Carl Flygare says:
Wombatty,
\"The Great Turning Point: The Church's Catastrophic Mistake on Geology - Before Darwin\" a five star book, according to your haphazard review anyway, implicitly champions a young earth creationist (YEC) worldview. Since you believe that the earth is between 6,000 - 10,000 years old the ragtag 'research' of the RATE (Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth) group should be familiar to you. John Baumgardner (occasional collaborator with author Terry Mortenson at the dunghill website and abstruse apologetics ministry disingenuously known as Answers in Genesis) and the RATE group recently accepted $2.5 million in private donations to conduct YEC research at the same time that Baumgardner was publishing old-earth and old-moon papers in mainstream scientific journals. This is fact, not assertion - and nicely illustrates the intellectual and ethical poverty endemic to the YEC community. This is particularly relevant since Baumgardner's first slide at a recent RATE conference shouted \"News Flash: paradigm overturned; textbooks need to be rewritten, earth is young, etc.\"
After years of staring mindlessly at their belly buttons and bibles RATE posits a 'cosmic-scale event' (a miracle in simple English) that accelerated radioactive decay by a factor of a billion-fold during a single year (Noah's flood) to account for the findings of creationist geochronology. This is a serious problem for YECs. Radioisotope decay generates heat. If you compress 4.5 billion years of decay into 6,000 years you've got a real heat problem. But this isn't the only one:
Magma - the geologic record includes roughly 8 x 10^24 grams of lava flows and igneous intrusions. Assuming (conservatively) a specific heat of 0.15, this magma would release 5.4 x 10^27 joules while cooling 1,100 degrees C. In addition, the heat of crystallization as the magma solidifies would release a great deal more heat.
Limestone formation - there are roughly 5 x 10^23 grams of limestone in the earth's sediments, and the formation of calcite releases about 11,290 joules/gram. If only 10% of the limestone were formed during Noah's fictitious flood, the 5.6 x 10^26 joules of heat released would be enough to boil the flood waters and poach Noah - along with everything else on his leaky tub.
Meteorite impacts - erosion and crustal movements have erased an unknown number of impact craters on earth, but creationists Whitcomb and DeYoung simply assert that cratering to the extent seen on the Moon and Mercury occurred on earth during the year of Noah's flood (aka ghastly global genocide). The heat from just one of the largest lunar impacts released an estimated 3.7 x 10^27 joules - the same sized object falling to earth would release even more energy.
5.6 x 10^26 joules is enough to heat boil the oceans. 3.7 x 10^27 joules will vaporize them completely. Since steam and air have a lower heat capacity than water, the steam released would quickly raise the temperature of the atmosphere over 1,000 decrees C. At these temperatures much of the atmosphere would boil off the earth.
YECs can only resolve this problem by invoking a miracle. The sky-fairy of Abraham just magically zapped away the heat. An infinite regress of miraculous contortions are required to prop up YEC assertions - my preferred framework of methodological and philosophical naturalism avoids the problems inherent in your 'Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardly' worldview - where things do go bump in the night, the universe is demon haunted, donkeys can talk, people can fly, and a man names Jesus lives up in the sky.
Thanks for the entertainment Wombatty. Your dingbatty delusions are endlessly comedic - just like the sacred schizophrenia of your buffoonish co-religionists.
