Ceridwen018
Well-Known Member
What an efficient skeptic we suddenly become! My goodness, Steve! Imagine you are a pot, and he is a kettle...Steve said:
"Oh sure--so the chemicals were catalyzed then? Psh, yeah, right. Everyone knows that the bearded man in the sky snapped his fingers and it happened. Please, keep your mythological science to yourself! Come back when you have some evidence!"
Steve, you make me sad. These are by far the oldest arguments in the book. They have already been presented and debunked countless times on these forums alone, however, I will take this time to attack them once more. I don't know why I'm doing this--its not like you're even going to read my post--but perhaps I just hope that someone somewhere will appreciate it. Let us begin:
1. Galaxies wind themselves up too fast.
Creationist Claim: Stars closer to the center of a spiral galaxy orbit the galaxy faster than stars farther away. Over many millions of years, the difference in orbital rates should wind the spiral tighter and tighter. We do not see any evidence for this in galaxies of different ages. (TO)
Response: Spiral arms are density waves, which, like sound in air, travel through the galaxy's disk, causing a piling-up of stars and gas at the crests of the waves. In some galaxies, the central bulge reflects the wave, giving rise to a giant standing spiral wave with a uniform rotation rate and a lifetime of about one or two billion years.
The causes of the density waves are still not known, but there are many possibilities. Tidal effects from a neighboring galaxy probably cause some of them.
The spiral pattern is energetically favorable. Spiral configurations develop spontaneously in computer simulations based on gravitational dynamics (Carlberg et al. 1999).
http://www.sciam.com/askexpert_question.cfm?articleID=0008A68A-8C7F-1C72-9EB7809EC588F2D7
2. Comets disintegrate too quickly.
Creationist Claim: Comets lose material as they near the sun. If the solar system were very old, comets would long ago have evaporated. (TO)
Response: The comets that entered the inner solar system a very long time ago indeed have evaporated. However, new comets enter the inner solar system from time to time. The Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt hold many comets deep in space, beyond the orbit of Neptune, where they do not evaporate. Occasionally, gravitational perturbations from other comets bump one of them into a highly elliptical orbit, which causes it to near the sun. (TO)
http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~jewitt/kb.html
3. Not enough mud on the sea floor.
Creationist Claim: At current rates of erosion, only thirty million years are needed to account for all the sediments in the ocean. If the earth were as ancient as is claimed, there should be more sediments. (TO)
Response: So will you be changing your "6000 year old Earth" theory to a "30 million year old Earth" theory, then? This statement is quite simply false, and one that I feel confident in answering in my own words. The sediment from the sea floor is what built the continents in many cases--that seems like quite a bit of sediment to me. In the Atlantic ocean, the sediment of the sea floor varies drastically. At the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the sediment is measured as 0, for this is where new sea floor is being constantly generated from beneath the Earth's crust. The thickest sediment huds the continental margins. Generally, the level of sediment increases as one moves away from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge closer to the continents. The amount of sediment contained in the ocean floor is proper in relation to the postulated age of the Earth.
4. Not enough sodium in the sea.
Creationist Claim: Known processes to remove sodium from the oceans account for only 27 percent of the sodium that is added. Given the accumulation of sodium this implies, the oceans could not be more than 62 million years old. (Austin, S. A. and D. R. Humphreys, 1990. The sea's missing salt: A dilemma for evolutionists. Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism, Pittsburgh, 2: 17-33. http://tccsa.tc/articles/ocean_sodium.html)
Response: Austin and Humphreys greatly underestimate the amount of sodium lost in the alteration of basalt. They omit sodium lost in the formation of diatomaceous earth, and they omit numerous others mechanisms which are minor individually but collectively account for a significant fraction of salt.
A detailed analysis of sodium shows that 35.6 x 1010 kg/yr come into the ocean, and 38.1 x 1010 kg/yr are removed (Morton 1996). Within measurement error, the amount of sodium added matches the amount removed. ( Morton, Glenn R., 1996. Salt in the sea. http://www.asa3.org/archive/evolution/199606/0051.html)
Steve, I will leave you with that for now, as I do not have the time to continue. However, I will be happy to complete the process of debunking these outlandish creationist claims made by your pseudo-scientific website, AIG, if you still require it.
