quote:
Originally posted by wj:
For those who may not be aware, the author, D. Russell Humphreys has a PhD in physics. Here is a biography at answersingenesis:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/bios/r_humphreys.asp
He does not restrict his creationist science to cosmology. He has also adduced evidence for a young (6,000 year) earth from such diverse sources as cosmology, geology, geophysics and archaeology. See http://christiananswers.net/q-aig/aig-c012.html
It appears that you only need a PhD in one area of science to be an expert in all areas of science and be able to point out the errors of the fools who specialise in such fields.
Do physicists have a good sense of humour?
11. History is too short
Strange leep in logic here. Just because no written records survive from prior to 5000 years does not mean they did not once exist. The dark age upheavals mean that we have little written from that period,
which is only a few hundred years ago, it's not inconceivable that
6000 year old records have been lost.
There are those who date the pyramids in egypt to more like 10,000 years (I believe based upon astronomical alignments) .. controversial
that though.
10 Agriculture is too recent
African tribes only started farming within the last 300-400 years
after the white settlers forced them to abandon their nomadic life.
African tribes have been about for several thousand years and only
adopted agriculture because it was thrust upon them.
9 Not enough stone age skeletons
A global population of 10 million would be spread pretty thin (the
UK population alone is about 60 million currently I believe), and
w still know very little of funeral practices. Certainly some of
the stone age cultures buried their dead (the graves have been
found), but we have no way of knowing how ALL stone age corpses
were disposed of.
Cremation has been common among cultures and could leave little more
than teeth, burial in lakes or the see is possible and I don't know
of any archealogical digs on the sea/lake beds.
Not having found something does NOT mean it does not exits. The ceolocanth was presumed extinct because we hadn't seen them, then
they turned up alive and well in places we hadn't looked.
American cities are relatively young, European ones aren't. Try
digging deep enough under Rome, London, Paris, Milan, Berlin, etc.
and I'm sure you'd find more stone age burials.
8 Helium in the wrong places
The rate of helium loss from the atmosphere presumably would have
been different when the atmoshpere was different, which it was when
the earth was young (whenever that may have been). Extrapolating
that loss rate back over millions of years is hardly valid.
What about cosmogenic helium contamination ??
7 Fossil radioactivity shortens geologic 'ages' to a few years
I thought young earth theorists discounted radioactive decay as
a method of dating materials.
6 Injected sandstone shortens geologic 'ages'.
This one's an unsubstantaited assumption. We do not know the exact
conditions under which the Rockys were formed and so cannot
comment in either direction on the likely time it would take
for the sandstone to solidify.
5 Many strata are too tightly bent
I can find nothing in non-creationist literature to suggest that
tight anticilines or synclines cannot be formed by sustained pressure
over time. Please show me where this exists in non-creationist
literature.
4 Earth's magnetic field is decaying too fast
See
http://earth.agu.org/sci_soc/hoffman.html
According to research mentioned on this site the polarity of the
earth's magnetic field reverses every few million years, at which
time the dipole field appears to re-energize.
3 Not enough sodium in the sea
see
http://www.glenn.morton.btinternet.co.uk/salt.htm
For an explanation of why the sodium output considered in creationsist
literature is incorrect.
2 Not enough mud on the sea floor
What about the ocean trenches ? We do not know how deep they are
or how much mud they contain.
1 Comets disintegrate too quickly
I don't really follow the logic of this one for the following reason:
Saying that a comet CANNOT exist for more than 10,000 years pre-supposes a maximum size AND minimum orbital period.
Comets only disintegrate when in proximity to the sun, and have
been observed to split into several seprate comets at times.
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I've got a PhD too, but I doubt you will be as quick to accept
my explanations as you were the descriptions of the problems.
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