PRATTs: refutation resource thread

[Febble]

This is a stickied thread for any post that presents an important refutation of a PRATT (Previously Refuted A Thousand Times) YEC notion. It is a locked thread, but there is an unlocked thread here for people to suggest posts that should be added. Please post in that thread, with a link to the post that you think should be added to this one, together with reasons why.

I hope that over time, this can become a resource to be linked to when PRATTs are presented.

If anyone wants to discuss one of these posts, please link to it and start a thread.

Thanks!

Lizzie



ETA: please post suggestions in this thread.

[Mike PSS]

Originally Posted by Mike PSS

Here's a neat table.

Look at the tables in the back of this paper from Radiocarbon....
Here's Kitagawa's paper outlining ALL the core data from 1993 and 1998.

Then look at the attached image table from the Groningen Lab.
The Groningen AMS tandetron
S. Wijma, J. van der Plicht *

Attachment 21

NOTE: They do question ONE of the data points as possible contamination. But, as can be seen, this is only a small variance in an otherwise consistent line.

More data for you.

[Mike PSS]

Originally Posted by Dave Hawkins

Again, this thread is about blind testing in the field of radiometric dating. It appears that no off topic posts from this thread have been split off.

You haven't replies to my ON TOPIC post number six where I linked the Lake Suigetsu 14C measurements with the Groningen AMS lab.

And there is some pretty interesting information about the level of precision of the Groningen facility in that article. So get readin' and commentin'.

Oh, and for blind testing we always have the TIRI and FIRI studies done by Radiocarbon.

PART 1: THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL RADIOCARBON INTERCOMPARISON (FIRI)
PART 2: THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL RADIOCARBON INTERCOMPARISON (TIRI)

Originally Posted by Page 149

1.6 FINAL SAMPLE LIST
A short list of 7 materials was identified as core samples having met the criteria previously identified and is given in Table 1.10. Three sets of duplicate samples were provided blind (Kauri, Belfast wood, and barley mash). The optional sample list then included Cambridge cellulose (Sample K), Dogee Barrow wood (Sample L), St Bees whole peat (Sample M), 3 mammoth tusk samples (Samples N, O, and P), and leather (Sample Q).

Table 1.10 Core sample descriptions
Core sample description FIRI code Age/Activity
Kauri wood A, B Near background
Marine turbidite C ~3 half-lives
Belfast dendro-dated wood D, F ~1 half-life
Humic acid E ~2 half-lives
Barley mash G, J modern
Hohenheim wood H <1 half-life
Belfast dendro-dated cellulose I ~1 half-life

1.6.1 Instructions and Information Sent to All Participating Laboratories
The samples were then sent to laboratories in August/September 1999. A brief description of the pretreatment undertaken in the laboratory before dispatch and instructions concerning sample pretreatment (if any) before dating were provided to the participating laboratories. The duplicate samples were not identified and laboratories were asked to treat the samples using their routinelaboratory procedures.

A total of 120 sets of samples were dispatched.

For Samples A and B, the laboratories were told that these samples should be considered as close to, or beyond, the limit of 14C detection.

For Sample C, laboratories were told that this sample should be fully hydrolyzed and no fractions should be measured. It was emphasized that this sample required no further pretreatment and that pre-etching had been shown to produce small, but significant, age differences. The laboratories were also informed that this sample should be stored in a sealed container.

There you go Dave. Blind testing with 7 samples, only two of which the labs had an inkling what the age was (near detection limit). And that instruction was on only one of three of the same sample. So you had one sample tested with an expected age but two samples were blind of the same material.

What do you think they found? Well, lets look at some results that are displaced by around eight years shall we.

Originally Posted by Page 328

It is also of interest to compare the 2 samples that are common in both TIRI and FIRI. These are the TIRI-B and FIRI-D and FIRI-F (Belfast pine), and TIRI-K and FIRI-C (marine turbidite from the same source).

Table 6.2 TIRI and FIRI samples in common
Sample description Consensus value True age Estimated precision (1σ)
TIRI-B: Belfast dendro-dated wood 4503 yr BP 3200-3239 BC (14C age 4495 BP) 6
FIRI-D, F: Belfast dendro-dated wood 4508 yr BP 3200-3239 BC
(14C age 4495 BP) 3

TIRI-K: turbidite 18,155 yr BP — 34
FIRI-C: turbidite 18,176 yr BP — 10.5

The consensus values, as estimated from the 2 different studies, are virtually identical. The estimated precisions are different. This is likely due to 3 reasons: a) the larger number of laboratories that participated in FIRI compared to TIRI; b) the tighter screening criteria used in FIRI; and c) the reduced scatter in the set of measurements once outliers have been removed.

So go find those anomolies (they exist). Go find those outliers (they exist). Go find all the faults in the 85 labs that did this study. Then come back here with a straight face and say that these labs don't do blind testing.

[Per Ahlberg]

Um, Hi Dave! (Waves across crowd.)

I'm not going to be posting all that much over the next few days, as the rest of the week is a public holiday here in Sweden and I'll be off digging the garden and stuff, but I would like to take you up on the question of what counts as evidence for historical events. I'll try to make some additional posts later as and when I find time.

I guess what you're ultimately driving at with this question is the reliability of the biblical flood account, so I'll discuss the general principles with reference to specific examples from that context. It might be interesting if you could respond briefly to each of these points as the argument develops, so that we can see clearly where it is that we part company (as we surely will do!) and why.

OK, so we can start by noting that there exist a number of flood stories that appear to be closely related - re-tellings of the same story, in essence. This certainly applies to the flood stories in Genesis and Gilgamesh, which have close detailed similarities, but the Greek version (where Deucalion takes the place of Noah / Utnapishtim) and the Indian version (where Manu has the same role) can also reasonably be interpreted as variants of the same.

So the question is, what does that mean? Does it have any bearing on physical events? On a trivial level the answer is obviously yes: large floods do occur, and myths like these are likely to contain somewhere within them memories of actual floods. But the real question in the present context is 1) whether they are pointers to a single specific flood, and 2) if so, whether this flood was the world-drowning event described in Genesis.

Before moving onto the scientific data, I would like to make a couple of general points about orally transmitted myths and legends.

Firstly, they are not histories, in our sense of the word, but neither do they tend to be "just made up". Rather, we know that oral traditions tend to re-work historical fragments into novel and non-historical constellations. A very good example is provided by the cycle of legends surrounding Attila the Hun, Theoderic the Great and the downfall of the Burgundian kings: the neat thing here is that we have both original historical records from the 5th-6th centuries and, from the 12-13th century, written-down versions of oral poetic traditions ("Niebelungenlied", "Volsunga Saga", etc.) dealing with the same events. In other words, we can compare the original historical event with the end result of a six-hundred-year oral tradition about that event. What we find is that the names of the historical characters (Attila, Theoderic, Gunther and so forth) survive very well, but become mixed in with a gallery of fictional characters (for example Hagen and Siegfried). Time perspectives become compressed (Theoderic was not in real life a contemporary of Attila and Gunther) and non-historical plot elements are introduced (in real life Gunther and the other Burgundians were defeated at Worms on the Rhine by a Hunnish force, not led by Attila; in the "Niebelungenlied", Attila invites them in good faith to his court in Hungary where they are treacherously killed at the instigation of Attila's wife, who happens to be Gunther's sister...).

Secondly, even obviously native myths do not necessarily reflect local events. For example, there exists in Sweden a number of mediaeval folk myths about Saint Stephen, describing (without the slightest biblical foundation) his life as a stable boy at the court of King Herod and how he first saw the star of Bethlehem when watering the horses at a spring. The myths are indigenous to Sweden, but their subject matter is imported - and fairly recently, as Sweden only adopted Christianity during the 11th century.

From this we can conclude two things:

1) The fact that the flood stories we are considering cover a geographical region spanning from Greece to India need not mean that the event they relate to (if we allow for the sake of argument that there was such an event) affected all these areas. The story could have originated in a single location and spread from there.

2) The fact that the flood stories describe the flood as global need not mean that it was.


Coming back to the two questions I posed near the beginning, I think we can answer that, yes, all four stories relate to the same "event" (whether an actual physical event or a mythic invention), but the stories themselves are not powerful enough evidence to allow us to determine the scope, timing or indeed reality of the event. They are suggestive but not in any sense conclusive.

Which brings us to the geological evidence, and fortunately this is absolutely unambiguous. We know what geological flood deposits look like, because they are not uncommon, and we can say with complete confidence that there has not been a global flood at any time while humans have been living on this planet, or before for that matter. No global flood layer exists. There is simply no possibility that such an event has occurred, unless you allow that a god or gods might have magicked the evidence away - and then you are immediately trapped in last-Thursdayism where all meaningful discussion must cease.

So there it is: we have a number of myths that claim to tell of a global flood, and clear evidence that no such flood has occurred. This suggests either that the myths contain memories of a real calamitous but local flood (or floods) that have been inflated to cosmic proportions during the retelling, or else that the global flood theme is simply a mythic invention. I regard the former as somewhat more probable.

[Per Ahlberg]

Here goes:

Hi again!

Dave, the issue relating to Derek Ager's work (which, it is worth mentioning, is pretty mainstream: his opinions substantially reflect the research community consensus) is that evidence against "uniformitarianism" does not equate in any sense to evidence for a global flood. In any case the uniformitarianist position is often misunderstood and misrepresented.

Lyell's central argument was that the formation of the geological record could be explained by processes that still operate today, rather than by grandiose one-off calamities like the biblical flood. There is not, I think, a single serious professional geologist alive who would deny the basic truth of that claim. However, two additional factors must be taken into account in order to turn the simplest version of the uniformitarianist hypothesis into something more realistic. The first is that "processes that operate today" range from the more-or-less-constant (wind, rainfall, frost shattering etc.) through the infrequent and spectacular (volcanic eruptions, big landslides) to the really infrequent and spectacular (major meteorite impacts). The geological record will thus partly be shaped by violent events that the average geologist is unlikely to experience in a lifetime. The second is that certain aspects of the global environment really have changed over time in ways that have affected the processes of deposition. For example, before the development of extensive land vegetation (about 350 million years ago) rates of erosion on land were higher than now. The geological record from the earlier parts of Earth's history thus contain features that cannot be wholly explained by processes that operate in today's environment. This "modified uniformitarianism" is the standard interpretative model adopted by pretty much all geologists today.

The reason why you can't take the "modified uniformitarianist" stance as evidence for the biblical flood is simple: the biblical flood is not just some sort of generic geological catastrophe but a very specific one with a reasonably predictable geological correlates. Without getting caught up in details about "Fountains of the Deep" we can, I think, agree that the biblical flood involves an enormous amount of rain falling during a brief period and eventually producing complete inundation of all land on Earth. Geologists know a great deal about what happens when high ground is deluged by abnormal amounts of rain (basically the soil starts to erode and be washed away downhill, but it happens in rather specific ways) and how soil sediments behave when they are washed out into the sea. We can thus be pretty sure about what a global flood deposit would look like, at least in general terms - and we can be certain that it would be very conspicuous just about everywhere in the world. It would be the sort of thing you would show to first-year undergraduates on their first geology field trip.

And here's the crunch: there is no such deposit.

There's really no other or less stark way of putting it, and this simple fact makes all further discussion of the evidence from flood myths irrelevant. No flood deposit means no global flood. Period. So quoting Derek Ager (or any other comparable geologist) in support of the biblical flood because they argue for the importance of catastrophic events in the geological record is wrong and misleading, because their work does not provide any evidence for the flood - in fact quite the contrary. To do so deliberately would unquestionably constitute a quote mine, but if you simply hadn't appreciated the difference that is of course another matter.

[Dave Hawkins]

Hi Dave,

I wouldn't want you to think I'm not interested in the flood myths: I do find them interesting from all sorts of angles, including their origins and relationship to each other, but not as evidence for a global flood because that possibility is already ruled out by the geological evidence.

OK, as we are now staring to move on to the geological record, we need to get into the nitty-gritty of detailed sedimentology, because this is what is going to tell us how particular strata were deposited. This is why I asked a series of questions about different depositional structures a while back. You see the details really matter here: a statement like "2/3 of the geologic column is mudstone quite possibly laid by moving water" or "BILLIONS OF FOSSILS BURIED IN ROCK LAYERS LAID DOWN BY WATER ALL OVER THE EARTH" is simply far too general to allow us to draw any conclusions about what happened.

It really would be helpful at this point if you could provide a brief account of how you think the flood worked (where did the water come from? how did it inundate the continents? where did it go afterwards?): you seem to dismiss the role of rain, but Genesis states explicitly that it rained for forty days and forty nights. However, be that as it may I think we can make some headway simply with reference to the time scale. The Bible is unambiguous here: the whole flood lasted less than a year. Even if we allow some continued precipitation of sediment from the water column afterwards we're looking at no more than 2-3 years for the entire sedimentation episode.

This allows us to draw a number of detailed conclusions about what the flood deposit should look like:

It should contain no hardgrounds, hardened sediment surfaces with attached fossils such as corals and oysters, because these take decades or centuries to form.

It should contain no bioherms, that is fossil reefs, because these take centuries or millennia to form.

It should contain no bioturbation horizons, that is layers full of animal burrows, because these take many years to form and require reasonably calm and stable conditions.

It should contain no palaleosols, that is fossil soils (recognisable from root casts and peculiar types of weathering), because these take decades or centuries to form and indicate deposition on land.

The fossils should not be sorted into a well-resolved biostratigraphic sequence but should occur higgeldy-jumbly throughout the deposit. Human skeletons should be present throughout the deposit.

The deposit should occur in all parts of the world, draped across continents as well as ocean floors.

There should be very little on top of it, except some minor and local sedimentary deposition by rivers from the last few millennia.


So there we are: some straightforward criteria. And there is no sedimentary deposit in existence that even comes close to matching all these criteria. If you want to carry this discussion forward you will need to show either that my criteria are wrong (and how they are wrong), or demonstrate with convincingly documented examples (map references, photos, stratigraphic sequences) that a deposit matching my criteria actually exists. Otherwise I will regard the discussion as concluded and the non-historicity of the biblical flood as demonstrated.

[Dave Hawkins]

Hi Dave,

I have to say I appreciate your unambiguous identification of the Hydroplate Theory ("HT" below) as your preferred explanatory model: this gives us a specific point to discuss and avoids the endless waltzing around that too often characterises this kind of debate. However, you should be aware that the HT cannot possibly be true. Given our understanding of the laws of physics (which is complete enough to allow us to build things like nuclear reactors and computers that actually work, hence probably a reliable guide to reality), we can easily calculate that the releases of energy accompanying the HT events would be so enormous as to roast the entire planet. Noah and shipmates would have been converted to carbon dioxide and ash long before they had the opportunity to release their dove. Pappy Jack has provided a set of links to previous discussion of this topic in post #620 of the accompanying "Unfavoured Few" thread. To further demonstrate the absurdities inherent in the HT I would like to pick up on a couple of specific claims.

The formation of sedimentary deposits.
According to the diagram you posted, "most fossils and limestone form" and "sediments and fossils [are] sorted and layered by liquefaction" during the flood phase, which in turn is followed by the continental drift phase. The diagram has the continental drift phase occupying a single day(!), which would imply the continents reaching speeds of several hundred miles per hour(!!). I trust you can see the absurdity of this idea; presumably this is why you want to allow somewhat more time for the continental drift phase at the expense of the flood phase. However, even if you allow, say, 10 days for the continental drift phase the absurdities are insurmountable:

1) How could a period of less than a month, following directly after a planet-wide geological cataclysm, allow the deposition of a gloibal sedimentary record that is well known and fully documented to contain thousands of stratigraphically superimposed examples of hardgrounds, reefs, oyster beds and bioturbation horizons, as well as innumerable fluctuations in depositional environment from deep marine through shallow marine to freshwater to river flood plain (with many superimposed palaeosols) to aeolian desert sandstones?

2) How could sorting and layering by "liquefaction" produce the kind of exquisitely detailed and globally consistent stratigraphic distribution of fossils that allow us for example to recognise 15 successive conodont zones in the Late Devonian alone? Here's a diagram of that particular zonation:

and here are some conodonts - spectacularly abundant microfossils that occur in millions upon millions in rocks of Ordovician to Triassic age:

The mid-oceanic ridges
We understand perfectly well how the mid-oceanic ridges form: they are zones of slow spreading, where near-constant volcanic eruptions add new material at a rate of a few centimetres per year, corresponding exactly to the rates of continental movement that we can measure directly by means of satellite. Furthermore, the ridges are surrounded by symmetric stripe patterns of geomagnetic reversals (i.e. the magnetic polarity "set" in the basalt when it solidified is either the same as today, or reversed) which can be dated with reference to the radiometric ages of the rocks, and which prove to match exactly both their predicted ages inferred from position and observed spreading rate, and the ages of relevant volcanic deposits on land.

The Hydroplate Theory completely fails to explain these observations, and also contains abundant physical and thermodynamic absurdities as I mentioned above. The only possible conclusion is that it is wrong. You should therefore abandon it: clinging to it at this point would be intellectually dishonest.


Regarding Derek Ager, I have already answered your points in a previous post. You cannot simply equate catastrophe with catastrophe and "add up" the total number of catastrophic events in the geological record (which is considerable, but probably not quite as all-pervasive as Ager argued) into the biblical flood. The argument is a non-sequitur and I have already explained to you in some detail why it fails to match the observed facts.


At this point I have nothing further to add. I have demonstrated with reference to known facts of physics, sedimentology and palaeontology that the Hydroplate Theory is false, that there is no geological evidence for a universal deluge, and that consequently the flood myths cannot preserve the memory of such a deluge. I would like to thank you for a civilised and enjoyable discussion. Before we close this, however, I wonder if you would do me the favour of answering two questions:

1) Do you concede that there was no biblical flood?

2) If not, why not?

[Per Ahlberg]

Actually, on second thoughts, I'll do it now. No time like the present and all that...

Originally Posted by Dave

You claim to have demonstrated that the Hydroplate Theory cannot possibly been correct. Surely you can't believe that. You have not
demonstrated this. You have asserted this and expressed some personal incredulity about the speed of continental drift, the hardground/bioherm/bioturbation horizons issue, and liquefaction.

I have drawn your attention to the fact that the enormous energy releases accompanying a Hydroplate catastrophy and motorway-speed continental drift would raise global temperatures to a point that would annihilate the entire biosphere. It is a rather obvious point that you cannot accelerate entire continents to speeds upwards of a hundred miles per hour, and then decelerate them again to near-standstill within a few days, without releasing titanic amounts of heat. Similarly (and speaking here as someone with a fairly detailed knowledge of the stratigraphic column), "liquefaction sorting" cannot possibly account for the biostratigraphic record, for the crashingly obvious reason that this record contains parallel and perfectly correlated sequences of change for fossils with drastically different sizes, shapes and densities. You might as soon fling a ton of mixed books into a river and expect the flowing water to sort them according to the Dewey Decimal System. If you think these objections amount to no more than "personal incredulity" you have a lot to learn about the process of evaluating evidence.

But you didn't say anything about reading any creationist materials, which was my question. So, while I now understand that you have extensive academic and field experience in geology, it appears that you adopted the mainstream view because that's what you were taught and you went out in the field and saw lots of sedimentary rocks such and never really had any reason to question what you were taught because no other viewpoints were seriously presented to you. Is this about right?

No it isn't. I adopted the mainstream view because the reasoning behind it was carefully explained, it didn't violate any laws of physics, and what I saw in the field made sense in terms of it. A major part of an academic geology training at Cambridge is practical fieldwork where the students are set the task of examining and interpreting particular geological features. All of this is based on explicit chains of reasoning: what are the structures like? - what do we know about processes that can produce such structures? - what can we infer to have happened in this particular case? Furthermore, I knew that the mainstream view (or rather spectrum of views) had emerged from a constant process of critical discussion and peer review going back nearly two hundred years. Dramatic changes in outlook have occurred during those two hundred years, including the rejection of the young-earth creationist perspectives that were initially prevalent among specialists in the field but had to be abandoned because the evidence just didn't support them. I have read bits and pieces of the modern creationist literature (a friend at college once lent me Gish's "Evolution: The Fossils Say No", and I have leafed through a few others as well) but have found them to be calamitously deficient in logic and full of obviously false assertions.

No, I don't see the absurdity of it. In fact, I think it's a far better idea that the modern version of Plate Tectonics. After all, one of the acknowledged "fathers" of modern Plate Tectonics, Antonio Snider-Pelligrini, believed that the divergence was rapid and catastrophic also. Perhaps you are not so familiar with the meaning of the term 'hydroplate' as it's not a term you run across in mainstream literature every day. It means that the plates moved upon (and thus were lubricated by) water prior to the water being completely depleted from the 'fountains of the deep.' This seems to do away with the friction objection.

Learn some basic physics. Please.

As for your conodont argument, I think Walt's liquefaction argument explains it very well

As for conodonts being sorted perfectly, not sure what exactly you are referring to. Perhaps you mean by color?

If you don't know what sorting criterion I'm referring to, how can you tell whether Walt's liquefaction argument explains it well? But in any case I'm not talking about colour, but shape: this is what allows us to define and name different conodont species. "Aha!" you say, "that fits perfectly with liquefaction sorting", but it doesn't. Let me explain:

Conodont elements are the mineralised parts ("teeth", if you will) of the feeding apparatus of extinct soft-bodied vertebrates that looked a bit like tiny eels (but were not related to them). A few complete examples of whole conodont animals have been found, but normally you only get the "teeth". Conodont elements come in many different shapes. Originally these were all given different names, but when complete animals were found it was realised that some very dissimilar elements go together in the same apparatus. Here's a conodont apparatus preserved in the rock:



and here's one reconstructed in three dimensions:



Now, here's the key point. It is readily apparent that the different elements of one of these apparatuses, with their radically dissimilar shapes, will have quite different hydrodynamic sorting properties. If the "liquefaction sorting" hypothesis were correct, we would thus not expect to find the elements of the different apparatuses correctly associated in the same strata. But we do: Promissum elements all occur at a single stratigraphic level, Ozarkodina elements all occur at a single (but different) level, and so on. This on its own makes the "liquefaction sorting" hypothesis seem very shaky. When you consider the fact that the conodont-yielding part of the stratigraphic column also yields beautifully resolved and perfectly correlated change sequences of land-plant spores, which are perhaps one twentieth the size of conodont elements:



and goniatite cephalopods which are about 100 times the linear size of conodont elements (and air-filled so they would have floated after death):



as well as correlated sequences of fishes, land-plant megafossils and goodness knows what else, the hypothesis falls apart completely. It lacks power to explain the patterns we see, predicts patterns we don't see (everything should be sorted by shape and/or weight, which it plainly isn't), and can therefore be dismissed as wrong. End of story.

First, let's discuss paleosols. It is my position that, while there are some true paleosols, many of the supposed ones are not.

On what expertise do you base this position? Have you studied palaeosols?

The ones that are true ones can be explained within the Flood paradigm, i.e. we know how soils form today and soils have would have formed essentially the same way during the early Recovery Phase of the Flood. These newly formed soils could have easily been buried in post-Ice Age catastrophic flows apparently common in the 'big melt' years following the Ice Age.

Sorry, but you are just making this up. There is NO evidence for such a scenario as you describe. To take a concrete example, my colleague Greg Retallack is studying palaeosols in Pennsylvania and has identified more than 1000 superimposed palaeosol horizons from the Middle Devonian to Lower Carboniferous stratigraphic interval - which is only a small segment of the total stratigraphic column. How exactly is that meant to fit into your "big melt" hypothesis?

You are probably familiar with Dr. Joe Meert's examples of supposed paleosols. If not, please refer to his first paleosol exhibit on his website HERE. He makes some claims about why he changed the picture and the lines and labels on his picture but spends most of his space on the page talking about things other than paleosols. Contrast this with Tas Walker's highly detailed discussion of this particular paleosol here ... "Paleosols: digging deeper buries ‘challenge’ to Flood geology" which includes Walker's side of the story about the picture change. I suggest that you read the entire article. It's a short read and it's free (no funds going to the ECCSS). I will let you read for yourself Walker's detailed objections to Meert's interpretation and simply give you an excerpt here of Walker's proposed Flood interpretation for this particular site ...

OK, I read it. Joe Meert's roasting of Tas Walker is fully justified.

As for fossil reefs (which you say take milennia to form), first, I'm surprised that you believe they only take milennia and not millions of years. IIRC I've been told by others that they supposedly take millions of years to form.

Depends on the size of the reef. I was speaking about the relatively small patch reefs that are frequent in tropical marine limestones during the Silurian to Permian and Jurassic to Recent. Giganto-reefs like the Great Barrier Reef take much longer to form.

Secondly, coral reefs make indeed take milennia to form if they have always grown at present rates. But I think this is a bad assumption. Note what GRISDA has to say about this ...

I would always be suspicious of studies that extrapolate from supposed maximum rates, but OK, just for the sake of argument let's allow 3400 years for Enewetak reef. By the same general measure that you can get a metre of reef in just over two years. Now according to flood geology the bulk of the global stratigraphic column was produced in less than two years, and we know for a fact that it contains thousands of different reef horizons, I could show you several dozen just in the Silurian of Gotland where I was doing fieldwork last summer. Do these figures match? No: they are out by a factor of 1000 or so. Furthermore, flood geology requires that all these reefs grew during a period of incredibly rapid sedimentation, whereas we know from many present-day examples that corals hate heavy sedimentation and that reefs are easily killed by sediment influx.

Hoping to see from Per: a more detailed explanation of why you think my logic pertaining to Derek Ager's ideas is wrong headed.

OK, let me try once more: you are adding oranges together in the hope that enough oranges will equate to one pineapple. But they won't.

Let me try an analogy:
Suppose I were to say to you that a gigantic traffic accident killed every inhabitant of New York City apart from one family at some point in the fairly recent past. As evidence I present records showing that minor and major traffic accidents have been a frequent occurrence in the city ever since the days of horse-drawn carriages, and that some of these have killed dozens of people at a time. I argue that, if you add all of these up, the total number of deaths runs into the high thousands and - well, there you are: evidence for a gigantic accident that wiped out everybody.

Can you see where I'm going wrong? This is exactly analogous to the argument you have been making.

[Per Ahlberg]

Hi Dave,

Here's a slightly schematic example of what I meant by perfectly correlated sequences:

You have a sequence of sedimentary rocks - let's say a section in a quarry, or a big coastal cliff. Moving up the sequence you find, side by side in the same rocks, a succession of conodont species "A-B-C-D", a succession of spore species "1-2-3-4" and a succession of goniatite species "I-II-III-IV". In the lowest stratum, A, 1 and I occur together; in the next stratum B, 2 and II; and so on. If you go to look at sedimentary rocks in another region you find the same associations. You may or may not have the whole sequence, because your second locality may be of slightly different age (perhaps the sequence begins with the "B, 2, II" stratum and continues up to a "E, 5, V" stratum that isn't represented at the first site) but the order of species is the same. You do not this time find conodont "A" associated with goniatite "IV", or whatever.

Returning briefly to the question of decelerating continents, the fundamental problem is conservation of energy. If an entire continent is thundering along at motorway speeds and then slows to less than walking pace in a few hours, it has lost a phenomenal amount of momentum. Now that momentum doesn't just vanish: it must by necessity be converted into an equal amount of some other kind of energy. Given that we are not looking at a "billiard balls" system where the momentum is transferred from one moving object to another, there is really only one place where that energy can end up (some of it directly, some after passing through intermediate forms such as Loud Crunching Noises): it ends as the universal lowest-grade waste energy, heat. A lot of heat. A really gigantic amount of heat. As an Air force pilot you must have noticed how hot the plane tyres get when you brake at landing. The immediate cause is friction, but what this really means is that the momentum of the plane is being transformed into heat. Now imagine a whole continent doing that.

[Per Ahlberg]

Evaluation of hypotheses and "explanatory power"

Dave,

One thing I come up against repeatedly in discussions with you is the issue of how hypotheses are evaluated. Your comments about my geology education, where you asked

it appears that you adopted the mainstream view because that's what you were taught and you went out in the field and saw lots of sedimentary rocks such and never really had any reason to question what you were taught because no other viewpoints were seriously presented to you. Is this about right?

is quite telling in this regard. For goodness' sake, of course it doesn't work like that! How could you seriously imagine such a thing? Do you really think the teachers are such fools that they merely repeat received wisdom mindlessly, and the students are such fools that they blithely accept the teachings without question? More to the point, if that's how you think it works, where did the "received wisdom" actually come from in the first place??

What this failure of understanding really comes down to, I think, is that you do not understand how hypotheses are developed and tested. This also comes through in your response to my thumbnail critique of the Hydroplate theory: I explained briefly how it is completely at variance with the known laws of physics, but you did not seem to see this as a fatal flaw. Rather, you seemed to feel that this was only a niggling criticism that needed to be weighed against the positive points of the theory. So let's have a brief look at hypotheses and how they work.

OK, so you observe a phenomenon that seems to require an explanation - say, the occurrence on dry land of obviously marine sediments full of seashells - and you think up a tentative explanation. There's your initial hypothesis. But you can't just stop there: in order for your hypothesis to deserve the name you need to test it. Key considerations at this point are:

1) Is it falsifiable? This does not mean "can it be proved wrong?" but "could it in principle be proved wrong?", and it is the single most important attribute of a hypothesis. A non-falsifiable hypothesis is simply worthless, because it cannot help us to understand anything. A falsifiable hypothesis on the other hand is useful, even if it ultimately proves to be wrong, because it allows us to arrive at understanding.

Let me give you a couple of concrete examples relating to the supposed biblical flood.

"Hypothesis A: there was a global flood which has left a record in the geological column."

"Hypothesis B: there was a global flood, but God magicked away the physical evidence afterwards because he didn't want people to be able to use science to investigate His works."

Hypothesis A is good, because it is falsifiable (and in fact it has been falsified; it was good but wrong). Hypothesis B is worthless because there is no way of falsifying it, and indeed no way of distinguishing it from conceptually similar hypotheses such as "there was a flood, but Satan magicked away the evidence to deceive mankind" or "we were all created 10 minutes ago".

So, being falsifiable is the first criterion of a good hypothesis, but just because a hypothesis is falsifiable doesn't mean it's true.

2) Does it violate known laws of physics or contradict well-established observations? A degree of caution is required here, because sometimes that which appears "well-established" is not so securely founded as you might think, but this is nevertheless a powerful criterion. The Hydroplate theory violates basic laws of physics that are the most securely established parts of the entire scientific edifice, and on that basis alone the theory can be dismissed. End of story. The same goes for any Young Earth claim requiring accelerated rates of nuclear decay or light speed in the recent past. The hypothesis "The globally distributed flood myths arise from a preserved memory of a global flood" is perfectly reasonable in its own terms, but is falsified by the fact that it is contradicted by the absence of a global flood layer in the geologic column.

3) How great is its explanatory power? This is the most subtle criterion. It asks whether the hypothesis really has the power to explain the phenomenon - in other words to account for it credibly, without hand-waving, in terms of mechanisms that are known to exist. If for example we think of hydrological sorting as a process, this is certainly known to occur and we know that it can sort large stones from small stones. However, a quick look at the stratigraphic column shows (as per my example with conodonts, spores and goniatites) that it contains matching change sequences for different fossil groups that are very different in size, shape and density, and where the changes within each individual group bear no resemblance to any known hydrological sorting criteria. Thus, even though hydrological sorting is a genuine process, the hypothesis "the change sequences in the fossil record have been produced by hydrological sorting" fails because it lacks explanatory power. It utterly fails to explain the thing it purports to explain.

The "received wisdom" presented to science students at a university consists entirely of hypotheses that have been tested in this way and found to be robust. This does not mean that they are all correct, because science is constantly advancing and new discoveries change our perspectives, but they are what gives science its terrifying strength to cut through to the truth. Once upon a time, at the beginning of the process, many of the hypotheses that were tested originated from a Young Earth creationist perspective. They all failed.

[Per Ahlberg]

Originally Posted by Dave

First, I think Walt may be off on the "1 day drift" idea. I see no reason why it would not have lasted several weeks (IIRC), i.e. the period of time it took for the water to be expended from the FOTD. If we take 2 weeks, we have a back of the envelope calculation of 3000 miles / 336 hours = ~ 9 mph. And maybe it took more than 2 weeks. An item for further study to be sure.

The physics of the Hydroplate theory have already been amply covered in the "Unfavoured few" thread: I will not comment further here except to note again that it is an utter, absolute, physical impossibility.

[Re. the existence of biostratigraphic sequences:] I would challenge this assertion. Can you demonstrate that this is true generally?

Yes, of course; that's why it has been possible to build up a global biostratigraphic zonation reaching all the way through the 545 million years of the Phanerozoic, from the Cambrian to the present. It also squares with my own hands-on experience working with the vertebrate zonation of the Middle-Late Devonian. If you want to know more you can look up the International Commission on Stratigraphy.

Now, given that you will be inclined to wave all this away, I would like to ask you a simple question:

The ICS is a formally constituted international scientific body that receives substantial governmental funding and provides important expert advise for, among others, petroleum geologists. In other words they have a constant spotlight on them and the quality of their output is carefully scrutinized by multitudes of commercial and non-commercial users. How long do you think they could keep going if they were just making shit up and selling a fantasy product, a fictional stratigraphy, to their customer base? Do you REALLY think that people wouldn't notice pretty quickly?

Just for the sake of completeness I have decided to have a look at a few of the examples supposedly contradicting the existence of a global biostratigraphy. I have focused on the ones where I have the greatest personal expertise. Here goes:

Fish origins scaled back

The discovery of two fossilised fish in ‘lower Cambrian’ rocks pushes their supposed age back more than 50 million years on the evolutionary time scale.

The problem for evolution is that this finding makes it even harder to explain fish origins. This is because it further reduces the time available for them to have theoretically ‘evolved’ from non-fish, and to have developed their highly complex nervous system and mode of breathing along the way.

With the fossil record acknowledged as ‘far from complete’, these two fish add to the evolutionists’ difficulties of explaining what they call the ‘Cambrian explosion’ — a ‘seemingly abrupt’ explosion of life.

OK, this story relates to the discovery of Myllokunmingia and Haikouichthys from the Early Cambrian Chengjiang lagerstätte (exceptionally preserved fossil biota) of China. This fauna is about 525 million years old. This material is well known to me personally. Contrary to the impression given in the article, Myllokunmingia and Haikouichthys are not "fish" in the sense of modern bony fish or even sharks, but something much more primitive: they lack jaws, bone, and probably paired fins. (What was initially described as paired ventral fins is in fact probably a median pre-anal fin fold like that seen in modern hagfish.) There is not the remotest possibility that they could be mistaken for any kind of modern fish.

M. and H. do not present any problem whatsoever for our understanding of vertebrate evolution, let alone biostratigraphy. Modern vertebrates comprise three principal branches: the jawed vertebrates or gnathostomes (sharks & rays, bony fish, and land vertebrates), the lampreys, and the hagfishes. Lampreys and hagfishes lack jaws, bone and paired fins. Fossil evidence indicates that bony fishes and shark relatives go at least 420 million years back in time (we have fossils of them from the Silurian) and there are scales and bone fragments of "ostracoderms" (armoured fishes that lacked jaws but had certain other gnathostome features such as paired fins) extending back to about 500 million years. Molecular phylogenies of living vertebrates indicate that the hagfishes and lampreys separated from the jawed vertebrates more than 500 million years ago. The characteristics of Myllokunmingia and Haikouichthys show that they belong in the deepest part of the vertebrate tree: they could be basal members of the jawed vertebrate lineage, basal lampreys/hagfishes, or members of the common ancestral stock of both. Whatever the case, their occurrence in Early Cambrian rocks is not strange at all. It is a lucky find, but not a puzzling one.

Fish Scales in the Cambrian

Virtually all of the major divisions of life (the phyla) are found in the Cambrian, the rock system which evolutionists maintain is more than 500 million years old. Until recently, it was thought that no vertebrates were found in the Cambrian.

However, in 1995 the enigmatic tooth-like objects known as conodonts, common in upper Cambrian rocks, were shown to be from eel-like creatures. These were identified as true vertebrates on the basis of distinctive eye muscles not found in invertebrates.

Now small fossils found in 1976 appear to be adding more weight to the idea that the Cambrian is not, as once thought, free of vertebrates (these were believed not to have evolved yet). They are fish-like scales known as Anatolepis.1 Some have argued that the scales could belong to the arthropod phylum, which includes insects and crustaceans.

However, microscopic studies reveal that the scales contain dentine, which is only known in vertebrates. The researchers feel this is conclusive evidence that these are fish scales.

Same trick again. Anatolepis scales are not goldfish scales or modern shark scales! Anatolepis, like the earliest conodonts, comes from the very end of the Cambrian and is about 500 million years old. Opinions still differ on whether it is a vertebrate or not, but I am inclined to agree with the identification of dentine in the tubercles. This makes it a very early and very primitive ostracoderm (see above). However, undisputed ostracoderms like Astraspis (USA) and Arandaspis (Australia) are known from the Ordovician period and are about 460 million years old. Anatolepis does not present a stratigraphic problem.

Fossil Platypus Tooth in South America

Australian palaeontologist Michael Archer has found another definite fossil platypus tooth in South America, making three in all. The teeth are almost identical to fossil platypus teeth found in Australia.

He says, ‘This should shatter our warm conviction that the platypus was uniquely Australian.’

Today’s platypuses, which have no teeth, are far inferior to earlier platypuses in other ways, too, Dr Archer notes. He is quoted as saying it has ‘changed from a highly robust animal with good sets of teeth’ into what is effectively ‘an extremely degenerate small mammal’.

The Weekend Australian, 23–24 January 1993 (p. 10).

The Sydney Morning Herald, 21 January 1993 (p. 5).

This is relevant to the problem raised by skeptics of the frail, timid platypus’ migrating to southern Australia from Ararat. It also helps answer the common belief that Australia’s unique fauna must have evolved here, because their fossils are found nowhere else. Marsupial fossils have now been found on every continent.

How is this supposed to relate to biostratigraphy at all? In any case, this report also distorts the significance of the discovery. The discovery of fossil platypuses in South America was interesting but not terribly surprising, because it has long been known that Australia was in indirect contact with South America via Antarctica right through to the end of the Paleocene. Even today, large parts of the Australian flora (for example among the Proteaceae or in the genus Nothofagus) have their closest relatives in South America, and the closest relatives of the Australian marsupial radiation are to be found among the South American marsupials. However, the Australian marsupial radiation (kangaroos, phalangers, wombats, koalas and all the rest) is unique to that continent plus New Guinea. This discovery does nothing at all to support a migration from Ararat.

Do you notice a pattern here, Dave? Each one of these articles is a tendentious distortion of information that was freely available to the authors. They are lies. Do you think it is a good thing to put your trust in lies or use them to bolster your argument?

I will not comment on the Grand Canyon pollen story, because I lack personal expertise in this case, but informed commentary on the problems can be found here and here. It appears likely that the occurrence of pollen in this shale is the result of groundwater contamination.

Yes. Especially the one I cited.

Yet another extremely telling statement. I didn't ask "have you read an online creationist article about a palaeosol?" I was actually wondering whether you have studied palaeosols in the field and in the lab, examining their structure, chemistry and sedimentary contexts yourself, in detail. No? Then who do you think you are to disparage the work of those who actually have done those things? You are in no position to judge their findings.

Well in one sense, everyone 'makes up' a hypothesis and then tests it. So if that's what you mean, OK. But you do the same thing.

Dave, what you do and what scientists do is not the same thing. Judging by your Internet posting record you have never attempted a meaningful hypothesis test, and would not recognise one if you saw one. Why do you think people keep shouting "why do the curves agree" at you? Really? It's not just a jibe, you know - it directs your attention to a crashingly obvious gorilla-in-the-living-room hypothesis test that you for some reason choose to ignore. By the way, why are you ignoring my post about hypothesis testing?

My post-Flood Ice Age followed by a Big Melt and Sea Level Rise is an actual scientific hypothesis which enjoys a large body of supporting evidence.

No it doesn't. This is a simple flat-out falsehood. And yes, I do know a good deal about ice-age geology, though not as much as SteveF. Again, let me ask you: if this hypothesis enjoys a large body of supporting evidence, why is it not accepted by anyone outside the creationist community? Specifically, why is it not accepted by people like SteveF who actually work on Pleistocene geology and palaeontology?

So you say. But I think we are agreeing to provide evidence--i.e. reasons WHY we think certain things in this discussion. I have offered you a perfectly good creationist explanation for Meert's supposed paleosol example and you've not told me any reasons why it's no good.

Joe Meert's response effectively and thoroughly demolishes Tas Walker's claims, that's why. Why should I spend time repeating what he has already expressed so eloquently?

[about the occurrence of coral reefs at multiple levels in the stratigraphic column:]My thought is that many existing reefs may have been dislodged and redeposited during the Flood. Then new reefs began growing after the Flood. What do you see wrong with this idea?

The following:

1) Reefs are extremely heavy (they are made of solid biogenic limestone) and so could only be moved by extremely violent water flows. These would also tumble and shatter the reefs. We find such material here and there in storm deposits. However, the reefs I am talking about are all the right way up, unbroken, surrounded by quiet-water sediments, and their lateral edges grade into the surrounding sediment.

2) Reef faunas show pronounced change over time. The composition of the Silurian reefs of Gotland (tabulate and rugose corals, plus stromatoporoids) is completely different from that of Cretaceous or Recent reefs, with no species overlap at all. If all these reefs were contemporary and had been torn from their foundations and redeposited during some cataclysm, that would obviously not be the case.

As you can see, your hypothesis has been falsified: it does not provide an adequate account of the reef distribution observed in the stratigraphic column.


With regard to the car crash analogy, you say:

We must examine the nature of the smashed-up-ness.

What do you think the last 200 years of geological research has been doing?????

I'm done. Life's too short for this. There's none so deaf as them as won't hear.

[Occam's Aftershave]

Originally Posted by Dave Hawkins

Care to post a picture of this 27 layer succession?

There is no one photo that shows all the layers, but here is a nice scientific cross-sectional representative drawing of the area (source is the U.S. National Park Service.)




Even your buddies at GRISDA agree the multiple layered forests exist

B. Successive Layers

Petrified wood and trees are found in numerous locations around the world, but the Yellowstone Petrified Forests are unusual because of the many levels stacked one upon another. In 1960 Erling Dorf of Princeton University studied the Amethyst Mountain Fossil Forest and counted 27 levels.8 I have plotted 31 levels on Mount Hornaday on the west side of the Soda Butte Creek Valley (Figure 4). The greatest sequence of superimposed fossil forest levels is located in the Specimen Creek area where 65 or more levels can be counted (Table 1). Other areas with fewer levels are Mt. Norris on the east side of Soda Butte Creek Valley (5 levels), Specimen Ridge flanking the Lamar Valley (15 levels), and Cache Creek (26 levels).9 Multiple levels are also seen at Miller Creek northeast of the Lamar Valley, in Tom Minor Basin (including Ramshorn Peak), and in the Stratified Primitive Area. Scattered trees and petrified wood can be found throughout the northern region of Yellowstone Park and other surrounding areas.

GRISDA

Turns out the 27 layers is a low number. At one point there are 65 successively buried mature fossil forests.

Studies have shown these forests were buried in place and not transported by any flood mechanism.

Yellowstone fossil forests; new evidence for burial in place
Richard F. Yuretich
Geology; March 1984; v. 12; no. 3; p. 159-162

Specimen Ridge; stumps are commonly rooted in a fine-grained tuffaceous sandstone that shows no petrographic evidence of being deposited by current action; in fact, most sandstones have textures resembling immature soils. Conglomerates that overlie these root-zone sandstones flow around and bury the vertical trunks. Trees were apparently killed in place by either mudflows or rising lake waters, giving rise to discontinuous, localized clusters of preserved trees in a given stratigraphic interval. However, the episodic nature of mudflow sedimentation indicates that these stacked clusters are likely remnants of successive forests with enough time between them to allow for incipient soil development.

source

Care to explain how Da Flood produced that? GRISDA couldn't.

[gladiatrix]

Originally Posted by VoxRat

Agreed.

And I've never seen or heard of any but the most brain-dead of audiences reacting to this odious propaganda with anything other than revulsion.

I hope Ben Stein hasn't made it necessary to actually dignify such garbage with a response.

The problem is that Stein and his creato/IDist buds are playing the old equivocation game here and slinging mud rather than producing evidence for their case in the hope that some of it will stick. I think that this tactic should be exposed vigorously and I salute Calilasseia here for having exposed this tactic earlier.

Now my two centavos.... At best, Hitler was a Social Darwinist and IMO a Christian (later). He was most definitely NOT an evolutionist. Social "Darwinism" is a PHILOSOPHY and is NOT the same thing as evolution, a SCIENTIFIC THEORY.

From Creationists, Hitler and Evolution

EXCERPT
A common charge made by creationists is that evolutionary theory is "evil" and is the source of racism in general, and of dictatorial killers in particular. The most often-heard assertion is that Hitler and his racist genocide were the product of "evolutionary philosophy". Henry Morris, for instance, flatly declares, "However one may react morally against Hitler, he was certainly a consistent evolutionst." (Morris, "Evolution and Modern racism", ICR Impact, October 1973) Morris adds: "The philosophies of Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche--the forerunners of Stalin and Hitler--have been particularly baleful in their effect: both were dedicated evolutionists." (Morris, Troubled Waters of Evolution, 1974 p. 33)

How accurate is this creationist finger-pointing? Not very. The creationists are apparently unaware of the fact that Stalinist Russia rejected Darwinian evolution as "bourgeois" and instead embraced the non-Darwinian "proletarian biology" of Lysenko and Michurin (a disaster from which Russian genetics and biological sciences has still not completely recovered). As for Hitler, even a cursory reading of his book Mein Kampf reveals that the true source of Hitler's inspiration and exhortations came from a source that creationists, understandably, would rather not talk about.

Hitler's goal was the "purification" of the "Aryan race" through the elimination of "subhumans", which included Jews, gypsies, Asians, black Africans, and everyone else who was not a white Aryan. Despite the creationists claims that this was based on Darwinain evolutionary theory, Hitler's own writings give quite a different story. The ICR claims that "Hitler used the German word for evolution (Entwicklung) over and over again in his book." (ICR Impact, "The Ascent of Racism", Paul Humber Feb 1987) Like so many of ICR's claims, this one is simply not true---a quick scan of several online English translations of Mein Kampf shows only ONE use of the word "evolution", in a context which does not refer at all to biological evolution, but instead to the development of political ideas in Germany: "This evolution has not yet taken the shape of a conscious intention and movement to restore the political power and independence of our nation."

Had ICR made even a cursory reading of Mein Kampf, they would have seen a quite different source for Hitler's racist inspiration than the one they would have us believe. White Aryans, Hitler writes, are the special creations of God, the "highest image of the Lord", put here specifically to rule over the "subhuman" races: "Human culture and civilization on this continent are inseparably bound up with the presence of the Aryan. If he dies out or declines, the dark veils of an age without culture will again descend on this globe. The undermining of the existence of human culture by the destruction of its bearer seems in the eyes of a folkish philosophy the most execrable crime. Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits sacrilege against the benevolent Creator of this miracle and contributes to the expulsion from paradise." (all quotes from Hitler, Mein Kampf, online version) Actions which aid the "subhumans" at the expense of the Aryan master race, Hitler declared, were an offense against God: " It is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator if His most gifted beings by the hundreds and hundreds of thousands are allowed to degenerate in the present proletarian morass, while Hottentots and Zulu Kaffirs are trained for intellectual professions."

Rather than basing his racism on any evolutionary theory, Hitler based it squarely on his view of white Aryans as the favored people of God. In fact, Hitler solemnly declares that his program of removing Jews and other "subhumans" from the earth is a divine task forced upon him by the Lord Almighty: "What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproductionof our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purityof our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that ourpeople may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the Creator of the universe."

Hitler concludes: "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord," adding "Compared to the absurd catchword about safeguarding law and order, thus laying a peaceable groundwork for mutual swindles, the task of preserving and advancing the highest humanity, given to this earth by the benevolence of the Almighty, seems a truly high mission." For Hitler, removing the subhumans from earth was not a matter of biology or evolution---it was a divine mandate from God Himself, the "work of the Lord", a "truly high mission".

Allow me to point out that "Social Darwinism" is the product of a philosopher Herbert Spenser (and HERE). It was SPENCER who coined the phrase"survival of the fittest", not Darwin. Spencer's meaning for this phrase is radically different from the same phrase (LATER used by Darwin).

Survival of the fittest is a phrase which is a shorthand for a concept relating to competition for survival or predominance. Originally applied to economics by Herbert Spencer, Spencer drew parallels with Charles Darwin's theories of evolution by what Darwin termed natural selection. The phrase is essentially a metaphor and is often felt to be unhelpful - biologists almost exclusively use natural selection in preference. Some have argued that it is a tautology, since if "fitness" is measured in terms of survival, the phrase becomes "survival of the survivors". Fitness however is a measure of reproduction within population genetics.

Spencer was alleging that only the most ruthless competitors become rich and that only they "deserve" to be by "virtue" of their superior abilities (being will to do what it takes to get to the "top"). The poor "deserve" their socioeconomic status because they weren't sufficiently "competitive" to claw their way up the economic ladder. IOW, just another refrain from the old song of "Might Makes Right!" In evolution, "survival of the fittest" means whoever leaves the most offspring behind (their genes predominate in the population). In nature, that laurel does not always go to the "ruthless competitor" or "baddest junkyard dog on the block" (Spencer's version using 21st century parlance). The two things ARE NOT the same, however much you want them to be.

Furthermore, this phase, reluctantly adopted by Darwin, does NOT mean the survival of the meanest, strongest junkyard dog on the block at the expense of the weaker. This is a common mischaracterization by religionists and erstwhile "social Darwinists" like the American industrialists such as John D. Rockefeller et al, who first coined the phrase to justify their underhanded dog-eat-dog corporate warfare and exploitation of their workers. What this phrase really means , IN CONTEXT, from Introduction to Evolutionary Biology:

The phrase "survival of the fittest" is often used synonymously with natural selection. The phrase is both incomplete and misleading. For one thing, survival is only one component of selection -- and perhaps one of the less important ones in many populations. For example, in polygynous species, a number of males survive to reproductive age, but only a few ever mate. Males may differ little in their ability to survive, but greatly in their ability to attract mates -- the difference in reproductive success stems mainly from the latter consideration. Also, the word fit is often confused with physically fit. Fitness, in an evolutionary sense, is the average reproductive output of a class of genetic variants in a gene pool. Fit does not necessarily mean biggest, fastest or strongest..." In other words, who produces the most offspring (leaves more copies of their genes behind) is the "fittest"

.

By all rights what is now known as "Social Darwinism" should be called "Social Spencerism", but then creationists and other religionists with an axe to grind against evolution couldn't pretend that "Social Spencerism" is the equivalent of evolution, i.e., use the confusion in names to play their little game of equivocation (hope no one notices that the only thing that "Social Darwinism" has in common with the "Darwinism" is in name only).

Let's not forget that according to the Nazis' own document, Darwin's works and ANY work who used his concepts were BANNED (already documented by Cali). Here it is again:

From Lists of Banned Books, 1932-1939

What was forbidden? What was burned? It is difficult to say for sure, in part because there were so many agencies which got involved. According to Leonidas Hill, author of "The Nazi Attack on Un-German Literature, 1933-1945," by 1934, over forty agencies had lists ennumerating 4,100 publications to be banned. The following list is necessarily partial, but should represent the most influential literature blacklists from 1933 to 1935. Confiscating the Institute for Sexual Research LibrarySource: USHMM Archives #01628

[German Text]
6. Schriften weltanschaulichen und lebenskundlichen Charakters, deren Inhalt die falsche naturwissenschaftliche Aufklärung eines primitiven Darwinismus und Monismus ist (Häckel).

[English Translation of the above:]
6. Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Häckel).

The above gives the LIE to Stein/Dave and their fellow-travelers' claim that Hitler/Nazism was founded on any principle proposed by Darwin==>just imagine it, Stein/Dave have just beencaught bearing FALSE WITNESS, AGAIN...as Cali would say, "quelle surprise! (NOT!)"

In summary:

1. People who claim Hitler was an Darwinist (evolutionist) are committing an equivocation fallacy by trying to equate evolution ("Darwinism" in creato/IDistSpeak), a scientific theory, with social "Darwinism", a philosophy.
2. In addition it's also a form of poisoning the well fallacy(guilt by association), i.e., Hitler = Uber-EVIL, Hitler was a DARWINIST ergo Darwinism is EVIL. Assume that Hitler was a "Darwinist'", so what? Such an unpleasant fact (not in this case) would NOT make the science FALSE.

Creto/IDists have no scientific evidence that can invalidate ToE, so slimy tactics like these are all they've got (rather than a valid argument).

[gladiatrix]

Originally Posted by ericmurphy

Dave, just because you don't get what Cali is saying doesn't make it "nonsense." Your inability to understand perfectly intelligible English prose is legendary.

I will look forward to the amusement I get with your "refutation."

More chest-thumping from Dave, I see... I too look forward to his "refutation". Just for fun, here are my arguments that Hitler was a Christian. I will give my arguments in the form of critique an article, Was Hitler a Christian?', claiming that he wasn't one....

PART 1-- Critique of "Was Hitler A Christian"?

This article is an attempt to distance Hitler from his Christianity and absolve Chistianity from the formidable role it played in setting up Europe for the Holocaust. One ususally hears the standard denial or the false attribution that Hitler was a atheist or a "Darwinist"(why he was a "godless" atheist, BTW). This one at least acknowledges that Hitler was a Catholic who didn't renounce his faith (the Church never excommunicated the creep either.

First is the thorny problem of how to define what constitutes the TRUE Christian™, something that has eluded this religion from day one. Here is Kevin's lame and necessarily vague "definition":

Originally Posted by Kevin

By "follower of Jesus" I mean someone who considers Jesus a model for his own life or one who believes that the teachings of Jesus are superior to the teachings of others. I hope the reader appreciates that this criterion is the most inclusive one possible without making "Christian" a meaningless concept. Certainly most would (rightly) argue for a more restrictive definition." NOTE:And how! BTW, he NEVER defines what constitutes a TRUE Christian™ ).

Kevin quotes of the leaders of the German Confessing Church was held in the town of Barmen and a declaration was issued denying Hitler's claim to supremacy who define "Nazi" ethics as opposed to "Christian" ethics. This is a very vague rambling declaration that boils down to a "do unto them as you would have them do unto you" and "justice for all" polemic. The problem with this is that the 'Golden Rule'. and justice for all are NOT uniquely Christian concepts. The nauseating implication is that these concepts were invented by Christians!

The Golden Rule, Not a Christian Exclusive

The author also tries to white-wash the role of Christianity in setting the stage for the Holocaust. The first thing he does is to try and down-play the role of Protestantism, in other words he tries to gloss over the role Martin Luther played in this sorry scenario by ignoring the FACT that the Nazis practically plagiarized Martin Luther's anti-semitic words.

Legacy of Martin Luther, Anti-semite Extraordinaire

On Jews and Their Lies, by Martin Luther

Nazis Expropriated Luther's Anti-semitic Rantings

Furthermore, Kevin conveniently "forgets" to mention the FACT that the vast majority of European Christians (including Hitler) were indoctrinated with CENTURIES of anti-semitism from Catholicism and Lutheran Protestantism ( Who was Luther anyway? Just a disaffected, pissed-off Catholic).

A common racial slur was to call Jews "Christ-killers" (which Hitler used on many occassions: )

EXCERPT from CHRISTIAN ANTI-SEMITISM

Another unfortunate contribution Chrysostom made to Christian anti-Semitism was in holding the whole Jewish people culpable for the killing of Christ. The label of "Christ-killers" as applied to the Jewish people was to be reaffirmed by anti-Semites for the next 16 centuries. (Please note 16 CENTURIES of indocrination)

Let's look at this issue for a moment and squash it once and for all. To justify this label of "Christ-killer," Matthew 27:25 has been cited. In this passage, the Jewish people are shown admitting their collective responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus, "Then answered all the people and said, His blood be upon us, and our children...

Anti-semitism became a fixture of Christian doctrine with the rise of Constantine as the first Christian Emperor of the Roman Empire. His rise (306 CE) signaled the end of Christian persecution and within a few years, the beginning of the persection of the Jews, starting with the Edict of Mila in 313 CE, which outlawed synagogues, and in 315 CE with another edict mandating the execution of Jews convicted of "breaking the law" (for a list of what constituted "law-breaking" go to the above website). The persecution continued with numerous laws and customs, too many to be documented here. The end result is that most many European Christians were raised to hate Jews or at the very least to consider them as a little less than "human". Hitler could never have succeeded with the "groundwork" of 16 CENTURIES of such indoctrination and was himself, an end-product of it.

Kevin also fails to mention the fact that Hitler's first real international prestige came when he signed the Concordant wth the Vatican in 1933 (until then, most of Europe and America regarded him as a buffoon whose days were numbered). What was the Concordant of 1933? Hitler bought off the Church by promising not to interfere with the Church's "corporate" interests (schools, businesses) in return for the Church's agreement to shut up. They were more than happy to oblige because they also saw Hitler as the nemesis of "godless communism". These passages fromThe incestuous relationship between church and state in Germany was authored by Hitler and persists to this day , says it well.......

Historically, churches and religions have, more than once, played the role of society only check against political oppression. Accordingly, governments have often harbored hostility towards them particularly since they postulate a higher authority than the state.

But Hitler circumvented that problem in 1933. In return for maintaining state support for the churches, Hitler secured an agreement that the churches would not oppose the National Socialists rise to power.

Practically overnight, both churches developed active participation in advancing the goals of the Nazis. The Lutheran press began to talk of the Jews as the "natural enemies" of Christianity. The Catholic Church even agreed to an oath of fealty to be taken by all bishops, agreeing "Before God and on the Holy Gospels I swear and promise as becomes a bishop ”loyalty to the German Reich and to the state ... and to cause the clergy of my diocese to honor it.

In accepting Hitler deal, the churches sold any role they held as Germany moral lightning rod.

At war end, the allied forces crafted a new constitution for Germany which guarantees religious freedom and separation of church and state. Yet, contrary to this, the financial arrangement remained in place." (The Church keeps it's"thirty pieces of silver" given to them by Hitler!)

Just so Dave CAN'T try to lay the blame on the Catholics, the German Protestants were front and center in "singing the Persecution rap". The major violence of the Kristallnacht (Crystal Night) was perpetrated on Luther's birthday:

From here

In Mein Kampf, Hitler listed Martin Luther as one of the greatest reformers. And similar to Luther in the 1500s, Hitler spoke against the Jews. The Nazi plan to create a German Reich Church laid its bases on the "Spirit of Dr. Martin Luther." The first physical violence against the Jews came on November 9-10 on Kristallnacht (Crystal Night) where the Nazis killed Jews, shattered glass windows, and destroyed hundreds of synagogues, just as Luther had proposed. In Daniel Johah Goldhagen's book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, he writes:

"One leading Protestant churchman, Bishop Martin Sasse published a compendium of Martin Luther's antisemitic vitriol shortly after Kristallnacht's orgy of anti-Jewish violence. In the foreword to the volume, he applauded the burning of the synagogues and the coincidence of the day: 'On November 10, 1938, on Luther's birthday, the synagogues are burning in Germany.' The German people, he urged, ought to heed these words 'of the greatest antisemite of his time, the warner of his people against the Jews.'"

Let's have a few pictures, too...



Watch these Nazis Swear to GOD, Dave (not Darwin!) (need QuickTime)






Photo source

For those who don't know who dear old Ludwig, the big cheese for the Nazi Protestants, was (from Wiki):

Ludwig Müller (June 23, 1883 in Gütersloh - July 31, 1945 in Berlin) was a German who headed the German Christians and later became leader of the Protestant Reich Church. He had been associated with Nazism since the 1920s. He supported a revisionist "Christ the Aryan" and purifying Christianity of what he deemed "Jewish corruption." His election to leader of the Reich Church angered many Protestant congregations who deemed his selection to be politically motivated and innately anti-Christian. Hitler's interest in the group had waned by 1937; so Müller tried to revive his support by allowing the Gestapo to monitor churches and the Christian youth groups to consolidate with the Hitler Youth. He remained committed to Nazism to the end as he committed suicide after the Nazi defeat.

The Great Scandal: Christianity's Role in the Rise of the Nazis

Christianity and Fascism

The truth is that the Vatican knew what Hitler was doing and willfully turned a blind eye. What do you think would have happened if Pope Pius XII had stood against Hitler and excommunicated him and ordered all Catholics to oppose him (an edict like this would have had a far greater effect then than it would now) instead? I don't think Hilter's regime could have survived an outraged Catholic majority. But instead, Pius just collaborated like all the rest and what is worse, did it first! Furthermore, I think one would also have seen the "bandwagon effect". Other world leaders would have probably been emboldened and/or energized to condemn Hitler as well.

He continues with the "sin of omission" by failing to mention the heroic efforts of the Danes in saving their Jewish population from destruction. The despicable collaboration of most Christain Europeans with Hitler stands in sharp contrast to the Danes. Christains like to say that Hitler was too powerful to resist, but the Danes, who could hardly be described as a "power" in any shape form or fashion, managed to hide or export to safety almost all of their Jews. Denmark was and is a nominally Protestant country, but it's society is largely secular...religion has never been able to sink its fangs into the laws there like it has in some of the other European nations. As a result, there was no "comfortable" legacy of anti-semitic indoctrination to prepare the people for collaboration. One has to wonder why Kevin fails to mention these folks (maybe they weren't his kind of "TRUE Christians™)

The example of the Danes shows that successful resistance to the Nazi's implimentation of the "Final Solution" was possible. Were there Christians in the rest of Europe that resisted Hitler? Yes. However, this resistance was miniscule and ineffectual, because the ugly truth is that most of Europe's Christians were ideological "soul-mates" of the Nazis when it came to anti-semitism and they cooperated with the Nazis at every turn. Those few who resisted were the bravest of the brave IMO because their actions (courage in the face of tremendous odds against them and the possibility of almost certain death!). received no support from their Christian "brothers"

Denmark and the Jews


Kevin et al like to portray all of Hitler's pro-Christain statements as mere propaganda, calculated to "smooze" the Christians into cooperation. This is not completely true in light of the above. One has to remember that all relationships are complicated. Hitler has a complicated relationship with his Christianity. This should not surprise anyone. Hitler was an megalomaniac who came to see himself as the equivalent of Christ. Someone with this kind of ego is bound to come in conflict with the "Church" (all branches of Christianity in this instance) for the simple reason that the religious institutions that comprise Christianity, were a far older, more established powerbase that wouldn't "suffer fools [like Hitler] gladly". Conflict between the two was inevitable [Hitler would regard them as "competitors" and they would regard him as a "pretender to the throne".

I am really indebted to author of this article for no other reason than it links to WWII OSS psychiatric report on Hilter by Walter Langer. This report predicts Hitler's suicide years before it happened and in my view is one of the first "profiles' of a serial killer. There is a revealing passage:

From a scientific point of view, therefore, we are forced to consider Hitler, the Fuehrer, not as a personal devil, wicked as his actions and philosophy may be, but as the expression of a state of mind existing in millions of people, not only in Germany but, to a smaller degree, in all civilized countries. To remove Hitler may be a necessary first step, but it would not be the cure. It would be analogous to curing an ulcer without treating the underlying disease. If similar eruptions are to be prevented in the future, we cannot content ourselves with simply removing the overt manifestations of the disease. On the contratry, we must ferret out and seek to correct the underlying factors which produced the unwelcome phenomenon. We must discover the psychological streams which nourish this destructtve state of mind in order that we may divert them into channels which will permit a further evolution of our form of civilization.

What I object to is this refusal of Christians to accept responsibility for the leading role of Christianity played in the creation of the climate that spawned Hitler and ultimately resulted in the Holocaust. IMO it was this centuries-old climate of hatred that was one of " the psychological streams which nourish this destructive state of mind" mentioned by Langer above.

Refusal to acknowledge the role Christianity played here will only ensure the strong possiblity of such a thing happening in the future in other words, "those who ignore the lessons history are doomed to repeat them" . Institutions "evolve", just as nature evolves and the real tragedy here is the refusal of Christians to "fess up" and "go and sin no more". I am not for a moment claiming that Hitler exemplifies Christianity and that ALL Christians are just little "Hilers". But there is something really frightening and implacable about someone with a "mandate" from an Invisible Being, who can't be "called on the carpet" to explain Himself or justify the mandate. I think Steven Weinberg summed up what I am trying to say here with this:

"I think that on the balance the moral influence of religion has been awful. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil. But for good people to do evil -- that takes religion" IMO, the Holocaust is a prime example of the last.