A whole mess of Flood-splaining

I have to start by pointing out the tortured grammar of this question on Quora.

"Surely the story of Noah's Ark is possibly the most ludicrous story in history?

If thought about logically the idea that a man built a ship to house hundreds of thousands of species is clearly impossible?"

Why do I have to point this out? Because the response from Mark Hunter doesn't really fit as an answer. The question has question marks but isn't obviously a question - perhaps it is form of trolling - and the response immediately jumps into Bible quotes and scientific claims with no scaffolding of explanation. The question is not good but the answer feels as if someone were to ask me, "Where is Bracebridge, Canada?" and I simply gave that person a map. Bracebridge might be on it, depending on the sale and whim of the cartographer but it's a small town in a big country.

For this reason, it is difficult to attack a theme in Hunter's argument. There aren't many obvious themes.

I'll try to share my problems with it.

" ago there were heavens and an earth standing firmly out of water and in the midst of water" - I think this is Day one of creation and the claim seems to be that the universe is water and Earth sticks out of it the the heavens are above it. Again Hunter does not explain the relevance of this quote so in my first reading I thought it was an attack on the Noah's Flood story. After all, we know the universe is not entirely water, if the Earth sticks out of the water as described then the Earth is flat and Heaven being above Earth doesn't work for a round Earth nor in a time of space exploration.

hunter next offers a quote on the materials and construction of the Ark. It starts, "Make for yourself an ark from resinous wood." He follows this quote up with a discussion of naval architecture which includes:

"same timber particularly favored for shipbuilding by the Phoenicians and by Alexander the Great"

The problem is, although Hunter's quote uses the word 'resinous', other translations of the Bible use 'cypress'* and 'gopherwood'. At Bible Gateway passage: Genesis 6:14-16 - New International Version the asterisk on cypress states, "The meaning of the Hebrew for this word is uncertain." And Gopherwood is the Bible's version of Star Trek's Dilithium Crystals - it sounds specific but means nothing. This clearly means that we can’t make such a statement about other maritime builders or materials.

The following is not a comment on the Ark but on watertight construction. Hunter quotes "You should put the entrance of the ark in its side... ". This is a terrible idea if you want watertight seals. You don't make a door that will be even partially underwater.

Included in his naval architecture points is this:

"only about 290 species of land mammals larger than sheep and about 1,360 smaller than rats" - this suggests to me that I am putting more effort critiquing the argument than he was in making it. It doesn't belong in a architecture list and also there are 1,200 species of bats alone so his numbers don't make sense. Further, it is irrelevant because he needs to look at all species of animal alive and extinct.

In his list of, I don't know, animal facts? He writes:

“10,000 are birds, 9,000 are reptiles and amphibians, many of which could have survived outside the ark”

There are a few birds who could fly for a year but there are a lot that cannot and also cannot land on water and take off again. I don't know of any bird that could live unsheltered through 40 days of rain falling around a meter per hour. They couldn't fly through it and a meter per hour of rainfall would break their wings and necks. There is no reason to imagine that chameleons could live a year in the water. Amphibians? Forget it. The water would be too salty.

"Where Did the Floodwaters Go?

Evidently they are right here on earth. Today there is about 1.4 billion cu km (326 million cu mi) of water on the earth. It covers more than 70 percent of the globe’s surface. The average depth of the oceans is 4 km (2.5 mi); average elevation of the land is only 0.8 km (0.5 mi) above sea level. If the earth’s surface was smoothed out, it would all be covered with water to a depth of 2,400 m (8,000 ft)"

All this seems to require massive earthquakes. Hunter's needs such Earthquakes to flatten and flood the world. This also suggests that more Earthquakes will be needed after a year to make the planet lumpy again and drain some of the lands. Such earthquakes would mostly flatten but not dig trenches or quickly raise tall mountains. This reads like a non-geologist hoping that the magic of the word ‘earthquake’ will fix all credibility problems.

This next point might be the craziest:

"a frozen mammoth was uncovered in Siberia in 1901. After thousands of years, vegetation was still in its mouth. Some see in this, as well as in such other things as marine fossils found on high mountains, deserts, convincing evidence of a sudden, catastrophic global flood"

He thinks something frozen would be evidence of the globes covered in liquid water. If the water is liquid, things won't freeze.

To finish things off:

"floodgates of the heavens were opened." - again, he seems to think the universe is full of water. That might be reasonable for person a few thousand years ago ignorant of the water cycle, but it has to be seen as crazy now, right? right?

Hunter goes on with a list of flood myths around the world. The thing is, I've read the Korean one mentioned in such lists and it describes a flood on a mountain rather than a large one. We might as well look at myths around the world that claim their tribe's founder was born of an animal. In Korea, Dang-gun was born of a god and a Bear who lived in a cave for a year to become human ( Dangun - Wikipedia ). Around the world, similar myths are offered. All are ridiculous.

Historic and Observational Science

From AIG:

[I]t is useful to divide science into two different areas: operational science and historical (origins) science. Operational science deals with testing and verifying ideas in the present and leads to the production of useful products like computers, cars, and satellites. Historical (origins) science involves interpreting evidence from the past and includes the models of evolution and special creation. Recognizing that everyone has presuppositions that shape the way they interpret the evidence is an important step in realizing that historical science is not equal to operational science. Because no one was there to witness the past (except God), we must interpret it based on a set of starting assumptions. Creationists and evolutionists have the same evidence; they just interpret it within a different framework. Evolution denies the role of God in the universe, and creation accepts His eyewitness account—the Bible—as the foundation for arriving at a correct understanding of the universe.

and:

IF AN IDEA IS NOT TESTABLE, REPEATABLE, OBSERVABLE, AND FALSIFIABLE, IT IS NOT CONSIDERED SCIENTIFIC.

and:

 The denial of supernatural events limits the depth of understanding that science can have and the types of questions science can ask. We may define naturalism and materialism as:
Naturalism: a belief denying that an event or object has a supernatural significance; specifically, the doctrine that scientific laws are adequate to account for all phenomena.
Materialism: a belief claiming that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all organisms, processes, and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or interactions of matter.
The problem with the above definition of science is that, even though naturalistic science claims to be neutral and unbiased, it starts with a bias. The quote from Dr. Todd on page 19 demonstrates that bias: only matter and energy exist and all explanations and causes must be directly related to the laws that matter and energy follow. Even if the amazingly intricate structure of flagella in bacteria appears so complex that it must have a designer, naturalistic science cannot accept that idea because this idea falls outside the realm of naturalism/materialism. Many scientists have claimed that allowing supernatural explanations into our understanding of the universe would cause us to stop looking for answers and just declare, “God wanted to do it that way.” This is, of course, false.

The ability to study the world around us is only reasonable because there is a Lawgiver who established the laws of nature. Most people do not realize that modern science was founded by men who believed that nature can be studied because it follows the laws given to it by the Lawgiver. Johannes Kepler, one of the founders of astronomy, said that science was “thinking God’s thoughts after Him.” Many founders of scientific disciplines, such as Bacon, Newton, Kepler, Galileo, Pascal, Boyle, Dalton, Linnaeus, Mendel, Maxwell, and Kelvin were Bible-believing Christians.  

... In a biblical worldview, scientific observations are interpreted in light of the truth that is found in the Bible. If conclusions contradict the truth revealed in Scripture, the conclusions are rejected. The same thing happens in naturalistic science. Any conclusion that does not have a naturalistic explanation is rejected.

...Making a distinction between two types of scientific study helps us to understand the limitations of naturalistic presuppositions in science:Operational (Observational) Science: a systematic approach to understanding that uses observable, testable, repeatable, and falsifiable experimentation to understand how nature commonly behaves.
Operational science is the type of science that allows us to understand how DNA codes for proteins in cells. It is the type of science that has allowed us to cure and treat diseases, put a man on the moon, build satellites and telescopes, and make products that are useful to humans. Biblical creationists believe that God has created a universe that uses a set of natural laws that operate consistently in the universe. Understanding how those laws operate is the basis for scientific thinking.
Some events defy natural laws. Christians refer to these things as miracles, but naturalistic science must find a way to explain these occurrences naturally. This approach rejects miracles in the Bible because they cannot be explained using natural laws. Such scientists occasionally try to explain the miracles in the Bible as natural phenomena, but this ultimately undermines the authority of God and His Word.
Historical (Origins) Science: interpreting evidence from past events based on a presupposed philosophical point of view.
The past is not directly observable, testable, repeatable, or falsifiable; so interpretations of past events present greater challenges than interpretations involving operational science. Neither creation nor evolution is directly observable, testable, repeatable, or falsifiable. Each is based on certain philosophical assumptions about how the earth began. Naturalistic evolution assumes that there was no God, and biblical creation assumes that there was a God who created everything in the universe. Starting from two opposite presuppositions and looking at the same evidence, the explanations of the history of the universe are very different. The argument is not over the evidence—the evidence is the same—it is over the way the evidence should be interpreted.

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That's a long set of excerpts.  Read more -there is a lot more - at the link.

I feel there are two main themes in the post and in the excerpted above.  The (artificial) distinction between observational and historic science and the inclusion of the supernatural in science. I also want to look at the claim that natural laws require a lawgiver.

This all-in-caps quote demonstrates the perceived difference between observational and historic science."IF AN IDEA IS NOT TESTABLE, REPEATABLE, OBSERVABLE, AND FALSIFIABLE, IT IS NOT CONSIDERED SCIENTIFIC."

I agree with this wholeheartedly.  If only I could find an example of so-called historic science that failed these criteria.
Let's look at the Greenland Ice Cores.  Superficially, looking at the long, thin cylinders and counting backwards through the layers is problematic.  We have not seen the snow fall on that location for more than a few decades and as the layer pile up and squeeze those below, there might be changes in the way those layers look, confusing the observer.
However, there are ways to repeat the tests and falsify them.  Let's look at falsification first.  The original creationist argument mentions "isotopes" once in one sentence and never again.  The method of looking for differences in the isotope ratios is not explored and yet it is a way to test the results.  The article also leaves out the presence of identifiable volcanic dust and ash.  When researchers find dust at 200 years-before-present, they can look for records of volcanic eruptions and compare the dates.  This is the definition of falsification.

Is it repeatable?  Yes.  There is lots of ice out there and researchers can drill more than one core and compare the results of one to another.

The same thing happens when we look at the insertion of viral DNA and how if an this happened to an ancestor all the descendants should have the inserted DNA in the appropriate place.  Researchers in a variety of locations and labs can look at viral DNA and compare that to the DNA in humans and other apes and confirm to deny that the DNA is the same.  Exceptions can be looked for.  No such exceptions have been found.

The Sensuous Curmudgeon covered similar ground in 2012.

Now for whether the supernatural can tested in a scientific way.  No, it can't.  When I teach ESL to young children, I sometimes amuse them by appearing to push a piece of chalk into one ear and pulling it out the other.  If you accept the supernatural, then even if you see that the chalk is hidden in my hand in one performance, you have to accept that the next time I do the trick, real magic occurred.

In my opinion, the best response to the science-testing-the-supernatural claim comes from Richard Hoppe and his look at Behe's suggested bacterial flagellum experiment.  Behe had suggested that bacteria lacking a flagellum be exposed to condition that would favor the evolution of a flagellum to see if one actually evolved.

Hoppe thought about the results of such an experiment.  

But then Hoppe notes that Behe states we can know nothing about the Designer and Its abilities.  He then imagines the experiment runs its course and bacteria flagellum appear...

. Does that mean that evolution works and ID is “disproven”? Not at all. After all, since we know nothing about the skill set and intentions of the putative designer(s), it’s possible that the designer(s) somehow ‘watched’ our culture, and sometime during the course of the generations ‘reached’ in and poofed a flagellum into existence on one of the bacteria.

If a flagellum appears, it means that evolution occurred the bacteria gained the flagellum through evolutionary processes or that The Designer chose to give them a flagellum.  If no flagellum appears, it means evolution did not occur or that it did occur and the bacteria were about to sprout flagella but The Designer chose to remove it. 

 Adding the supernatural to the mix means nothing can be scientifically determined. The argument turns into the brain-in-a-jar-on-a-desk-in-a-lab hypothesis.  If the supernatural is accepted, then nothing is settled.  We see what The Designer wants us to see and nothing else.  I try to keep this a religion-neutral blog but the only rebuttal that I can see Christians make to this point is that the Christian God is always honest and never deceptive.  If that is the case, then we can accept what our senses inform us of and the supernatural is not relevant.

"The ability to study the world around us is only reasonable because there is a Lawgiver who established the laws of nature."
The laws are what is observed, not required.  The quote above makes the same conflation that allows the joke about the judge outlawing gravity to be funny.  The law of universal gravitation has nothing in common with the laws of your country against murder.  The former is a fact of the universe and the latter is a arbitrary rule made by humans.
Further, Ham et al require the 'lawgiver' to mess around with the laws of nature.  In addition to claiming that any change to the laws of nature would destroy us all, they need the speed of light to change so light from distant stars can reach the Earth in six thousand years or less.  They need ice layers in Greenland to pile up so they appear to show one hundred thousand years  after only four thousand years passed.
They simultaneously state that the laws of nature are unchanging and they may have been different in the past.
Henry Morris made this claim - link is to Talk Origins:

Radiometric dating assumes that radioisotope decay rates are constant, but this assumption is not supported. All processes in nature vary according to different factors, and we should not expect radioactivity to be different.Source:
Morris, Henry M. 1985. Scientific Creationism. Green Forest, AR: Master Books, p. 139.

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In his debate with Bill Nye, Ham stated that the current diversity of life evolved from the far-fewer animals on the ark, simultaneously arguing against evolution and requiring evolution to occur at far faster rates than ever observed.

Nye argued that there are some 16,000,000 species on the planet today, and that if there was a Flood only 4,000 years ago, and only 7,000 representative species on the Ark to start with, there would have to have been 11 new species evolving every day over the last 4,000 years since the Flood.

Reactions to the Ham vs Nye debate

This post is not finished but I don't know when that will be.  I watched the opening of the debate live, then stopped and drove to my in-laws and watched the last hour or so.  Then I began watching again and have made it to one hour, thirty-nine minutes.  I do plan to see the fifteen or twenty minute gap.

A friend described those who found Nye the clear winner to be displaying confirmation bias.  I had made similar, but less eloquent, statements so I was pleased to see my own conclusion reinforced.  Still, Nye did a lot right.

I guess I need to give some specifics at the start.  On Feb 4, Ken Ham defended the proposition that Creation is the most viable model of origins in today's modern, scientific era against Bill Nye, who defended evolution.  The video is available at a few locations but I don't know for how long: try here, here and here.

My own impressions:

Ham is getting mileage from his previous debate -at Harvard in the '90s.

Ham has a degree in applied science -emphasis in environmental biology.

five minute intro: Ham begins the attack and offers scientists who accept creationism but do science. Of course, they don't appear to use creation science in their work. Then, he gets into his personal division of science into observational and historic focuses.

Nye takes his time to gain some acceptance by telling a pretty good, but long, joke.  Then he uses the example of CSI to tear down the idea of two kinds of science.  

Billions of people are religious but not creationists.

thirty minute talks.

Ham: More professional scientist claiming they are creationists without any appearance of using creationism in their work.

Ham and one of his scientist discusses Lenski's work: The ability to grow on citrate is not complex new ability.

Andrew Fabich: E-coli supposably evolving.  The information is already there - it's just a switch that's turned on and off.  There's nothing new. ... Later, Dr Lenski and his student read Fabich's claim in horror and have responded 1, 2, 3.  I have excerpted a few paragraphs from the third link below in my notes of reactions to the debate. (More about Dr Lenski.)

"Darwin was racist." From a book -not necessarily by Darwin - "The highest race of all, the Caucasians..." Everyone from the 1800's would appear racist to us today. Australians, Ham's own nationality, had some racist image problems even just a few decades ago.

I just remembered how to do screen shots: 

In discussing the difference between observational and historic science, Ham showed a video of Nye talking about creationists accepting many scientific wonders -including smoke detectors - while yet not accepting evolution.  Ham emphasized a few such wonders -including smoke detectors - and called then observational science.  And yet, I think smoke detectors use the half-life of radioactive elements and this must remain unchanged through history or the detector's results would be meaningless.

Nye:

Deep time. - ice cores.

Nine thousand year old tree.

"Your claim, for me, is not satisfactory." An elegant statement but not a thrilling one.

Nye on Ham's need for incredible speed in evolution to suit creationism's short time line:

Noah's ark and modern shipbuilding.

Around 1:20, Nye talks about the Big Bang Theory. This is important stuff and you need to explain the small details, but it takes a lot of time and comes off as a little dry at a debate.  I hope creationists were listening.

First 5:00 minute rebuttal
Ham:
"You can't observe the age of the Earth"
Radioactive decay - Uranium to lead, etc.

"The point is, there's a problem." - Yes, there is. The radiocarbon dating used on the wood can only give results up to around 50,000 years so a result in that range is equal to a pegged needle.  To suggest otherwise is dishonest. This claim can also be found at creation.com  and the original source, 'research' by Andrew Snelling is at the same site.   Gondwana Research looks into a similar claim here.

The more I think about this, the more impressed I am with Ham's daring, with his cajones (it seems less crude in a foreign language).  If Nye had understood how radiometric dating worked -and why didn't he, this was an obvious direction for a Young Earther to go? -he could have exposed clear dishonesty on Ham's part.

Dr Steve Austin used Potassium-Argon dating on a lava flow from Mt St. Helens.  The results varied greatly.

There is a big problem.  From Wikipedia: "Due to the long half-life, the technique is most applicable for dating minerals and rocks more than 100,000 years old. For shorter timescales, it is likely that not enough Argon 40 will have had time to accumulate in order to be accurately measurable."

slides from 1:32:00 - get them while on Windows computer.

Nye:
Didn't understand about radiocarbon dating - dang it!!! Attempted a rebuttal and moved on.
"Were the fish sinners?"
On Ham's claim that you cannot see the past, "but that's what astronomers do."

2nd rebuttal
Ham:
"What is a kind? ...  Predicted less than a thousand kinds on Noah's ark."
1:42 - planes in the ice on Greenland. Wow!  and Wow!
Bears have teeth very much like a lion or tiger.  Look at a panda's teeth - it looks like it should be a savage carnivore.
      Okay, I just searched with Google images for lion, bear, panda bear and Australian fruit bat teeth.  All have big scary canines.  The bears and bat all have grinding molars and the lion has only cutting teeth.  I guess he figures Nye can't do the search in time for his next turn to talk.

"The Chinese and the Egyptians built big boats. Research shows some had three layers interlocking so they wouldn't twist like that (like the Nye discussed a giant American wooden ship had twisted and leaked)."  Right, except the only place i can find news of three interlocking layers is at Creationist websites and there is substantial disagreement about whether the giant Chinese ships were actually built (some claim they were and did sail to India and elsewhere, others say they only floated in a sheltered lake, others say they may have existed on land and finally some say they were never built).

Horizon problem. Light and the expanding universe.

Nye:
1000 kinds makes Nye's criticism even stronger - instead of needing 11 new species to appear every day, now we need 35!
Nye claims some knowledge of shipbuilding and is skeptical that Noah could build the Ark with seven others.
"...explain to us why we should accept your word for it that natural law changed 4000 years ago, completely, and there's no record of it.  You know, there are pyramids that are older than that."
It is not reasonable to me to believe that everything changed 4000 years ago: species, the surface of the Earth, the stars in the sky and the relationships of all the other things on Earth to humans.

Evolution is not exclusively atheistic.

We need scientists and engineers.
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Questions from the audience
1st question - Nye asks ham if he can predict something
2nd What was before the Big Bang?  Nye: I don't know - it is wonderful!
Ham: "There is a book..."
3rd dating techniques
Ham:....appendix is very important to the immune system -
...I did make predictions....one race, God made kinds
4th question - how did consciousness come from matter
Nye: "Don't know.  It's a great mystery. ...The joy of discovery."
Ham: There is a book" .. debaters both beyond debate subject....  Ham: after you die, you are gone, why bother with discovery?
5th question "What would change your mind?"
Ham:  long answer  "No one's ever going to convince me that the word of God is not true."
The model of the flood is subject to change but the fact of the flood is not subject to change.
Nye: We would need evidence. Bring on any of those things and you would change me immediately.
--
6th question: radiometric dating
Nye the science is strong on radiometric dating
Ham: showed slide from before "Hundreds of physical processes..."
This is a form of the Gish Gallop.  I know the coral reef claim is wrong and I'm pretty sure the meteor dust one is, too.  Note that Ham doesn't even try to defend any of them so what is Nye to do, attack 50+ in his next turn.  And even if he did, from the little info Ham offered, Ham could say, "No, I meant a different form of meteor dust buildup" or the like.

7th Question for Ham: Compare the rate of continental plates today to the rate 6000 years ago.
Ham: There was a catastrophic breakup.  Historic V observational science.
Nye: It must have been easier for you to explain this a hundred years ago.  The evidence of reversed magnetic fields supports old age slow plate movement evidence.

8th:  Favorite colour

9th: 2nd law of thermodynamics
Nye: Earth is not a closed system.We receive energy from the sun.
Ham: Energy or matter will never produce life.

10th: Could you be convinced the world is older than c10,000 years.
Ham: No
Nye: You want us all to take your claim based on nothing.  What can you predict?

11th: Is there room for God in science?
Nye: yes.
Ham: God is necessary for science.  observational v historic science. We assume laws of logic, nature the uniformity of nature. Where does that (as I've written it, "Where do they come from) come from?

12: Mr Ham, do you take everything in the Bible literally? Should we stone pig-touchers? Should men marry many wives?
Ham: Define literally.  If it's history, like Genesis, take it as literal.  The Bible shows marriage to multiple women causes trouble.
Nye: You pick and choose what to take literally.

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stopped at 2:28

Poop and Flood Geology

Naturalis Historia discusses how the existence of poop in the sediment column is a big problem for Young Earth Creationists.  It is a long post so I don't feel too bad in offering this extended quote:

Young earth creationists propose an alternative history. In their history a massive global flood deposited 10s of thousands of feet of sediments in this area over a period of a few days to maybe a few months. In the past 4000 year erosion has then sculpted the rocks into these mountains and hills.  Therefore, these flood geology theories of YECs would undoubtedly view the rock formations from which these fossils were found as having formed right in the middle of a chaotic global flood only 4-6 thousand years ago.
So how does a group of strange-looking 8-foot long reptiles survive the initial stages of a cataclysmic global flood in which 15,000 feet of sediments have already been deposited below where they gathered together? Even if they were running or swimming around during the flood and managed to find their way onto a small piece of land between waves how come these feces appear to have aged before being preserved (many show desiccation cracks as if they dried out before they were preserved)?  Also, how does a pile of loose digested plant material survive the next huge wave of water bringing sediments in to cover them up.  In this case these piles of feces look to have been preserved by a layer of volcanic ash being dumped on them. How does that happen in the middle of a global flood? 

---
Naturalis Historia had previously discussed animal feces during the flood here.  The blogger described dinosaur, bird and fish feces as well as the action of dung beetles.  Here is an excerpt from the dung beetle portion:

Dung beetles take dung from large dung piles of herbivores like elephants and roll pieces up into balls, roll them away and bury them for safe keeping like a squirrel buries nuts.   The presence of these in the fossil record is yet another evidence that where they are preserved represents a place were the normal ecology of the world was working rather than a large global catastrophe.  For dung balls to be found in burrows, now only did there have to be fresh dung around but it had to be there long enough for beetles to do their work.  Again, in the young earth creationists view these beetles were living near the end of a global catastrophe after 20,000 feet of sediments had suddenly been laid down and yet they were still alive managed to find fresh dung and had time to roll it up and bury it before being covered by the next giant wave of water that would then cover them with many new layers of sediments that would become rock. 

----
The Rocks Don't Lie is my favorite book on the subject.  As I read the book, I understood what the author was writing about but now, around a year later, the clearest and simplest evidence I remember from the book for an ancient Earth rather than a global flood was in discussion of Grand Canyon sediment.  Montgomery points out that the layers include sediment, then shale, then sediment, then shale, then sediment.  Sediment and shale require different processes to form so at least five different events had to have occurred.  He also points out the 'discontinuities' - parts where the column had built up, then been worn away, creating gaps of millions of years.  Silvestru had claimed that such discontinuities were simply guesses by secular scientists and chose to ignore any evidence to the contrary.

Silvestru's Global Flood: Part one

This was becoming a long blogpost.  To make commenting on specific points easier, I have broken my discussion of the video below into a few different blog posts. This is the first post and mostly discusses the whole video in general.

In early September, 2011, my coworker posted on a Facebook group comments and a link to a video of Dr Silvestru discussing how he feels the global flood occurred.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-BaMAt4dnE

The relevant part of the video is more than an hour long and it took me some time to watch it, take notes and research, to the extent I was able, his claims.  Although my coworker’s post mostly matched the aims of the Facebook group, discussion was squashed by the time I was able to add my comments.  As an aside, I do not exactly feel that my coworker was being restrained or censored so much as the limitations of Facebook Groups made his discussions unwieldy.  He might reasonably feel his views were censored by a philosophical group that should be anti-censorship, but I hope he can also see that Facebook’s everything-on-one-page format becomes annoying when multiple threads are simultaneously drawing comments.

Perhaps inviting people to an off-site location, on a Google Group or the like, would have been wiser and allowed me to post this critique somewhere.

Anyway, by the time I began writing this critique, the discussion is no longer ongoing at that Facebook page and I am not sure where to put this.  That’s part of the reason I have been coy about naming my coworker.

--------------------------------------------

One reason Silvestru's arguments are hard to rebut is that neither I nor his target audience have the background to really understand or debate his claims.  I believe that my unnamed coworker is in the same position.  Some of his arguments, though possibly not difficult to learn to follow, appear arcane enough that I have passed on the business of trying to learn the necessary background.

I think Carl Sagan described what I think to be a similar phenomenon in discussing the work of von Daniken.  I used “I think” twice as I going from memory and cannot find his exact quote.  He said something like,

“With my fellow astronomers, I felt the astronomical aspects of his claims were weak, but the archaeological claims appeared strong.  Then I spoke to archaeologists and found they felt the archaeological claims were weak but the astronomy looked strong.”

I feel there is something universal here.  Generally, if we do not have extensive knowledge in a field, we are inclined to accept the claims of others.  Sagan wasn’t an archaeologist, so he provisionally accepted the validity of the archaeological claims.  Silvestru’s audience, myself included, are not knowledgeable about geology, so it is easy to accept his claims.  Even if we do not, it is hard to determine if and where his errors or misrepresentations are.

Near the beginning and at the end, he mentions large and dramatic events that I can agree happened.  He starts his talk by mentioning large-but-local floods, and suggests there was a 1,000 year long ice age.  At the end of his talk, he shows a chart with three extinction events.  I am not sure that he did, could, or even should tie them into the main theme of his talk.

Why shouldn’t he tie them into his talk?  As an evolutionist, I think that the problems regarding the story of the Flood are too big and diverse to ever be answered, but that same size means that Flood proponents should focus on segments or individual issues and offer some in-depth solution to each...eventually bringing them into a whole, a ‘modern synthesis’ if you will.  Silvestru does first step; he focuses on a possible explanation for the Flood without looking into the Ark or it’s contents.  Silvestru isn’t a naval engineer or biologist and, to his credit, he doesn’t try to be.

At some point though, he needs to dig into the larger picture.  I would, someday and from someone, like to see a Young Earth Creationist timeline that includes the Age of the Earth, the Flood, the rise and fall of the tower of Babel (and an explanation for why the endeavor was stopped, but manned journeys to the moon and unmanned journeys much further have not been), about when Silvestru’s one-thousand-year Ice Age (I presume this is Veith's 600 year-long ice age as well) occurred and how and what caused the other two extinction events Silvestru touches upon.  Also, when did the huge-but-local flood occur in the US (come to think of it, he may have said it happened at the end of the Ice Age).

Somewhat related, I would also like some connection to other reasonably well-dated events, such as construction of the pyramids, which I think occurred both before and after the Flood.

Should a reader choose to look into this, I can definitely accept error bars or +/- or the like.  I do understand that exact figures are hard to find dealing with events thousands of years in the past and would not imagine using uncertainty (or uncertainty only) as a reason to attack the claims.  Still, I do feel that such a timeline would immediately show the problems with the Biblical narrative.  Some events could be simultaneous, like the building of Babel and an Ice Age mostly affecting Europe and other Northern locales, but I think that agreed upon dates for Egyptian, Greek, Persian, Indian, Chinese and other civilizations would make the gap between Flood and recorded history very busy.

Either as a discussion of one of Silvestru’s first points or as big-picture aside, I need to mention uniformitarianism  vs catastrophism.  I am by no means an expert, but I think creationists (as catastrophists) overly simplify the uniformitarian view, both original and as it is understood today.  Uniformists accept gradual, slow change through local and entirely natural forces.  This might typically mean erosion and storm damage, for example.  However, it doesn’t deny the effects of earthquakes, large floods, volcanoes, or even meteors.  Uniformists do accept that some catastrophes do happen.  I suppose that if the flood was caused by entirely natural forces, as Silvestru tries to show, it could even fit into the uniformist view.  Let’s bar the Flood for the moment but still note that, for example, the Uniformist view allows both slow and fast burial of fossils.

Now, onto the video.  At 51 minutes, Silvestru states “The Genesis Flood happened after the natural laws were set and should therefore be explainable by existing scientific methods."

Note that I try to quote accurately,

but I do not promise 100%.

I do promise not to distort quotes deliberately.

 I find this to be bad theology.  If the Flood can be explained by natural laws, I see two problems.  First, there is no need to add God to the narrative.  Because Silvestru has kept his focus narrow (and I do approve of his focus), he does not defend the building of the Ark or any of the biological claims.  Perhaps there was a Flood, life survived on high mountains (Silverstu will later offer a depth of 3km and does not go into detail about mountains growing after the Flood), and people of the Bible saw the evidence of the Flood and added it - with embellishments - to the Bible.

 A second problem works like this:  God created the world and built in the Flood so that two thousand years after He (pardon the crude description) hit the ‘start button’, calamity would strike.  If he didn’t know humanity would become so evil they needed wiping out, then we should see unnatural causes for the Flood.  If he did know, even before he started, he is no better than a three-year-old frustrated with his toy for not working right.

 Silvestru asks the rhetorical questions “Where did the water come from and where did it go?”  Admirably, he goes out of his way to reject two other Creationist explanations: the Vapor Canopy and Walt Brown’s Deep Earth water deposits of water.

 His mechanism is described from fifty-four minutes to one hour, although he adds to that description somewhat through his talk.  It seems that when plate tectonics started, it started fast and brought a lot of hot mantle to the surface.  The description sounds reasonable as he describes it, but I don’t think I could do it justice.  Even if I want to give it the best and most positive possible description, even if it is entirely true; my description and eloquence would fail.  Let’s just say that the ocean floor becomes quite hot.  This causes it to expand and rise one mile and super-heated water to evaporate and rain heavily around the world.  For more detail, watch the video.

 In twenty to forty days, Silvestru claims, the ocean floor raised one vertical mile and either at the same time or soon afterwards, the continents sank by a mile.  Again, I haven’t even tried to understand the evidence for this, or even looked for it.  As I heard it, it seemed reasonable that if part of a sphere swells, another part of the sphere should dimple.

Now on to specific points, some of which I can argue against, some of which, I cannot.  To facilitate commenting, I have broken up the rest of the video into several blog posts.

Coconino Sandstone: Silvestru's Global Flood, part 2

This is part of a longer post about Silvestru's video containing evidence for a Global Flood.  I chose to break up the posts so that individual claims can be better discussed.  The video can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-BaMAt4dnE

Note that the video starts with about thirty minutes of introduction.  I believe the original poster of the video has left some suggestions of where to start watching to skip the intro.

In this post, I look at silvestru's claims for the Coconino Sandstone.  As I mentioned in my original post, some claims, both for and against evolution, are beyond my ability to comment.  I am smart enough that I could learn more about geology and the like, but feel that it would take too much time to devote to a hobby.  The second set of points in this post are an example of what I am unable to argue for or against and, as part of trying to be fair, it is an example from the old-Earth side of the argument.

At some point between 51 minutes and one hour, 4 minutes (I didn't record the timestamp for this one) we come to evidence I can at least imagine I have a handle on.  Silvestru claims that the Coconino Sandstone, found around the Grand Canyon was laid down during the Flood.  I don’t see how this can be as there are footprints of terrestrial animals among those layers.  Some of those prints look be from newts, small aquatic vertebrates.  Others are from scorpions.  I feel this is good evidence that the location was not under three kilometres of water at the time.  There could have been water, but it would have to be fresh and relatively still - far less than the full torrent a global flood requires.

 Newts, indeed all amphibians, cannot tolerate salt water, and this water would be very salty for reasons that Silvestru gives and others that I will offer. At one hour twenty-six minutes, Silvestru describes ‘mineral-rich water’ permeating the mantle and sediments, so there is one source.  I feel that salt of the oceans, plus that of various salt lakes and deposits means that the total salt content of the water would be near current ocean levels and completely deadly to amphibians.  The fast moving water- carrying great quantities of fine silt - would also clog the newt’s gills.  It would also be somewhere between irritating and lethal for any animal with gills. This is one of the big-/small- picture problems I have with Silvestru.

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Below is an argument against Coconino being caused by a global flood.  There is little need to comment on it as I do not have the background to defend or dispute it.  I hope it does not seem dishonest to display a claim like this then back away from it.  In my defense, I have offered examples from Dr Silvestru where I do the same.    My goal here is to show the limits of my own understanding and to suggest that others in the same position (of ignorance) should not use such arguments.

Regarding the Coconino Sandstone: Again, I am not a geologist.  Here, I will quote someone about the Coconino Sandstone discussing desert sand.  I suppose it is possible to determine that the sand in sandstone was laid down by wind in a desert rather than by silt in water, but I don't have the background.

That prompts a rather obvious question: How does a giant desert form in the middle of a global flood?The Coconino sandstone contains lots of evidence that it formed on land, not underwater. It has tracks made by terrestrial animals, for example, which is a real problem for flood geology. What were terrestrial animals doing walking around, leaving tracks in sand dunes in the middle of a global flood, especially after thousands of feet of sediments had been deposited by that flood beneath them?

A commenter at that link also discusses the shape and size of the sand grains.  

Just to stick with the Coconino Sandstone for a while longer - it's also a second source sediment, if I remember my geology correctly. But even if I don't: a look through a hand lens at the sand grains will show you nicely rounded, nearly spherical, almost uniformly sized grains. That means they most likely have gone through at least two cycles of erosion and deposition.

For more on both subjects, Talk Origins has some citations.
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Updated May6: Another blog discussing the layers of the Grand Canyon.  An excerpt, there are more layers discussed at the link.

The Grand Canyon’s “layers”, on the other hand, are not all comprised of material one would associate with a volcanic eruption. In fact, they are comprised of a vast series of strata of different types, each requiring a distinct and long-lasting depositional environment in order to have time to form. The bottom layer is the Vishnu Group, mostly granite and precambrian rock. Above that, it’s all sedimentary rock, each layer deposited in an entirely different environment, in roughly this order from the bottom up:
Tapeats Sandstone: This is the oldest of what is called the Tonto Group, large strata formed at the edge of an ancient body of water called the Tonto sea. 300 feet thick, comprised of near-shore and sandbar deposits from the edge of that sea.
Bright Angel Shale: 325 feet thick, full of trilobites and other brachiopod and mollusk fossils, as well as lots of tracks, trails and burrows from animals. Formed in a shallow marine environment as the Tonto sea encroached further on land.
Muav Limestone: The last of the Tonto Group formations. 375 feet thick, with more trilobite and brachiopod fossils and yet more invertebrate tracks and trails. This was deposited as the Tonto sea encroached even further on the land.
Redwall Limestone: 500 feet thick. Like most limestones, this one is made up of the shells of sea creatures, made of calcium carbonate, after they die and settle to the bottom of a shallow sea. A 500-foot thick limestone takes an incredibly long time to form and it’s not possible for all of those sea creatures whose dead bodies are in the formation to have lived at the same time. This formation requires a shallow, relatively tranquil marine environment for a very long period of time in order to form.

Silvestru's Global Flood: Part three: Monterey Canyon

This is part of a longer post about Silvestru's video containing evidence for a Global Flood.  I chose to break up the posts so that individual claims can be better discussed.  The video can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-BaMAt4dnE

Note that the video starts with about thirty minutes of introduction.  I believe the original poster of the video has left some suggestions of where to start watching to skip the intro.

In this post, at 1:04 Silvestru says, "What about a canyon - or gorge - in the ocean - deeper and longer than the Grand Canyon. Monterey Canyon  - California. The ocean doesn't flow. Evolutionists keep a low profile. - They don't even talk about it."

Let's ignore the condescending opinion.  I guess evolutionists don't talk much about it, but geologists seem to.

Here is the abstract of Robert Lloyd's master's thesis:

Evidence is presented that indicates that Monterey Submarine Canyon was once the terminus of a major land drainage system. This pre-existing drainage system is not in evidence today because it has been altered by displacement along the San Andreas Fault. A numerical model based on conservation of mass and plate tectonic reconstruction is utilized to reconstruct the topography of the region as it appeared prior to onset of motion along the San Andreas Fault. Model results indicate that the Colorado River may have drained into Monterey Bay during early Miocene time. (Author)

Elsewhere, this is described as 'the dominant theory'.  I'm out of my league here, but at the very least, geologists do talk and write about this.

One Problem with Silvestru's claim is that the Monterey Canyon, in his scenario, would never be on the surface.  If "the ocean doesn't flow" and his mechanism keeps that area underwater, how can it be a sign of a global flood?  Indeed, as Silvestru needs the ocean floor to buckle and pour water over the land, he also needs this canyon to flow in the opposite direction for at least half the time.

Silvestru;s Global Flood, Part four, atomic bursts

This is part of a longer post about Silvestru's video containing evidence for a Global Flood.  I chose to break up the posts so that individual claims can be better discussed.  The video can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-BaMAt4dnE

Note that the video starts with about thirty minutes of introduction.  I believe the original poster of the video has left some suggestions of where to start watching to skip the intro.

In this post, which I thought about naming, "the science of 1950's monster movies" due to the strange belief that blaming atomic energy would solve his problems, Silvestru hypothesizes how the Earth could buckle and the oceans could flood the land.

At around 1:10, Silvestru brings up the mechanism for the flood, and I do, at last, feel competent to comment upon this. My summary:

Combined creationist model: Massive radioactive bursts send heat from the core, through the mantle to the ocean floor, creating domes.  The ocean basins' volume decreases and the water is pushed over the continents.  Radio clocks are 'reset'  Ocean floors rise, continents sink and deep ocean sediments flow onto (what is now) land.

His description includes images which show radioactive bursts moving up to the mantle under the ocean floors.  Here is a big problem.  Radioactive waves can travel more-or-less forever in vacuum. They don't travel nearly so far in atmosphere, liquids and don't travel far at all in heavy metal solids.  If radioactive bursts originated at or near the core, they would almost immediately hit the atoms of nearby ore.  Depending on the ore, the burst might be extinguished or amplified, but the direction of the continued burst would be random.  A particle hits and excites a nucleus and one or more particles may leave but there is no expectation that the new particles would continue in the same direction.  If Silvestru wants to imagine the entire Earth's mantle expanding due to heat energy, fine.  However, he cannot expect merely local expansion and buckling to occur.  His mechanism sucks.

Silvestru's Global Flood: Part five. The Bouma Sequence

This is part of a longer post about Silvestru's video containing evidence for a Global Flood.  I chose to break up the posts so that individual claims can be better discussed.  The video can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-BaMAt4dnE

Note that the video starts with about thirty minutes of introduction.  I believe the original poster of the video has left some suggestions of where to start watching to skip the intro.

In this post, I display my ignorance:

At 1:18, he claims that fine sediment can settle in fast moving water, describing this as the Bouma sequence. I don't know if this is possible, but the results of this Google search seem to show otherwise.

After some quick searching, understanding the Bouma sequence seems to require more time than i wish to spend.  Read this abstract for some details.

Mostly, I want to say that when a specialist offers an incomprehensible argument, you need to look at other arguments, ones that you understand, to determine if you want to believe the new one.  Logic states that each argument rises or falls on its own merits but we can use logic to consider the trustworthiness of the speaker as well.  However you look at it, this is not an argument I am capable of rebutting, but that does not mean it is correct.

Silvestru's Global Flood: Part six, the Himalayas

Silvestru discusses the Himalayas around 1:22.  To simplify, he points out that there are fish fossils on or near the peak of Everest and also that geologists agree on a 3cm/year erosion rate.  He states that the mountain should be 135km deep valley in the mantle by now if erosion had continued for millions of years.  He says there is no way the mountain was raised 50 million years ago, it would have eroded to nothing.

I do feel moderately competent to comment here, especially as he provides nothing but assertion for his claims.  No evidence of anything is given here and I feel that is because there was no evidence for his claim.

Here is a very short video of how geologists feel the Himalayas were formed.  As I was taught in elementary school, they appear to have been formed when the Indian subcontinent impacted Asia.  The rocks found on Everest came from North and South, not vertically. This admirably explains the fish fossils as well - they may have come from the North.

Unless Silvestru can defend his claim that the rock rose vertically and not from either side, he has to be considered a liar, and a poor one.  This is grade school stuff.