I was just on the Thom Hartmann show (briefly), appearing after Michael McHugh, head of a Christian (and creationist) homeschooling outfit. Thom was on the side of truth, and evolution, but he also took calls on the topic, and you know what that means. McHugh had pushed a young-earth view, insisting that the earth is 6,000 years old, and Hartmann said that didn’t compute—that the earth was billions of years old. So one gentleman called in offering the following:
I have a solution to your time theory: what if the earth is billions of years old but God didn’t create time until 6,000 years ago?
There should be audio/video links, which I’ll post when I get them.
“I have a solution to your time theory: what if the earth is billions of years old but God didn’t create time until 6,000 years ago?”
OMG I just found Jesus!
Compulsory education doesn’t seem to have helped him much. Is he from Texas?
About the only way I can parse that is if this person either is suffering from the same thing that makes people ask the ‘what came before the Big Bang?’ question or he has a different definition of ‘time’ than I do. (Possibly involving the idea of counting time (minutes, weeks, etc.)… which still doesn’t make any sense, since Sumerians were quite interested in demarcating time.
well becca, what was before the big bang?
A little smooching, eating chocolates, champagne, heavy petting….the usual.
It takes two to big bang, unles the supreme was hermaphroditic…
It’s really unfortunate that I can’t tell if this is a serious question or not.
It is a question. Serious? What do you mean?
That either. Haha?
In stock at Amazon:
Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot
by Philip Henry Gosse
(this edition 2010, original publication 1857)
Not sure whether you were recommending this book as support for the caller’s question.
But if, like me, you were thinking “Last Thursdayism”, then you beat me to the point!
What if evolution is true, but God created everything 6,000 years ago?
What if global climate change is caused by humans, but God did it 6,0000 years ago?
What if logic is, but God suspended it 6,000 years ago?
Ergo, Gos is logic
One line of argument (with facetious intent) against a YEC is to list a number of geological features that show that the Earth appears to be very very old, so if God created the Earth 6,000 years ago, then it was God’s intent that we *believe* that the Earth is billions of years old. So, to assert that the Earth is 6,000 years old is, in effect, blasphemy.
However, like all other arguments this one is also ineffectual.
Those evil christians! How can they go to the cloud house after they die if they can’t even submit to the desires of their god idea. How can christians have any pudding if they don’t eat their christ meat.
I have a solution for the creationists.
Why won’t they stop using oil and gas until such time that the exploration and discovery of the fossil fuels are done by Ken Ham, rather than those ungodly geologists?
The stupid…it burns.
Wonder whether Sean Carroll at Cal Tech has received similar “solutions”?
Science Friday just had a terrific interview with Ross Stein U.S. Geological Survey about the recent Chilean earthquake.
Stein tells the fantastic story of Darwin on the Beagle visiting near the present-day earthquake site right after the Beagle felt an earthquake in February 1835. Darwin and Fitzroy went ashore, smelled all the dead marine life, and concluded that the earthquake cause the land to rise out of the ocean. Then Darwin looked up at the Andes peaks above him, which he already knew were filled with fossilized sea life, and concluded that mountains are formed by the process of earthquakes. Then Darwin divided the height of the Andes mountains by the rate of big earthquakes (about ) and concluded that the earth must be millions of years old.
Stein gets off a great line about the scandal that biologists have absconded with Darwin’s legacy, when Darwin is also a father of geology.
This part of the interview begins about two thirds of the way through—don’t miss this one! Anyone can come up with a rough estimate of the very old age of the earth just by looking at the result of Chilean earthquakes:
Before Darwin and the Fitz Roy, the mapuches, pehuenches and others knew very well what Mr Darwin concluded after “careful” examination. They-the “orginals”- survived there couple of hundred earthquakes during at leat 25k years, if you are not a clovist of course. And to my knwoledge Mr Darwin didnt ask them.
No doubt you’re correct, as the Legend of Trentren Vilu and Caicai Vilu asserts that the god of Earth, Trentren Vilu, elevated the land and protected it from the god of Water, Caicai Vilu. “Trentren Vilu reached a costly victory, he won the battle, but was unable to restore the land to its primeval state leaving it in the dismembered form it still has today.”
Teach the controversy! BTW, what’s a “clovist”?
It wasnt a controversy then, or now. Knowledge embedded in cultural practices was fitness. Dont dismiss Cai Cai or Tren Tren so quickly. A clovist, is a follower of the belief that before Clovis there was nothing worth in what we know today as NorthAmerica, ie: US. Mr Darwin could have used his time better talking to the locals. But of course he was discovering everything.
…discovering everything… mmh, yes… it’s called ‘scientific method’…
By the way, present-day Texas illustrates some of the potential pitfalls of ‘talking to the locals’…
By the way, there are many kind of locals, TX “locals” are of a different category of the locals I was talking about,i.e.: couple of thousands years experiencing the land difference. How about that? TX”locals”-and rednecks-go back 300 years? Actually the comment “discovering everything” was pointing to present day scientists being more Popists than the Pope-no pun intended-rather than Mr Darwin. Actually the experiments performed by Mr Darwin are, say, few? And what “scientifc method” has to do with getting off the boat and talking to the locals? Nada.
Wow, did I hit a raw nerve? Sorry, didn’t mean to.
I assume you are a human anthropologist, or have some experience in the field? I did some modest fieldwork in my early days, and my point is that one needs a solid framework of independent data to gauge what the ‘locals’ are talking about. Darwin just getting off the boat and talking to the good people there would have been pretty useless without his own collection of observations against which to calibrate the local oral tradition. That was meant by ‘scientific method’. As to the experiments, well, geologists were rather restricted in what they could do, experimentwise, in Darwin’s time, weren’t they? (Although nowadays a dashing specimen has managed to crack quite a few houses in my vicinity through ill-advised ‘deep-heat mining’, eliciting a few fair-to-middling earthquakes in the process.)
Raw nerve? Are you kiddin? Whos got any raw nerves left these days? Mine are cured with boiling brine (sulfur). I happen to be born in Chile, thence, quakes, Mr Darwin, barnacles and locals outstand in many interrelated issues. I must confess that Mr Darwins’ cojones are remarkable, metaphorically, to take on the landscape like he did in Chile and elsewhere. I mean the lad saw more of the country than 90 % of my connationals know today. I wish there had been a more solid approach to “local knowledge” then, but that is only after the fact. No offense taken. A bit nervous with so much quaking-not quacking-goin on in Chile.
Thanks for the input, and my heartfelt sympathy regarding the earthquake situation. The mini ones I’ve experienced thus far were scaring enough, so I can’t even begin to imagine what a 8.8 Richter whammer would be. My maternal grandfather died in the 1977 Bucharest earthquake.
The “8.8” number is a moment magnitude number – the Richter scale was abandoned many years ago (1979?).
Thank you very much. One of the guests attending the government change, under earthquake attack, said: “Now that I experienced the quake (a 6.7) I understand what you feel-chileans-better,but I wish I didnt”. My family -me too- went through the 9.5 in 1960-that i still remember even as I was so young- and myself the 1985, 8.6/7? Now I live on top of the Cascadia subduction….so I miss home less. Isnt Richter THE only scale used by all. Puzzingly the TVN satellite tv fom chile keeps mentioning the Mercalli also, which nobody uses.
“mapuches, pehuenches and others”
So, based on their local knowledge, what were their estimates for a minimum age of the Earth based on the fossils and earthquakes?
they didnt worry about it
At sea it’s called “mare moto” (the moving sea); long long ago I read an account of someone who was determined to convince people that the shock of an earthquake can in fact be felt on ships. This is hardly surprising since water is not very compressible and does indeed transmit pressure changes, but the guy spent a lot of time collecting anecdotes from sailors and fishermen. Many sailors describe the experience as being similar to grounding a ship or being buffeted by a whale; at least one described the event as being like an earthquake except that they were at sea. I think the book was a brief story of early seismology written by a someone who contributed to the field (and whose name escapes me) – for all I know it could have been Richter who wrote the book.
I just heard McHugh (we get the show on delay here) and holy crap it was painful. I have some issues with Hartmann (he’s not a big fan of atheism and is quite woo-y) but he totally owned McHugh and thoroughly questioned all of his nonsensical claims.
How the Kw*k are we supposed to build a bridge to that?
If you want to go down that road, maybe god created time yesterday, or for that matter, one minute ago. That would certainly put the supposed events of 2000 years ago in perspective.
“So, to assert that the Earth is 6,000 years old is, in effect, blasphemy. However, like all other arguments this one is also ineffectual.”
I’ve actually found it effective* with some of the not willfully ignorant creationists I’ve come across in other forums. I don’t put it as blasphemy though (which doesn’t, despite what some atheists and fundamentalists may think, have much currency as a term with most Christians), but rather as posing the question of whether God was being metaphorical in the Bible and not giving science lessons or was lying with the entire universe being the most gigantic fraud imaginable.
[ * “effective” here meaning opening people up to the truth of evolution and the grandeur of that view of life, not converting them into incompatiblist atheists which would be some others’ idea of effectiveness.]
It helps that I’ve used this when the issue came up on a forum not dedicated to either of science or religion, where you will get folk not deeply committed. You won’t see many of these in places like this were the only kind of creationist who would stick around here after picking up the heavy vibe of hostility to all religion would be the most committed. While it’s not a line of argument that will work on a committed YEC, in the process of demolishing the YEC, one can reach out to the less committed, mostly being folk who simply have no idea what the truth is and no idea just how solid evolution is. Such folk often don’t comment in a discussion but I hear from them offline by email and can give them some more info in a less contentious milieu. I’ve won a few converts and I do keep the heads of the creationists down where I hang out so at least the waverers get no encouragement to go further down the creationist road.
BTW, when I engage in these things, I find Donald Prothero’s ‘Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters’ the best handy reference since it has a good section on the Grand Canyon which one its own has more than enough ammo to blow a YEC out of the water and Americans are mostly kind of irrationally proud of the Grand Canyon and take to the grandeur that only the scientific pov can give it. Our host’s WEIT is more use with folk more subtle than the usual YEC and a book I regularly recommend to folk on the fence (despite his ferocity here, WEIT is something most Christians could read without great offence, Prothero is snarkier).
All of this works better in my hands because I’m one of those evil religious folk on the side of evolution who are the enemies of all others here.
You think the guy might be a theoretical physicist?
You know someone is out there speculating on negative time, hell someone is trying to sort out what time looks like on the imaginary axis.
Opps, left off the beginning:
“About the only way I can parse that is if this person either is suffering from the same thing that makes people ask the ‘what came before the Big Bang?’ question …”
You think the guy might be a theoretical physicist?
You know someone is out there speculating on negative time, hell someone is trying to sort out what time looks like on the imaginary axis.
Hope the caller consults an amateur philosopher when the transmission in his Buick needs repair too.
‘Time is an illusion. Motion, doubly so.’
I’ve been slogging it out on the msnbc forum for a couple of days. The standard line is “we teach both sides – evolution and creation (wink-wink).” These comments are usually salted with a lot of snippets about “the weaknesses of evolution.” Sad state.
Welcome to the world of a secular/atheist homeschooler. I frequent a certain homeschooling forum and get this all the time. It’s frustrating since most of their arguments are completely circular. The bible cannot be contradicted, no matter what the evidence shows. So, yea, they “teach” evolution from a fundy xtian worldview only.
I make sure my dd knows the facts about evolution and teach her what creationism is: a religious belief with no basis in reality.
That quote would comport well with the thesis of Judy Freudberg and Tony Geiss who discussed a land before time populated by extinct animals not seen in the last 6,000 years. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Land_Before_Time )
The creationists can cite that…
Religious folks are good at coming up with such lame anti-reality excuses – it only shows up their tenuous comprehension of the world we live in. One of my favorites from long ago: The shroud of Turin is genuine; the carbon dating makes it appear to be less than half its genuine age because the mystical energies of the resurrection transformed some of the carbon in the fabric to the 14C isotope. Coincidentally the non-mystical energies which generate the 14C isotope high in the earth’s atmosphere would also cause such damage to the fabric that the shroud would cease to exist, but that is a minor point since we’re obviously talking about a miracle. Who but god could create 14C in the shroud without destroying the shroud? The resurrection truly was a mira mirabilis!
It’s actually fairly clever, in a way. Rather than trying to contort the scientific evidence, or just putting his fingers in his ears and saying “lalalalala I can’t hear you”, he simply waves his little existential magic wand and makes the whole issue disappear in a metaphysical puff of smoke.
Of course, it still doesn’t make any sense, but I still give kudos for the cleverness.
Oh oh, I know I know! There must be a stupid christian god because what other reason could there be for water freezing at 32 degrees instead of 0 degrees. Very clever of that disgusting christian sky fairy.
freezing at 32 degrees at 1 atmosphere of pressure in the presence of nucleating substances.
What can I say, god is picky too.
“what if the earth is billions of years old but God didn’t create time until 6,000 years ago?”
What I HOPE he meant was: “what if the earth is billions of years old but God didn’t create NORMAL time until 6,000 years ago?”
At least such a statement would have some support by some theologians. In other words, I would venture a guess that he believes that the world was created 6000 years ago (give or take) PLUS six day-AGES.
That would give it the weight of cotton candy.
How exactly does that affect the size of the dinosaurs that the jesus crispy thing rode?