Is the Global Flood Feasible? Discussion Q&A

Perhaps someone can tell us what the ICC is. It sounds suspicious to me.
--suspicious? hehe, the ICC is the International conference on creationism.------------------

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2001/0321acc_beta_decay.asp
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http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/magazines/tj/v14n1_radioact.asp--Sorry if I can't make some key quotes, I would but I am going to hit the hay, gotta get up early next morning. As of getting in depth in all of these porportions in geo-physics it makes me want to be a geophysicist! This actaually sounds acomidating towards my main interest along with cosmology, hey why not a Ph.D in both? "You need to go to some of these websites and look at the reference lists. [/QUOTE]"
..And? Whats the website, did you forget to include it?------------------

TC: Just for reference, Mark24's calculation of 400C (750F) exceeds the melting point of lead. This temperature, required by Baumgardner's theory that you're so enamored of, would quite effectively sterilize the planet. Unless you assume either a) goddidit, which you continually assert is "un-scientific" or b) Noah's ark was a spaceship that allowed him to escape from the planet into space, for which there is even less evidence than the biblical version (although it might make a good sci-fi story), there's no way this amount of heat could leave ANY survivors, including Noah - or even bacteria.In short, you either have to admit to supernatural presupposition, or reject the entire theory. (I think you're better off arguing with wmscott's dating, and going with his ice age surge/isostatic rebound - there's at least some minor, very questionable physical evidence he's managed to come up with. Which is a heck of a lot more than Baumgardner's got. At least wmscott doesn't need to boil the planet down to bedrock).

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Originally posted by TrueCreation:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2001/0321acc_beta_decay.asp
-And
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/magazines/tj/v14n1_radioact.asp

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--Sorry if I can't make some key quotes, I would but I am going to hit the hay, gotta get up early next morning. As of getting in depth in all of these porportions in geo-physics it makes me want to be a geophysicist! This actaually sounds acomidating towards my main interest along with cosmology, hey why not a Ph.D in both?

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Okay, the next time I do a K-Ar date I'll be verrry careful plucking those biotite grains out of the plasma. How long do you think these conditions have existed in the earth's crust?And let's see... 1.5% error takes us from 5 Ga to 4.9 Ga. Okay, I can live with that. Now let's look at some of the errors using creationist clocks...

"TC: Just for reference, Mark24's calculation of 400C (750F) exceeds the melting point of lead. This temperature, required by Baumgardner's theory that you're so enamored of, would quite effectively sterilize the planet. Unless you assume either a) goddidit, which you continually assert is "un-scientific" or b) Noah's ark was a spaceship that allowed him to escape from the planet into space, for which there is even less evidence than the biblical version (although it might make a good sci-fi story), there's no way this amount of heat could leave ANY survivors, including Noah - or even bacteria.
In short, you either have to admit to supernatural presupposition, or reject the entire theory. (I think you're better off arguing with wmscott's dating, and going with his ice age surge/isostatic rebound - there's at least some minor, very questionable physical evidence he's managed to come up with. Which is a heck of a lot more than Baumgardner's got. At least wmscott doesn't need to boil the planet down to bedrock). "
--I don't think we have the this problem, as the activity that would cause this would not have been up to your calculations, also, I would rather get the source of those quotes, in which in the source he obviously talks somewhat about his theory, I am questioning the initial conditions to start off the whole thing is my problem currently.------------------

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Originally posted by TrueCreation:
"Grass, a flowering plant appears in the fossil record. Given grass floats to the bottom quite fast (your words), it should appear much sooner. It’s decay is irrelevant, it is COMMON in the record."
--As is evident by fossil pollen in pre-cambrian/cambrian strata as I was unaware of earlier, flowering plants must have existed to produce this pollen.

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This goes back a way, but at last I have found a recent reference to this material. http://www.asa3.org/archive/asa/199709/0101.htmlThis is from Glenn Morton, who states:"Like it or not, there is serious question, even among anti-evolutionists, about the validity of this report."He shows that the first people to have problems with the Burdick discovery were other creationists. The whole point is that noone has been able to duplicate Burdick's work and his story has so many holes in it that it probably contains its own pollen deposits. If you want to discuss any details of Morton's analysis, I'd be glad to do so.As an aside, it was interesting to find that the creationist websites on this subject had no links to the evolutionist critiques of Burdick, whereas Morton does link to at least one of the creationist rebuttals.

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Originally posted by TrueCreation:
"TC: Just for reference, Mark24's calculation of 400C (750F) exceeds the melting point of lead. This temperature, required by Baumgardner's theory that you're so enamored of, would quite effectively sterilize the planet. Unless you assume either a) goddidit, which you continually assert is "un-scientific" or b) Noah's ark was a spaceship that allowed him to escape from the planet into space, for which there is even less evidence than the biblical version (although it might make a good sci-fi story), there's no way this amount of heat could leave ANY survivors, including Noah - or even bacteria.

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In short, you either have to admit to supernatural presupposition, or reject the entire theory. (I think you're better off arguing with wmscott's dating, and going with his ice age surge/isostatic rebound - there's at least some minor, very questionable physical evidence he's managed to come up with. Which is a heck of a lot more than Baumgardner's got. At least wmscott doesn't need to boil the planet down to bedrock). "

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--I don't think we have the this problem, as the activity that would cause this would not have been up to your calculations, also, I would rather get the source of those quotes, in which in the source he obviously talks somewhat about his theory, I am questioning the initial conditions to start off the whole thing is my problem currently.

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I gave every stage of the calculation, even the bit on the site where you enter figures, has a section that tells you how it was derived.Argue with the maths. This is the minimum temperature required to boil off up to 1km of water from the oceans.

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Originally posted by TrueCreation:

Indeed I do believe a significant fraction of the volume of the oceans was boiled away during the catastrophe.

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So, I just pulled out 1km as a significant fraction. What’s wrong?
In order to boil off this depth of water the activity would HAVE to be up to this calculation.This is just to show the temperature required to evaporate such an amount of water, it has nothing to do with the relationship of Kelvin to 10^28 joules released.Please explain, therefore how a "significant fraction" of the earths ocean was boiled off without achieving such temperatures.Baumgardner knew the problem existed, why don't you believe him?Mark------------------
Occam's razor is not for shaving with.

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Originally posted by TrueCreation:
--I don't think we have the this problem, as the activity that would cause this would not have been up to your calculations, also, I would rather get the source of those quotes, in which in the source he obviously talks somewhat about his theory, I am questioning the initial conditions to start off the whole thing is my problem currently.

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Here is another calculation that I found in my archives. I think it's by Tim Thompson, but the author line got lost. My apologies to the author if it is not Tim. At any rate, the calculation is compelling."According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, there are about 3.9x1021 g of Nitrogen and 1.2 x 10 21 g of oxygen in the air, with the other gases being very minor. The heat capacity at constant pressure of either N2 or O2 is about 30 J/degree-C-mole or about 1 J/C-g (A mole of O2 weighs 32 g, N2, 28g). That is, it takes about 1 J to heat a gram of air by 1 degree Celsius at constant pressure(it takes even less at constant volume). For the steam from the boiling oceans to condense to form rain it must release its latent heat of vaporization, 2225 J/g. This means that the condensation of 1 gram of steam to water releases enough heat to raise the temperature of 22.5 grams of air by 100 C. To fall as ‘cool’ rain it must release about another 4.2 J/degree C for each degree it cools. It takes only 5.1x1023 J to heat the whole atmosphere to 100 C. Again according to Britannica, there are about 1.4 billion cubic kilometers (1.4 x 1024 g) of water in the ocean. This means that boiling the entire ocean would release about 6,000 times the amount of heat required to raise the average temperature of the entire atmosphere to 100 degrees Celsius, .... Boiling any truly significant fraction of the ocean will necessarily lead to air pressures well above 1 atmosphere, since atmospheric pressure is hydrostatic and the weight of the steam will be much more than the weight of the air. Temperatures well reach well above 100 C, because the boiling point of water will raise as the air pressure increases.

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"Yes, some heat will be absorbed on the surface of the earth as water condenses. In that case the water will give up its heat of vaporization to what ever it condenses on and it will still be at 100 C until it gives up more heat. If the ‘significant fraction’ of the ocean that boils is about 10% you will still have 600 times more heat than you need to heat the whole atmosphere to 100C. You will not have cool rain, you will have boiling hot rain and boiling hot water condensing on everything. If 10% of the 1.4 billion cubic kilometer of water in the ocean boils and you condense only 10% of that on the earth’s land mass of about 150 million square kilometers you still have enough boiling hot water to make a layer 90 meters deep. How is anything going to survive that? You can’t condense it on the ocean. According to Baumgardner the ocean is already boiling."

When is someone going to give me a resource to the quotes from Baumgardner, I can't answer many of your posts without them. I am sure that from such bold assertions of these quotes, they are sure to exist.------------------

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Originally posted by TrueCreation:
When is someone going to give me a resource to the quotes from Baumgardner, I can't answer many of your posts without them. I am sure that from such bold assertions of these quotes, they are sure to exist.

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This one? "The main difficulty of this theory is that it admittedly doesn't work without miracles" [Baumgardner, 1990a, 1990b].You have been given the source, it's your job to locate it, if you wish to question it.And you don't need Baumgardners source to check maths, regarding my message 223, & edges 234. It was you who didn't have a problem boiling off a significant percentage of the worlds oceans.Mark------------------
Occam's razor is not for shaving with.

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[This message has been edited by mark24, 01-30-2002]

"This one? "The main difficulty of this theory is that it admittedly doesn't work without miracles" [Baumgardner, 1990a, 1990b]."
--No not for that one, that one seems to have already been refuted, I am looking for these quotes from post 222:Baumgardner concludes that "an enhanced rate of nuclear decay during the [Flood] event and a loss of thermal energy afterward" "cannot be understood or modeled in terms of time-invariant laws of nature". He believes that "intervention by God in the natural order during and after the catastrophe appears to be a logical necessity."------------------

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Originally posted by TrueCreation:
"This one? "The main difficulty of this theory is that it admittedly doesn't work without miracles" [Baumgardner, 1990a, 1990b]."
--No not for that one, that one seems to have already been refuted, I am looking for these quotes from post 222:

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This hasn't been refuted. HE SAID IT & YOU HAVE THE REFERENCE TO THE DOCUMENT HE SAID IT IN!!!!!Baumgardner & the rest of us agree, why don't you? What specifically do you think has been refuted?

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Originally posted by TrueCreation:

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Baumgardner concludes that "an enhanced rate of nuclear decay during the [Flood] event and a loss of thermal energy afterward" "cannot be understood or modeled in terms of time-invariant laws of nature". He believes that "intervention by God in the natural order during and after the catastrophe appears to be a logical necessity."

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It is the author's conclusion that this cannot happen within the framework of time-invariant physics" (Baumgardner 1994)."That no air-breathing life could survive such a catastrophe and that most marine life also perished is readily believable" (Baumgardner 1994).Mark------------------
Occam's razor is not for shaving with.

Howdy folks!I wish I had more time to spend here, as there are some claims being made that are so-ripe for refutation. Re: BaumgardnerActually that quote, "admittedly does not work without miracles," is not directly from Baumgardner, but accurately summarizes his position as expounded in:Baumgardner, John R., 1990a. Changes accompanying Noah's Flood. Proceedings of the second international conference on creationism, vol. II, pp. 35-45.Baumgardner, John R., 1990b. The imparative of non-stationary natural law in relation to Noah's Flood. Creation Research Society Quarterly 27(3): 98-100.Many observations "point to the need to remove large amounts of heat from extensive bodies of rock in the earth in order to account for the geological change proposed for the Flood. It is the author's conclusion that this cannot happen within the framework of time-invariant physics" (1986, p. 21). I can't find the source for that one either, but I remeber reading this in one of his articles.Here's an interesting quote from a guy named Hill Roberts that I saved from a message board long ago. Roberts is an old-earth creationist. He explains the major problem with the model quite well:"The Terra model will only produce results of rapid crustal motion if one inserts completely non-physical constants into the simulation. For example he uses properties of rock in terms of specific heat, thermal conduction, thermal gradients, tensile strength, shear strength, compressive failure, dynamic loading and mass density profiles that have NO relation to the actual values for these properties of basalt and granite (the two basic types of crustal rock). Some of the values he uses for these constants of nature differ by more than an order of magnitude from reality. When he uses values for these properties of nature that are correct for such materials, his model produces exactly the type of slow motion for the continents consistent with the rest of geological data. Furthermore, his own model shows that if the continents were to move at such rates, the surface destruction would be so great and so prolonged that the earth would STILL be uninhabitable for all the massive earthquakes which would STILL be happening if runaway subduction happened only a few thousand years back. So which part of the model's results do you want to keep for your presuppositions."

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"As it happens, computer simulation and finite element modeling is something I do myself in my professional work. Anyone who works with such tools knows that a computer model can be made to produce any result at all simply by changing the model and/or using inputs that produce the desired results. For example, in a model of a satellite flying around the earth, I can easily produce a model that indicates such a satellite can orbit the earth at only ten kilometers altitude. All I have to do is give the atmospheric portion of standard, high-fidelity models constants for the density of air that are off by a factor of 10. But surely everyone understands that satellites cannot orbit at ten kilometers altitude just because a computer model with bad data says so, even if its a really good community-standard computer model that produces high-precision results for orbital mechanics when used with correct data. Computer models can be great. But it is never fair to input a lighter-than-air pig into one and then claim pigs really can fly"Be Well!Patrick

Regarding Burdick's precambrian pollen, this is unfortunately not-so-atypical of YEC research. The whole thing was amply refuted by another YEC, Arthur Chadwick, 20 years ago. I emailed Chadwick a few months ago asking him what he thought about the fact the claim is still being floated around, and he said that it was "as refuted as anything can be in science," or something very close to that, and that he and Kurt Wise were planning on writing another article on the matter. The following is from something I wrote:

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In a 1966 CRS article, creationist C. L. Burdick claimed to have found modern pollen in the Hakatai Shale (Microflora of the Grand Canyon. Creation Research Society 1966 Annual 3(1):38-50). This finding was lauded by creationists as definitive "disproof" of plant evolution, and even today is presented as such on numerous creation "science" web sites.

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Unfortunately for Burdick and others who have promoted this claim, the supposed precambrian pollen is apparently nothing more than surface contamination. In 1980, another creationist, Arthur Chadwick of Loma Linda University, published an article in the journal Origins summarizing the results of his attempts to confirm Burdick's claims. Precambrian Pollen in the Grand Canyon - A Reexamination. Origins 8(1):7-12 (1981). He concluded:

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"A total of fifty samples from the same strata which Burdick had studied were processed. All slides were completely scanned. No single example of an authentic pollen grain was obtained from any of these samples. In fact, the slides produced from the Hakatai Formation were in most cases completely free from any material of biologic origin, modern or fossil."

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But what of Burdick's supposed precambrian pollen? Where did it come from? As Chadwick points out, the samples were taken from a surficially exposed portion of the Hakatai, and this immediately suggests contamination of modern pollen in Burdick's samples. This suggestion was amply confirmed by Chadwick, who notes:

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"No rigorous attempt was apparently made by Burdick to evaluate personally the modern pollen rain in the Grand Canyon. A single sample of soil from near one of the collecting sites could have completely satisfied Burdick as to the source of most of the grains he has reported. A typical analysis of a site near where Burdick collected his Hakatai samples yielded the following profile: bisaccate pollen (conifers) 30%; juniper 12%; ephedra 16%; various species of angiosperms (42%) (Sigels 1971). Although the poor quality of the photographs in the plates of Burdick's first paper makes definite assignments impossible, one can approximate the composition of the flora he reports. Of the grains identifiable as pollen or spores in the two papers by Burdick (n=18), 7 or 37% are bisaccates, 2 or 11% are possibly juniper. Ephedra pollen constitute 11% and angiosperms and unassignable grains 34%. Thus even with this small sample size, Burdick's grains approximate the modern pollen rain found in surface samples in the area of the Grand Canyon where he collected his samples"

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In fact, there are objective criteria for distinguishing between original pollen and pollen contaminates. These have not been adequately adressed. For instance, ancient pollen should be darkly colored, not clear or yellowish like fresh pollen. A bigger problem is that the Hakatai was "baked" by the intrusion of igneous sills after deposition of the shale. Thus the pollen, if it was originally present, would have been baked also, probably baked into unrecognizability. Chadwick again:

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"The preservation of the grains which Burdick figures in his first paper is difficult to estimate because of the poor quality of the photos. In the second paper the grains appear nearly fresh. The complete absence of organic material other than the pollen and spores cited by Burdick makes comparisons difficult, but many analyses from other Precambrian rocks where organic remains are thought to occur reveal little more than carbon films. Considering the deep burial, lithification, and oxidized condition of the Hakatai shales, the state of preservation of these grains suggests that they were not a part of these sediments during their diagenesis. Incidentally, the red color of the grains, cited by Burdick as an indication of their antiquity, if not due to laboratory staining procedures commonly employed, is in any case not necessarily an indication of antiquity since the ferruginous stain in the rocks can be readily acquired (as any Grand Canyon hiker will testify)."

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Which is the more likely scenario: a) the surface exposure of the Hakatai Shale in the Grand Canyon contains original pollen grains which just happen to match the pollen spectrum of the Grand Canyon area, while the overlying 10,000 ft of sediments contain no evidence at all of any metazoan life of any kind and the first indisputed pollen grains occur much higher still, or b) the supposed precambrian pollen grains are simply surficial contaminants which entered the exposed shale very recently, after the Hakatai bed was exposed to the air by erosion? Chadwick notes that "More difficulties are created than are solved by Burdick's report since it would require the explanation of the accumulation of all the Upper Precambrian sediments (10,000 ft.), their lithification and subsequent erosion before the first additional fossil forms were buried. Add to this picture the many thousands of macerations of lower Paleozoic and Precambrian rocks which have been carried out in scores of palynology laboratories around the world which have not supported Burdick's claims. There is a general absence of evidence for flowering plants below the middle Cretaceous. It is a responsibility and challenge to creationists to develop a model of earth history which explains this absence."

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[This message has been edited by ps418, 01-30-2002]

(Baumgardner 1994) This is as vague as saying (TrueCreation 2002) where is the source? I am awaiting it so that I can continue the conversation, as it makes alot of relevance on his explination of this.------------------