|
Register | Sign In |
|
QuickSearch
EvC Forum active members: 45 (9208 total) |
| |
anil dahar | |
Total: 919,516 Year: 6,773/9,624 Month: 113/238 Week: 30/83 Day: 6/3 Hour: 0/0 |
Thread ▼ Details |
|
Thread Info
|
|
|
Author | Topic: Earth science curriculum tailored to fit wavering fundamentalists | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 6077 Joined: Member Rating: 7.3 |
Quick question: Am I missing the typical "quote" button that bookends text with the quote tags? Can't seem to find one anywhere and it's a pain to type them in.
Somebody here typically gives new-comers a quick tutorial on the BBcodes used here. They're very much like HTML tags, only they use square brackets instead of angle brackets. A quick and simple solution: if you see something in a post that you want to know how to do (eg, quote boxes), then click on the Peek button. That will display that message with the BBcode tags visible. Go ahead and try it with this message.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 6077 Joined: Member Rating: 7.3 |
Copy-and-paste is what I always do. But I do know what you mean by Reply buttons, though when I use them I still have to do a lot of editing and cut-and-paste to break it up into addressable chunks.
When you have written a message using codes, you should view it by use of the Preview button first so that you can spot and correct any codes that didn't work as you expected. You can always go back and edit your own messages, but it's better if you don't have to do that too much. Edited by dwise1, : Using the Preview button.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 6077 Joined: Member Rating: 7.3 |
Welcome. Very noble plan. Your personal qualities, having come out of that community, should make your contributions much more valuable than if you were an out-sider (more on this below). Some additional resource recommendations:
As I said earlier, the fact that you have come out of the same community as your intended audience should make your contributions much more valuable than if you were an out-sider. You know from personal experience how they view creationism and its relationship to their religious beliefs. I had entered into the fray in the late 1980's thinking that they only needed to be shown that the claims are false and so was totally unprepared for the vicious reactions I got. I learned the hard way that they believe that their faith depends utterly on "creation science" claims being true, such that if the earth is shown to be older than 10,000 years then Scripture would have no meaning (ICR's John Morris as reported at the 1986 International Conference on Creationism). Unlike me, you are going in knowing what they think is at stake. It is a sad fact that the majority of youth raised on fundamentalism are leaving the faith, often leaving religion altogether. I've seen estimates ranging from 60% to 80%. Going to college or even to a public high school is a major factor, though not for the trumped-up claim that those schools are "anti-God". My own conceit, which I believe you may share, is that exposure to what evolution and the other sciences really are and what they really say triggers the "creation science" booby-trap to destroy their faith. However, I have also seen it argued that the humanities, especially philosophy and English literature, are much more to blame, since they shatter the fundamentalist's belief that there is only one way to view the world and teach him how to start to see things from different perspectives. There are also the problems inherent in taking fundamentalist teachings too much to heart as teenagers so often will do; many of the testimonals in ex-Christian forums attest to the mental and emotional anguish they suffered not only from that life-style but also from the fears it creates (eg, what it meant for their own salvation that the Fruits of the Spirit were being withheld from them). Whatever specific causes of that hemorrhaging of youth from the fundamentalist communities, it is clear that those communities' current inability to maintain a state of ignorance plays a significant role. I believe we are in agreement that their false teachings about the world (AKA "creation science", et al.) require that they keep themselves and their children in ignorance of the truth. Keeping themselves in ignorance is the easy part, since they have learned how to monitor and censor their own thoughts, knowing when they are getting too close to learning the truth so that their defense mechanisms can kick in and close their minds. But their children are at especial risk because they have no defense mechanisms yet. Their children trust what they've been told and they actually believe it, navely as all children do. The only way to keep their children's faith safe is to keep them ignorant, to shield them from the world. That used to be easy to do when those religious communities could isolate themselves geographically and block contact with the outside world, or at least be able to filter everything coming into the community. As you just testified to us, they chose everything that you were taught and blocked you from secular music and all sources of news from the outside (TV, radio, newspapers). But as they moved out into more integrated neighborhoods (ie, having neighbors of different faiths) and became more involved in society at large (eg, working for and with others), that became harder to do. Now with the Internet, they have lost far more control over what information and ideas their children have access to. So then, as you have described, your older relatives have learned to avoid learning and to suppress any curiosity, whereas your younger relatives have not learned those necessary fundamentalist skills yet. As a result, your younger relative are more receptive and open-minded. But what will happen when they come to realize that they've been lied to all their lives? Or at the very least, after having been taught all their lives that if the earth is indeed older than 10,000 years then Scripture has no meaning, God either does not exist or should not be worshipped, and the only alternative is to become a hedonistic atheist (or similar fake consequences), what do you expect them to do? And given the outrageously false ideas that fundamentalists have about atheism and atheists, how would you expect them to behave as "atheists"? So while you are trying to educate them about science and the truth about "creation science", are you also planning to discuss with them the consequences of them basing their faith on contrary-to-fact claims and what the real consequences should be as opposed to the nonsense consequences they had been booby-trapped with? Just raising the questions in case you hadn't thought about that yet.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 6077 Joined: Member Rating: 7.3 |
The Gish Gallop is primarily a dirty debate trick: in a very short time, blast your opponent with far more false claims than he could possibly respond to properly in the few minutes the debate format allows him. As you know from experience, it can take tens of minutes, even more than a hour, to expose and explain the falsehood of one 5-second "creation science" lie. In one minute, the creationist can hit you with 12 such claims and the debate format only gives you maybe 20 minutes to respond. You might be able to respond to one of the claims, but the audience will walk away thinking of the 11 that you "couldn't explain". Of course, that only works in a verbal exchange, since in a written exchange you have the time to research each claim and respond to it. That is why, as I have found, creationists try to avoid written exchanges like the plague or else have to resort to other dirty tricks (which I have seen done far too many times).
When your friend's brother started using it, I don't know whether it was in emulation of what he had seen done by the pros, or that he has had experience sparring with non-creationists and had used it before (likely), or that his knowledge of the claims is only sound-bite deep (highly likely). For example, an atheist acquaintance who had very little experience with "creation science" told me of his encounter with a local creationist activist and showed me a letter from that creationist which was highly insulting, mocking, and filled with false claims (a gallop?). When I contacted that creationist, at first he tried to treat me the same way, but the moment he realized that I knew something about the subject then butter couldn't melt in his mouth he was sweet-talking me so -- though he also started trying to disengage and would try to avoid discussing creationism by any means necessary, including incessant lying. His common tactic would be ask me an "impossible question", one designed to be unanswerable, and insist emphatically that he really want the answer, but when I did give him the answer and ask to discuss it with him, suddenly he lost all interest and then throw another "impossible question" at me. Having been a "fellow traveller" of the "Jesus Freak Movement" of circa 1970 (many friends and acquaintances converted while I observed that culture up close), I had become very familiar with their proselytizing training materials, mainly tracts depicting "witnessing" to non-believers and converting them (a few Chick Pubs tracts used the same format, like "Big Daddy?", both the original and Hovind's remake). Mainly, you were to try to knock them off balance by hitting them with questions that they cannot answer or with "facts" that contradict what they believe and then when you have softened them up and made them vulnerable, you start to feed them your proselytizing spiel. That was what those "impossible questions" were supposed to have done to me. And when used in person, that is what a form of the Gallop is supposed to do. But that last possibility, "that his knowledge of the claims is only sound-bite deep", is far too common. They get fed all these claims, but they don't understand them. They'll read books and web pages and go to classes all for the purpose of "gathering ammo" to use in their street proselytizing, but without understand any of it. They can usually get away with it because their intended victims are as ignorant as they, but when they encounter someone knowledgeable then that can devastate them, as Answers in Genesis has warned creationists. Very early on (CompuServe in the late 1980's), I adopted the approach of taking a creationist's claim seriously, or at least at face value, and to try to discuss it with him, in the process of which he would discover it to be false and would then do the right thing. Yeah, I was pretty nave back then. I certainly was not prepared for the vicious hostility of their responses. But besides their false beliefs that their faith depended on "creation science" being true, I also sensed that a lot of their hostility was to try to cover up the fact that they had absolutely no idea what they were talking about . So then to your particular problem. Certainly, you need to get him to concentrate on one single claim and you both need to follow it to the end. I would most certainly advise that you do as I would do, take his claim at face value and discuss it with him and examine the facts. If I were the one talking with him and he finally informed me that he really didn't understand the claim himself, then I would ask him why he would do such a thing and how could he have trusted that claim if he couldn't even understand it, etc. And I would continue to discuss it with him, leading him though an explanation of the actual science. Since he would undoubtedly break off that discussion prematurely, I would voice disappointment and then start over with another of his claims, and so on. Of course, since you are the "boots on the ground", exactly how you deal with him must be at your discretion. That paper is by yet another creationist MD, like Michael Denton who, after receiving criticism of his anti-evolution book, stated that he realized that he actually knew far less on the subject that he had thought he knew. You seem to have a handle on his claims. I'm much better with young-earth PRATTs. If he tries to hit you with any of those, like the solar-mass-loss claim or the claim that the earth's rotation is slowing down very rapidly (it is slowing down overall, but at several thousandths of the rate that creationists had miscalculated because they didn't understand leap seconds), then I could provide you with some material. Footnote:Sometimes a creationist retelling a claim he doesn't understand anything about can go really bad. I once received an email from a high-schooler asking about a claim a counselor at Christian camp had told him. It was the solar-mass-loss claim and this was my first exposure to it, though this one was very badly garbled. The counselor had told him that "every scientist knows" that every year the sun burns up half its mass. In my response, I went through several lines of reasoning and calculations to show him how absolutely ridiculous and contrary-to-fact that claim was. I pointed out that all the fusion reaction occurs in the sun's core which is about 1/8 of its volume (from memory; I could be off on that) but which contains half of the sun's mass. I suggested that either his counselor or somebody along the long "urban legend" chain that that claim had followed, like so many other creationist claims, had gotten the story mixed up by confusing "half the mass is in the core" with the amount of mass lost (actually, about 4.6 million tons per second). But in the process I found Kent Hovind's version, which has the loss rate somewhat right while grossly exaggerating the outcome (without showing any calculations, he has the ancient sun being so incredibly massive as to have sucked the earth in with its gravity, whereas the sun's gravity 5 billion years ago would have been marginally greater sucking the earth in about 70,000 miles closer).
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 6077 Joined: Member Rating: 7.3
|
... - there must be entire libraries of material that he reduced down to that one informative piece. They just don't realize how much knowledge is out there.
In the Religion & Science Forum of CompuServe circa 1989, a new creationist joined the discussion. He firmly believed in YEC, but unlike the rest of the creationists there he was honest. And he made an honest effort to engage in honest discussion. And he would stick out a discussion instead of using dirty tricks to cop out. And he was willing to admit when he was wrong about a claim. To get through to these folk, we have to figure out how to awaken them to the fact that unlike the GRI (60 years in existence and zero contributions to science), scientists have been crawling all over this planet spending BILLIONS on research and actually learning how things work. He lasted about a year as a creationist, at which point he switched to fighting "creation science". He told his story of what had caused him to switch. Part of that honesty was that whenever he made a claim, he was ready to try to back it up even if he had to go to the library and research it (the public didn't gain access to the Internet for a few years yet, so we had to go to the library). So one day he was in the university library researching a Gould quote which led him to a reference to a paleontology journal that described a fossil. That led him to the large room that was filled with such journals, which he started to read. Including detailed articles on fossils that "creation science" had taught him did not exist and could not exist. He realized that the evidence does exist and that there is a lot of it and that the scientists really did know what they were talking about. I'll have to try to find his web page describing that eureka moment if it's still up. And that's just paleontology!
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 6077 Joined: Member Rating: 7.3 |
At the end of this month, midnight of 30 June, we have a leap second event scheduled in which we will add a second to the day.
Does your intended audience hold to the "earth's slowing rotation as indicated by the adding of leap seconds" claim that was created circa 1979 apparently by Walter Brown and is still quite popular in the creationist community with Kent Hovind apparently being the current most popular vector: By Kent Hovind, transcript of one of his seminar tapes:
quote: By Scott Huse, one of Hovind's sources, 1983:
quote: By Wysong, Huse's source, 1981:
quote: By Walter Brown, the apparent ultimate origin of the claim, c. 1979:
quote:In another version of the same claim, Brown wrote "twenty-two years" instead of "2 years". I believe the latter to be a typo and that it should have read "22 years". Have you dealt with this PRATT yet? Because of the upcoming leap second event, I would assume that this PRATT will yet again rear its ugly head. Edited by dwise1, : Added more citations
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 6077 Joined: Member Rating: 7.3 |
Like I said, since the next leap-second event is coming up in five days, we may see creationists raise this PRATT again.
There are several factors causing the earth's rotational speed to change, tidal forces caused by the moon being a major one. Some even cause it to speed up (eg, events causing the earth's moment of inertia to decrease, such as when an earthquake causes part of the crust to lower -- think of a spinning ice skater pulling her arms in), but the overall effect is that the earth's spin is slowing down. The question is: at what rate is it slowing down? In the late 1970's the new NAVSTAR GPS system was a hot topic in technical and popular science magazines and people were hearing about leap seconds for the first time, even though they had been in use for the previous two decades ever since we went on the the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) standard based on atomic clocks. At the time, we were having to add a leap second about every 18 months. The creationist originator of this PRATT, most likely Walter Brown, mistook that to mean that earth was slowing down so fast that the length of the day was increasing by a second every 18 months and then extrapolated backwards from there. In reality, their claimed rate is about 7,000 times too great. We know exactly how fast the earth is slowing down, because that is being observed and measured directly and empirically by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS, since it is formerly the International Earth Rotation Service). It is the IERS that is responsible for announcing leap seconds. Leap seconds do not correct for the slowing of the earth's rotation, though that is a factor, but rather for the simple fact that the length of the day is currently not a whole number of seconds. The length of a second was established more than a century ago as 1-86,400th of a day, but since the length of the day has increased since then there's an extra fraction of a second that our clocks do not account for. That extra fraction of a second keeps adding up day after day until it becomes greater than half a second, at which point we need to correct the clock by adding a leap second. The goal is to keep noon UTC within half a second of astronomical noon. Even if the earth's rotation were to suddenly stop and remain the same forever after, we would still need to add leap seconds. A commonsense refutation of the claim might be to compare adding leap seconds to adding a day for leap year. The calendar can only deal in whole days, but the year is not a whole number of days, but rather is nearly a quarter of a day longer (ie, about 365.2425 days in a year). We add a day to the calendar every four years in order to correct for the error that accumulates, not because the length of the year is actually changing. The leap second claim surfaced circa 1979. Its classic definitive refutation was published in 1982: As the World Turns: Can Creationists Keep Time? by William M. Thwaites and Frank T. Awbrey, Creation/Evolution, Issue IX, Summer 1982, pp.18-22, reprinted at http://ncse.com/cej/3/3/as-world-turns. Despite it's having been soundly refuted more than three decades ago, the PRATT persists. In 2002, Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance attempted to engage creationists in dialog about various of their claims, starting with this one since it is so obviously and indisputably wrong. They contacted 15 web sites carrying this claim. Most ignored them and some responded but refused to make any corrections. They followed up for the next decade, finally concluding in 2011 that it wasn't worth it. The two-page essay starts at http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_dialog.htm. Here's a funny related story. A few years ago a young creationist, crazynutsx (or something like that), announced his new creation/evolution debate forum and invited us over. A few of us took him up on it. He really wasn't ready yet to take on that task. He was full of himself after having only learned what the creationists told him and knowing nothing of how those claims had been refuted long ago. He reminded me of a former creationist, Steve Rauch, who wrote:
quote:Eventually, crazynutsx abandoned his own forum and since then some Japanese youths hacked into it and have taken it over. One of crazy's last attempts was the leap-second PRATT. Since I was very familiar with it, he was at a distinct disadvantage. It didn't help that his method of "scholarship" was to plagiarize other sources and post it as his own work. At one point I insisted that he define a term that we were using, so he plagiarized a lengthy portion of an article to support his claims. What he had posted was straight from Thwaites' and Awbrey's classic 1982 refutation of the claim. I think it was at about that point that he abandoned his own forum. That forum is at http://creationvsevolution.freeforums.org .
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 6077 Joined: Member Rating: 7.3 |
I've never heard that before about a saline solution interfering with dating methods. Why don't you answer him?
Because we operate by standards quite different than creationists'. We cannot simply spout nonsense that we make up in our heads, but rather we need to found the sources of the claim and the scientific sources or ideas that they are misquoting and misrepresenting. It is more difficult for us to follow this straight and narrow path instead of the creationists' wide and winding one, but we find the results to be much more reliable. You should watch and learn.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 6077 Joined: Member Rating: 7.3 |
You do need to find his source, but if this guy is indeed trying to follow in Hovind's twisted footsteps, then that would prove very difficult. Hovind made a habit of keeping almost all his material in verbal form through recordings of his live presentations. He hardly ever wrote anything. As a result, a Hovind bibliography can be rather rare. Though in his PowerPoint presentations, he would include citations in some of the slides, but you'd have to be quick in order to write them down.
I suspect that he is referring to the basic problem of having to ensure that your sample is not contaminated. One of the conditions for getting an accurate date is that none of the isotopes being measured had been added or removed over time. I understand that to include amounts of the isotope being leeched out chemically. I'm guessing that a saline solution could do that, hence the claim. Though that raises more questions in my mind. What evidence would that leave, such that geochronologists would be able to determine that this sample was contaminated. What concentration saline solution is needed for this to happen? Are the right isotopes affected? What is the actual effect of the leeching out? By what percentage would that affect the date obtained from an contaminated sample? Eg, I encountered a creationist claim that something was found that changed certain decay rates by a fraction of a percent, but that didn't help the claim because it required a change of well over a thousand percent. Hopefully members here who have practical experience with carbondating can fill us in on the contamination problem. PSIOW, I don't think it's the reservoir effect, but rather the contamination problem. Edited by dwise1, : PS
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 6077 Joined: Member Rating: 7.3 |
Answering this "chicken or the egg" questions is virtually impossible to answer when it comes to creationist claims. So many of them spread like urban legends and get picked up by creationist writers and speakers, most of whom do not disclose their actual creationist sources but rather claim an original scientific source, one which they have themselves never even tried to find and read themselves (definitely what happened with the moon dust claim; see my MOON DUST page). The leap-second claim is the only exception I know of, since its origin was so recent and creationist sources were cited.
For example, Batchelor is cited as claiming mis-dating of live seals and living molluscs. The very first creationist claim I ever heard was in 1970 and that was the mis-dating of living molluscs. It wasn't until the 1980's when I finally found a citation for the source, the reading of which refuted the claim. The second claim I ever heard was at the same time: a NASA computer found Joshua's "Lost Day" -- that one claimed to have been from around 1965, but it actually dates back to the 1880's. I was suspicious of the first claim and recognized the second one as completely bogus, so I rejected creationism on the spot, 45 years ago.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 6077 Joined: Member Rating: 7.3 |
To add to edge's reply, here is a reference about rapid depositation:
quote:We can tell a lot about a stratum when we examine the rock closely. This article described some of the characteristics of rapidly-deposited sediment, namely the inclusion of larger particles that would fallen out of suspension very much earlier in a case of slower depositation. I received that reference from a SDAist on CompuServe in the early 90's by which he sought to support his claim of polystrate trees with root systems extending into the coal seams under them. Instead, that article specifically stated that the root systems did not so extend. But it also described how geologists can tell how rapidly sediment had been deposited, which should make it of interest here. I believe that that SDAist ("Seventh Day Adventist") had pulled that citation from something written by Dr. Steve Austin (PhD Geology). Actually, that SDAist provided me with one of my first realizations of creationists' primary goal for going on-line: to convert us. He was in the habit of copying entire sections of creationist books verbatim (even including the footnote numbers, but without including any of the footnotes). When I had finally worn him down to writing his own messages, he immediately tried to convert me. He even went so far as to as to praise the miracles that SDA's prominent founder, Ellen G. White (uncomfortably close to my ex-wife's name), could perform after she had gone into a trance. I responded with complete honesty that I used to be able to perform the exact same "miracles" when I was still well-practiced in Aikido (Tohei Sensai's school, which emphasizes Ki development) and I never ever had to go into any trance to do it. It was at that instant that he suddenly had very pressing business matters to attend to (he ran a mail-order hobby business) after which he completely disappeared. A word about Dr. Steve Austin. Yes, his doctorate is legitimate. The Institute for Creation Research (ICR) had paid all his expenses, including living expenses, for him to earn that degree, just so they could have an actual PhD Geology on staff whose degree was legitimate (unlike the ones bought from diploma mills). While he was a student, he wrote several geology articles for creationist publications (eg, the ones I read in Creation Society Research Quarterly), but he used the pseudonym of "Stuart Nevins", near-anagram of his real name (it's missing an "e" and has an extra "r"). In one of his articles I read, he repeated the false idea of absolutely gradual building of the strata (ie, take a system of strata representing some millions of years, so "that must mean that each layer was built up by this miniscule fraction of an inch each and every year"); even a first-semester geology student should have known better and here he was already a graduate student -- either he had absolutely no understanding of geology or he was lying and, since I'm certain he isn't that stupid, he must have been knowingly lying. And indeed, now that he knows as a PhD what can create invalid radiometric dates, he has been using that knowledge to selectively collect samples that will give invalid dates. Creationist is as creationist does.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 6077 Joined: Member Rating: 7.3 |
Circa 1990, there was a young-earth creationist fossil shop in a local shopping mall. Even though he was a YEC, his fossils were displayed in jewelry cases with the commonly accepted (AKA "old earth") dates; only the prominent display of many posters from ICR books and the creationist books for sale at the cash register betrayed his YEC beliefs (though he also sold a book by Hugh Ross, an OEC, but then that's capitalism for you).
However, here is something that you could benefit by regardless of your immediate rejection of anything old-earth. The vast majority of geological observations of age are of relative ages. We can plainly see that A happened before D and that B happened before D but after A, etc, etc, etc. It is when we then can find some igneous intrusions that we can tie some fixed ages to particular layers, along with a realization of how long it would take certain formations to form. Now, even though you reject the radiometric dating of those tie points (used by a geology book I own, though I don't know how widely the term is used) or of how long it would take for certain formations to form, there is still the relative ages of the layers that you could use. I would assume that you can accept the relative ages of the various layers. That could even be something that you and geologists could agree on, the relative ages of the layers. True, geologists then go on to establish absolute ages, which you reject. OK, but at least you still have the relative ages.
|
|
|
Do Nothing Button
Copyright 2001-2023 by EvC Forum, All Rights Reserved
Version 4.2
Innovative software from Qwixotic © 2024