-- Num ---- Username ---- Category ------------- Posted -- Expires 
| 62543 | STU_BMDAVIS  | RELIGION             | 10/12/93 | 10/26/93 | 
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| Description: The origion of the universe- ev. vs. crea             
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[deleted]
 
>>How does Genesis Creationism (hereafter "creationism") fit?
[deleted]
>>-Mr. Bill

I have to step in for a sec here, and present a little bit of the
evidence that is out there right now for creation theories.  first
I want to point out that neither creation nor evolution are single
throies, but composite ideas which are made up of a number of
theories.  central to evolutionary theory is the idea of the Big Bang,
life coming from a primordial soup over a very large time span (that
amount of time seems to be increased every 5 years or so by leading
evolutionary theorists)  by the process of evolution and natural
selection.  I am going to attempt to sumarize a large body of
information in a fairly short post here, so I obviously cannot include
everyting, or to the extent I would like to do so.  references are
available, and I would love to reffer you to some good reading on the
subject if you have an open enough mind and are willing to put a little
time into the subject.
 ***********disclaimer end************
first you are talking about the bb theory -- and using that as a basis
to refute creation.  what is it you said about theories of science
having to follow natural laws?  I ask you this.  could an explosion
ever create more order?  if a tornado went through a junkyard, would
there be a 747 left behind? The only answer that has been advanced to
counter this is that addition of more energy could create more order.
how many lightning bolts does it take to get Frankenstein?  if you
didn't have a little light go off in that more order statement you
should have-- it is called entropy.  natural law. all things progress
from a state of more order to a state of less order.  second law of
thermodynamics.  the 2 laws state that 1. all existing processes of
nature merely change energy from one form to another.  In nature,
energy is neither creatd or destroyed.  matter itself is maintained
at a canstant level. Processes change matter and energy from one form
to others but the total quantity of evergy in the universe always is
constant.

2.  as these processes in nature occur, the total energy resevoir is
reduced to simpler forms with a consequent increase in entropy.  as
energy is used it becomes less available for further use.  part of
the energy spent to produce something is always lost by radieation,
friction, or other effects.  It becomes non-recoverable heat
dissipating in space.  Ultimately, as things are going, the entire
universe will end up as a stagnant mass of low-level heat energy.
Any amount of energy cannot produce order, and there is only a finite
amount of energy which can ever exist, where did the energy that
caused the big bang come from?  where did that supposed spec of matter
come from -- was it pre-exitsting or was it created?  the concept of
is directly in conflict with the _LAW_ of entropy.  Latin root of
evolution means litterally out-rolling.  entropy is from greek for
in-turning.  by your own definition then natural laws would suggest
that evolution cannot be a valid theory, nor can the bb.  I could go
on about the bb, but there is a few billion more years to cover
according to evolutionary theory so I better get moving. ;) the planet
earth itself-- age and history in order for evolution to make any sense,
it must have some way to explain how life came from non-life without
any intervention.  The way that is is done is by adding large amounts
of time as if that somehow makes it credible.  so we have a theory that
the earth is millions of years old.  the current number is around 4 1/2
billion.  (every 30 years or so the projected age doubles)  some say
4.6 now, but we will round it of at 4.5 for time's sake.  Creation
theories suggest that the age of the earth is about -- 6,000.  pretty
big difference, huh?  visualize a stack of books about evolution in
fact is based upon upward trending, which up to your knee, that is
about 6,000 pages.  put next to it a stack with about 4.5 billion
pages and you are about 114 miles straight up.  what kind of evidence
is there to support either theory?  well, there are a bunch of natural
"clocks" that we can look at to tell about how old we are dealing with.
there are in fact about 70 different methods that we are aware of that
can be used in geochronology (study of age of the earth)  -- processes
that go on continuously and have cumulative and measurable results that
can be used to establish and end point for where they began.  one such
clock is interplanetary dust, or cosmic dust or whatever you wnat to
call it.  it enters our atmosphere at a constant rate, and accumulates
on the earth.  on the earth here the dust is hardly detectable and we
would expect it would be washed into the oceans over time.  the moon
however has no such erosion.  when we sent a mission to moon NASA
experts were predicting about 54 feet of accumulated dust from the 4.5
billion years of accumulation. sound reasonable?  well, they actually
only found about 1/8 of an inch of dust up there.  not more than 8,000
years accumulation at most.  here is an obscure one, juvenile water.
juvenile water is water that is erupted out of volcanoes as steam and
condenses and falls to the ground as rain.  every volcanic eruption
sends up about 20% water, which has never been on the surface of the
earth before, thus the name juvenile water.  every volcanic eruption
thus adds water to the oceans that was never there before.  scientists
estimate that about a cubic mile of water per year is added to the
oceans by the average 12 eruptions a year.  track that back wards,
and all of the water on earth could have come from volcanoes in 340
million years.  (there are about 340,000,000 cubic miles of water on
the earth today)  if we look at that, then there could have been no
water on the surface of the earth 340million years ago.  if you check
your evolutionary map, that is smack dab in the center of the age of
fishes.  the idea of the origion of life assumes that 2,000 million
years ago there were full oceans on the earth.  How about comets?
every time that a comet orbits the sun (or any other sun) they are
blown apart by solar wind.
the tail of a comet is made up of matter that used to be part of the
center of the comet.  measuring the observable rate of comet
disintegration, all of the existing short-period comets would have
disintigrated in about 10,000 years. unfortunately there about 5
million of the suckers out there right now.  the only thing that is
out to counter that one is a theory that there is out there
somewhere a "nest" of comets beyond the solar system that everyonce
in a while sends a comet our way because of some cosmic disturbance.
problem is no one has ever seen this thing or even theorized where
it might be.  lets try oil. haven't you seen the pictures of oil
gushing out of the ground when a drill hits a new deposit?  The oil
is trapped under a layer of sedentary rocks at extreme pressure.
The thing of it is that even the densest of sedentary rocks is porous
and over time oil would dissapate.  in many cases deep wells at very
high pressure would only take 5,000 years to dissapate completely
leaving no pressure at all in the well.  lets learn about erosion
and top soil next, top soil is a layer about 7 or 8 inches thick in
most places which is all that sustains life here on earth. without it
we would be a sterile planet like our moon.  one author wrote aabout
it that "that thin film is all that stands between man and extinction."
the current estimate is that the processes of decay, plant growth, and
erosion produce about 6 inches of top soil every 5 to 20,000 years.
if the earth were really going on like it is for millions of years,
even billions, then there would be a lot more top soil then currently
exists.  at the present rate of erosion, the ocean should have about
30 times the accumulatoin of sediment than there really is... and the
evidence of continental geography suggests that actually erosion in
the past has been much greater.  (assuming that ocean has really been
there for a billion years or more)  it would only take 14 million years
for all of the continents on the planet to erode to sea level.  a more
micro example isthe Missippi river delta. the delta of the river is
enlarging by a known amount every year due to silt being carried down
the river.  there is no indication that any silt has every been carried
very far out to sea.  at the present rate the entire missippi delta
would only need 5,000 years to accumulate.  and science acknowleges
that the river used to be even bigger than it is today.  How about
niagra falls? Because the rim of the falls is wearing away at a known
rate per year geologists tell us that 5,000 years ago it was at it's
origional prepice.  how about coral reefs?  all of the reefs in the
world are made of calcium carvobanate deposits and can be accounted
for in just a few thousand years.  Or have you been up the road to any
of the caves around the valley lately?  how long did they tell you it
took to make the stalagtites?  usually the figure is about 100 million
years.  is there evidence of this?  have you been under the Lincoln
memorial?  I have.  looks like natural caverns.  it took less than 50
years to build stalactites 5 feet in length.  research has shown that
at most the formations could be accounted for in a few tens of thousands
of years.  How about land?  we did water earlier.  Volcanos also add
igneous rock to the earth's crust when they erupt.  we have about a
dozen volcanoes a year plus more volcanic activity on the ocean floor
that cannot be measured, and observations of our past have shown that
there have been periods of intense volcanic activity in the past much
greater than today.  using only volcanic addition and looking
conservatively at the statistics, the entire crust of the earth could
have been formed in only 500 million years-- was there no land in
the Cambrian period?  I could do this all night but just let me list
some other clocks that show the evidence for a young earth.  magnetic
field of the earth-decay.  disolved minerals in the ocean- rate of
accumulation.  atmospheric helium- accumulation in outer atmosphere.
receding moon- recedes at 2 inches a year or so.  (earth is slowing
down)  shrinking sun- about 5 feet per hour. (20million years ago sun
would be in earth)  oldest living thing on earth- bristlecone pine
trees (age 5,000 years- scientists predict they will live another few
thousand years)  growth rate of the human population-- only a million
years at a growth rate of 1/2% per year (1/4 present growth) would
produce a population (begining with today's population) of 10 to the
2100th power.  at a growth rate of 1/2% per year begining with one
family the present population of the earth would come about in about
4,000 years.  supposing that the present population of earth could be
arrived at in a million years, that is about 25,000 generations and
we would have about 3,000 billion people who would have died already.
a couple dozed graves per acre filling the entire earth. yet for some
reason ancient bones are very rare.

COUNTER ARGUMENTS FROM EVOLUTIONARY THEORY

yes, there some clocking methods that are used to demonstrate an old
earth hypothesis.  the most well known of all "clocks"- radiometric
dating.  Major forms are potassium argon, uranium lead, and carbon 14.
The premise of these is assumptions about the dacay process of these
unstable elements.  ex. radioactive uranium gradually breaks down to
form lead.  because the process is slow these tests are thought to be
good for dating long periods of time.  of these carbon 14 is the only
one that can work for anything besides igneous rocks.  thus usually
measuring the age of hte volcanic rock around them.  Unfortunatly
the processes are not very reliable and are highly inconsistent.
an example is the Apollo 11 mission which brought back rocks and
soil from the moon.  uranium lead tests on this same set of subjects
revealed ages of 4.6 billion years, 5.4 billion years, 4.8 billion years,
and 8.2 billion years.  Science magazine published an age of 2.3 billion
years based on potassium argon testing.  how do we tell if these are
acurate clocks?  compare with a known standard.  bolcanic rocks from
Hawaii were tested by the potassium argon method and found to be
between 160 and 3 million years old.  the particular lava flow they
came from erupted in 1801.  could there be a flaw in there somewhere?
similar case exists on a Russian lava flow that is known to be only
a few thousand years old-- tests placed it between 50 million and 14.6
billion years old.  carbon 14 dating is not any more in line, some
examples are Australopithicus (etheopia)  who is fossils are measured
by one of the other methods by supposedly 1 to 2 million years old
according to Potassium argon testing was found in the same deposit
with animal bones that C-14 dating placed at about 15,500 years old.
Zinjanthropus (kenya) was found to be about 2 million years old by
Potassium argon dating surrounding ash and mammal bones he was found
with were only 10,000 years old by C-14 methods.  A hint as to the
problems with these dating methods comes from a site near grand prarie
in alberta canada.  a power line fell and high voltage petrified the
roots of the surrounding trees.  when asked what the results of a KAr
test on them would be brought scientists at the University of Regina,
Saskatchewan, to say that the "results would be meaningless; it would
indicate an age of millions of years because (get this) heat was
involved in the petrification process." THATS THE POINT!!! all of
the fossils we have been dating were buried in volcanic ash, a pretty
hot way to die if you ask me!!  Thus the 2 methods of dating volcanic
rock have an inheirent flaw to them.  As for C-14 dating, the problem
is the whole system depends upon a constant, steady, unchanging rate
of radiation for all these last 30,000 years at least.  There are a
number of unprovable assumptions in the method.  It is just not
reliable when placed in real life applications agains known time scales.
living mollusks have been dated t 2,300 years dead.  fresh seal skins
have come up 1,300 years old.  mortar from an English castle less than
800 years old came up at 7,370 years old.  the decay rate of C-14 can
be affected by atmospheric polution from volcanic activity and
industrial burning, solar activity and changes like solar flares and
sunspots, cosmic radiation from extra-ordinary events in our galaxy
like a supernova  and meteors or other large cosmic bodies falling to
earth.  the method depends on there being no globally catastrophic
events in the past 50,000 years.  if conditions on the earth were
different in the past then C-14 is nearly worthless as a method,
especially beyond about 5k years.  (see also "riddle of the great
Siberian explosion" Readers digest aug. '77)  Another peculiarity of
C-14 is that it cannot be measured if the object is older than 50,000
years because there is no longer enough to measure.  natural gas,
according to the evolutionary chart is about 50,000,000 years old--
C-14 puts it at 34,000. Coal, 100,000,000 years by chart, 1,680 by C-14.
there is not one point on which the evolutionary based geological chart
matches radiometric dates. EVolution demands that millions of years
pass- but the evidence that exists simply does not support that
assumption.  I have to stop for now because the VAX goes down in  a
few minutes but let me leave you with some thoughts.
Someone suggested that Creation isn't science because it is based
upon the Bible.  I advance that evolution is not a science either--
but a religion. those who believe in it believe in evolution period.
I do not intend this as a derogatory statement at all, but evolution
is a religion in itself who's followers have faith in it despite what
ever facts come up agains them.  I leave you with a writing by Dr.
Wernher Von Braun, leading scientist in the US space program until
his death in the late 1970's.  "One cannot be exposed to the law and
order of the universe without concluding that there must be a design
and purpose behind it all... the better we understand the intricacies
of the universe and all it harbors, the more reason we have fouind to
marvel at the inherent design upon which it is based...  To be forced
to believe only one conclusion- that everything in the universe
happened by chance- would violate the very objectivity of science
itself... what random process could produce the brains of a man or the
system of the human eye?  ...they say they cannot visualize a designer.
Well, can a physicist visualize an electron? ... What strange rationale
makes some physicists accept the inconceivable electron as real while
refusing to accpt the reality of a Designer on the ground that they
cannot conceive Him?  ... It is in scientific honesty that I endorse
the presentation of alternative theories for the origin of the
universe, life and man in the science classroom.
It would be an error to overlook thepossiblity that the universe was
planned rather than happening by chance."  think on that for a while,
it is certainly enough material for one night-- but if you have
questions or want references or whatever just let me know
(preferably in e-mail, I don't check the religion bb that often) and
I will try and help you out.  I didn't even get to the origion of
life yet...
 -Brian@I.believe.in.six.days.and.a.rest