As many people who follow our ministry know, on November 2, 2006, a two week trial ended in my wife and I being found guilty of three basic charges related to IRS laws. I am currently in jail awaiting sentencing on January 19th. Below are several points of interest on which I am reflecting:
1) Our attorneys say that there were several key events that must be appealed. Pray that this case will be overturned on appeal.
2) I’m doing rather well considering the circumstances. So far six men have been saved. I have Bible studies three to four times each day with some of the men. Many of the men here are black and most are here for drug related charges. Some of the men, white and black, are loud, vulgar, and play the TV full blast most of the day. Every cop, judge, lawyer, and politician needs to spend a week locked up before they take office. It changes your outlook on many things.
3) I finally got a pillow after only eight days and requests! I am about ready for a new pair of socks next!
4) Dr. David Gibbs, Jr. preached a great sermon nearly thirty years ago about Pastor John Bunyan in England refusing to take a license to preach and spending thirteen years in the Bedford jail for it. While he was there, he wrote a classic, “Pilgrim’s Progress.” David Gibbs, III, his son, who testified against us during the trial, testified that all church ministries should contract with the government by becoming 501 (c) (3). Being 501 (c) (3) is taking a government license to have a church ministry. The second law of thermodynamics applies to things other than matter.
5) I think I have pushed hard for seventeen years spreading creation and if God is done using me in that ministry, I am OK with that. However, I am asking God for this to be reversed and grant me forty more years of preaching His Word out of jail. Even though I am not out preaching, there are still many thousands creation tapes and DVD’s circling the globe and winning souls. Everyone can help us by continuing to get and circulate the creation materials. The ministry is still going with Eric out preaching in my place. Dinosaur Adventure Land is still open at this time with the winter park hours of Thursday through Saturday, and our dedicated staff keeps working on new tools to win souls. Subtitling the seminar in about fifteen languages is one project in the works.
6) Being here gives me a much better appreciation for many Bible characters who suffered for doing right. Abel, Joseph in Egypt, John on the Isle of Patmos, Job, Daniel, Jeremiah, Shadrach, Peter, Paul, and Stephen, just to name a few, and millions of other Christians in the last 2000 years. Acts and Foxes book of Martyrs take on new life for me, as does the story of Corrie ten Boom and Alexander Solzenitzen’s work. The book of Acts records over 50 instances of God’s people being arrested, tried, beatened, or jailed. And that is just the book of Acts!
7) If the case is not reversed, I face anywhere from parole to 7 to 12 years. I am meeting people here that I would probably never had met, had I not been sent here. I yearn for my freedom and family. Paul’s letters written from jail will mean much more to me now. Reading them shows us that nearly everyone forsook him, and most of his needs for physical comfort were ignored. He asked that people “remember my bonds”, yet we don’t know if any ever did. One of the men in here told me that he has been here for eleven months, and has never had a visitor. Our office has a list of men that you could minister to as a pen pal. I will encourage everyone to get a prisoner pen-pal and donate the creation videos to their local prisons. We have donated many hundreds over the years and have seen many saved. This experience will change me for the good forever.
I have also been teaching basic math to many of the men. They love it, and are eager to learn. The appalling failure of our education system is evident in here. Even hardened drug dealers react with glee when they finally understand the concepts of calculating the number of yards of concrete needed for their driveway.
9) It seems that most are starved for real affection and a father’s love and approval. One man, with over thirty tatoos, was excited when I made him a bookmarker. I drew his name in such a way that each letter is 1/8″ wide and 8″ long. It can only be read by tipping the paper and looking down the lines. I told him that you have to look at life from God’s perspective to make any sense out of it. They all loved it!
10) When I compare my time in jail to the Apostle Paul’s time, I am forced to realize that I have so much for which to be thankful. I have not been beaten. I have hot and cold water. I have three meals a day. I have clean clothes two times each week. I have climate controlled and sanitary conditions. I have a sink and toilet. I have a phone and can call out to my family sometimes. I have people in here that are saved and supportive. I have people outside that love me and are praying for me. I can look out a window. I have an unlimited supply of sanitary water. (Well, chlorinated, fluorinated, city water.) I am not facing beatings in the middle of the night. I am not facing execution. I have access to medical care. I do not sleep on a bug infested pile of straw, nor a rock. I am not chained to a wall or floor, or a Roman soldier. I have a Bible and reading material. I can receive 2 visits per week. I have a pencil and paper, and can send letters that will get to them in a few days. I am blessed, spoiled, and honored to be a child of God.
Why Did God Allow This? Maybe God wants me…….
1) To receive punishment for my sin.
2) To use me in an area in the jail that needed salt. (Matt. 5:13)
3) To let me be prepared for a new phase of ministry and this is boot camp.
4) To be humbled by God.
5) To allow God to see how fellow Christians react. He is gathering evidence for their day of reckoning. The same is true for me.
6) To give me time off to reflect, refresh, recharge, and renew my Bible study and prayer time.
7) To let me see the anguish my grandkids, who love me dearly, are going through, so that I would be more compassionate with kids to whom I preach, or that are visiting DAL, many of whom have similar experiences with jailed loved ones. To show me how much can be done with so little. These men can make all sorts of things like water heaters from toothbrushes, and tatoo guns from ink pens. Most Christians are wasteful of God’s resources.
9) To give me a better appreciation for our veterans who slept in swamps and other squalid conditions for my freedom. I will hug POW’s from now on.
10) To give me a renewed appreciation for missionaries who leave family and comforts to spread God’s word.
11) To bring my thought, prayers, and concerns into action by inspiring me to visit those in the hospitals who never get visitors.
12) To let me see first hand and up close, the results of sin, drugs, and alcohol in a man’s life.
13) To let me see men pace back and forth like caged lions. Truly the wicked are like the troubled sea that cannot rest. Isaiah 55:20
14) To let me see why God’s law, which is perfect, converting the soul, authorizes: beatings, four times restitution, and execution for crimes, but never imprisonment. Certainly there are Roman and Egyptian prisons mentioned in the Bible, but none were authorized by God. This system costs everyone in many ways, and does little good and much harm.
15) To give me a taste of what awaits in the tribulation. The “state” control in that time will be overpowering.
16) To allow me to experience the joy of holding hands in a prayer circle with nine or ten men on fire for Jesus while facing severe sentences.
17) To make me order my priorities better. I cannot ever let my family fail, while I build a ministry.
18) To make me more like Jesus, the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
19) To show that God is beginning to take His children out as the tribulation nears. Isaiah 57:1
What Can Be Done?
1. Many of you have called or written to ask if you can write letters on our behalf. We have learned that you can do this. Letters can be sent to CSE, who will give them all to the attorneys. The letters should be addressed “To The Court”, and may reference such things as our character, our Christian beliefs, and how the CSE ministry has impacted your life and ministry. These letters must be received by December 9th.
2. Keep praying and winning souls.
3. Listen for the trumpet!
Remember my bonds,
Kent Hovind
“You lie when we know you’re lying, and you know you’re lying, and we know that you know you’re lying, so an honest discussion with you is impossible.”
Care to substantiate that allegation? An apology is optional.
(My name is not Mary)
CMarychurch,
Let me cut right to the chase. Here is the biggest problem with C-14 dating as communicated to us in “Chemical Principles” (Masterton, Slowinski, Stanitski 6th edition; page 811).
“This method has been applied to date a wide variety of organic objects. It depends upon an assumption that cannot be proved. For carbon-14 dating to be valid, the 14C/12C ratio in the atmosphere must have remained constant over centuries. Ages estimated by this method agree within +/-10% with historical records, suggesting that the assumption is valid.”
The Chauvet Caves in France are reported to be some 30,000 years old by carbon-14 dating. Let’s have a thought experiment and use for this investigation the first-order reaction equation:
log(Xo/X) = kt/2.30
where Xo is the amount of radioactive substance at zero time, X is the amount remaining after time t, k is the first-order rate constant and t is the time in years. We accept k = 1.21×10^-4 (Masterton et. all page 809). Suppose we find a bit of bone or whatever morsel you prefer that was at one time in the past living organic matter. We perform the necessary laboratory procedures and determine that X = 2.64% of Xo. Oh yea, we are assuming that the amount of 14C at the time of death (Xd) is equal to Xo the amount of 14C if the beast would have died just now or Xd = 100% of Xo. Whoa, look at that;
t = 2.3•log(Xd/X)/k
t = 2.3•log(1/0.0264)/(1.21×10^-4)
t = 30,000
the bit of bone is 30,000 years old, given our assumption. But what if, long ago when this creature died, the ratio of 14C/12C in the atmosphere was not as high? Let’s assume that Xd = 10% of Xo. We find the same bit of bone and in the same lab we determine X = 2.64% of Xo. Here we recalculate the age using the same formula and hummm;
t = 2.3•log(Xd/X)/k
t = 2.3•log(0.1/0.0264)/(1.21×10^-4)
t = 11,000 years
the bit of bone is 11,000 years old? Now, I don’t want to jump to any conclusions but here we have three professional chemists who say that the dating depends on the ratio. Are they wrong? Maybe all three of them are evangelical Christian chemists; praise God. Are there any chemists who say it does not depend on the ratio? I could not find any. Know that an even younger age could be calculated given a different assumed ratio. As far as the +/-10% error compared with historical records, I am comfortable with using the technique to date things approximately for say the past 4,000 to 6,000 years.
-Mel
I am sorry to be so tardy in replying to all the questions posed, but uncustomarily I have been involved in two other discussion groups and I am trying to finish the final edits on several books needing to go to the printer. Even now, I can only address a few issues and will try to get to the others as time allows.
First of all, I wish to thank ‘CreationCD’ for posting part of my speech at the Godless Americans’ March On Washington (GAMOW). It would have been immodest of me to presume to post it myself, even though I think it was one of the most important speeches I have ever given.
Secondly, I wish to thank him for drawing attention to my little article “The REAL Bible: Who’s Got It?” which can be accessed at http://www.atheists.org. The article is important in that it shows that Bible-believers are dependent upon the decisions of scientific scholars for their reconstruction (creation, actually) of the Greek and Hebrew texts used as translation bases for creating bibles in the vernacular languages. (It also documents the fact that the decisions concerning which ‘books’ should be in THE Bible and which of the many contradictory manuscripts of each book should be followed are based entirely on theopolitical factors.) It is important that people read the article itself as well as the many attempted refutations that can be found on the Web.
I am disappointed that no one has tried to answer my hypothetical question concerning the ethics and theology of transferring human genes into chimpanzees. Because this is so crucial to Christian theology, I want to restate the problem before answering the best of the challenges posed to me.
Assume for the sake of argument that genomic analysis ultimately shows there are exactly 100 genes and/or DNA control sequences that make up the genetic differences between humans and chimps. As I noted before, only ‘microevolutionary’ differences separate humans from chimps, and if genetic engineers replaced chimp genes with human genes one-at-a-time, at what point would you consider the product more human than chimp? Would just one human gene do it? How about 51 human genes? Or 99 human genes? When would it need to believe in Jesus to be saved? When would it need to be baptized? Does it make any sense to believe that humans have a soul, but organisms that are nearly 99% identical do not?
Notice that this problem does not presuppose the validity of evolution, only depending upon the demonstrated ability of genetic engineers to transfer genes between species.
The majority of bloggers on this site seem to think there is something faulty about the geologic column. While the accuracy of the geologic column can be enhanced somewhat by evolutionary theory, it does not depend upon it. As you probably all know, most of the geological column was created by creationist scientists working before Darwin’s 1859 ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES and Alfred Russel Wallace’s famous paper of about the same time. The geologic column is pieced together, first of all, by simply following the implications of the Law of Superposition: oldest rocks are on the bottom, youngest rocks are on the top.
(Please don’t bring up the old chestnut of rock strata out of order and cite the Lewis Overthrust. I’ve been there and have collected ‘slickensides’ formed when the Precambrian limestone slid over the Cretaceous shale, moving roughly from west to east. I personally have observed the folding of Cretaceous strata to the east of the contact and can tell you for certain that Whitcomb and Morris’ description of the overthrust is not only incorrect but probably deceitful as well.)
The geologic column’s validity is proven every day by geologists exploring for oil and other natural resources. The deep wells that now can be drilled show again and again that the column is valid and that the index fossil series again and again can be seen to be a reliable index of relative age. The fortunes of many millionaires have been made because of the geologic column!
Note also, that the validity of the geologic column is not to any significant extent dependent upon the absolute ages of the strata included, only upon their relative ages. (Of course, if the earth is only six thousand years old, it is hard to understand how the entire column could have been formed during a one-year-long flood!)
Again I must comment that there is no quick fix for formal training in field geology. I know of no creationists at all who are competent field geologists. Those who depend upon creationist amateurs for geological knowledge are doing themselves a great disservice if they do not check their claims against the practical facts of everyday economic geology.
Let me now consider Mel’s comments about the Wikipedia note on the human genome, where he suggests there is circular reasoning going on.
Despite Mel’s statement that he has studied some textbooks on molecular genetics and population genetics (which is altogether admirable), I fear that his steady diet of creationist literature has created a bias which makes it difficult to understand the professional scientific literature correctly. I think this is the problem in the case he brings up.
The Wikipedia article he quoted notes the following (emphases mine):
“Identification of regulatory sequences relies IN PART on evolutionary conservation. The evolutionary branch between the human and mouse, for example, occurred 70-90 million years ago. So computer comparisons of gene sequences that identify conserved non-coding sequences will be an indication of their importance in duties such as gene regulation. ANOTHER COMPARATIVE GENOMIC APPROACH TO LOCATING REGULATORY SEQUENCES IN HUMANS IS THE GENE SEQUENCING OF THE PUFFER FISH. These vertebrates have essentially the same genes and regulatory gene sequences as humans, but with only one-eight the ‘junk’ DNA. The compact DNA sequence of the puffer fish makes it much easier to locate the regulatory genes.”
Mel comments that “2) the regulatory sequence they are serching [sic, the type of deletion typo I myself seem to make a lot!] for has been pre-concieved (sic) to fit the evolutionary model. In other words, the regulatory sequence discovered by these evolutionists will be force fit to evolutionary ideology by ad hoc explanations.”
First of all, we must ask what it could possibly mean to “force fit” regulatory sequences to fit an evolutionary ideology. Either they prove to be regulatory sequences or they don’t. If laboratory experiments done on putative regulatory sequences show that they do in fact regulate, how does that invalidate the method? The proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say. If evolutionary methods lead to accurate predictions, so much the better for evolutionary methods! Evolutionary theory has proven again and again to have enormous heuristic value. Creationist or ID claims, however, have no heuristic value that I have ever heard of.
Let me try to explain the problem here more clearly.
The genome is composed of DNA sequences (exons) that encode protein sequences and lots of DNA sequences that don’t — introns and so-called “junk DNA”. It has been known for a long time that a certain percentage of the “junk” isn’t junk at all. Rather, it contains DNA sequences that are involved in control of gene expression at several levels. It also is clear that most of the junk is, indeed, junk — including such things as pseudogenes, viral DNA, and apparently even some bacterial DNA sequences. (The last I checked, it appeared that one or two percent of the human genome isn’t even human!)
How to know which sequences are important and which are simply junk?
Before the sequencing of complete genomes, there was very little that could be done to answer this question. Once several other genomes had been sequenced and could be compared with that of the human genome, however, two ways became apparent in which to see what was regulatory (important) and what was junk.
Way #1: the puffer fish genome.
As the Wikipedia article notes, humans and puffer fish have essentially the same genes (i.e., protein-coding sequences) but the puffer fish contains only about one-eighth the amount of non-coding (“junk”) DNA. A reasonable way to understand this is that the puffer fish genome has very little truly junk DNA, and that most of the non-coding sequences are regulatory sequences. Seeing which of the puffer non-coding sequences have close homologs in the human genome can help to identify those parts of the human genome that aren’t junk at all.
Way #2: evolutionarily conserved sequences.
Sequences that have been conserved for varying amounts of time in different evolutionary lineages can give us an understanding of how important they are. By comparing these conserved sequences with the number of changes in completely unconserved sequences such as pseudogenes, we may draw conclusions about how fundamental they must be for gene regulation.
Since pseudogenes no longer are maintained by natural selection, they are free to vary at a relatively high mutation rate. Regulatory genes, however, would be under the control of natural selection. If there is a selective advantage for them to change in a way that affects gene regulation in certain ways, they MAY undergo some change. However, random mutations that do not produce useful regulatory changes will be weeded out by natural selection. Keep in mind, natural selection can be both a force for change and for stability, depending upon the circumstances confronting a particular species at a particular time.
How can we tell how long particular sequences have been conserved or not? Our method gives only approximate results, but it is nonetheless quite useful. It is only approximate because it depends upon pin-pointing the place in the fossil record where the lineages being compared seem to have parted ways. I have already noted the importance of the sea urchin genome sequencing. The fossil evidence shows the echinoderm and chordate lineages have been distinct since the base of the Cambrian Period (ca. 570 million years ago). How much earlier than that these lineages separated can be estimated by other means.
Because of the incompleteness of the fossil record, we can never know exactly when two lineages separated. Even so, the continuing discoveries of important connecting link fossils is steadily improving the precision of these studies. (Please don’t trot out all those misrepresentations of radiometric dating. Creationists have been using the same fallacious (and sometimes deceptive) arguments since Whitcomb and Morris’ times. Again, studying a good book such as THE AGE OF THE EARTH (1991) by my friend G. Brent Dalrymple, or a more up-to-date text, would do wonders to eliminate creationist misunderstandings of how radiometric dating actually works and how sources of error in fact are minimized.)
To get back to Ways #1 and #2:
The two methods can be used to validate each other. When both methods give the same result, we can have great confidence in the result and plan functional experiments with confidence. When they conflict, we must be more suspicious and conduct preliminary experiments to try to understand whether the difference is due to error or simply different physiologies. In any case, the results of conserved-sequence studies is already leading to discovery of important regulatory processes (e.g., the discovery of the roll of short RNA sequences in gene regulation) — processes which shortly will be used to save lives and facilitate gene therapies.
Concerning chromosomes:
Mel writes that “While superficially humans and chimps are strikingly similar, intrinsically they are excludingly (sic) different. The chimps have two (sic) many pairs of chromosomes.” It is true that chimps and gorillas have 48 chromosomes and humans have 46. Nevertheless, the chromosomes are nearly identical in many fine details. If one stains the chromosomes to produce the famous product-code-like banding that allows chromosomes to be compared in detail, one sees that despite some inversions and a few translocations, virtually all the particular banding patterns of the human chromosomes have their exact counterparts in the ape chromosomes. Moreover, it can see by this staining technique that two ape chromosomes have fused to form a single human chromosome that retains all the detailed patterns of the ape chromosomes. This work was done back in the 60s and now can be used as a reference guide for annotating the several genomes. By comparing the chromosomes of gorillas, chimps, humans, and orangutans, it is possible to work out the sequence of chromosomal rearrangements that accompanied the evolutionary developments of the species in question. Again, this is much like reconstructing the evolutionary histories of biblical manuscripts.
Well, I’ve run out of time for a while. I really would like to know what everybody thinks about narrowing the gap between chimps and humans by 51% by genetic engineering. This is a Gedankenexperiment (thought experiment) of the sort Albert Einstein loved to come up with. Unfortunately, I can’t claim credit for it.
For reason,
Frank Zindler
In reply to Mel regarding his previous post concerning carbon dating and, in particular, citing “Chemical Principles” (Masterton, Slowinski, Stanitski 6th edition; page 811).
Mel, could you perhaps have misunderstood the article. My understanding is that it is not the C14/C12 ratio which may vary by 10% but the perceived carbon-dated ages as verified by the known ages of historical artifacts. It seems to me that what the three authors are saying is that the time calculation is dependant upon the ratio but that comparisons with articles of known historical age demonstrate that the ratio over time appears to have remained within 10%. Is it not therefore invalid for you to do a spurious calculation using a ratio of 1 to 10 rather than one of 9 to 10. I don’t wish to accuse you of deliberate sharp practice in using the 0.1 figure in your second calculation as though it represented a 10% difference in the ratio so I would be grateful if you would respond in explanation.
Regards
Samphire
PS Thanks to FZ for the time he has taken in detailed explanations. I hope the ground is not too stony.
PPS To all those who have written suggesting a letter to Jeb Bush, as a limey knowing little of your legal system, did not the case arise as a federal indictment and therefore Jeb as a state politician can have no influence upon it?
TO MFOX:
——-
Here is the biggest problem with C-14 dating as communicated to us in “Chemical Principles” (Masterton, Slowinski, Stanitski 6th edition; page 811).
“This method has been applied to date a wide variety of organic objects. It depends upon an assumption that cannot be proved. For carbon-14 dating to be valid, the 14C/12C ratio in the atmosphere must have remained constant over centuries. Ages estimated by this method agree within +/-10% with historical records, suggesting that the assumption is valid.”
——-
CM- That 1986 book is wrong or badly written. Calibration curves for C14 dating are now standard practice. Note also the observation that even uncalibrated dates closely match known dates.
————
the bit of bone is 30,000 years old, given our assumption. But what if, long ago when this creature died, the ratio of 14C/12C in the atmosphere was not as high? Let’s assume that Xd = 10% of Xo. We find the same bit of bone [.....] is 11,000 years old?
———–
CM – But here is the problem with the hypothetical scenario … there is no evidence there has been a ten fold change in C14 levels. And if there was then this would be compensated for with calibration.
———-
Now, I don’t want to jump to any conclusions but here we have three professional chemists who say that the dating depends on the ratio. Are they wrong?
———
CM – They are absolutely correct regarding the ratio being important. Nobody is claiming otherwise. However, Young Earth evangelists like Hovind (and this badly written book) are claiming the ratio is assumed to be constant which is false.
Mary,
(my name is not Mary)
Could you be Carl Marychurch, author of what used to be
http://www.geocities.com/kenthovind/
one of the longest running and most vocal anti-Hovind websites, come to gloat?
If you’d rather be called Carl, then introduce yourself.
Most of us have already told everyone who we are or given our testimonies.
If you are Carl Marychurch, we’re honored that you’ve joined us.
After all the articles you’ve written, the research you’ve posted on your website, and the volumes you’ve written asking for a debate, I’m surprised you don’t seem to understand at least theoretically the possible consequences carbon 14 buildup in the atmosphere or the burial of almost all organic carbon in a young earth model or global flood model.
I’m also surprised that you didn’t start posting on this site while Dr. Hovind was here to respond but waited until he couldn’t. I understand your last debate was against 14 year old Phillip O’Donnell, on his website
http://www.livingdinos.com
Two great audio lectures on carbon 14 and radioisotope dating by Dr. Russell Humphreys can be found at
http://www.answersingenesis.org/answersmedia/searchProcess.aspx?keywords=carbon
Some good science facts about C-14 can be found at:
http://www.c14dating.com/
Please note that I am as skeptical about conclusions drawn form scientific observations as you are about the bible (not the observations, just the conclusions).
I’m glad to see many people that Dr. Hovind reached over the years with his seminars are able to stand up for themselves especially against so knowledgeable opponents of creationism as Frank Zindler and possibly Carl Marychurch.
For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.
For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. …
For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. …
Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
1 Corinthians 1: 18 – 25
mfox
Said this at 8:48am:
Frank,
Suppose a man has sex with a sheep. Note that this is a clear abomination to the Lord but I believe it has actually happened more than a few times, just recall Genesis 6: 5:
“And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”
Now that is the heart of Frank, Melvin, Moses, bioteacher, and Kent, just to name a few, each with their own particular flavor for sin.
Samphire: So you attribute the great advances in medicine over the past hundred years to man’s “particular flavour for sin”? Or when you talk of “every imagination of the thoughts of his heart” perhaps you are referring only to the Christians’ preoccupation with sex? Anyway, if God had not intended man to have sex with sheep he would have created neither the Welsh nor the gumboot. (it’s a joke)
Back to the man-with-sheep sex scandal, what happens? Do we get a little man-sheep running around? No. We get nothing but separation from God and His will. The reason we get nothing is because the process is designed to give us nothing so that things will remain as they were created. Random uncontrolled change is ruled out from the moment of creation.
Samphire: Wrong. Otherwise we would not get babies born with genetic diseases. It is selection and the ability to reach maturity and procreate which are the controlling factors.
What awful evolution would ensue if fruit was wrought from this activity?
Samphire: Wrong – evolution could not happen at all for obvious reasons. If you don’t understand that then you don’t understand the basic elements of the theory.
Stick to your own kind is the instruction from God. Some would say that this means black people should not marry white people. This does not make Biblical sense to me. If two can mate and the fruit of their action is viable, then they are of the same kind. A horse and a donkey are not of the same kind, unless of course you can show me a mule that is not a dead end.
Samphire: So how do you account for ring species in which each member can mate with its neighbour but individuals cannot viably mate with members on the opposite side of the ring? I am thinking of the Ensatina Salamander and Larus Gulls. The salamander is a particularly wonderful example of speciation in process with all the intermediate species present and alive. How many of the Salamanders and Gulls would Noah have had to take on board to make sure that the present evolutionary position would be maintained? Do you deny that the Salamanders and the Gulls are the same “kind”?. This is a stumbling block for Mr H. His definition of “kind” as taken from his slide show appears to be what a four-year-old child can recognise as a “kind”. Therefore, moths and butterflies are of one kind but St.Bernard mountain dogs and chiwawas probably aren’t. Sheer nonsense, of course.
There are, without question, variations within kinds. This is also by design. This variation is carefully controlled as the plan for our physical being is meticulously written in our specific DNA composition created during meiosis and set in motion at fertilization/conception. You probably would claim that the process of crossing over which takes place just prior to the first meiotic division is a random shuffling. You may also be so bold as to say that the distribution of traits to individuals is ruled by the “laws” of probability. Let me remind you that probability theory is used in very specific situations. In each of these situations we concede a lack of understand, ignorance of, the actual processes that are at play. It would be a supernatural intervention by the great god of chance for randomness to play any role in any physical process. Chance can’t cause anything. Chance can’t do anything. The large stone god Dagon had more potential than chance, for if someone pushed it over it could crush you.
Samphire: So how do you account for radio-activity? The ToE is based upon the definition that evolution is a change in the frequency of alleles within a population from one generation to the next. It goes further by stating that the change in frequency is caused not by chance but by natural selection. You continue to erect and destroy a straw man. Why do you and your fellow creationists perpetuate this error? Also, contrary to your argument, randon mutation occurs continually as evidenced by the individuality of each person’s junk DNA.
Perhaps we agree on one point? While superficially humans and chimps are strikingly similar, intrinsically they are excludingly different. The chimps have two many pairs of chromosomes. This subject might bring to the mind of the materialist; “Hey, lets find out.” It was actually attempted in Russia I believe and you guessed it, nothing happened except separation from God and His will. Why would they even think of doing such a thing? Don’t they have any morals? Well, they believe they have no morels.
Samphire: Who says about themselves that they have no morals?
You see they can’t find morals under a microscope in the same way they can’t see God under a microscope. And since they can’t find them there, they do not exist.
Samphire: Who says so? I’ve never come across anybody who has ever said such a thing.
Or would you like to show me the moral gene? And perhaps the murderer lacks the “spelling” of the moral gene. How can we fault him for his behavior? Let him be. He is only acting in the beautifully randomly determined way his chemical makeup dictates he should by all the physical laws that control him. He has done nothing “wrong”.
Samphire: What happened to morality when the Jews were ordered by God to kill all the males of their neighbouring tribe. To quote the Lord of Hosts “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”. What a wonderful example of morality. Many tribes and nations have thrived down the ages despite having had no prior sight of the Jewish mythology and its Ten Commandments. Believing in the power of their own god how many men have gone to war declaring “God is on the opponent’s side”? Very few, I imagine. Morality is nothing but a social construct. Without it, society would not survive. And the need for humanity to exist in a social structure in order to survive as a species is an evolutionary and therefore a genetic matter. I suggest that you try Lewis Wolpert’s “Six impossible things before breakfast” for a different slant on how belief and morality may have arisen through evolutionary pressures.
fertich
Said this at 11:58am:
May the Lord bless you for taking a stand for righteousness.
Today, John Bunyan is praised as a hero of the faith for refusing to take a license to preach.
At the time, I wonder what other Christian leaders thought about Pastor Bunyan’s stance?
Samphire: If he had stolen his flock’s social security payments then I think that the answer would have been “not much”. Nor did he go about preaching from a Winnebago but on foot. If Mr H really wants to comply wth Christ’s teaching then he should sell the bus and give the money to the poor or has the IRS already got a lien on it?.
To Frank,
QUESTIONS ABOUT CYTOCHROME C
(After you’re done correcting my spelling and grammar, please answer the questions.)
I believe Cytochrome c is a small jumper between Cytochrome o and Cytochrome a in a chain of proteins that transports electrons in cellular respiration?
In Keeton, Gould’s, Biological Science 1986 the chain in a mitochondria looks like this.
FP – FeS a – FeS b – Cyt b – Q – Cyt b2 – Cyt o – Cyt c – Cyt a – Cyt a3
(If this is wrong, please jot down the correct electron transport chain that we are talking about it won’t really matter for the questions.)
(1) Why is Cytochrome c the protein the one evolutionists always bring up?
(2) Why would this protein be the best match for the evolutionary tree out of all other protiens?
(3) What would you consider to be the minimum number of proteins in the chain to carry out electron transport during respiration.?
(4) Are these proteins used anywhere else in the cell or do they have to all evolve at the same time ?
(5) I believe every stage of respiration involves an enzyme and each enzyme is a complex protein machine that allows a chemical reaction to take place.
Examples
Hexokinase
Phosphoglucoisonmerase
Phosphofructokinase
Aldolase
Phosophotriose isomerase
Phosophglycermutase
Enolase
Pyuvate kinase
And on and on ….
I also believe some of these enzymes take energy from a previous step to make possible the next step.
So then what is the evolutionary benefit if one of these proteins “evolves”
without the other?
(6) What do you feel is the probability of forming a cytochrome c protein by chance?
I know cytochrome c is about 104 amino acids long.
I don’t have the number of amino acids for the other proteins on hand, but what do you feel is the reasonable percentage of amino acids that can be substituted in a protein and it still function?
The total number of variations shown in my book for the amino acid sequence of cytochrome c for each amino acid across the genome of 9 mammals, 8 other vertebrates, 2 insects, 2 fungi, and 3 plants are:
1 3 5 5 4 1 3 3 4 1 4 3 2 1 3 3 1 1 2 3 3 4 2 3 4 2 1 4 1 1 2 1 5 1 3 2 1 1 3 2
1 3 3 6 1 2 3 1 2 4 1 1 2 5 2 3 2 6 1 6 4 3 2 2 5 3 1 1 3 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
3 1 5 1 2 2 1 6 9 2 1 7 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 6 4 3 5 4
(1 amino acid always at position 1, 3 different amino acids can occupy position 2, 5 different amino acids can occupy position 3)
(Remember these sequences were chosen by the author to illustrate the differences between cytochrome c proteins along the evolutionary tree.)
That gives 1.2 x 10^33 possible working variations using know substitutions.
Do you feel this is reasonable?
The total number of different proteins that can be made by forming a chain 105 amino acids long from the 20 possible amino acids is 20^105 = 2.0 x 10^135
Assume 1.2 x 10^33 working variations of cytochrome c in 2.0 x 10^135 possible combinations, or a one in 1.6 x 10^102 chance of forming a working cytochome c protein from random combinations of amino acids, or for coding for this protein in DNA or RNA by random mutation.
Wikipedia says, there are about 10^80 atoms in the universe.
There are about 1.3 x 10^16 seconds in 10 billion years.
(7) How and where do you believe this protein came to be?
I have been told that right next door to cytochrome c in eubacteria, chloroplasts and mitochondria, the synthesis of ATP is carried out by a molecular machine known as ATP synthase. This machine is one of the “Paley’s watches” of cellular machinery.
Paley said, in his book Natural Theology, that we know a watch is a designed and created artifact because:
“ … we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e. g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that, if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, of a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner, or in any other order, than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it. To reckon up a few of the plainest of these parts, and of their offices, all tending to one result:– We see a cylindrical box containing a coiled elastic spring, which, by its endeavour to relax itself, turns round the box. We next observe a flexible chain (artificially wrought for the sake of flexure), communicating the action of the spring from the box to the fusee. We then find a series of wheels, the teeth of which catch in, and apply to, each other, conducting the motion from the fusee to the balance, and from the balance to the pointer; and at the same time, by the size and shape of those wheels, so regulating that motion, as to terminate in causing an index, by an equable and measured progression, to pass over a given space in a given time. We take notice that the wheels are made of brass in order to keep them from rust; the springs of steel, no other metal being so elastic; that over the face of the watch there is placed a glass, a material employed in no other part of the work, but in the room of which, if there had been any other than a transparent substance, the hour could not be seen without opening the case. This mechanism being observed (it requires indeed an examination of the instrument, and perhaps some previous knowledge of the subject, to perceive and understand it; but being once, as we have said, observed and understood), the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker: that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.”
Please look at this cellular watch:
A video of its workings:
http://vcell.ndsu.nodak.edu/animations/atpgradient/movie.htm
http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~terry/images/movs/synthase.mov
The complexity and fit of its componets:
http://nature.berkeley.edu/~hongwang/Project/ATP_synthase/
(8) How would you contend that this complex machine arose by chance?
Please also look at this nanomachine:
http://www.nanonet.go.jp/english/mailmag/2004/011a.html
http://www.nanonet.go.jp/english/mailmag/2004/files/011a.wmv
Samphire wrote:
“Mel, could you perhaps have misunderstood the article. My understanding is that it is not the C14/C12 ratio which may vary by 10% but the perceived carbon-dated ages as verified by the known ages of historical artifacts. It seems to me that what the three authors are saying is that the time calculation is dependant upon the ratio but that comparisons with articles of known historical age demonstrate that the ratio over time appears to have remained within 10%. Is it not therefore invalid for you to do a spurious calculation using a ratio of 1 to 10 rather than one of 9 to 10. I don’t wish to accuse you of deliberate sharp practice in using the 0.1 figure in your second calculation as though it represented a 10% difference in the ratio so I would be grateful if you would respond in explanation.”
I apologize if I was not clear. My assumption Xd = 10% of Xo was arbitrary and in no way connected to the +/-10% error. I accept that if you dated some organic mater that has been dead for a “known” length of time the error would be less than 10%. The problem with that is we do not agree entirely on what is known.
If it is indeed invalid of me to do spurious calculation using Xd = 10% of Xo, then it is also invalid of you to do the same with Xd = 100% of Xo. That is the point I was trying to make.
CM wrote:
“But here is the problem with the hypothetical scenario … there is no evidence there has been a ten fold change in C14 levels. And if there was then this would be compensated for with calibration.”
Yes, I agree that there is no indisputable evidence that the 14C levels have changed. It is also the case that there is no indisputable evidence that the 14C levels have stayed the same. That is the very reason why any assumed ratio about the distant past is improper if it is not qualified as was done in the chemistry text I quoted. I will have more to say about the calibration curves.
I would also like to thank Frank for his detailed explanation of his position. It will take me a few days to digest it before I respond.
-Mel
Hi Mel,
Thank you for that response. I agree that it is most unlikely that c14 levels would remain constant. In fact, it would be most surprising if that were the case. However, I still think that you over-egged the pudding in using 10% of a present day c14 concentration when the authors of the paper were talking of a 10% difference in perceived age without first making it clear what you were doing.
I have been watching a video on the AlphaNova website which I found quite dishonest or, more generously, disingenuous. Have a look and perhaps you would like to comment. It is at http://www.worldbydesign.org/alphanova/programs/c14dating.html
———————-
Could you be Carl Marychurch, author of what used to be http://www.geocities.com/kenthovind/ one of the longest running and most vocal anti-Hovind websites, come to gloat?
If you’d rather be called Carl, then introduce yourself. Most of us have already told everyone who we are or given our testimonies.
CM- I’m not here to gloat nor am I here to massage my own ego.
———–
After all the articles you’ve written, the research you’ve posted on your website, and the volumes you’ve written asking for a debate, I’m surprised you don’t seem to understand at least theoretically the possible consequences carbon 14 buildup in the atmosphere or the burial of almost all organic carbon in a young earth model or global flood model.
CM – Kent Hovind didn’t mention it so I didn’t bother writing about it. And I didn’t “write volumes” asking for a debate.
————–
I’m also surprised that you didn’t start posting on this site while Dr. Hovind was here to respond but waited until he couldn’t. I understand your last debate was against 14 year old Phillip O’Donnell, on his website http://www.livingdinos.com
CM- I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that mentioning a recent acceptance of an invitation by a young Hovind fan to discuss (debate if you will) my allegations against Kent Hovind (amongst some other things) on his new website is a negative reflection upon myself. I didn’t bother posting here because there wasn’t much science discussed until very recently. Kent Hovind never does written debates – surely you should be aware of his favourite avoidance technique.
——————-
Two great audio lectures on carbon 14 and radioisotope dating by Dr. Russell Humphreys can be found at
http://www.answersingenesis.org/answersmedia/searchProcess.aspx?keywords=carbon
Some good science facts about C-14 can be found at:
http://www.c14dating.com/
CM – I’m not sure what you are trying to argue.
——————-
I’m glad to see many people that Dr. Hovind reached over the years with his seminars are able to stand up for themselves especially against so knowledgeable opponents of creationism as Frank Zindler and possibly Carl Marychurch.
CM- And yet what drew me into CSEblosgs was a claim by a Hovind fan repeating a claim originally made by Kent Hovind that C14 levels are assumed to be constant. Even Humphreys presentation shows that is false. In fact, the entire point of Humpherys’ argument is that the calibrations curves should be adjusted.
Frank Zindler Dec 4, 9:45 PM, said
Assume for the sake of argument that genomic analysis ultimately shows there are exactly 100 genes and/or DNA control sequences that make up the genetic differences between humans and chimps. As I noted before, only ‘microevolutionary’ differences separate humans from chimps, and if genetic engineers replaced chimp genes with human genes one-at-a-time, at what point would you consider the product more human than chimp? Would just one human gene do it? How about 51 human genes? Or 99 human genes? When would it need to believe in Jesus to be saved? When would it need to be baptized? Does it make any sense to believe that humans have a soul, but organisms that are nearly 99% identical do not?
*************************************************************
Frank, I think we need to agree on what ‘microevolutionary’ differences are.
Please give the criteria that you use to distinguish micro from macro evolution.
Please also give your definition for a species, and a “kind” as used by creationist. So that we can discuss this.
I know you think a man is just a monkey who lost his fur, but really I got to tell you that any 5 year old can tell the difference. I’m sure you yourself could provide me with a detailed list of scores of differences and if you were honest with yourself you would also differentiate between them based on the question Dr. Gish asked you in your debate with him, at what point would you allow it to date your daughter? 1%? 51%? 99%? At what point is it a talking animal (if that’s possible) and at what point could it become a son in law and father your grandchildren? Are humans eligible but organisms that are nearly 99% identical are not?
Dr Menton has an excellent set of videos for viewing online dealing with ape-men called,
Lucy, She’s no Lady.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/video/ondemand/
I don’t think you’ve fully answered mfox’s post from December 1st, 8:48 AM,
Is this way of thinking that you pursue taking us in a direction you would be proud to see your children go or dragging us down to more bestial behavior?
***************************************************************
mfox said:
“While superficially humans and chimps are strikingly similar, intrinsically they are excludingly different. The chimps have two many pairs of chromosomes. This subject might bring to the mind of the materialist; “Hey, lets find out.” It was actually attempted in Russia I believe and you guessed it, nothing happened except separation from God and His will. Why would they even think of doing such a thing? Don’t they have any morals? Well, they believe they have no morels. You see they can’t find morals under a microscope in the same way they can’t see God under a microscope. And since they can’t find them there, they do not exist. Or would you like to show me the moral gene? And perhaps the murderer lacks the “spelling” of the moral gene. How can we fault him for his behavior? Let him be. He is only acting in the beautifully randomly determined way his chemical makeup dictates he should by all the physical laws that control him. He has done nothing “wrong”.”
*****************************************************************
For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;
Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath showed it unto them.
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:
Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,
And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.
Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:
Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.
For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:
And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet.
And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient;
Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers,
Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,
Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful:
Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.
*********************************************************
Just a thought, I’ve passed out about 600 DVD’s of Dr Hovind’s seminar this year and he claims millions of his videos have gone out, also he was also arrested for withdrawing close to half a million dollars most of which came from selling his creationist material, so what is the approximate readership of American Atheist Magazine?
Have a nice day.
Doug Hove
Doug Hove
“I know you think a man is just a monkey who lost his fur,”
Wrong, monkeys have tails. Humans, chimps, and gorillas are apes and do not have tails.
“Just a thought, I’ve passed out about 600 DVD’s of Dr Hovind’s seminar this year and he claims millions of his videos have gone out, also he was also arrested for withdrawing close to half a million dollars most of which came from selling his creationist material, so what is the approximate readership of American Atheist Magazine?”
Does not Kent Hovind say the majority is usually wrong and it this not an appealing to the masses fallacy?
Correct me if I am wrong. The calibration curves for C14-dating are constructed in the following way:
Data is collected with respect to the presumed age of artifacts via a variety of scientific techniques. A regression model, most often linear, is then constructed to fit these data. This is the model that is used to calibrate the C14 dates.
I know this is a superficial description but is it consistent with your (Frank, CM, Samphire) understanding of how the model is constructed? If not, you are free to fill in any important details, maybe a short list of techniques, about the calibration before I give my assessment of the procedure.
-Mel
mfox
Said this at 8:44pm:
Samphire,
Some odds and ends along the way:
If Jesus calls what the mustard seed grows into a tree than it is a tree. That is what it means to have all authority given to you.
We read from Matthew 16: 21
21From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day.
If Friday be the first day then Sunday bet he third day, right.
Let’s count how many times I tell you that the Theory of Evolution is not falsifiable before you correct the error of your ways.
The following is from Wikipedia
“The human genome has many different regulatory sequence which are crucial to controlling gene expression. These are typically short sequences that appear near and within genes. A systematic understanding of these regulatory sequences and how they together act as a gene regulatory network is only beginning to emerge from high-throughput expression and comparative genomics studies.
Identification of regulatory sequences relies in part on evolutionary conservation. The evolutionary branch between the human and mouse, for example, occurred 70-90 million years ago. So computer comparisons of gene sequences that identify conserved non-coding sequences will be an indication of their importance in duties such as gene regulation.
Another comparative genomic approach to locating regulatory sequences in humans is the gene sequencing of the puffer fish. These vertebrates have essentially the same genes and regulatory gene sequences as humans, but with only one-eighth the “junk” DNA. The compact DNA sequence of the puffer fish makes it much easier to locate the regulatory genes.”
Two points: 1) as I mensioned to Frank we are only beginning to understand how this information is passed from generation to generation and 2) the regulatory sequence they are serching for has been pre-concieved to fit the evolutionary model. In other words, the regulatory sequence discovered by these evolutionists will be force fit to evolutionary ideology by ad hoc explanations. Again, I am o.k. with this for anyone who accepts the premise that all things can be explained by natural processes. As for a scientist, why would he/she not find the sequence and then determine if it fits the ideology? As far as “junk” DNA is concerned, one man’s junk is another man’s treasure. Perhaps it is not junk.
Hi Mel,
You wrote the above on the 29th and, having spent a long weekend in the Vosges, I have previously not found the time to reply.
So if Jesus defines a mustard plant as a tree then we must accept it is a tree. OK, if you wish. I’ll let Linnaeus know he got it wrong
Friday night is one night and Saturday night makes two nights. Matthew 12:40 speaks of three nights.
Finally, I don’t really understand the point you are trying to make re falsification but if the tree already constructed from comparative anatomy failed to reflect a later tree constructed from a more recent study of biochemical attributes would that not be a falsification? I admit I am out of league on this subject.
Regards
Samphire
Darling,
You are confusing POWER, dictatorial POWER, with LAW, U.S. Constitutional LAW.
Sure!–dictators of all shapes and sizes and small bureaucractic formation LOVE to throw people in prison for not bowing down to them. That’s old hat; you should know that.
But that’s got nothing to do with LAW.
And I repeat: there is NO LAW WHICH REQUIRES A U.S. CITIZEN TO PAY INCOME TAXES.
Watch the movie “America: From Freedom to Fascism.”
Read “The Law the Never Was” by Bill Benson.
And there are others.
Inform yourself, Darling. Ignorance is slavery.
And as Goethke said (paraphrase): “There is no one so much a slave as they who falsely believe they are free.”
You are a slave, Darling. You are a slave. To a worldly tyrant. And what I can’t fathom is, how in the name of Jesus Christ can folks like you enjoy your servitude, in the face of history, and national law, and Scripture, all of which should make you ashamed to call yourself American, and/or a follower of Jesus Christ.
Look, whatever, I don’t care. Just stop confusing power with law. Just stop. If I’m gonna believe you are out of high school, that I am speaking with an adult you , I’ve got to ask that you stop making such a fundamental error.
darling
Said this at 10:37am:
——————————————————————————–
Gordon_Comstock, obviously you have not been reading these comments, because your questions have been asked and answered.
But, if you really want to know, the answer is here:
http://docs.law.gwu.edu/facweb/jsiegel/Personal/taxes/JustNoLaw.htm
More importantly – despite all the crazy tax protester theories and rhetoric, no court has held or will hold that the Internal Revenue Code is invalid or that the Internal Revenue Service lacks power to levy or collect income taxes:
http://evans-legal.com/dan/tpfaq.html
As to the “irrelevance” of which you claim, it must be remembered (and for you, darling, it must needs be yet researched) that the ENTIRE MONETARY SYSTEM of the U.S. is UNconstitutional at this present time. I’ll cite a few sources which prove that:
The U.S. Constitution, Article One, Sections Eight and Ten.
The book: “The Creature from Jekyll Island” by G. Edward Griffin.
The book: “Secrets of the Federal Reserve” by Eustace Mullins.
The book: “Thieves in the Temple” by Andre Michael Eggelletion.
The booklet “Economic Solutions” by Peter Kershaw.
DVD: “Phenomenon: Monopoly Men.”
DVD: “America: From Freedom to Fascism.”
As to the website you cited, try this one instead:
http://www.afn.org/~govern/IRSkinny.html
As you see, mine refutes yours, so we’re back to square one, and before we get off square one, YOU need to tell ME exactly WHEN the 16th Amendment was ratified, instead of merely, and UNconstitutionally being “declared” to be ratified.
darling, I await the specifics of your answer.
And again, I leave you also, darling, with these most applicable and pointed words of the Founding Father Samuel Adams:
“If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
I submit to you, darling, that thee care not one wit for liberty, neither doth thou knowest what it even is.
Remember the words of Sam Adams, darling. Remember them, let them sink in. If there is any hope for you, you will let them sink in, you will not ignore them and scoff, as you probably are at this immediate moment as you sit reading this.
You don’t even have the law on your side, darling. You don’t even have the Supreme Law of the Land on your side in your defense of your own servitude, and yet lawlessly, shamelessly, grovelingly do you still defend that servitude.
Snap out of it. Snap out of it, my friend.
darling
Said this at 10:37am:
——————————————————————————–
Gordon_Comstock, obviously you have not been reading these comments, because your questions have been asked and answered.
Not only that, but your question is irrelevant, because Mr. Hovind was not charged with failing to pay income tax.
But, if you really want to know, the answer is here:
http://docs.law.gwu.edu/facweb/jsiegel/Personal/taxes/JustNoLaw.htm
Oh, and darling, as to my point about the entire U.S. monetary system being currently illegal, I forgot to finish my point, which is this:
We live under an intrinsically illicit monetary system which is nevertheless coerced upon us. So who cares what Hovind or whoever does with their money, whether they “structure” it and give a deposit that 50 bucks short of reporting it to the IRS. Who cares?! That’s my point. The whole system is against the law, and is set before us to illegally curb our freedoms and illegally, unconstitutionally, unscripturally steal from us. Yes, it’s true; shocking only to people like you who are still getting their information from Satan’s worldly brainwashing system, but it’s true nonetheless. So if Hovind was just living as a free American would and should, according the the Supreme Law of the Land, then my question to you, darling, is this: Where do YOU get off defending lawlessness?
Another question, darling: Are you as concerned about CIA-linked-and-back drug smuggling “structurers” like Barry Seal in this country, as you are about Kent Hovind’s “structuring”?
I would really like to hear your answer on those, darling. Oh, and I sure hope you question the validity of that second one, that second question I just gave you. Please do, please, it’ll make my day. I’ll give you so many sources your monitor will flicker frenetically in trying to keep up with them all.
Samphire,
In Matthew 12: 40 Jesus is quoted as saying he will be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights, this is true. And in fact, Jesus was not in the heart of the earth at all because the earth does not have a heart and he was dead less than three whole days before he was raised, so he could not have possibly spent three nights away. Was Jesus mistaken?
Given the accounts in Matthew 16, 17, and 20 and the actual facts surrounding His death and resurrection it could hardly be the case that He was mistaken. He obviously knew what was going to happen in the minutest detail. Was Jesus lying?
There are times when strict exactness is required. Say for instance when my daughter asks that I pick her up at the mall at 8:00 pm. She is with her friends and they are probably going to leave the mall at the same time. If I want to be sure she is not left alone (young girl alone at mall bad), then I should be there at 8:00 pm. There are other times when strict exactness is not required. Suppose my daughter and I are traveling in a car to one of her games and she is to be there by 8:00 pm and she asks me what time it is. I look at the clock as it reads 7:47 pm. Now I know we are only about five minutes away at the time so I respond to her question with “It’s a quarter to eight.” Have I lied to my daughter? The answer is no of course not. Neither am I mistaken. What I am doing is addressing the real question which was “Am I going to be late to my game?” My daughter knows the territory so when I tell her it’s a quarter to eight she knows we have plenty of time and she can relax with the knowledge that unless something out of the ordinary happens, we will be there on time.
If you would read the whole of His discourse with the Pharisees in Matthew 12, then you may understand that the real issue in the hearts of the Pharisees by the time we reach verse 40 is not a sign from Jesus but what is it exactly that is expected of them. His answer is plain, repent – with all your heart – repent and follow Him. He then goes on to point out that these Pharisees, if they repent at all, will return to the evil of their ways even seven fold will they return to their evil ways.
It would be just like the Pharisees to take your attitude concerning His statements with respect to Jonah. I can imagine the Pharisees witnessing His death and then seeing Him raised less than three whole days later ignoring the miraculous fulfillment of His prophecy and calling Him on being a few hours early.
Jesus was strictly accurate every time it was required. He is on the record as predicting the events to a tee. He knows your heart and mine as well as He knew the hearts of the Pharisees and the faithful of that day. He is still to this day telling sinners they need to repent and follow Him. I pray that all will listen and heed the call.
-Mel
darling,
now for the punchline. That guy “Barry Seal” whom I mentioned above? That notorious drug smuggler who came and went over U.S. airspace, who generated drug money that was “structured” in and out of U.S. banks back and forth, he that was gunned down about a decade ago because he knew too much? Are you ready? Are you ready for the kicker? Here goes:
He is linked to the Clintons; he is linked to the Bushes; he is linked to Ollie North; he is linked to the CIA; etc, etc.
Sources, I’ve got sources. So many it’s silly. Try me.
Now, are you beginning to get the picture of the Satanic system you are defending, and of the Godly man you are attacking?
…but darling, prior to Barry Seal’s assassination, for years he came and went as he pleased in the U.S. He flouted laws, and arrests, and detainments, and trials. His planes flew in and out of U.S. airspace. He and his employees “structured” drug money in banks right and left.
You don’t do that, you CAN’T do that, unless you’ve got connections. And he did. Oh, did he ever.
darling, you are defending a system that smuggled heroine into this country by hiding it in the bodybags of fallen U.S. soldiers. And it wasn’t just a few; it was black op policy.
The drugs are propping up our economy; and that’s just ONE horrendous thing wrong with our economy, which you seek so eagerly to defend.
And you come against a guy like Hovind, who just seeks to act like a free American constitutionally ought?
Wow.
Ratiocarbon dating:
For background the interested may read the description of radiocarbon dating provided by Wikipedia. As stated in an earlier post, I am comfortable using this technique but I would be very careful not to overstate its reliability especially when predicted ages exceed 10,000 years. I would be equally comfortable scraping the whole process simply because it can be so misleading.
The problem remains: We do not know how much carbon was in the atmosphere pre-flood. Now you will say, “The flood never happened.” The truth is that the only scientific conclusions about the flood’s existence are based on premise. My premise is that the flood happened. If you can show that the flood could not have happened then be my guest. The materialist and the creationist do have at least one thing in common: We are both painting the target around the arrow.
Take the Grand Canyon for example. You and I make the same observations about its present size, shape, composition, and location. We then reach vastly different scientifically plausible conclusions about its origin. Why, because we are painting our scientific explanation with our own palette of ideology around the measurements we agree on. That is to say we are connecting the dots of data based on the picture we want to see.
I tried to show this to Frank with the Krebs cycle example he used but my background in that area proved to be too weak to form the proper argument. Perhaps here with the mathematical model, where my background is strong, of a calibration curve I can be more detailed in my explanation.
It is easy and useful to calibrate dates based on facts like the prolific testing of atomic weapons. But it is dangerous to equate such a process with calibrating radiocarbon dates with tree ring dates or ice and sediment core dates or speleothem dates. All of these techniques are based on the same assumption that radiocarbon dating is based on, namely the uniformitarian principle (UP). It appears to me that virtually all modern scientists are comfortable with this premise (UP). The affect of this consensus is that the mere suggestion that 14C levels as recently as 5000 years ago could have been essentially non-existent is enough to throw the lot of them into a tizzy. I am not saying I can prove levels were that low. I am saying you can’t prove they were not and levels that low fit my premise that the Biblical account of the flood is true.
You suppose correlation among dating procedures adds strength to your reasoning like the individual strands in a rope do when woven together. I submit that your reasoning is more like a chain which is only as strong as its weakest link. That link is the uniformitarian principle.
A thought experiment: What if I wanted to know how long I will live? Given I believe the psychic powers of Madame Uniformitarian are authentic based on her ability to tell me that I am 44 years old after she inspects my drivers license, I may employ her to give answer to my question. If she were to look into her crystal ball and say “You will live to be 100 years old”, I might calibrate this prediction by asking her to read the Tarot cards, read my palm, consult the magic 8 ball, and consult the Ouija board. Finally, if I could establish a meaningful statistical correlation between and among these data, then I could make a scientific prediction as to the length of my life within a reasonable measure of precision.
No offense to Madame intended, but if her psychic powers are actually not up to snuff, while precise my prediction may not have the desired level of accuracy.
There is nothing wrong with the science of the calibration curve. There is nothing wrong with the scientific use of standard calibration curves to predict the age of an artifact. In fact I agree with Charles O`Neill when he says “the cubic spline provides a good curve fit for arbitrary data points.” [“Cubic Spline Interpolation MAE 5093” 28 May 2002] But please do NOT tell me or my 5th grade child in his public school that you know for a fact the artifact is that old. Please DO tell us, as did the chemists in the book I quoted, that the age you report is based on assumptions that can’t be proved. What would be badly written / misleading / lying would be to publish, under the guise of science, an age without the assumption disclaimer. Here, as stated on the BETA Analytic web site, is the proper scientific attitude: “It is always important to quote the data source and mathematics with your interpretations.” Kent Hovind is very upfront on his tape. He tells you right at the start his assumptions. Will any atheist here be as upfront and admit acceptance, without proof, of the Uniformitarian Principle?
Now don’t get upset. I understand (UP) is manifest to you. That is why it is your premise. You think I am an idiot because UP is not plain to me. What is manifest to me are God and the truth and authority of His Word. Your position, that all can be explained via natural processes and all things have operated as they do now for all time past, can’t be reconciled with the God of the Bible. If Kent Hovind or I are engaged in bad science, then by all means point it out. But don’t attack our science because you disagree with our premise unless you can show, apart from violations of your premise, it to be false.
-Mel
Hi Compgene
It is not what I was taught – no adult baptism, no eternal lfe. But what about Matthew 20:22-23? And Jesus also baptised with water (John 3:22). And in Acts 2:41 are you saying that all those guys were not baptised in water? How does that work with the Apostolic succession?
I found it impossible to believe that the God of Love who created this amazing Universe could possibly be so pathetically trivial as to demand of the pinnacle of his creation the empty ceremony of being dunked under water in order to save them from the fires of His hell. I still do.
Kind regards
Hi, Mel.
OK, again. Whatever you say. When Jesus says a mustard plant is a tree its a tree. When he prophesies he will be buried for three nights he only means two nights.
However, when you say that you will deliver your daughter to the game at 8 on Monday morning and you actually deliver her at 8 on the Sunday then that really is bad, isn’t it? And if Jesus knew exactly what was going to happen why did he call it wrong? Why bother with the allusion to Jonah when he could have said “And just as Samphire will spend three days and three nights in a caravan at Llandudno in 1950…”. (true, by the way – we were driven out by a plague of earwigs. OK, OK its not biblical). But equally vapid when it comes to prophecy.
I’m (obviously) not a biblical scholar but it seems to me that, if not the focus, verse 40 is a pretty important element of the entire chapter. Nor do I find the chapter very edifying in relation to Jesus’s personality. Your dismissal of the event is not convincing.
Please would you give me an example of where Jesus was “strictly accurate”
Brother Kent & Jo & Family,
Have been praying for you for many years, and continue to do so. We love your testimony in the Lord Jesus Christ! If we can ever help, let us know…
In Christ Jesus…
“At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me. But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.
Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh! Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire. And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire. Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven. For the Son of man is come to save that which was lost.” ~ Matthew 18:1-11
Hi Mel,
You said “”I am not saying I can prove levels were that low. I am saying you can’t prove they were not and levels that low fit my premise that the Biblical account of the flood is true.”
What have c14 levels got to do with the Flood?
Mel said:
“A thought experiment: What if I wanted to know how long I will live? Given I believe the psychic powers of Madame Uniformitarian are authentic based on her ability to tell me that I am 44 years old after she inspects my drivers license, I may employ her to give answer to my question. If she were to look into her crystal ball and say “You will live to be 100 years old”, I might calibrate this prediction by asking her to read the Tarot cards, read my palm, consult the magic 8 ball, and consult the Ouija board. Finally, if I could establish a meaningful statistical correlation between and among these data, then I could make a scientific prediction as to the length of my life within a reasonable measure of precision.”
Not a clever example, Mel, I am afraid. There is no conjunction between crystal balls, tarot cards and your future much-lamented demise. At least, not unless you drive at high speed into the back of a lorryload of such rubbish on its way to San Francisco. However, you are not alone in putting up straw men arguments. Mr.H. constantly tries to represent evolution in terms of the evolution in the design of motor cars ignoring the fact that cars do not self-replicate. You would do better to carry out your mathematical analysis on the deaths of your fellow humans measured by life style, sex, weight, height, even religion, parentage etc. Having done that you could then call yourself an actuary and make a lot of money advising the life insurance industry. Indeed, Uniformitarianism is the bedrock of the life insurance industry.
As to the accuracy of your crystal ball reader’s prediction she may perhaps be an amateur actuary and took a good look at you as you entered the room and came to her own reasonably acurate conclusions based upon her experience and only pretended to see something in her crystal ball although I doubt that any person claiming psychic powers would ever be guilty of such charlatanism, would they? Obviously, I don’t include Sylvia Browne in that stricture as she doesn’t appear to have any psychic powers. Much better to use actual artifacts of known historical age to establlsh the calibration curves before using the evidence of the curve on other artifacts of unknown age. Of course, every dating comes with a built-in error factor.
I very much doubt that any physicist would get into a “tizzy” over your supposition that c14/c12 ratios were substantially lower before the Flood than after since there is no evidence for it. Where are the eroded continental sediments on the sea-floor, where did all that water disappear to, where are all the millions of species which appeared in the fossil record allegedly laid down in the Flood but which are no longer around today, how come we still have species around which were not on the Arc (such as whales – Genesis 6:17)? The list is endless.
Frank,
You wrote:
“I am disappointed that no one has tried to answer my hypothetical question concerning the ethics and theology of transferring human genes into chimpanzees. Because this is so crucial to Christian theology, I want to restate the problem before answering the best of the challenges posed to me.”
I do not understand the ethical question. You seem to be suggesting an engineering problem in which the goal is to transform a human being into a chimpanzee. From a Biblical perspective you can’t even begin to make a case for this project being ethical; rather, it is abominable. Not only that but it is doomed to failure. You believe, without proof, that all we are is carried in the genetic make up of our DNA. The Biblical truth is that little of what we truly are is contained in the physical make up of our body. We are spiritual beings. This is so by the power and will of God almighty. You can no more say that I am a complex organization of chemical compounds as you could say I am the hotel I stayed in last week.
So why is your hypothetical project abominable? Well our body is supposed to be a temple unto God. You don’t go tearing down and putting up the temple the way you like it, in the same way you don’t go around knocking out walls in your hotel room. The place does not belong to you. God made the temple the way He wants it. Don’t mess with the DNA of humans to try to make them something they are not and don’t mess with the DNA of animals trying to make them human. DON’T! It is just that simple and there is no ethical dilemma to play out.
-Mel
Hi, Mel
Both my parents unfortunately suffered damage in, to use your analogy, the hotel attic area. They both got Alzheimer’s, first my father and then, a few years later, my mother. As the disease took hold – and it is only a physical deterioration of the brain – their spirituality eventuality disappeared from view even though they lived on for many more months. Whereas they were both previously ardent Christians towards the end they had no ability to take any interest in anything whatsoever. Christianity was of no further interest. It was the humanity of their children and the carehome workers who helped them through.
When they were much younger my parents would visit the carehome in which my mother eventually resided in order to sing hymns to the old folks. When it became time for my mother to enter the home such church visits had long since ended. Hardly anyone came from the church to visit her, just one kind saint. In that church my father had been an elder for many years and my mother had run the Mothers’ Meeting.
Also for many years and even when they were elderly but still fairly fit it had been my parents’ habit to go out of their way to pick up one or two old ladies from around our town and take them to and from the Sunday services by car. Before her mind went completely we tried to get members of the congregation to do the same for my mother (all her children lived a couple of hours away from her). None would put themselves out. Instead, they voted a small sum of money for taxi fares for her. We sent the money back. None of us, their children, were short of the taxi fare. None of those lovely christians could be bothered to do for my mother what she had done for many others over the years. When she eventually died, we chose not to hold the funeral service at that church, a church that my father had been instrumental in building some fifty years earlier.
I remain to be convinced that we are much more than a very complex chemical machine. For my parents, once the machinery had gone wrong, it is as though the hotels had both become vacant and derelict.
Samphire,
You wrote:
“What have c14 levels got to do with the Flood?”
Understand the flood was not just a flood. It was a cataclysmic event that changed drastically all of the physical systems on the earth. Before the flood a strong magnetic field coupled with the waters above, some sort of water canopy, protected the earth from any harmful radiation. This would have prevented the formation of 14C as it is produced today and since for that matter.
Get out of your head the simple story of hard rain for forty days and then all the water washing away. Great storehouses of water were released from below in what must have been the total destruction of vast portions of the surface of the planet. The highest peaks pre-flood would be dwarfted by today’s standards. The world was a very different place pre-flood.
-Mel
Samphire,
Unfortunately the church is full of sinners with a free will. Some, like your parents, were not just hearers of the Word but doers also. I look forward to meeting them in heaven. That is where they will spend eternity with no more suffering, no more pain, no more Alzheimer’s.
As for the attic, if you are to understand the Biblical world view, then you must get the fact that we do not live in a place that is much like the original creation. It is a fallen world. Sin has entered in causing much destruction. One of the primary vehicles of this destruction is the 2nd law of thermodynamics. This law was not in place before Adam sinned.
Now we have disease, suffering, and death. The reason for these is that they are the general consequence of sin. You see I don’t mean to say that your parents Alzheimer’s was caused by any particular sin they committed but rather disease is a symptom of the fallen nature of this world. We, including your parents, deserve far worse than the suffering you witnessed them go through. The GOOD NEWS is that the major consequence of sin, eternal death, is reversible by faith in Jesus Christ and through the Grace of the one true living God. You asked me on what point was Jesus strictly exact. Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life; none come to the Father accept through the Son.
Your parents knew this and lived their lives in full expectation the promises of God would be fulfilled in Christ and His work on the cross. My prayer is that you too will come to the knowledge that through the Son you may have life and life to the full.
My point to Frank was that we are not to intentionally harm, damage, or otherwise distort the physical body we have been given. All the while we understand that this body is temporary, as we wait for our new and everlasting body. Any suffering that we go threw at present can’t be compared to the immeasurable joy that awaits us. Until then we count it all joy that we are considered worthy to suffer in bringing glory to the King.
-Mel
Regarding whether a mustard plant can be a tree:
http://www.4to40.com/earth/geography/htm/plantsindex.asp?counter=244
Mustard is the common name applied to certain annual plants that are grown for their pungent seed and for their leaves, which are eaten as greens. Like cabbages and turnips, they are members of the genus Brassia, family Cruciferae. Three species of mustard are commonly cultivated: black mustard, B. nigra, whose seeds produce the strongest flavor; white or yellow mustard, B. hirta; and Indian mustard, or mustard greens, B. junea. Mustard is native to southern Europe and southwestern Asia and has been cultivated since ancient times. (The mustard of the Bible, Mat. 13.31, 32 was probably black mustard, which grows to heights of 3.7 m/12 ft in Israel.) Mustards are cultivated today in temperate regions throughout the world.
Whole mustard seeds are used as a pickling flavoring and to add pungency to many cooked foods. Powdered dry mustard is a common kitchen spice. Its sharp, hot flavor develops when the powder is moistened, and the resulting paste must be used immediately. Prepared mustard is a mixture of powdered mustard with salt, spices, and lemon juice, with wine or vinegar to preserve the mustard’s pungency. Mustard oil is used medicinally as an ingredient of liniments, stomach stimulants, and emetics.
Regarding whether Jesus really spent three days and three nights in the tomb:
http://www.khouse.org/articles/1995/37/
(Chuck Missler)
Q: A question about Good Friday:
“How can there be three days and three nights between Friday and Sunday?”
The observances of Good Friday and Easter Sunday have perpetuated the traditional chronology that the crucifixion took place on a Friday, that the Lord’s body was buried on that day about 6 p.m., and that he rose from the dead early on Sunday. There are some, however, that feel this tradition is at odds with the Scriptural record. It also seems to conflict with certain prophetic and legal facts.
Three Days
The first problem is reckoning “three days” between Friday evening and Sunday morning. I once co-hosted a TV show which had the famed apologist John Warwick Montgomery as a guest. This issue came up and John rendered the traditional rationalization, pointing out that the Jews reckoned a partial day as a whole day.
I turned to my co-host and explained, “You must remember that John is an attorney, and that’s the way they bill.” (John almost fell out his chair laughing; he didn’t realize that I was aware of his distinguished legal background.) But the difficulty remains. Our Lord’s definitive statement is one of the problems:
“For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” Matthew 12:40
The mention of nights as well as days makes it hard to render this as simply an idiom rather than a statement of fact. Further, when Paul declares the resurrection of Christ to be “according to the Scriptures” in 1 Corinthians 15:4, it is difficult to conclude that he wasn’t citing Jonah 1:17. Intensifying the issue, the “three days” was a principal issue at the trial of Jesus.
“Now the chief priests, and elders, and all the council, sought false witness against Jesus… At the last came two false witnesses, And said, This [fellow] said, I am able to destroy the temple of God, and to build it in three days.” Matthew 26:59-61
What did Jesus really say? “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up”, John 2:19. The same phrase reoccurs in the gospels a dozen times. It also seems to frequently reoccur in prophetic patterns.
The Sabbaths
Nowhere in the Gospels does it assert that Christ was crucified on a Friday. In Mark 15:42, it refers to “…the day before the sabbath.” This may be the root of the misunderstanding. The Jews had other sabbaths in addition to the weekly Shabbat (Saturday).
There were seven “high sabbaths” each year; the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the 15th of Nisan, being one of them. Further, Matthew 28:1 should read, “At the end of the sabbaths,” implying a plurality of sabbaths that week.
If Passover, the 14th of Nisan, fell earlier in the week, the 15th could have been any day prior to Saturday, the weekly sabbath. “When the sabbaths were past” would, of course, be Sunday (actually, Saturday after sundown).
The Jericho Journey
Another problem with a Friday crucifixion is John 12:1: “Then Jesus six days before the passover came to Bethany…” (from Jericho). The Friday view would make six days earlier the weekly Shabbat, and on this day such a journey was legally out of the question for a devout Jew.
Summary
As for the Friday or Wednesday issue, there are many good scholars on each side of this controversy. I personally have become rather cynical toward any traditions that are not supported by Scripture. Good Friday is the “traditional” view. The Wednesday Crucifixion is known as the “reconstructed view.” The important thing is that the tomb was empty. The authorities made sure that this was indisputable.
Indeed, He is risen!
This article was originally published in the
April 1995 Personal Update NewsJournal.
Creation CD: I would also like to point out that a Jewish day begins at sundown of the day before, according to our way of thinking.
“and the evening and morning were the first day …”
Also just because a particular pope sets a date for Easter, Christmas, or the cruxifixion don’t make it so. That applies to places also, such as the Red Sea crossing, Mt. Arrat, etc..
Frank,
I am a teacher. I make my living answering questions. You know more than I do about the Krebs cycle. I asked you a question. I read your response to my question many times.
I think it is fair to say, you did not answer my question. So, not to be a pest but, if the discovery of completely different enzymes doing the same exact chemical job among humans and chimps would imply they are not related and thus falsify evolution, why does this discovery among prokaryotes not show them to be unrelated and hence falsify evolution?
-Mel
Samphire,
You wrote:
“Not a clever example, Mel, I am afraid. There is no conjunction between crystal balls, tarot cards and your future much-lamented demise.”
Are you telling me that the fortunes made by psychics are ill gotten? I can’t believe there exists no connection between these long practiced methods and the reality of the future. Madame Uniformitarian better hope that her methods correlate if she wants me to go home and tell my friends that she knows her stuff.
Kidding aside, my point in this example is to show that mathematical correlation can exist where no real physical implications can be made. The UP must be true in order for any of these dating methods to be necessarily true. This is just a flat out fact. Truly, your checking 14C dates against tree ring dates is only done to improve the supposed accuracy and does nothing to support UP which would imply factual accuracy. We either believe Madame knows her stuff or we don’t. There is one difference between Madame and UP. We can check Madame’s predictions. We can wait and see if I live to be 100 or not. We have no way of verifying the very old ages given by 14C. We can’t go back in time. We can only check them against equally suspect methods.
No straw man here. Are you not telling me that you believe the physical systems in place now on the earth have always operated the way they do now? Are you not telling me that the only possible fluctuation in atmospheric 14C must be explainable by systems in place now? Are you not telling me that the evidence showing that every square inch of the planet was at one time under water, including what is now at the summit of Everest, can only be explained by the slow movement of continents we see today?
The bottom line is this: Today’s facts can only be evidence of past events if we presuppose the conditions of the past.
-Mel
Samphire,
You ask:
Where did modern day whales come from if all the life that had breath in it was destroyed in the flood?
Remember, my premise is that the universe is an open system even today. God did not loose His powers to create after the sixth day. Not every detail of the history of the universe is contained in the Bible. He could have simply spoken the whales into existence had he so desired.
You ask:
Where are the eroded continental sediments on the sea-floor and here did all that water disappear to?
I could ask you the same thing about the sediment from the Grand Canyon and the water did not disappear, it is in the oceans. Before the flood the water was stored under the ground and in the upper atmosphere, just as the Bible describes. Remember great destruction occurred, great destruction.
-Mel
Regarding whether a mustard plant can be a tree:
Regarding whether Jesus really spent three days and three nights in the tomb:
*************************************************************************
NOTE: I posted this over 24 hours ago, so I am reposting it. Sorry if it’s a repeat.
*************************************************************************
Regarding whether a mustard plant can be a tree:`
http://www.4to40.com/earth/geography/htm/plantsindex.asp?counter=244
Mustard is the common name applied to certain annual plants that are grown for their pungent seed and for their leaves, which are eaten as greens. Like cabbages and turnips, they are members of the genus Brassia, family Cruciferae. Three species of mustard are commonly cultivated: black mustard, B. nigra, whose seeds produce the strongest flavor; white or yellow mustard, B. hirta; and Indian mustard, or mustard greens, B. junea. Mustard is native to southern Europe and southwestern Asia and has been cultivated since ancient times. (The mustard of the Bible, Mat. 13.31, 32 was probably black mustard, which grows to heights of 3.7 m/12 ft in Israel.) Mustards are cultivated today in temperate regions throughout the world.
Whole mustard seeds are used as a pickling flavoring and to add pungency to many cooked foods. Powdered dry mustard is a common kitchen spice. Its sharp, hot flavor develops when the powder is moistened, and the resulting paste must be used immediately. Prepared mustard is a mixture of powdered mustard with salt, spices, and lemon juice, with wine or vinegar to preserve the mustard’s pungency. Mustard oil is used medicinally as an ingredient of liniments, stomach stimulants, and emetics.
**********************************************************************
Regarding whether Jesus really spent three days and three nights in the tomb:
http://www.khouse.org/articles/1995/37/
( Chuck Missler )
Q: A question about Good Friday:
“How can there be three days and three nights between Friday and Sunday?”
[edited - article was removed, check the link - edited]
This article was originally published in the
April 1995 Personal Update NewsJournal.
*******************************************************************************
I would also like to point out that a Jewish day begins at sundown of the day before, according to our way of thinking.
“and the evening and morning were the first day …”
Creation CD: I would also like to add that a Jewish day begins at sundown of the day before and ends at sundown (according to our way of thinking).
Also just because a Pope declares the date of Jesus’ birth, the crucifixion, or the
Resurrection doesn’t make it so. Neither can he by Papal authority decide the location of the manger, the read sea crossing, or anything else.
At the risk of being a bore as well as repetitious, I nevertheless am compelled to restate my genetic engineering Gedanken experiment. That is because the thought experiment highlights the fact thhat we now are on the threshold of understanding completely the purely material differences that are the cause of the supposedly spiritual differences between humans and apes. We are witnessing the complete and total triumph of materialism in biology and the complete defeat of dualism and vitalism. With the defeat of vitalism comes the defeat of supernaturalism in general and theology in particular.
Because this thought needs to be persued first, I shall delay restatement of the Gedanken experiment problem until the end of this epistle.
Protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, the ONLY differences demonstrable between humans and apes are physiological and are the result of the actions of perhaps several hundred genes. (For the sake of simplifying the argument and to make the arithmetic simple, I have assumed exactly 100 genes, but of course even though the exact number will certainly be different, it will not affect the argument.)
Mel claims that “We are spiritual beings,” despite the fact that there is not one shred of evidence to support this claim. “The Biblical truth is that little of what we truly are is contained in the physical makeup of our body,” he asserts — also with no scientific evidence. I fear this is merely theologically wishful thinking.
I devoted a substantial part of my academic career to the study of brain physiology and the evolution of nervous systems. Although everywhere I saw relationships between human and non-human nervous systems going back to jellyfish, nowhere did I ever see any evidence of a “spiritual difference” between the human brain and any other brain. Nor did I encounter any problems that for even a millisecond suggested I might need to seek a supernatural explanation. Never did I feel the need to abandon Occham’s Razor and “multiply assumptions beyond necessity.” Never did I feel the need to commit the logical fallacy so beloved of theistic thinkers, the informal fallacy known as “ignotum per ignotius” (trying to explain the unknown in terms of the even more unknown).
Supernatural explanations for everything have steadily and inexorably been replaced by materialistic explanations. NEVER has science reverted to supernaturalism once a natural explanation has been found. Again and again, natural explanations have been improved and refined — once in a while, even completely abandoned — but never, never has science had to go back to a supernatural explanation.
The “spiritual differences” of which Mel writes are the subject of a very lively field of neurophysiological research. I like to call it “neurotheology,” for it is elucidating the physiological basis for “religious experiences,” religious hallucinations, the sense of “communion” with “something greater than ourselves,” and the like. One laboratory now can induce at will “religious experiences” by focusing a powerful electromagnetic field on a particular part of the brain. They are able to induce religous experiences even in the brains of Atheists.
Many years ago, when I was trying to discover the physiological basis for hypnosis in humans and other vertebrates, I had occasion to study hypnotic phenomena in religous rituals and practices. Years later, I published my thoughts on the relationship between hypmotizability and religiosity in an essay called “Religion, Hypnosis, and Music: An Evolutionary Perspective.” The essay is still available on the American Atheist Web-site , and I urge all who are seriously interested in the biological basis of religion read it even if they may remain unconvinced.
More than I could have hoped in my wildest dreams when I wrote that essay, the scientific study of religion has progressed from the formulation of explanatory hypotheses to the experimental testing of these hypotheses. A completely natural explanation of the ‘supernatural’ is being developed.
The notion that there is anything spiritual or supernatural about human mental activities was of course dispelled long ago when people began to experiment with hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD and it was realized that just a few molecules of the right kind can profoundly affect “spiritual” phenomena. Of course, anyone who has ever had a bit too much ethanol to drink knows how true that can be. (Another essay of mine, “Spirit, Soul, and Mind,” deals with this more coherently and also can be accessed on the Atheist Web-site.)
ALL the evidence of biology in general and of neurophysiology in particular shows that there is no “Ghost in the machine,” and that all living things are organic machines — period.
Finally, to get to the subject of genetic engineering and the differences between chimps and humans, the reproductive barrier between humans and sheep and humans and chimps is not germane to the question. Genetic engineering daily overcomes such barriers when it transplants the human insulin gene into bacteria to produce human insulin. Is crossing humans and bacteria an “abomination” if it helps to save human lives?
When we clone the human growth hormone gene into sheep and engineer it with a lactalbumin promoter so that human growth hormone will be secreted into milk when a sheep lactates, is that an abomination? Is showing that there is no “vital” difference between bacteria, sheep, and humans an abomination?
Do not think for a moment that the thought experiment I am considering is impossible. Absolutely no new technology is needed. We only need the soon-coming data about which genes to transplant. (Several months ago, the first significant genes were identified and reported. Significantly, these are genes expressed in the brain and include genes encoding short RNAs that have just been found to have a regulatory function in the brain — once again demonstrating the heuristic richness of evolutionary theory.)
The facts of comparative genomics make a mockery of the conceit of “special creation” — the notion that humans are absolutely and totally unrelated to all other animals. Christians must face up to the problem of whether or not an organism that has had 51% of the genetic differences separating humans and chimps removed and replaced with human characters would have a soul and have to be baptized. If “chimpanzumans” are ever produced, will they have to be evangelized?
While we’re at it, we also should decide if Neanderthals had souls and are now burning in hell because they never had a chance to “know Jesus.” After all, the preliminary reports of the Neanderthal genome I cited earlier indicate that the Neanderthals differed about as much from modern humans as would the hypothetical intermediate I’m trying to get everyone to think about.
As soon as I get a chance again (I’m leaving tomorrow for a lecture out of state and won’t be back until next week), I will address the question about ATP synthase. Suffice it to say that the answer will involve the same sort of evidence that was involved in showing that “the” bacterial flagellum is not “irreduceably complex” but followed evolutionarily reasonable pathways of development.
For reason,
Frank R. Zindler
mfox
Said this at 2:02pm:
“Samphire,
You ask:
Where did modern day whales come from if all the life that had breath in it was destroyed in the flood?
Remember, my premise is that the universe is an open system even today. God did not loose His powers to create after the sixth day. Not every detail of the history of the universe is contained in the Bible. He could have simply spoken the whales into existence had he so desired.”
That’s not what the bible says. So what was the purpose of the Ark other than to carry Noah and family around?
“You ask:
Where are the eroded continental sediments on the sea-floor and here did all that water disappear to?
I could ask you the same thing about the sediment from the Grand Canyon”
I asked first – where is it? This is your problem, not mine.
“and the water did not disappear, it is in the oceans.”
No, it isn’t. There isn’t enough room in the oceans – the waters covered the highest mountains”
“Before the flood the water was stored under the ground”
How in a near-spherical Earth? What pushed the water up?
“and in the upper atmosphere, just as the Bible describes. Remember great destruction occurred, great destruction.”
No evidence of it today. And what happened to the latent heat? Why wasn’t Noah boiled alive?
How come Mount Ararat is of a later date than the fossil-bearing strata through which it protrudes? This is not a radiometric question but an observation of the physical geology. The mountain pushes up through the sedimentary layers like a pustule pushing up through the epidermis. The sedimentary strata is stressed and distorted vertically upwards.
And you still haven’t answered my earlier queries.
I would also like to point out that a Jewish day begins at sundown of the day before, according to our way of thinking.
“and the evening and morning were the first day …”
Creation CD: I would also like to add that a Jewish day begins at sundown of the day before and ends at sundown (according to our way of thinking).mfox
Said this at 4:54pm:
“Samphire,
Unfortunately the church is full of sinners with a free will. Some, like your parents, were not just hearers of the Word but doers also. I look forward to meeting them in heaven. That is where they will spend eternity with no more suffering, no more pain, no more Alzheimer’s.
As for the attic, if you are to understand the Biblical world view, then you must get the fact that we do not live in a place that is much like the original creation. It is a fallen world. Sin has entered in causing much destruction. One of the primary vehicles of this destruction is the 2nd law of thermodynamics. This law was not in place before Adam sinned.”
With respect, Mel, that is utter nonsense. The whole of Genesis 1 and 2 is about movement and creeping and growing and the production of light and all manner of energy expenditure. If the 2nd Law did not exist the stars would not have shone and the River out of Eden might flow uphill. Your hypothesis is a necessary modern invention to support Creationism.
God would not have given Adam food to eat if the 2nd law was of no effect as digestion could not take place. Nor would he have been warm-blooded.
“Now we have disease, suffering, and death. The reason for these is that they are the general consequence of sin. You see I don’t mean to say that your parents Alzheimer’s was caused by any particular sin they committed but rather disease is a symptom of the fallen nature of this world. We, including your parents, deserve far worse than the suffering you witnessed them go through.”
That, in terms of a personal loving God, I do not accept although my parents quite happily could. Whether they would have been able to if they had had knowledge aforethought I cannot say – I strongly suspect that they would. In my mother’s case her identical twin sister went through the same process some three years earlier and my mother was terrified that it would eventually happen to her to as, indeed, it did.
“The GOOD NEWS is that the major consequence of sin, eternal death, is reversible by faith in Jesus Christ and through the Grace of the one true living God. You asked me on what point was Jesus strictly exact. Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life; none come to the Father accept through the Son. Your parents knew this and lived their lives in full expectation the promises of God would be fulfilled in Christ and His work on the cross. My prayer is that you too will come to the knowledge that through the Son you may have life and life to the full.”
Good delusional stuff.
“My point to Frank was that we are not to intentionally harm, damage, or otherwise distort the physical body we have been given. All the while we understand that this body is temporary, as we wait for our new and everlasting body. Any suffering that we go threw at present can’t be compared to the immeasurable joy that awaits us. Until then we count it all joy that we are considered worthy to suffer in bringing glory to the King.”
I detect that you are back-tracking having no answer to Frank’s rationality. Throughout the ages, the history of Christianity is that it has had to be dragged by humanism into the modern age. The Pope has still not quite found it possible to allow the wearing of condoms to prevent the scourge of Aids. Rather that millions die and many more millions orphaned than that Christianity’s puritanical view of sex should be diluted. Islam has been even more resistant to change to the great disadvantage of the Arab nations.
Kind regards
Samphire
mfox
Said this at 3:47pm:
“Samphire,
You wrote: “What have c14 levels got to do with the Flood?”
Understand the flood was not just a flood. It was a cataclysmic event that changed drastically all of the physical systems on the earth. Before the flood a strong magnetic field coupled with the waters above, some sort of water canopy, protected the earth from any harmful radiation. This would have prevented the formation of 14C as it is produced today and since for that matter.”
Ignorant conjecture and not reflected in the magnetic record. See http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/magfields.html
“Get out of your head the simple story of hard rain for forty days and then all the water washing away. Great storehouses of water were released from below in what must have been the total destruction of vast portions of the surface of the planet. The highest peaks pre-flood would be dwarfted by today’s standards. The world was a very different place pre-flood.”
It surely must have been. Are you suggesting that the continents were floating on a sea of water? Where is the geological evidence? It must be there as the event is so recent – more recent indeed than the construction of the pyramids. There is no evidence in Egypt that the world was much different to how it is today.
Samphire
Frank,
That we are spiritual beings is more than a wish; it is a hope. It is in fact our only hope (2nd law of thermodynamics). If I agreed with your stated premise of the universe as a closed system, then I would be forced to agree with you about a looming victory for materialism. Since you have no scientific evidence to support the closed universe, I reject everything you could possibly say based on that premise.
If the previous sounds harsh, understand, that is exactly what you are saying to me with respect to my open system premise. Why do you not allow, even for the sake of argument, the possibility of an open universe?
You wrote:
“Never did I feel the need to commit the logical fallacy so beloved of theistic thinkers, the informal fallacy known as “ignotum per ignotius” (trying to explain the unknown in terms of the even more unknown).”
To avoid being accused of creating straw men, let me ask: Do you, as I have read elsewhere from other materialists, claim the fabric of existence (living and non-living) is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. Most specifically, do mutations generally occur via sub-molecular events perpetrated in an unpredictable way? So that these are not loaded questions, exactly what role do you see “chance” playing in the fabric of existence?
You wrote:
“— but never, never has science had to go back to a supernatural explanation.”
The game isn’t over yet.
You wrote:
“One laboratory now can induce at will “religious experiences” by focusing a powerful electromagnetic field on a particular part of the brain. They are able to induce religious experiences even in the brains of Atheists.”
A religious experience is one thing; a personal encounter with the Lord Jesus Christ is another. Also, if a person came to Christ during a lab experiment, praise God; God can do the same by rubbing mud on a person’s eye just as easily.
You wrote:
“Of course, anyone who has ever had a bit too much ethanol to drink knows how true that can be.”
In Ephesians we read:
“Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit.”
You wrote:
“ALL the evidence of biology in general and of neurophysiology in particular shows that there is no “Ghost in the machine,” and that all living things are organic machines — period.”
But you ignore my question of the murderer. You suppose he is an organic machine and based on that organic machinery he must act. If his machinery tells him to murder, then there is truly no wrong done. How should we then respond to his act? There are three options. 1) Kill him before he kills us. Fair enough under your moral code. 2) Let him alone for punishment is only an abstraction due to some chemical imbalance in the brains of people who put on long black robes and swing a wooden hammer. 3) Hook him up to some electromagnetic field and reconfigure his machinery to operate “morally” what ever that is because we don’t have any rules for what is right or wrong because right or wrong is relative to the situation and the individual because circumstance dictates the proper course to prolong existence and that is the only thing that matters because we want to get as many of our genes in the gene pool as we can so our offspring will have our characteristics because it is important to impose our traits on future generations of our species or other species we might evolve into because when the heat death finally comes and all life is finished forever we want our genes to be there to see it and that is a worthwhile goal. Yes Frank, I know that is a run on sentence. My father was an English teacher for 30 years. I will see him in heaven someday and do you know what he will say about that sentence? Nothing! We will be too busy praising the one true living God in fellowship with one another we won’t even care.
You wrote:
“Is crossing humans and bacteria an “abomination” if it helps to save human lives?”
Possibly. Saving years of earthly existence is not the ultimate goal at all costs. There will always be suffering and death until the last day. What I said is a clear abomination is the goal of engineering a chimp from a human. Don’t do it. DON’T!
You wrote:
“Do not think for a moment that the thought experiment I am considering is impossible.”
I never said it was impossible to get the machinery correct. The spirit is another thing but you don’t believe is spirits. Read the following from Romans 1: 28 – 32:
28Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. 29They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.
You wrote:
“If “chimpanzumans” are ever produced, will they have to be evangelized?”
I highly doubt God would honor your insulting creation with a spirit; no evangelizing required and no dilemma for the Christian. Don’t do it Frank.
From Isaiah 65: 2
All day long I have held out my hands
to an obstinate people,
who walk in ways not good,
pursuing their own imaginations-
-Mel
Why did God allow this? That’s the wrong question Brother Hovind. Instead of delving into the mind of God for the answers you should examine your own mind because that’s were the answers lay. Prison time is hard enough to do day to day without your sense of matyrdom.
I have followed you and several like minded individual’s careers for many years. You were always my favorite Brother Hovind. If I was feeling down or getting the blues I always knew you would be there with something new that would bring a smile to face or many times double me up with laughter. I figure I owe you something. You have acomplished something that I would have considered impossible. You have managed to parlay a belief in a story to possibly over 200 years in a penitentiary. That Brother Hovind is amazing. God did not do this Brother, you did. For many years I thought you were a con. Your earlier troubles with the law I figured were a cost of doing business. Reciting your trials and tribulations plays well with a certain set of folks. Well I now know that I was wrong. Brother there is no way your a con, but a true believer. And there in lies your problem. If you were a con you would have sense enough to mitigate your sentence. But,as a true believer you would rather go down in flames.You started out as a true believer in certain creation stories. That Brother is certainly your right as an American. That you made a decent living off the propagation your ideas is testimony to the greatness of the American way.You also made a raft of enemies.You did not handle them well.Stuck in the Old Testament tradition of confronting unbelievers rather than the New Testament way of forgiveness.Your enemies were legion,their spirits cruel.Their derision was unrelenting.You did not survive this intact.You had taken on all the sciences of every major university on the planet.I think scripture once said something about girding one’s loins for battle.That may work for battle,but you were on a kamakazi mission.Your enemies attacked your ideas,your education and a few of them your manhood.But you were ready and paid them back in kind.You became more vicious as the years went by.Attacked by the science establishment that belittled you and your beliefs you did not back off.Instead you took on more enemies.Anybody that graduated from an acreditted university was now your enemy. Yale law,Harvard medicine,they were all fools.I take legal advice from Irwin Schiff and tax advice from Glen Stoll.Brother I am sure that there are plenty of full service law firms in the Pensacola area you could have used.Your hate had become overwhelming by this time and I doubt you could be in the same room with them.In the end you were betrayed by your own people.They must have figured if they had to pay so did you.I am an old line agnostic and I wouldn’t have turned you in even for a share of the money.If you will allow brother I will offer a few words of advice.Number one is listen to your legal counsel.Number two is jail house conversions are a dime a dozen.Also don’t come on as a true believer,because you are liable to find a true believer of another sort. When inmates ask tell them about your ministry,how profitable it was,the places you travelled to,the people you talked to,and in the end your losing battle with the IRS. They will be impressed.I know I am.And finally your in great company.It took the IRS to bring down Brother Kent Hovind and Brother Alfonso Capone.
Samphire,
You wrote:
“That’s not what the bible says. So what was the purpose of the Ark other than to carry Noah and family around?”
As you know, the primary purpose of the Ark was to keep the seed, genes if you will, (the physical machinery) of man and all flesh on the face of the earth that had the breath of life in it. After all, that was the promise made – Eve the mother of all the living. It was also to show that even the most righteous human blood line will in the end be lost without the blood of Christ.
We read Genesis 7: 3 and 8: 17:
3Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.
17Bring forth with thee every living thing that is with thee, of all flesh, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth; that they may breed abundantly in the earth, and be fruitful, and multiply upon the earth.
The fate of fish and even of whales is not referred to specifically. The species under the water, while devastated I am sure, could have survived the event. Or they could have been repopulated as I have stated before. Not every detail of history is included. As we read in John 21: 25,
25And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.
You wrote:
“I asked first – where is it? This is your problem, not mine.”
I suppose you are right. This event was so large and disruptive that it is difficult – dare I say impossible – to figure out exactly what happened. Much like with Humpty Dumpty, I should say, we are having some difficulty putting all the pieces back together again. A major stumbling block is undoubtedly that neither all of the king’s horses nor all of the king’s men are willing to work on the problem. But enough excuses. I will give the best effort to explain sediments; this from the perspective of a lowly pure mathematician.
Given I don’t know what physical event, if any (open system), God used to touch off the flood; let’s suppose it was a great ice ball from space. I use this one because you all seem to get such a big kick out of it; like it is so impossible. Have you looked at the moon on a clear night? What sorts of things should we find?
Well since it was only about four thousand years ago we might have some ice left. Got it. We might find evidence that regions of the globe were covered in ice in time past. Got it. Since it is so cold in space and that is where the ball quickly came from, we might find evidence that animals were frozen quickly, like that demonstration of a rose dipped into liquid nitrogen? God it.
There was most likely a great impact when the ball or balls hit the surface of the earth. Impact craters? Got ‘em. Could the impact, from at least one large ice ball, have been enough to crack the earth’s crust into plates? We got plates. Would these impacts together with the cracks upset the pressure equilibriums pre-existing in the earth’s geologic dynamic? Since it happened only about 4000 years ago we should still have pressure imbalance. Got it. The plates should still be moving. Got it. The earth should still have a wobble. Got it. There should be evidence of massive upheavals in the crust. Got it. There should be evidence of massive breaches in temporary sedimentary dams. Grand Canyon, got it. If the pre-flood world was lush with vegetation from pole to pole as it would have been in a perfect world then there should be both scattered remains of this all over the globe and huge grave yards of animals and compressed organic material. Got ’em all.
At the end of the day the mineral and organic matter deposited by water, air, and ice that exists today on earth can be modeled, and I stress the word can, from the events described in Genesis especially under the premise of an open universe but even under the assumption of a closed universe.
For Frank, on the other hand, to explain the spiritual differences between a human and a chimp by material means alone, now that would take a miracle.
You wrote:
“No, it isn’t. There isn’t enough room in the oceans – the waters covered the highest mountains”
You assume the mountains that are there now, were there when the flood occurred, how presumptuous of you.
You wrote:
“How in a near-spherical Earth? What pushed the water up?”
Pressure, intense pressure.
You wrote:
“No evidence of it today. And what happened to the latent heat? Why wasn’t Noah boiled alive?”
What are you talking about? Even your theories say that great changes have occurred over the face of the earth; destruction or evolution, it becomes semantics for the objective observer.
Yes, well it is possible Noah and his family needed a miracle here so as not to boil. The universe is open and therefore God is free to intercede from the outside in and protect the Ark in ways a closed universe is at a loss to explain, just the facts of physics. Also, from my calculations the Ark only had enough Euclidian space for 38,000 kinds. Another miracle? Probably, but not necessarily. The modern theory of quantum loop gravity suggests the geometry of space time is not uniform and can very even from point to point. Check it out.
You wrote:
“How come Mount Ararat is of a later date than the fossil-bearing strata through which it protrudes? This is not a radiometric question but an observation of the physical geology. The mountain pushes up through the sedimentary layers like a pustule pushing up through the epidermis. The sedimentary strata is stressed and distorted vertically upwards.”
Yes, you have it now, a dramatic consequence of the dynamic forces unleashed during the catastrophe of the flood.
You wrote:
“And you still haven’t answered my earlier queries.”
My apologies. It could be that the posting order of these missives is not consistent with the flow of the discussion. A similar confusion can creep in concerning the three creation accounts contained in scripture. I will review your posts and get back to you as I wait for Frank to answer a few of my stickier questions.
-Mel
Samphire,
You have a particular wit and I enjoy your posts as long as we keep our humor in the café and out of the bar, if you know what I mean.
Thank you for your compliments of the season and a Merry Christmas to you as well.
You wrote [Dec. 11 5: 28 pm on another thread]:
“OK, near the Big Bang speeds approached the speed of light. But how close?”
There exist various models with varying numbers, take your pick. I would choose speeds very near for longer periods of time because the resulting model fits my premise. You would probably choose speeds not so close and for shorter lengths of time because that would fit your premise. The models don’t care; the math works either way.
You wrote:
“However, if you have read “A Brief History of Time” you will remember there is a graph of time measured along the x-axis (I do not have the book to hand so cannot give you a page reference) which mirrors much of what you have to say. In fact, it does not end in a singularity, a point which Prof Hawkins seems to have missed (or perhaps it was me so I apologize with great humility in advance), but is a smooth curve about the origin. In other words, perhaps time never commenced – it always existed.”
I have read it and agree with your characterization of the Hawkins perspective. In his book “The Universe in a Nutshell” he speaks of imaginary time, a mathematical construct needed to avoid the beginning implied by the singularity. He surely does not want there to have been a beginning. I do not have any problem with him espousing his opinion concerning the big bang or any other topic because he is clear in his assumptions. He does not try to hide them nor overstate his position. Not having the book in hand I will quote him from memory: “I can tell you nothing about reality; I can only give you the best mathematical model to describe our observations.” I am sure he would agree that “best model” would be scientifically debatable in most cases.
You wrote:
“Biblical “days” have nothing to do with the discussion in so far as they represent a time measurement not equal to Earth time. A day can only be defined after the event of the Earth being created as a body circulating a previously created Sun. To try to measure time in terms of “days” before the Earth/Sun relationship commenced is meaningless.
I do not understand what you mean by “formation ages”. Please explain.”
I am right there with you. It seems very peculiar at first glance that God would state time in days before days were created. I agree that this could imply that the creation of the universe took longer than six literal 24 hour time intervals. How long was the “formation age” of the universe? [I would loosely define formation age as the length of time it took the universe to be formed into a configuration comparable to what we see now.] The answer is, and always will be, we do not know. We were not there. We can’t go back in time. The question is: Was anyone there during creation? Yes. God was there. He says it took six days, morning and evening for each. I have no grounds to say that this description is not 100% accurate. Yet, at the same time, I allow the possibility that the description is figurative.
What is obvious from Genesis is that God wanted to relate the time it took for his creation work in a way that would fit our frame of reference. Perhaps, as I walk and talk with Him in His Kingdom when it comes and if it is still of any importance to me, I will ask God exactly what He meant by six days. For now, I am content in taking Him at his Word.
You wrote:
“
‘It is also germane to note that Biblical descriptions of the formation of the universe are consistent with the phenomenon of time dilation.’
Chapter and verse, please?”
This is a fair question. The answer will have to wait till next post.
-Mel
mfox
Said this at 10:34am:
“The fate of fish and even of whales is not referred to specifically. The species under the water, while devastated I am sure, could have survived the event. Or they could have been repopulated as I have stated before”
Swimming in thick muddy ooze for the best part of a year with nothing to eat?
“Given I don’t know what physical event, if any (open system), God used to touch off the flood; let’s suppose it was a great ice ball from space. I use this one because you all seem to get such a big kick out of it; like it is so impossible. Have you looked at the moon on a clear night? What sorts of things should we find?”
We don’t get a kick out of the alleged ice-ball idea – it is the creation of the creationists.
“Well since it was only about four thousand years ago we might have some ice left. Got it. We might find evidence that regions of the globe were covered in ice in time past. Got it.”
How does that show evidence of the iceball? There is evidence that there have been a number of ice-ages in the history of the world – not just one.
“Since it is so cold in space and that is where the ball quickly came from, we might find evidence that animals were frozen quickly, like that demonstration of a rose dipped into liquid nitrogen? God it.”
A paleantological example, please.
“There was most likely a great impact when the ball or balls hit the surface of the earth. Impact craters? Got ‘em.”
To erode all that rock into the observed sedimentary layers presently covering the Earth’s surface would take an awful lot of water. Allowing for, say an average depth of water of 2 miles, an iceball of the same density as liquid water (it could be more or less dense) would have to be about 700 miles in diameter (my back-of-a-cigarette-packet calculation). I’m not sure Noah and his wife would survive a hit by an object that size. By comparison, the Hale-Bopp comet was only 25 miles in diameter.
“Could the impact, from at least one large ice ball, have been enough to crack the earth’s crust into plates? We got plates.”
The plates are not “cracked” in the way you suggest. Hit a boiled egg with a spoon and the resultant “plates” do not move about the surface of the egg.
“Would these impacts together with the cracks upset the pressure equilibriums pre-existing in the earth’s geologic dynamic? Since it happened only about 4000 years ago we should still have pressure imbalance. Got it.”
These imbalances are not caused as a result of being hit by a comet but because of the Earth’s underlying structure.
“The plates should still be moving. Got it.”
Yes, but in all sorts of directions as they do today? Not what one would expect from being hit by a comet.
“The earth should still have a wobble. Got it.”
It will take a pure mathematician to calculate the mass of the body which would be necessary to cause the size of the present wobble and its point of impact. My back-of-a-cigarette-packet isn’t clever enough by a long way.
“There should be evidence of massive upheavals in the crust. Got it.”
But not arising from a single impact point. The plates are not moving today as a result of their own inertia caused by being hit by an ice-ball but because the Hot underlying asthenospheric mantle rises to the surface and spreads laterally, transporting oceans and continents as on a slow conveyor belt.
“There should be evidence of massive breaches in temporary sedimentary dams. Grand Canyon, got it.”
No, it hasn’t. Have you seen how steep the sides of the canyon are in places? How could wet mud (and wind-blown desert sand) be deposited during a single flood and maintain its stability without collapsing into the canyon. The first older layers have then to be eroded in turn before the younger layers are deposited on top; difficult to do during a flood. It takes a long time for such a thickness of sediment to consolidate, drain down, and be metamorphosed into rock. And after all that has been done you need to overlay the whole caboodle in lava You need an old Earth as much as evolutionists do.
“If the pre-flood world was lush with vegetation from pole to pole as it would have been in a perfect world then there should be both scattered remains of this all over the globe and huge grave yards of animals and compressed organic material. Got ’em all.”
Yep – in Africa there is a pile of bones of around 800 million large animals – all alive at the same time and all in one small area. KH mentions them in his seminars. It must have been very crowded round there immediately before the Flood. Still, it is only one more unbelievable fact you have to swallow.
“At the end of the day the mineral and organic matter deposited by water, air, and ice that exists today on earth can be modeled, and I stress the word can, from the events described in Genesis especially under the premise of an open universe but even under the assumption of a closed universe.”
I’d like to see you try to model, say, the North Dakota Geologic Column. Simple question – how do you get mud cracks, animal burrows, windblown sand, multi-layered coal deposits, evaporitic layers, and 1300 feet of limestone and much, much, much more all laid down under water inside a year?
“You assume the mountains that are there now, were there when the flood occurred, how presumptuous of you.”
We only need a couple of mountains, Mount Ararat and another – that makes “mountains”. Mount Ararat is over 3 miles high. Only problem with using Mount Ararat is that it appears to have been formed after the Flood but that is your problem rather than mine. Clearly there were mountains at the time of the Flood because the Bible mentions them and the Bible differentiates between “mountains” and “hills”.
Immediately after the Flood there does not appear to have been a shortage of mountains so not only would Noah have had to put up with the stresses and strains of long-distance cruising while looking after the biggest zoo in the world but also withstand some tedious vulcanism as well.
“You wrote: “How in a near-spherical Earth? What pushed the water up?”” “Pressure, intense pressure.”
From what? Water is pretty well incompressible. Are you suggesting the the surface crust was floating on water? If the land was floating where’s the pressure? Rock is good in compression but I wouldn’t like to use it to make mountaineering ropes. How does a fountain under the sea work when the driving mechanism is caused by the overlying weight of sea-water? I think that you also need to employ a few Free-Energy Machines to power the fountains.
“You wrote: “No evidence of it today. And what happened to the latent heat? Why wasn’t Noah boiled alive?” What are you talking about? Even your theories say that great changes have occurred over the face of the earth; destruction or evolution, it becomes semantics for the objective observer.”
If the flood water came from rain it would release the latent heat of evaporation. If it came from the fountains of the deep then the water would have been very hot as geysers are today. If it came from the comet then Noah would have frozen to death. Perhaps it came from all three sources and thus, all carefully mixed, kept a nice Mediterranean climate.
“Yes, well it is possible Noah and his family needed a miracle here so as not to boil.”
Yet another miracle! Wouldn’t it have been easier for God to evolve a nasty wind-blown virus so that we then wouldn’t have all these impossible-to-believe miracles?
“The universe is open and therefore God is free to intercede from the outside in and protect the Ark in ways a closed universe is at a loss to explain, just the facts of physics.”
I don’t understand what you mean by an “open universe”. Please could you direct me to a source of explanation.
“Also, from my calculations the Ark only had enough Euclidian space for 38,000 kinds. Another miracle? Probably, but not necessarily. The modern theory of quantum loop gravity suggests the geometry of space time is not uniform and can very even from point to point. Check it out.”
I doubt that the theory suggests that an area of space can be just precisely Ark-sized for an exact period of time of about a couple of years. In any event, I bet that theory would not help you because the geometry of all beings within that space would be equally affected. A bigger local space – bigger animals. (In writing this I am not suggesting that I understand any part of the quantum loop gravity theory)
“You wrote: “How come Mount Ararat is of a later date than the fossil-bearing strata through which it protrudes? This is not a radiometric question but an observation of the physical geology. The mountain pushes up through the sedimentary layers like a pustule pushing up through the epidermis. The sedimentary strata is stressed and distorted vertically upwards.” Yes, you have it now, a dramatic consequence of the dynamic forces unleashed during the catastrophe of the flood.”
I think that you miss the point. The mountain could not have arisen until the sedimentary layers had been layed down for some time. The mountain did not push itself up through mud but rock. Even if it arose out of the waters of the Flood how long do you think it would take for a three-mile-high volcanic mountain to cool down sufficiently to allow Noah and his menagerie to climb down the mountain? Yes – I know that some people even today think that walking on hot coals requires the assistance of the supernatural.
“You wrote: “And you still haven’t answered my earlier queries.” My apologies. It could be that the posting order of these missives is not consistent with the flow of the discussion. A similar confusion can creep in concerning the three creation accounts contained in scripture. I will review your posts and get back to you as I wait for Frank to answer a few of my stickier questions.”
Thanks, Mel. I shall look forward to it.
Samphire
mfox
Said this at 7:46am:
“Samphire,
You have a particular wit and I enjoy your posts as long as we keep our humor in the café and out of the bar, if you know what I mean.”
No – I am not sure I do. A horse walks into a bar. “Hello”, says the barman, “Why the long face?”
“You wrote [Dec. 11 5: 28 pm on another thread]: “OK, near the Big Bang speeds approached the speed of light. But how close?” There exist various models with varying numbers, take your pick. I would choose speeds very near for longer periods of time because the resulting model fits my premise. You would probably choose speeds not so close and for shorter lengths of time because that would fit your premise. The models don’t care; the math works either way.”
I don’t think so. My example of SN1987A is independent of the absolute speed of light. Effectively, it is a matter of pure maths and therefore in your particular specialist realm. But later in this post you seem to be admitting that it is not your belief that creation took six literal Earth days so, unfortunately, we have no dispute.
“You wrote: “However, if you have read “A Brief History of Time” you will remember there is a graph of time measured along the x-axis (I do not have the book to hand so cannot give you a page reference) which mirrors much of what you have to say. In fact, it does not end in a singularity, a point which Prof Hawkins seems to have missed (or perhaps it was me so I apologize with great humility in advance), but is a smooth curve about the origin. In other words, perhaps time never commenced – it always existed.” I have read it and agree with your characterization of the Hawkins perspective. In his book “The Universe in a Nutshell” he speaks of imaginary time, a mathematical construct needed to avoid the beginning implied by the singularity. He surely does not want there to have been a beginning. I do not have any problem with him espousing his opinion concerning the big bang or any other topic because he is clear in his assumptions. He does not try to hide them nor overstate his position. Not having the book in hand I will quote him from memory: “I can tell you nothing about reality; I can only give you the best mathematical model to describe our observations.” I am sure he would agree that “best model” would be scientifically debatable in most cases.”
Absolutely. Even he has been known to evolve his understanding.
“You wrote: “Biblical “days” have nothing to do with the discussion in so far as they represent a time measurement not equal to Earth time. A day can only be defined after the event of the Earth being created as a body circulating a previously created Sun. To try to measure time in terms of “days” before the Earth/Sun relationship commenced is meaningless. I do not understand what you mean by “formation ages”. Please explain.” I am right there with you. It seems very peculiar at first glance that God would state time in days before days were created. I agree that this could imply that the creation of the universe took longer than six literal 24 hour time intervals. How long was the “formation age” of the universe? [I would loosely define formation age as the length of time it took the universe to be formed into a configuration comparable to what we see now.] The answer is, and always will be, we do not know. We were not there. We can’t go back in time. The question is: Was anyone there during creation? Yes. God was there. He says it took six days, morning and evening for each. I have no grounds to say that this description is not 100% accurate. Yet, at the same time, I allow the possibility that the description is figurative.”
So you would allow an ancient Universe?
“What is obvious from Genesis is that God wanted to relate the time it took for his creation work in a way that would fit our frame of reference. ”
Mr.KH might not agree with you.
“Perhaps, as I walk and talk with Him in His Kingdom when it comes and if it is still of any importance to me, I will ask God exactly what He meant by six days. For now, I am content in taking Him at his Word.”
As you will have left your brain behind here on Earth what will you use for a memory? It has always worried me that, without my memory, I won’t be able to defend myself against allegations that I have been a pretty terrible fellow here on Earth. I might even be accused of being the Pope – with no way of refuting such a terrible charge. You can’t let me have OJ’s lawyers’ telephone numbers, can you?
Kind regards
Samphire
Samphire,
You wrote:
“I don’t think so. My example of SN1987A is independent of the absolute speed of light. Effectively, it is a matter of pure maths and therefore in your particular specialist realm. But later in this post you seem to be admitting that it is not your belief that creation took six literal Earth days so, unfortunately, we have no dispute.”
Your comparison here of a supernova to the beginnings of the universe is as absurd as your comparisons of an egg to the earth. The supernova is about a tail end in the life of a star existing in a universe condemned to death by the 2nd law of thermodynamics, the big bang is supposed to be about the inception of all there is in the physical world.
You wrote:
“So you would allow an ancient Universe?”
What I allow is insignificant. From the perspective of science alone, one must allow for an ancient Universe because models can be constructed for it given present data. It is my opinion these models are not consistent with the real course of history. This opinion is based on premise. My premise is that God spoke literal truth when he said the universe was created in six days. Producing a mathematical model for an ancient universe is not enough to show my premise to be false. Therefore, I continue forth from the a priori six day model. If God Himself tells me otherwise I will scrap the six day model in favor of what ever He tells me.
When you say, “we have no dispute”, do you allow, as by the the rules of science you should, for a young earth? That is, do you concede a universe as young as 6000 years is a physical possibility? If not, then we most certainly have a dispute.
You wrote: [my insert]
“Absolutely. Even he [Hawking] has been known to evolve his understanding.”
Do you agree with Hawking with respect to the relationship between the maths and reality? He is clearly expressing his premise that our best hope for understanding reality is through the maths. At the same time, his training is telling him the maths have no real physical connection to reality. Math is axiomatic and not based on experience. Every single conclusion is based on logical reason connected to arbitrary axioms and is self sufficient or removed from all empirical data. The whole lot is a priori. This is good because it adds objectivity. It is also bad because its “fit” could be completely superficial and only tangent to reality.
If the maths only give us a tangent of reality then all of science amounts to chasing shadows of reality. We are back in Plato’s cave. It was in graduate school I first came to the realization that math is a dim view of reality. I for one want more than a dim view. This desire coupled with the supernova of my own self righteousness during the same period and the revelation by the Holy Spirit of God of His power and love made known to all men in the person of His Son Jesus Christ, broke my hardened heart. I went to my knees before almighty God, confessed my sins and asked Him to forgive and rescue me. He did! The person described in the Bible, Jesus Christ, is the living God. He is real and He is reality. I have put all of my eggs, cracked as they were, in His basket. He literally saved me from death. So, laugh all you like at my ridiculous [to you] models and mock Him as my “crutch” but know He is more than a crutch to me, He is my life.
You can even take a debate position and concede nothing knowing in your heart the models I will continue to present to you are scientifically possible even when they are highly unlikely. But God can provide a way when there seems to be no way. Don’t be too hard on my unlikely models though. The initial conditions for a big bang that produces this universe are astronomically unlikely. What is more, once the universe is set, life in it is a scientific anomaly. It does not fit in.
I would request as we continue with these discussions that you would concede, given the open universe premise, that my conclusions are indeed physically possible before you expound on how silly this open system appears to you. Understand that your closed system appears to me equally silly. We could limit our exchange to sarcastic comments meant to belittle the opposing view but my time is too valuable for this. If you don’t like the open system, then attach it. Show me that the closed universe is the only option.
I must take a few days, not to give a lecture or eat cheese but, to grade some papers and celebrate the imminent coming of the King. I look forward to addressing all of your objections and will rejoin this discussion next week.
-Mel
mfox said this at 8:43am: “Samphire, You wrote “I don’t think so. My example of SN1987A is independent of the absolute speed of light. Effectively, it is a matter of pure maths and therefore in your particular specialist realm. But later in this post you seem to be admitting that it is not your belief that creation took six literal Earth days so, unfortunately, we have no dispute.” Your comparison here of a supernova to the beginnings of the universe is as absurd as your comparisons of an egg to the earth. The supernova is about a tail end in the life of a star existing in a universe condemned to death by the 2nd law of thermodynamics, the big bang is supposed to be about the inception of all there is in the physical world.”
With respect, mel, you miss the point. This has nothing to do with the beginnings of the Universe but with the fact that through simple observation, angular measurement and the application of schoolboy geometry it can be shown that the supernova occurred 168,000 years ago thus ruling out YEC.
“When you say, “we have no dispute”, do you allow, as by the the rules of science you should, for a young earth? That is, do you concede a universe as young as 6000 years is a physical possibility? If not, then we most certainly have a dispute.”
It was 6,000 years old a one point in time.
“Do you agree with Hawking with respect to the relationship between the maths and reality? He is clearly expressing his premise that our best hope for understanding reality is through the maths. At the same time, his training is telling him the maths have no real physical connection to reality. Math is axiomatic and not based on experience. Every single conclusion is based on logical reason connected to arbitrary axioms and is self sufficient or removed from all empirical data. The whole lot is a priori. This is good because it adds objectivity. It is also bad because its “fit” could be completely superficial and only tangent to reality.”
I agree to a great extent but, in the case of cosmology, the maths has to reflect the observations.
“So, laugh all you like at my ridiculous [to you] models and mock Him as my “crutch” but know He is more than a crutch to me, He is my life.”
Why do you accuse me of laughing; you mentioned “crutch”, not me? To a large proportion of humanity, their particular god is there life. That is their particular reality – it is not mine.
“You can even take a debate position and concede nothing knowing in your heart the models I will continue to present to you are scientifically possible even when they are highly unlikely.”
You haven’t given me one yet.
‘But God can provide a way when there seems to be no way. Don’t be too hard on my unlikely models though. The initial conditions for a big bang that produces this universe are astronomically unlikely. What is more, once the universe is set, life in it is a scientific anomaly. It does not fit in.”
Well, apparently you are wrong on that last one. Unless, of course, we don’t actually exist.
“I would request as we continue with these discussions that you would concede, given the open universe premise, that my conclusions are indeed physically possible before you expound on how silly this open system appears to you. Understand that your closed system appears to me equally silly. We could limit our exchange to sarcastic comments meant to belittle the opposing view but my time is too valuable for this. If you don’t like the open system, then attach it. Show me that the closed universe is the only option.”
I don’t that I have been sarcastic in this conversation. I have asked you what you mean by an open system but you have not yet filled me in on it so I cannot comment on the idea.
“I must take a few days, not to give a lecture or eat cheese but, to grade some papers and celebrate the imminent coming of the King. I look forward to addressing all of your objections and will rejoin this discussion next week.”
A merry Christmas to you, mel,
Samphire
P.S. Can you actually sensibly celebrate something which hasn’t happened yet?
hey guys, lets leave this site to encouraging Dr. Hovind and his supporters. I really aprecciate his ministry, and pray for him and his family, and I think the purpose of this blog is to encourage the ministry down there. If any of you want to debate some of the crazy issues above, you’re welcome to visit my blog at hovindtrials.blogspot.com and I’ll take you on at any issue you want to adress. But let’s leave this to its original pupose.