YEC dilemmas

[Mallon]

I often come across major inconsistencies or self-contradictions in YEC "science"/theology, and I kick myself for not writing them down when I first see them. I think quite a list could be compiled. There's the YEC adoption of catastrophic plate tectonism that takes 20 million years to kick-start, for example. Or any of the questions listed in my signature. Major issues like these often go unanswered by YECs, and I'm hoping we can compile a list of them here.
Talk Reason did something similar for the ID movement:
http://www.talkreason.org/articles/hunch.cfm

I'll get the ball rolling:

• Why do some YECs support catastrophic plate tectonism when it supposedly takes 20 million years to initiate?
• If uniformitarianism is bunk, then how can we be sure that the Genesis creation days were 24 hours long?
• If God created the world with the appearance of age and history, then how can we be sure that dinosaur fossils are the remains of once-living animals?
• If evolutionary theory is wrong, then why did God give man goosebumps?
• Is it not circular reasoning to suggest that all evidence supports a literal reading of the Scriptures if we first presume that it must?
• If you feel "the Bible says it, that settles it," then why attempt to defend YECism using science at all?
• How were fossil termite mounds, which take many years to make, built during the Flood?

I have yet to find direct answers to questions like these. Feel free to add some of your own.

 

[Mallon]

• How do YECs account for the organization of life in nested hierarchies?

 

[gluadys]

On a more theological note:

If we can't trust God's creation, how can we trust God's scriptures?

Or Galileo's question

Why would God give us sense and reason if they are not to be used?

 

[Xaero]

• why are creationists neglecting morphological changes during evolution, but believe in hyperevolution shortly beginning after the flood to result in - for example - marsupial animals?

• 
  why do they think that things came into existence out of nothing everytime god says he "created", but they deny the ex nihilo creation of blacksmith and the waster? (Isa 54:16)

 

[shernren]

On the philosophical side, I have always found the creationist schism in science to be strange and disturbing. What makes it ok to interpret Scripture with heliocentrism, but not with evolution?

 

[Mallon]

How much time must elapse for our observations to become non-scientific?

 

[Willtor]

How much time must elapse for our observations to become non-scientific?

I'm guessing you're discussing the problem of the time it takes for light to reach our eyes from whatever we're observing? If not, I'd suggest that dilemma: what is the difference between observing stars and observing the Bible?

 

[Melethiel]

I'm guessing you're discussing the problem of the time it takes for light to reach our eyes from whatever we're observing? If not, I'd suggest that dilemma: what is the difference between observing stars and observing the Bible?

Not to mention the processing time. It takes about 200 ms for a stimulus to reach your brain. Add processing time, and the time it takes to consciously perceive something is about 400-500 ms. A lot can happen in that time.

 

[metherion]

-How long (exactly) was the Flood?
-Did birds come from the water on the 5th day or the earth on the 6th day? (Gen 1:20-23 vs. 2:19)?
-when did God create bats? If He created them on the 5th day with the birds, Scripture is wrong because the bat isn't a bird as clearly stated in the dietary laws of the Hebrews, and if He created them on the 6th day with the beasts then Scripture is wrong and inconsistent because it specifically calls bats birds. (The bat being a bird is great on its own, but some people won't acknowledge it until you bring it into the creation stories.)

Metherion

 

[shernren]

Not to mention the processing time. It takes about 200 ms for a stimulus to reach your brain. Add processing time, and the time it takes to consciously perceive something is about 400-500 ms. A lot can happen in that time.

The way our brain perceives time is monumentally screwed-up. An interesting experiment (though I can't find the primary source, or even remember the secondary source I got it from) is to take a green LED and a red LED, mount them on a card a small but reasonable distance apart, and rig the green LED to light a split second after the red LED. If you rig it right, an observer will see a bright spot migrate across the card - and the spot won't change color when it reaches the other end, it changes color in the middle. This suggests that the visual cortex receives the red spot at one end, the green spot at the other, makes the interpretation that it must have changed halfway, and then only sends the result back to the cerebral cortex where the observer consciously observes the spot changing halfway. A similar experiment involving the sense of touch is known as the cutaneous rabbit.

While this isn't generally an issue for creationism at large, I feel that it places enormous strain on AiG's "operational vs. origins science" distinction, which is part of creationism's schism in science I noted earlier. If "origins" science is "unreliable" because it happened in the past, so is "operational" science. It doesn't take 500 million years of intervening time to screw up the evidence; 500 milliseconds will do it, and if you want to admit defeat because of that, you might as well say nothing is real!

 

[Markus6]

Why did God punish every single snake for something the devil did?

 

[Melethiel]

The way our brain perceives time is monumentally screwed-up. An interesting experiment (though I can't find the primary source, or even remember the secondary source I got it from) is to take a green LED and a red LED, mount them on a card a small but reasonable distance apart, and rig the green LED to light a split second after the red LED. If you rig it right, an observer will see a bright spot migrate across the card - and the spot won't change color when it reaches the other end, it changes color in the middle. This suggests that the visual cortex receives the red spot at one end, the green spot at the other, makes the interpretation that it must have changed halfway, and then only sends the result back to the cerebral cortex where the observer consciously observes the spot changing halfway. A similar experiment involving the sense of touch is known as the cutaneous rabbit.

While this isn't generally an issue for creationism at large, I feel that it places enormous strain on AiG's "operational vs. origins science" distinction, which is part of creationism's schism in science I noted earlier. If "origins" science is "unreliable" because it happened in the past, so is "operational" science. It doesn't take 500 million years of intervening time to screw up the evidence; 500 milliseconds will do it, and if you want to admit defeat because of that, you might as well say nothing is real!

Hmm, interesting. I haven't heard about that one. What I find interesting, and what allows us to function in pseudo-real time, is that the brain "tracks back" a stimulus to when it actually started. For example, say you give a stimulus to someone on their finger. They will receive it 200 ms later, but the brain will track it back to point 0. It is movement into the conscious mind which causes this problem, since it takes another few hundred ms for something to reach concious processing.

 

[shernren]

It's called the color-phi phenomenon: http://www.bioone.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1668%2F0003-1569(2000)040%5B0874%3ACATB%5D2.0.CO%3B2#I0003-1569-40-6-874-F03 (section "How consciousness-speak has muddled a simple perceptual phenomenon), the phi phenomenon being that when we see two similar stills within a short period of each other we tend to interpolate between them with motion - which gives us TV and movies.

 

[Mallon]

A good one from Assyrian:

Why would Adam need the light from stars that were destroyed hundreds of thousand of years before the heavens were created? These are the stars that exploded before 6000 years ago but whose explosion has been seen since then. These stars never actually existed in the YEC universe, but their light was visible in the night sky.

 

[Mallon]

Did God create a perfect Adam with shortened telomeres? Telomere shortening is a necessary product of cell division, and if Adam and his progeny were expected to grow, their cells would necessarily have divided and eventually died due to telomere shortening -- all in a perfect world with supposedly no physical death.

... How in the world could creatures have possibly grown in a world with no death?

 

[Jadis40]

I found another one just tonight having to do with flood geology and the Garden of Eden and the problem of trying to locate it on a modern landscape when there was supposedly a global flood, when it references two rivers that still exist:

http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2000/PSCF3-00Hill.html
Shee makes the point that Cush has been wrongly translated to mean Ethiopia, but should actually should be translated to refer to the Kassites, in Iran. This makes a lot more sense to me given what I know from history in regard to Mesopotamia.

 

[Xaero]

inconsistent hermeneutics: when YECs see Gen1 as ex nihilo creation events, why not looking at other godly creation events this way, so that the blacksmith and waster (Isa 54:16 - use of 'bara' like in Gen1) were also an ex nihilo creation?

 

[Mallon]

I forget who came up with this earlier:
If YEC's fear the slippery slope of treating the entire Bible allegorically, what prevents them from treating it all literally?

 

[shernren]

I caught a cool little mis-quote on AiG. The article reads:

... even though they believe that H. erectus evolved into modern humans, it is wrong to assign a separate species name to it. Thorne and Henneberg are natural allies in this; Henneberg has recently published his findings that if you bunch all the ‘apemen’ in together, they exhibit the range of variation one would normally find within a single species!

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2005/0228hobbit_war.asp

But the citation should give us a clue:

[SIZE=+1]Hominins are a single lineage: brain and body size variability does not reflect postulated taxonomic diversity of hominins.[/SIZE]

Fossil hominin taxonomy is still debated, chiefly due to the fragmentary nature of fossils and the use of qualitative (subjective) morphological traits. A quantitative analysis of a complete database of hominin cranial capacities (CC, n = 207) and body weight estimates (Wt, n = 285), covering a period from 5.1 ma (millions of years) to 10 ka (thousands of years) shows no discontinuities through time or geographic latitude. Distributions of residuals of CC and Wt around regressions on date and latitude are continuous and do not differ significantly from normal. Thus, with respect to these characteristics, all hominins appear to be a single gradually evolving lineage.

(emphasis added) Look ma, no jumps! It is astounding how Wieland can turn "a single gradually evolving lineage" into "a species" and then claim that he is being supported - when really, he should be quite scared of the fact that no discontinuities can be found over 5 million years of hom evolution.

 

[Assyrian]

OK now that is deeply disturbing. I don't know why. I have see other deceptive and misleading quote mines before, but the dishonesty here gets to me. Maybe it is because I have just woken up and I'm still a bit sleepy. But it is sad and depressing that a Christian would lie this way.