Evolution

[messenjah]

Hello,

Welcome to a debate about evolution vs. creation

I am a Creationist, I believe that God created the world in six 24 hour days. I believe that Jesus is the Son of God and he was sent to forgive us for our sins. Before I start this debate I want to state something, I do not believe that any side of the issue can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but I do believe that the evidence overwhelmingly points to Creation.

Now for my evidence. First of all, the only way that evolution could work is with a large amount of time. By showing that the earth could not be billions and billions of years old, I can then show that evolution does not really work. For example, if I found a watch 20 feet deep in coal, I would guess that the watch was 1000 years old. Unfortanetely, the watch is was made in 1995 therefore it could only have gotten in there seven years ago. Then again, the batteries are only 5 years old, so it could only have been dropped in there five years ago. This is an example. It only takes one fact to prove that the time wouldn't work.

1) The moon is receding a few inches each year. Billions of years ago the moon would have been so close that the tides would have been much higher, eroding away the continents.

2) Jupiter and Saturn are cooling off rather rapidly. They are losing heat twice as fast as they gain it from the sun. They cannot be billions of years old.

3) The erosion rate of the continents is such that they would erode to sea level in less than 14,000,000 years, destroying all old fossils.

4) The size of the Mississippi River delta, divided by the rate mud is being deposited, gives an age of less than 30,000 years. (The Flood in Noah’s day could have washed out 80% of the mud there in a few hours or days, so 4400 years is a reasonable age for the delta.)

5) The oceans are getting saltier. If they were billions of years old, they would be much saltier than they are now.

6) The current population of earth (5.5 billion souls) could easily be generated from eight people (survivors of the Flood) in less than 4000 years.

Now evolutionists can make up theories on their side, but the weight of the evidence is on my side and evolutionists have to either, a)disprove my facts, or b) find a theory that incorporates both my fact and their theory and use evidence to support it.

Give me your best shot.

 

[brt28006]

Originally posted by messenjah
Hello,

Welcome to a debate about evolution vs. creation

I am a Creationist, I believe that God created the world in six 24 hour days. I believe that Jesus is the Son of God and he was sent to forgive us for our sins. Before I start this debate I want to state something, I do not believe that any side of the issue can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but I do believe that the evidence overwhelmingly points to Creation.

Now for my evidence. First of all, the only way that evolution could work is with a large amount of time. By showing that the earth could not be billions and billions of years old, I can then show that evolution does not really work. For example, if I found a watch 20 feet deep in coal, I would guess that the watch was 1000 years old. Unfortanetely, the watch is was made in 1995 therefore it could only have gotten in there seven years ago. Then again, the batteries are only 5 years old, so it could only have been dropped in there five years ago. This is an example. It only takes one fact to prove that the time wouldn't work.

1) The moon is receding a few inches each year. Billions of years ago the moon would have been so close that the tides would have been much higher, eroding away the continents.

The moon is, in fact, receding at 3.8 CENTIMETERS (less than an inch and a half) per year. Now, the difference between and inch and a half and two inches per year makes a huge difference over a four billion year timescale. I say four billion for the sake of argument, but many scientists believe the moon to be around 3 billion years old, and possibly younger. Earth itself wasn't even formed by four billion years ago.

Let's do a calculation.
1.5 (inches) times 4 billion (years) = 6 billion inches
Six billion inches divided by 12 inches = 500 million feet
500,000,000 divided by 5,280 = 94696 miles.
Current distance to the moon is 384,400 kilometers.
I don't know kilometers to miles conversion.

Regardless, life on this planet would have been a bit different with the moon that close, but not so different that life, especially sea life, could not flourish. Remember, by evolutionist model, life on land did not begin until at least 450 million years ago, and as such, the moon would have been even further away.

2) Jupiter and Saturn are cooling off rather rapidly. They are losing heat twice as fast as they gain it from the sun. They cannot be billions of years old.

Jupiter creates its own heat, it is the only planet in our solar system to do so.
I don't know where you got your evidence that they are cooling down, but even if they were, so what?

3) The erosion rate of the continents is such that they would erode to sea level in less than 14,000,000 years, destroying all old fossils.

Probably less than .001 - .01 percent of all life has been fossilized.
Apart from that, a great deal of sediment that washes out to sea gets washed back in again. Ever sit on a beach down where the water is coming in? You'll feel the sand pulled out from around you, but then feel it get replaced as the next wave rolls in.

Also, volcanoes add quite a bit of new land each year. Look at Iceland and Hawaii.
Tectonic upheaval, which creates some mountains, also increases the ammount of land visible above the Earth's surface.

4) The size of the Mississippi River delta, divided by the rate mud is being deposited, gives an age of less than 30,000 years. (The Flood in Noah’s day could have washed out 80% of the mud there in a few hours or days, so 4400 years is a reasonable age for the delta.)

And... I don't believe anyone has ever said the Mississippi has been around since the beginning of time.
Since erosion would naturally increase the size of the River, the ammount of mud being deposited has been changing throughout its existence.

5) The oceans are getting saltier. If they were billions of years old, they would be much saltier than they are now.

Actually, the oceans are getting much less saline. With the vast reserves of fresh water in Antarctica being exposed, sea level is rising and the water is slowly but surely becoming less salty.

Antarctica might hold as much as 70% of the world's fresh water, to give you an idea of how much is available to decrease salinity of the Oceans. Scientists say a similar thing happened at the end of the last Ice Age (and every Ice Age prior to that.)

6) The current population of earth (5.5 billion souls) could easily be generated from eight people (survivors of the Flood) in less than 4000 years.

The Earth's population has DOUBLED in the last 50 years alone. I don't think anyone is doubting humanity's ability to infest.

Although a global flood would have annihilated all life as we know it (perhaps sparing deep sea thermal vent dwellers), and there is no freakin' way that Noah and the animals would have had fresh water to drink and food to eat afterwards in the enormous time it would have taken the waters to receed... but I guess we'll just ignore this. Creationists seem to, anyway.

They also ignore this:
The versions of the Bible I've looked at all say that Noah took 50,000 animals aboard the ark... so how can we be making a thousand species extinct each year nowadays and still have such incredible diversity? Speciation, baby.
Maybe just ALL the versions I've read have been wrong, I dunno.

Give me your best shot.

Oh, my best shot.
Whoops.

 

[TheBear]

Originally posted by messenjah
Hello,

Welcome to a debate about evolution vs. creation

I am a Creationist, I believe that God created the world in six 24 hour days. I believe that Jesus is the Son of God and he was sent to forgive us for our sins. Before I start this debate I want to state something, I do not believe that any side of the issue can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but I do believe that the evidence overwhelmingly points to Creation.

Now for my evidence. First of all, the only way that evolution could work is with a large amount of time. By showing that the earth could not be billions and billions of years old, I can then show that evolution does not really work. For example, if I found a watch 20 feet deep in coal, I would guess that the watch was 1000 years old. Unfortanetely, the watch is was made in 1995 therefore it could only have gotten in there seven years ago. Then again, the batteries are only 5 years old, so it could only have been dropped in there five years ago. This is an example. It only takes one fact to prove that the time wouldn't work.

1) The moon is receding a few inches each year. Billions of years ago the moon would have been so close that the tides would have been much higher, eroding away the continents.

2) Jupiter and Saturn are cooling off rather rapidly. They are losing heat twice as fast as they gain it from the sun. They cannot be billions of years old.

3) The erosion rate of the continents is such that they would erode to sea level in less than 14,000,000 years, destroying all old fossils.

4) The size of the Mississippi River delta, divided by the rate mud is being deposited, gives an age of less than 30,000 years. (The Flood in Noah’s day could have washed out 80% of the mud there in a few hours or days, so 4400 years is a reasonable age for the delta.)

5) The oceans are getting saltier. If they were billions of years old, they would be much saltier than they are now.

6) The current population of earth (5.5 billion souls) could easily be generated from eight people (survivors of the Flood) in less than 4000 years.

Now evolutionists can make up theories on their side, but the weight of the evidence is on my side and evolutionists have to either, a)disprove my facts, or b) find a theory that incorporates both my fact and their theory and use evidence to support it.

Give me your best shot.

Ahhh, yes. It's the old, and disproven 'Hovind Theory' of creationism.

Well, here is a nice link you may be interested in. It, and other researcher's work, dismantles the 'Hovind Theory', point by point.

Enjoy.

Young Earth?


John

 

[Ray K]

Originally posted by messenjah
Hello,

Welcome to a debate about evolution vs. creation

...

Give me your best shot.

This brainless, cut & paste mentality is why creationists are mocked by everyone else.

You should really try to study both sides of the issues. Young Earth creationism has more holes than swiss cheese. Check out the link that TheBear gave you and read it with an open mind.

 

[Starscream]

Ray K

This brainless, cut & paste mentality is why creationists are mocked by everyone else.

Yes, I couldn't agree with you more. Why do creationists even pretend to be scientific about this at all?

 

[OntheRock]

Because we beleive in the bible. There is no science for faith. With God, it is a faith issue. Evolution attacks the faith of God, in that it aims to proove that life evolved from a few elements and such. The bible teaches that God formed man out of dust and portrays it as an instantaneous event.

 

[elephanticity]

Originally posted by OntheRock
Because we beleive in the bible. There is no science for faith. With God, it is a faith issue. Evolution attacks the faith of God, in that it aims to proove that life evolved from a few elements and such. The bible teaches that God formed man out of dust and portrays it as an instantaneous event.

Evolution does not attack the faith. Many christians accept the theory. Nothing in the theory says 'There Is No God.' The closest you might come is that it is an explanation for existence that does not REQUIRE God. Of course, a number of scientific theories and disciplines do not Require God's intervention to explain physical science:
Geology, epidemeology, gravity, genetics, astrophysics, electrical engineering, mining engineering, psychology, psychiatry, biology, oncology, radiology, phrenology, linguistics....

 

[mac_philo]

This post is typical, confused, creationist claptrap. The big bang says the universe is billions of years old. Therefore saturn is billions of years old.

Wrong, sorry. That's about as asinine as saying that the United States is 225 years old, therefore the Saturn motor company is 225 years old.

In any case, aren't all of these evolution threads redundant? There are only so many ways to argue this nonsense.

 

[TheBear]

Originally posted by OntheRock
Because we beleive in the bible. There is no science for faith. With God, it is a faith issue. Evolution attacks the faith of God, in that it aims to proove that life evolved from a few elements and such. The bible teaches that God formed man out of dust and portrays it as an instantaneous event.

As a Christian, with extremely strong faith in God, I categorically disagree with the statement that evolution attacks my faith in God. Actually, the more complex and the more ordered the universe is observed, the more I am in awe of God.

Have you ever taken a close look at the 'out of dust' explaination? What does this mean? Surely, God could have formed man out of nothing. But He didn't. He used existing materials and elements. What does this mean? Why did He choose 'dust', and not air? How many dust particles did He use? What was the exact process and mechanism used? Exactly how long did this process take?

If you take the Biblical account at face value, that is the most evolutionary process ever recorded. A super macro-evolutionary change, from 'dust' to man.


John

 

[Starscream]

Bear

As a Christian, with extremely strong faith in God, I categorically disagree with the statement that evolution attacks my faith in God. Actually, the more complex and the more ordered the universe is observed, the more I am in awe of God.

On a forum such as this I hold comments like this in high regard.

Thanks for reminding us all that evolution is not a topic that seperates theist and atheist alike.

 

[messenjah]

I got a few Christians who believe that God created the world through evolution.

1) Where did sin come from?

2) When did Satan fall from Heaven?

3) God created the plants on the third day and the sun on the fourth day. Awful hard on those plants to wait for the sun for billions of years.

4) Evolution teaches us that we are animals. Why is it that High-School Biology teachers teach us that we are animals and then wonder why we act like it?

5) Do you truly believe that death was in the original plan of God?

6) When God looked at His Creation on the sixth DAY and said it was good, was Satan controlling the earth and was Adam standing on a bunch of dead things?

7) On the sixth DAY, God gave Adam dominion over the earth. Was Satan ruling then? If so you have a real problem there over who controlled the earth.

Think about THAT with an open mind.

 

[OntheRock]

quote
"an explanation for existence that does not REQUIRE God."

This is why christians will not go with evolution until the proof is without a doubt.

 

[Craigybabe]

I heard that "the creation" in Genesis was written in order to explain our origins in a simplified manner to the lay people of that time. If the scientists at that time didn't have much knowledge on the subject then the public certainly wouldn't have!

Again that 'magic 7' appeared in the chapter. 7 is a special number that was used all through out the bible because it has some sort of symbolic meaning, I think. Same goes for 40 days and forty nights (that COULD have just meant 'a long time').

I'm not trying to inflict this view upon anyone seeing as I don't particularly have a personal view myself. I'm just trying to be objective!

Anyway who cares HOW the Lord made the Earth? All that matters is that He made it in style!

My Love to you all

Craig

 

[Zadok]

1) The moon is receding a few inches each year. Billions of years ago the moon would have been so close that the tides would have been much higher, eroding away the continents.

Cut and pasted from the Matson vs. Hovind debate...

Young-earth "proof" #5: The Moon is receding a few inches each year.
Less than a million years ago the Moon would have been so close that the
tides would have drowned everyone twice a day. Less than 2 or 3 million
years ago the Moon would have been inside the Roche limit (and thus
destroyed).
(Dr. Hilpman v. Dr. Hovind, June 15, 1992; the Royal Hall of the
University of Missouri)

5. Once again, Dr. Hovind's figures just boggle the mind! Let us
assume, for the sake of argument, that the Moon is receding at 6 inches
per year. If we go back a million years, then the Moon was 6 million
inches closer to the earth. That comes to about 95 miles! Since the
Moon is about 240,000 miles away, that doesn't amount to diddly-squat!
Indeed, since the Moon doesn't orbit in a perfect circle it varies more
than that on its own.
A more accurate estimate, based on the present rate of lunar
recession, puts the Moon within the Roche limit around 1 or 2 billion
years ago. That is the argument most creationists use. (Since Dr.
Hovind's notes match the figures he quoted in his debate with Dr.
Hilpman, I assume that those figures are not a simple oversight.)
As I understand it, the tides act as a brake which slows down the
earth's rotation. The earth's lost energy can't simply disappear, and it
goes into speeding up the Moon. As it speeds up, the Moon moves to a
higher orbit. Thus, the energy of the Earth-Moon system is conserved.
The effectiveness of the tidal brake on the earth's rotation
strongly depends on the configuration of the oceans. Thus, we should
inquire as to whether the current arrangement is an average value or not.

The present rate of tidal dissipation is anomalously high because the
tidal force is close to a resonance in the response function of the
oceans; a more realistic calculation shows that dissipation must have
been much smaller in the past and that 4.5 billion years ago the moon was
well outside the Roche limit, at a distance of at least thirty-eight
earth radii (Hansen 1982; see also Finch 1982).
(Brush, 1983, p.78)

Thus, our moon was probably never closer than 151,000 miles. A
modern astronomy text gives an estimate of 250,000 kilometers (155,000
miles), which agrees very closely with Brush's figure (Chaisson and
McMillan, 1993, p.173). Thus, the "problem" disappears!
It may surprise you to learn that Darwin's son, George Darwin, a
respected scientist in his time, did some serious calculations along this
line. In the nineteenth century that was a reasonable scientific
conjecture. Today, in the light of what we know, it's an exercise in
futility. For more insight into the problem, see Dalrymple (1991, pp.51-
52).

 

[Zadok]

2) Jupiter and Saturn are cooling off rather rapidly. They are losing heat twice as fast as they gain it from the sun. They cannot be billions of years old.

Rebuttle from the same Matson vs. Hovind debate. This is some of the best debate material EVER!!

Young-earth "proof" #10: Jupiter and Saturn are cooling off rather
rapidly. Since they still give off internal heat, they cannot be
billions of years old.

10. Jupiter is not cooling off that rapidly! Based on the fact
that Jupiter is radiating twice as much energy as it receives from the
Sun, and given its mass and other data, we can calculate the heat loss.
"A simple calculation indicates that the average temperature of the
interior of Jupiter falls by only about a millionth of a kelvin per
year." (Chaisson and McMillan, 1993, p.269). (A drop of one kelvin is
equal to a drop of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit.) In short, Jupiter is big
enough that it could still be radiating heat trapped during its formation
4.5 billion years ago. Thus, there's no problem there.
Saturn, which radiates almost three times more energy than it
receives from the Sun, is a more complicated case as it is not massive
enough to retain its primeval heat of formation 4.5 billion years ago.

The explanation for this strange state of affairs, first suggested
by Ed Salpeter of Cornell and David Stevenson of Caltech, also explains
the mystery of Saturn's apparent helium deficit, all in one neat package.
At the temperatures and high pressures found in Jupiter's interior,
liquid helium dissolves in liquid hydrogen. In Saturn, where the internal
temperature is lower, the helium doesn't dissolve so easily, and tends to
form droplets instead. The phenomenon is familiar to cooks who know that
it is generally much easier to dissolve ingredients in hot liquids than
in cold ones. Saturn probably started out with a fairly uniform mix of
hydrogen and helium, but the helium tended to condense out of the
surrounding hydrogen, much as water vapor condenses out of Earth's
atmosphere to form a mist. The amount of helium condensation was greatest
in the planet's cool outer layers, where the mist turned to rain about 2
billion years ago. A light shower of liquid helium has been falling
through Saturn's interior ever since. This helium precipitation is
responsible for depleting the outer layers of their helium content.
...As the helium sinks toward the center, the planet's gravitational
field compresses it and heats it up. [Saturn is a "gas giant," a planet
without a surface. As the helium in the outer layers "rained" down into
the lower levels it was squeezed into a smaller space due to gravity,
which caused the helium atoms to bump into each other more often. That
is, the helium heated up according to Boyle's law.]
(Chaisson and McMillan, 1993, p.288)

You may object that the above is just a "theory," but this
hypothesis comes with realistic, detailed mathematical and physical
explanations -- something almost unheard of in creationist literature.
We now have a plausible explanation for Saturn's heat output. Therefore,
Saturn presents no problem with respect to the above creationist
argument.

 

[Zadok]

4) The size of the Mississippi River delta, divided by the rate mud is being deposited, gives an age of less than 30,000 years. (The Flood in Noah’s day could have washed out 80% of the mud there in a few hours or days, so 4400 years is a reasonable age for the delta.)

Ye haw, more cut and paste!!

Young-earth "proof" #19: The size of the Mississippi River delta divided
by the sediment accumulation rate gives an age of less than 30,000 years.

19. Since when does the age of the earth have anything to do with
the Mississippi delta? If the Mississippi delta is, in fact, 30,000
years old, what of it?
Because of oil exploration, geologists know that the sediment in
regions around the Mississippi River delta is 7 miles thick! (Hayward,
1985, p.83). Did you ever wonder how Noah's flood, which was quite
shallow according to Dr. Hovind, perhaps less than a quarter of a mile
deep, managed to stack up 7 miles of sediment?

It is stretching the long arm of coincidence much too far, to suggest
that there just happened to be a vast hole in the ocean bed seven miles
deep near the mouth of the Mississippi, and that the Flood just happened
to fill that hole with sediment, while leaving nearby areas of the
Atlantic unfilled; and that similar coincidences just happened to occur
around the mouths of all the world's great rivers.
(Hayward, 1985, p.84)

It sounds like miracle-time for scientific creationists, but wait!
Dr. Hovind will probably assure you that, when the waters were draining
off the continents at the end of the flood, all that sediment was whisked
down the Mississippi River and deposited in mere hours or days.
Unfortunately, there's a fatal bug in that scenario.
It takes time for the earth to sink under a load of sediment.
Suppose you went down to the Gulf of Mexico one fine day, say just off
the Texas coast, and dumped a pile of sediment there 7 miles high! I
haven't the foggiest idea how long that mountain of sediment would sit
there before sinking down to sea level, but I can assure you that it
would not happen in hours or even days. That heap would probably still
be there after thousands of years.
A super-charged Mississippi River isn't even going to build
mountains to begin with. The onrushing sediment-loaded water would just
be pushed further into the gulf. You would get a "delta" vastly more
spread out than the one we have -- and nowhere near 7 miles thick. Think
about it.

 

[Zadok]

5) The oceans are getting saltier. If they were billions of years old, they would be much saltier than they are now.

I have a rebuttle for EVERYTHING!!!

Young-earth "proof" #24: Given the rate of salt influx to the oceans,
they should be much saltier than they are if the earth were billions of
years old.

24. Wrong! Dr. Hovind is assuming that salt cannot be removed
from the oceans. The more sophisticated creationists, such as Melvin
Cook, know better than to use such an argument. Here's what Cook had to
say:

The validity of the application of total salt in the ocean in the
determination of age turned out to have a very simple answer in the fact
shown by Goldschmidt (1954) that it is in steady state and therefore
useless as a means of determining the age of the oceans. [Cook, 1966,
p.73]
(Dalrymple, 1984, pp.115-116)

 

[Zadok]

6) The current population of earth (5.5 billion souls) could easily be generated from eight people (survivors of the Flood) in less than 4000 years.

EVEN MORE REBUTTLES!!!!

Young-earth "proof" #25: The current population of Earth (5.5 billion)
could easily be generated from 8 people in less than 4000 years. If the
earth were really billions of years old, the human population would have
gone through the roof!

25. Yes, and by the same reasoning 8 germs could populate every
cubic inch of available living space on Earth with 1 million germs in
less than a week! That is, after 158 generations, assuming a generous
die-off rate such that the fourth generation has about 40 germs instead
of 128, and assuming that the population divides every hour, each and
every cubic inch of living space on the earth, from 100 feet below ground
to a mile above, would have 1 million germs by that time. I guess, by
creationist reckoning, the earth must be a week old! If it were a few
thousand years old, the germ population would have gone through the roof!
Yes, given unlimited living space, a good deal of luck in the
early stages, protection from mass destruction by disease or other
disasters, and a high motivation of purpose throughout, eight people
could probably populate the earth in a few thousand years. Eight germs
could do it in less than a week. Eight bunny rabbits would fall
somewhere in between. Eight cats would give us yet another figure. What
do any of these figures have to do with the age of the earth? Nothing!
What do these figures have to do with actual growth rates? Asolutely
nothing!
The human exponential growth rate of the last few hundred years is
possible only because of technology. When our ability to stay one jump
ahead of starvation and disease fails, when our resources give out, then
you'll see a dramatic change in that growth rate! It will no longer be
exponential. It will be disasterous!
When man lived in scattered tribal groups, which is what he did
for 99% of his history, the net human population growth was zero most of
the time, just as it is for animals today. Animal populations may
undergo cycles of boom and bust, especially small animals such as rabbits
or mice, but their net growth is zero. No permanent increase in
population can be sustained unless it is reflected by a permanent change
in the environment. Such a change might include the loss of a predator
due to the colonization of new territory, a permanent increase in the
food supply due to climatic change or a change in dietary habits, or a
variety of other factors. In the case of man, the development of
agriculture and the use of fossil fuels have played major roles. After a
favorable change in the environment, a population of animals (or people)
may record a permanent jump before leveling off at a zero net growth
again. Thus, the growth rate, before technology intervened in a major
way, necessarily involved a series of plateaus where the population was
in approximate equilibrium with the environment. Indeed, many tribal
groups probably died out. There was no assurance that early man would
even survive. Jumps between plateau levels would likely have been
exponential. Indeed, the exponential growth rate of the last 300 years
or so can be thought of as one long jump to a new plateau which has been
raised artificially high by technology.
Those who imagine that eight people gave rise to all living today
according to a simple exponential growth curve have demonstrated an
inability to think things through. Let's look at the equation involved
in these growth rate calculations.

P(n) = P(1 + r)n

P(n) is the population generated after n years. (With the proper
adjustment of r, n could be months or generations, etc. For our
purposes, years will do nicely and r will be adjusted accordingly.) P
is the initial population which, in our case, is eight. The growth rate
is r which would be close to zero for humanity per year. A negative
value would indicate a population decline. Henry Morris used a value for
r of 0.0033 [0.33%] in a similar calculation which started with Adam and
Eve. However, since the flood supposedly reduced the population to eight
people 1656 years after creation, a figure Dr. Hovind gives based on
patriarchal ages, we should start our exponential curve at the latter
date. If we assume, for the sake of this argument, that the earth is
6000 years old, then we start our calculation with 8 people 4344 years
ago. We must wind up with the present population of 5.5 billion people,
the figure given by Dr. Hovind.
It turns out that if r = 0.0047 then after 4344 years we would
wind up with about 5.6 billion people, which is close enough. After
substituting the values for P and r into the above equation we are at
liberty to try out different values for n to obtain the population at
different times. At the time the Israelites entered Canaan, we get a
world population of 2024! By the time you divide that up between Egypt,
Canaan, the rest of the world, and Israel, that leaves maybe 6 or 7
people for the Israeli army! If we go back to the time that the Hykos
were expelled from Egypt, in 1560 BC, we get a world population of 325
people!
We can't calculate the population at the time the Great Pyramid of
Cheops was built, around 2500 BC, because it was supposedly washed away
by Noah's flood!! Being an antediluvian structure, many people might
have been available to work on it. Odd, that the Great Pyramid of Cheops
shows no water marks. Stranger still, that the Egyptians should be
unaware of Noah's flood! I would think that Noah's flood, coming a mere
century or thereabouts after the Great Pyramid of Cheops was built, would
have found a prominent place in the Egyptian annuals.
As you can see, an exponential growth curve leads to absurdity
when we assume that 8 people generated today's population. Creationists,
of course, could jack the r value way up at the start, jack it way down
in the middle, and jack it up again for modern times, but the ad hoc
nature of such an argument becomes a little too obvious. Regarding the
foolishness of this whole enterprise, Dr. Alan Hayward had this to say:

Nobody who has ever studied the population explosion would make such an
unwise extrapolation. It is well known that growth rates have increased
enormously in recent centuries. Population expert Paul Ehrlich gives
world average yearly growth rates of 0.9 per cent between 1850 and 1930,
0.3 per cent between 1650 and 1850, and a mere 0.07 per cent in the
thousand years prior to 1650. And in the fourteenth century the
population increase must have been very small indeed, and it may even
have been turned into a big decrease, because of the Black Death.
Ehrlich's figures are not just guesses; they are based on historical
records. These facts show how misguided it is to extrapolate present
population trends into the remote past.
(Hayward, 1985, p.136)

The Times Atlas of World History (1978) estimated that the world
population increased 16 times between 8000 BC and 4000 BC. That yields a
growth rate (r = 0.069%) which is almost identical to the figure quoted
above by Hayward for ancient times.
Try plugging in some real data! It does make a difference. If we
assume a growth rate of 0.07% before 1650 (a rate already a bit high
because of agriculture), a growth rate of 0.3% between 1650 and 1850, a
growth rate of 0.9% between 1850 and 1930, and a growth rate of 2.0%
between 1930 and 1994 you will find that Noah and his crew are the
ancestors of a whopping 1740 people today!

 

[Zadok]

3) The erosion rate of the continents is such that they would erode to sea level in less than 14,000,000 years, destroying all old fossils.

REBUTTLES FOR ALL AND ALL FOR REBUTTLES!!!

Young-earth "proof" #15: Continents are eroding at a rate which would
bring them to sea level in less than 14 million years. Inasmuch as the
continents are anything but flat, the earth cannot be billions of years
old. (27.5 x 109 tons sediment/year are lost to the oceans by erosion;
the present mass of the continents above sea level is 383 x 1015 tons.)

15. This argument by creationist Stuart E. Nevins, which appeared
in the ICR Impact series (No.8) in 1973, simply ignores the impact of
modern geology! Nevins overlooks the fact that the continents are
dynamic and have grown appreciably over time, both by accretion of
material at the margins and by addition of material from the mantle below
(Dalrymple, 1984, p.114). Volcanic activity, the emplacement of gigantic
masses of rising, molten rock, and the stupendous compressional forces of
the earth's colliding plates have been building mountains off and on for
billions of years. Mountain building is going on even now in many parts
of the world.
We could also mention that the current rates of erosion are
particularly high and that isostatic rebound would greatly increase the
time for a continent to erode flat, but that's just icing on the cake.
Any argument which pretends that continents are inert lumps of rock
subject only to erosion is out of touch with reality. We need not
consider it further.
Davis A. Young (1988, pp.128-131) treats Nevins' argument in more
detail. Another point made by Nevins is that sediment is piling up on
the ocean floor faster than it's being removed. Even if that's true,
there is no reason to view it as being anything more than a temporary
imbalance.

...it is generally regarded by geologists that the rates of erosion at
present are relatively high because of the topography of the continents.
The continental land masses are believed to be much more rugged and
mountainous than is usually the case, and mountainous topography speeds
up rates of erosion. Thus at the present time we ought fully to expect
that more sediment is being added to the oceans than is being removed.
Paleogeography indicates that very often in the past the opposite was the
case.
(Young, 1988, p.131)

 

[Zadok]

Give me your best shot.

BANG!! Your dead...