without any kind of warning or explanation, but the topic I had opened was deleted and all my posts in other topics were deleted. Not only was any trace of my very existence eliminated, but attempts to connect to their site with the browser trying to log me in automatically result in a 404 page: site does not exist.That kind of gross misconduct and abuse of power is exactly what I would expect to see should Christianity seize political power. May that never happen!

Actually, I have come across that one before. In one of the books by Dr. Henry Morris, one of the founders of the ICR, a co-creator of "creation science", "The Father of Flood Geology", and a PhD Hydraulic Engineering. He is also apparently the source of most of their thermodynanics claims, since his partner-in-crime, Duane Gish, is a PhD Biochemistry. In the forward his book, The Age of the Earth, Brent Dalrymple described his first introduction to creationism as being a lecture visit Gish and Morris made to the US Geological Survey circa 1975. Even then, they were making their thermodyamics claims and much of the conversations the scientists had with them centered around trying to explain to the creationists exactly how they were getting it wrong. And Gish and Morris did learn from that ... they learned to avoid talking with scientists.I'll have to track it down, but Morris seemed to be drawing from the idea of equating heat with "waste energy", the energy that cannot be put to work within a system, with entropy. From that, he concluded that as we would add more heat to a system, as the sun does to the earth, then we would be increasing the entropy, not decreasing it. He even threw in some equations to support his claim. While I don't have formal training in thermodynamics, I'm sure that he's oversimplifying and making false equivalencies. Just because waste energy shows up as heat does not mean that all heat is waste energy. It is obvious that the incoming heat from the sun does do a lot of work, not the least of which is to drive our planet's weather systems, which in turn can produce a lot of mechanical energy. And with his training and work experience (teaching engineering and applied science in the university), Morris should have known better.