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.

The problem comes when an admin weighs in with a wall of text to prove our solar power denier correct. Honestly this shower have to be seen to be believed. The worst of it is that I'm a Christian, a Roman Catholic and a scientist which gives me a foot in both camps, yet the condemnation is strong. They're even banning pastors!

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!

There is one particular admin who is the bane of everyone's life. He continues to go on and on about "regurgitating pablum which you haven't critically examined" (this on molecular biology which he hasn't studied, doesn't understand and in reply to a molecular biologist ie me), "you haven't done your due diligence", "historiographically sound historicity of the scholastic method" and his very favourites "you lie", "you twist", "you misrepresent". He's "proved" that any small amout of energy from the sun that reaches us can't be used to show evolution doesn't viololate the 2LoT because chloroplasts die. Also that by definition, energy input into a system can only increase the entropy. I'm losing the will to live!

Keep up the will to live Trixie, there are still some people left on this little planet that act and think reasonably But, seriously, this admin you're talking about seems to have a problem with coherence. What is "historiographically sound historicity of the scholastic method" supposed to mean?

You tell me, he's even made it onto the pages of FSTDT because of his fondness for using every derivation of history in three lines and the one sentence.

Here's a wee taster from FSTDT by this joke of an admin

I've been dealing with that over the last year or two, with Granville Sewell. However, I didn't try very hard and mostly used it as a source of amusement. I suggest that you do likewise.It is quite impossible for somebody, even a mathematician, to understand 2LoT, if their religion requires that they not understand it.Edited by nwr, : fix typo

At least they are consistent. Most creationists are also global warming denialists.Edited by nwr, : fix typo

Last night someone who was arguing for a 6000 year old earth and a global flood supported their position by linking to information on ice ages dated to 11,000 and 14,700 years ago. Another genius tried to cast doubt on carbon-dating by pointing out problems specific to K/Ar dating then linking to a page which exposed the errors in the usual arguments against carbon-dating, so refuting himself.Also we've had demands for the genealogy and trade records for the Neolithic period in Northern Ireland.Edited by Trixie, : No reason given.

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.

And the crucial point is that the light is harvested by plants and converted into chemical energy stores. Then the food chain happens.

I actually built a solar furnace for my inorganic chemistry final project using a 27 cm x 27 cm Fresnel lens (the kind used in overhead projectors). I focused the sunlight to about a 2 cm circle and put a thermocoupler connected to a Microlab system directly into the beam. The temperature went to 915 deg C (1680 deg F) in about 1 minute! By heating a steel ball bearing with the beam, I was able to calculate that the furnace produced about 20 Watts of power (~270 watts / sq meter). And this was end of April / early May, so the sun wasn't even at its peak then.But it didn't even occur to me to try it at night.

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I actually built a solar furnace for my inorganic chemistry final project using a 27 cm x 27 cm Fresnel lens (the kind used in overhead projectors). I focused the sunlight to about a 2 cm circle and put a thermocoupler connected to a Microlab system directly into the beam. The temperature went to 915 deg C (1680 deg F) in about 1 minute! By heating a steel ball bearing with the beam, I was able to calculate that the furnace produced about 20 Watts of power (~270 watts / sq meter). And this was end of April / early May, so the sun wasn't even at its peak then.
But it didn't even occur to me to try it at night.

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Is it not a shame that our cretin friends are blatantly denied funding? I mean - if they were given a spaceship they could increase the body of knowledge on sun by flying close during the night Even though I live in the country where cretins are a small minority, it is equally frustrating to encounter the same blatant lies week after week. It is as if they (the creationists) were coated with teflon - no amount of reasoning sticks.

Trixie, the persons you cited in this post seem as if they are truly ignorant. They have little or no scientific knowledge and get their information from piecing together stuff posted on creationist websites. In many ways, they are to be forgiven and patiently corrected. For the most part, I don't believe they are actually interested in the science behind what they are discussing but instead they are victims of this false dichotomy that the radical fundies (redundant adjective?) are pushing. "If evolution is true then the entire Bible is false" or "Since the Bible is true, then evolution is false and the Earth was created in 6 literal days" is the mentality that drives most people to defend creationism - not the science behind it.While many on this forum would ridicule that type of thinking, I understand it and don't necessarily think it is something to be criticized. What is to be criticized is those behind this false information; people such as this admin you mentioned. They are arrogant, self-righteous, condescending as well as ignorant - traits that are the exact opposite of what a Christian should be. I am not clear what truly motivates this group; it is not the love of science, neither is it the quest for truth, and I would think that defending the Christian faith would require a different approach (ie. not telling lies, not being arrogant and self-righteous).As a fellow Christian who accepts evolution, I believe what we need to fight against is this false dichotomy that is pushed by the fundies. The trouble is that we are passionate about the science, while most of those in the creo camp are not; science is merely the medium. Thus much of the frustration ... some arguments are so fundamentally flawed it would take semesters of lecture to explain the reasons why the argument is flawed. And then they need the ability to understand and process that information (science is not everyone's forte).So, I believe the real problem with the average creationist is not ignorance, but the belief in an either/or situation. This results in an infuriating attempt to defend the "either" because the "or" is so wrong. As long as people fear that acceptance of "the other side" eliminates or challenges their belief, they will remain ignorant. Remove that fear, and it allows them to open their minds to the truth. Try approaching things in that way (at least mentally, the science is still the evidence) and see if it is less frustrating.