Now, let us continue. First of all, to refute the idea that creation science is based on science, I present you with the belief statement I mentioned earlier:

"(1) The Bible is the written Word of God...all of its assertions are historically and scientifically true in all of its original autographs....This means that the account of origins in Genesis is a factual presentation of simple historical truths. (2) All basic types of living things, including man, were made by direct acts of God during Creation Week as described in Genesis. Whatever biological changes have occured since Creation have accomplished only changes within the original created kinds. (3) The great Flood described in Genesis, commonly refered to as the Noachian Deluge, was an historical event, worldwide in its extent and effect. (4) Finally, we are an organization of Christian men of science, who accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. The account of the special creation of Adam and Eve as one man and one woman, and their subsequent Fall into sin, is the basis for our belief in the necessity of a Savior for all mankind. Therefore, salvation can come only thru accepting Jesus Christ as our Savior."

That's a very nice statement of the orthodox Protestent view of Creation. But it isn't science. Science derives conclusions from observational evidence. Creationism clearly doesn't, as the first sentence points out. Therefore, it isn't science, and shouldn't be treated as such.

Now, I'm going to try and address as many of your points as I can.

"1: The radioactive decay of uranium and thorium alone would produce all the helium of the atmosphere in only
40,000 years. There is no known way in which large amounts of helium can escape the atmosphere. Thus, unless the rates of decay of radioactive elements was much lower in the past, the atmosphere appears to be relatively young."

Specifically, helium-4, and the date I've read has it as 'no more than 200,000 years.' The problem is, helium can and does escape the atmosphere. How? Two very technical sounding processes that I doubt I could adequately explain. But you can read about them yourself in these two papers:

Banks, P. M. & T. E. Holzer. 1969. "High-latitude plasma transport: the polar wind" in Journal of Geophysical Research 74, pp. 6317-6332.

Sheldon, W. R. & J. W. Kern. 1972. "Atmospheric helium and geomagnetic field reversals" in Journal of Geophysical Research 77, pp. 6194-6201

"4: As tidal friction slows the Earth's spin, physics requires that the Moon recedes from the Earth."

Um...source? Because as it says in my high school physics textbook, the Earth and the Moon are tidally locked, and as a result the two bodies are gradually getting closer. Someday in the distant future, the Moon is going to get too close and be torn apart. Then we'll have rings! Unfortunately, the mass and orbit of these rings will suck the atmosphere off our planet. But it might not happen! Because the Earth might be consumed by an ever expanding sun before that time. As the old saying goes, damned if you do...

"5: If the Moon was billions of years old, by now the dust that's accumulated on the surface should be AT MINIMUM several meters thick, with some estimates as high as a mile. Instead, it's only a couple of inches. Either the rate of impact was exceedingly low in the past, huge amounts of dust were removed or transformed by an unknown process, or the moon is far less than 4.6 billion years old."

This one is easier to explain. The figures you're using for dust accumulation are simply wrong. Why? Because they were recorded using the assumption that all the nickel collected was the result of cosmic dust, when in fact most of it is from smog.

More accurate measurements from a variety of different detection methods give a much smaller amount. How much smaller? The orignal number used for your claim was 14,000,000 tons per year. The more accurate figure is 20,000 to 40,000 tons per year. Using those figures the amount of dust on the moon should be about a foot or less. Of that dust, only the first few inches would actually be dust. The rest is composed of harder and more packed material.

Also, for each meteorite impact, you don't just get its mass, but also the mass of all the rocks it vaporizes. Not all of the material is from meteorites.

I'm putting two and three down here at the bottom because I don't have as much detail to go along with them. So, feel free to tear me apart if necessary.

"2: Volcanoes eject almost a cubic mile of material into the atmosphere every year. If this rate were constant, 10 times the amount of the sediment on Earth would be expelled in 4.6 billion years. Only about 25% of sediments are of volcanic origin, and evidence suggests that erruption rates were much higher in the past. No process has been proposed that can remove or transform so much volcanic material. Thus, unless such a process can be found, or volcanic activity was actually far lower in the past, Earth's sediments appear to be less than 100 million years old."

First of all, this only works if you have volcanoes going all the time, constantly, for the entire course of history. This is obviously untrue. Some years we have volcanic eruptions, some years we don't. Second, where do you think the material ejected by a volcano goes? It isn't going fast enough to achieve escape velocity. Instead, it falls back onto the Earth, where it is eroded into the sea, falls back into the Earth, and comes up again. The process is cyclic in nature.

"3: The continents are eroding at a rate that would level them in less than 25 million years. Thus, assuming that the continents were significantly larger in the past, the continents steadily grow to counter the erosion, or the erosion has begun only recently, the continents can not be any older than 40 or 50 million years."

Again, continents do grow, through a variety of processes, but mostly through volcanic action. You can fly to Hawaii or Iceland or the the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and witness this for yourself.

You seem to be implying, and I apologize if I'm misreading your statements, that eroded material simply vanishes from the surface of the Earth. This isn't true, any more than evaporated water vanishes.

The most interesting point about the lunar dust theory is that it's still being cited. Han Petterson's original assumpions which he made back in 1960 were discredited soon after. Peterson himself thought that his initial figure of 15 million tons per year was rediculously high and proposed that a third of that might be more reliable. As you say the current figure is 40,000 metric tons per year which would give an estimate of a few centimetres depth on the moon over a 4 billion year lifetime.

What is really noticeable in this discussion is the way that the pro-Creationists here seem to cling to old theories and ignore new ones. The Juaqrez river footprints were later disproved successfully, but that rebuttal is ignored. The dust layer on the moon, at an estimated speed of laying, must be a certain depth if the moon is old. It's quite demonstrably not that thick, therefore the rate - estimated rather than observed - must be wrong. But you seem to want to stick to that estimated rate instead of adapting to new empirical evidence.

And the Ringworld's nights were caused by an inner ring of free-floating (or connected?) squares. Asteroid defense was provided by active weapons and the attitude controls of the Ring itself.

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"Wait a minute - this isn't the Monsterometer, it's the Frog Exaggerator!"

Sorry about that. I assumed that the last part of the last sentance in your statement ("...to base one's faith on the absolute historic accurracy of the bible is silly, it's simply too easy to disprove.") was talking about the historic accuracy of the Bible, not the whole chain of logic. The problem is that I can't show that the logic works unless you believe in the Garden of Eden story, which is considered mith by Christian Theistic Evolutionists. Again, my apologies.

Sol:

Does that really matter? The evidence is still there, whether you're looking specifically for it or not. And this is only a statement of beliefs, not a statement of their mission. And there's a big difference between a belief and a logical conclusion.

The solar wind directly interacting with the upper atmosphere during a geomagnetic field reversal!? Ha! OK, problem here is that there is no evidence that the Earth's magnetic field has ever reversed, and no conceivable mechanism by which it could do so without frying the entire planet. All those "reversals" on the ocean floor, which are the ONLY evidence of geomagnetic reversal, are just locations in which the magnetic field was slightly weaker when the rock was formed.

See my comments to JEM about the receding Moon.

Sorry, but I've got a page long mathematical dissertation about moon dust sitting in front of me which is quite convincing. I'd post it, but I don't know how to get half these symbols into the keyboard. I think the problem with your numbers is that you only account for the dust from space, not for the pulverized moon rock, of which there is 67 times more. You mentioned that, but don't appear to account for it.

Volcanoes:
Sorry. I meant to say "on average". OK, it's going to fall back to Earth to become sediment, and most of it is going to stay there for quite a while before being eroded. Even if it did all fall into the ocean, there's no way it could get back into the mantle. And volcanoes couldn't account for that ammount of erosion all over the world. I localized places like Hawaii, sure, but not everywhere.

You are misreading me, but that's all right. I've done that often enough, myself. What I'm saying is that the eroded material is going to end up at the bottom of the ocean, leveling out the continents and raising the ocean floor.

JEM:

Thanks for your support.

As for the Moon, if the Moon wasn't there 2 billion years ago, how did it get there? It couldn't spin off from the Earth, as the relative amounts of the elements are too dissimilar. It couldn't have congealed from the same gas cloud as Earth, as it's orbit is too far inclined. It couldn't have been formed from particles orbiting the Earth, as there would be visible particles still orbiting within the Moon's orbit. It couldn't have been captured, as it's in a nearly circular orbit. Assuming nobody has a better theory, the logical thing to conclude is that it was created in it's present orbit, less than the 1.5-2 billion years ago afore mentioned.

See the evidence I gave Sol in relation to the Moon dust.

First:

Don't you mean pro-Creationist (singular)? I appear to be the only one here. OK, well, for one thing, I'd never even heard of the Juarez footprints until a few days ago, and as I said, I've got a large mathematical dissertation in my hand right now that shows that the numbers I gave for moon dust are correct. There have been cases where I was simply misinformed, and just because someone doesn't know about a rebuttal doesn't mean that they ignore it. And what about Archaeopteryx? Some Evolutionists still cling to that, despite the fact that it has been prooven to be a hoax.

All right, I'm done. Essentially, every point of evidence I use you deny, ignore, or replace with your own unfounded speculation. That's fine. It doesn't constitute an argument, but that's fine. I could, of course, simply respond by saying that all of your "points" are based on several extreme misunderstandings of basic facts, but where would that get us, exactly?

Of course, you'll no doubt interpret this as a great victory for your viewpoint, when in fact all it really means is that I'm tired, and I have to go to work now.

At any rate, if anyone asks in the future, I am now a Jainist, and believe that the world has always existed as it does now. Unchanging and unchangeable. It is the most reasonable position, after all.

The latest figures I've been able to find for lunar orbital parameters are from 1994 and were obtained by laser rangefinding measurements. The curently accepted distance from the centre of the earth to the centre of the moon is 385,000km with a current recession rate of 3.7cm per year. Assuming a constant rate (which is dubious as at the moment the moon is almost at the right distance for the energy transfer to be in resonance with the movement of the oceans-in the past and in the future the energy transfer will be less)then the moon would only have moved a distance of 166,500km over its supposed lifetime of 4.5 billion years. This does not give evidence at all for a 'young' system

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HMS White Star (your local friendly agent of Chaos:-) )

Can we get a headcount of those that do and do not believe that God exists and created the universe?

Experimental Deism in a nutshell: God-being was bored / curious / lonely, and decided to create the Universe as an experiment. He/She/It/They formulated a universe bound by certain natural laws (Thermodynamics, Speed of C, gravitation and electromagnetism, etc.), as well as the potential for generating life (we assume, since we're here) and set it running: *BANG!*

And then left it alone, waiting to see what arose, with perhaps only occasional interference when things aren't developing. ("Okay, the big lizards on the Third Planet of Yellow Dwarf 1,345,264 in galaxy 26,252,753,828 just aren't getting any smarter. PROPS! Give me a 15-kilometer asteroid, drop it on that little peninsula there, we'll start over with those little furry critters, the.. um..." "Mammals, Boss." "Yeah, mammals. Run with that.")

In this worldview, the meaning of life would be to advance in knowledge until the species could talk to the God-Being on a near-level playing field, and discuss their experiences. Sin would be anything that hinders the growth of knowledge, thought, or endangers the species by harming its members.

You know, I happen to own a book that has a visual and taxonomic comparison of Archaeopteryx and Compsognathus... and they're nowhere near identical. Similar, yes, but not identical.

Some major differences:
Archaeopteryx has:
finger bones far too long
clavicles joined in a "wishbone"
an "opisthopubic pelvis" (birdlike)
a backwards rotated and opposed big toe, forming a birdlike foot for grasping and perching

And feathers, of course.

It should be pointed out that these feathers attatch to the forearm with anchors similar to todays birds, and are detailed down to the microscopic level, which effectively removes any possibility of forgery... unless the finder was one of the greatest forgers of all time, in which case why bother making a bird when you could do a DaVinci?

I hate to suggest it, but the person who wrote the book you used as a source may be either short on facts, or deceived, or being intentionally deceptive. It's not that old faker Gish, is it?

In any case, focusing on Archaeopteryx does very little. I see you haven't (or your book hasn't) mentioned Sinosauropteryx, Unenlagia, Caudipteryx, Protoarchaeopteryx, or Eoalulavis, all of which are non-Archaeopteryx fossils found in varying places (mostly in China and Mongolia), all of which point to a change from reptile to avian.

You can check these out in the July '98 issue of National Geographic, should you be willing.

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"When we turn our back on our principles, we stop being human." -- Janeway, "Equinox"

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HMS White Star (your local friendly agent of Chaos:-) )

OK, I'll have to concede this point. I have more. Just out of curiosity, exactly when was/will the moon [be] in the right place for energy transfer to be in resonance with the oceans (assuming constant rate, of course)?

First:

My source is "In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood" by Walt Brown, the world's foremost Creation Scientist. It was written in '95, so it's bound to be a little out of date. Maybe I should see if there's a seventh edition or not.

Experimental Deism sounds like something out of Gentry Lee's Rama series (which I highly recomend that you do NOT read; first one's by Clarke, and it's OK, but the others are D-U-M dumb). And another thing: something I've heard evolutionists say over and over again is "We assume that, even though it defies laws of probibility and physics, it still happened. We're here, after all." And Sol says Creation Scientists are unscientific.

As I said, unless the've found more fossils in the past four years, only one fossil out of six has a wishbone, and it's an obvious forgery. And of course they look like modern feathers. They are. The forger applied some sort of "amorphous paste", such as rubber cement, to the fossil, placed feathers in the paste, and pressed the slab and counterslab together. There are also "double strikes" in the slab, where there is a softer indentation of a nearby feather, such as those that would be created by a minor slip or adjustment while the slab and counterslab were being pressed together. And there's still no sternum, which is prerequisite for flight. And it's still practically impossible to fossilize a feather. I'm no expert on dinosaurian anatomy, but excluding the feathers, isn't it possible that this was just other flying dino, similar to the Pteradactyl, with bat-like wings? And another thing: I thought that the evolutionary series supposedly went something like "fish-reptile-anphibian-bird-mammal" (simplified). If that's correct, then why didn't the Archaeopteryx turn into an anphibian first?

And in my ongoing series on the age of the world:

6: Calculations show that the large, high-rimmed craters on the moon should level out do to gravity in less than 100 millenia. On Mercury and Venus, where gravity is greater and temperature higher, the craters should level out in far less time. Most random chance theorists say that almost all of those craters were formed several billion years ago, when the system was supposedly formed. If that's the case, why are they still here?

7: The Moon has a hot interior, indicating that it is less than a billion years old. Again I refer you to my point that there is no known way that the moon could exist in it's present orbit without being created there in it's present condition.

8: As comets pass near the sun, some of their mass vaporizes. Comets frequently break up, or fall into the sun or other planets. Most comets break up and disintegrate after less than 1000 orbits, usually less than 100,000 years. There is no known way to add comets to the system in a manor that remotely approaches their rate of destruction, and planets' gravity tend to expel comets from the system, rather than capture them. As the chances of a comet being older than 100,000 are extremely slim, comets, and therefore the rest of the system, must be less than that age.

9: Small, icy comets strike the atmosphere at an average rate of one every 20 seconds. Each one releases, on average, 100 tons of water into the atmosphere. If this rate is constant, and the Earth is several billion years old, then we should have several times more water than we do now, and RC theorists say that the rate of impact was higher in the past.

Have fun!

On a side note, I just checked out Ringworld. Seems like a combination of Clarke and Adams. : )

There is an error in your data: The above statement assumes that most or nearly all comets have an orbital period of less than 100 years. In actuality, very few do. Most comets are in very long elliptical orbits which take millennia to complete. (Kohoutek, for example, has an orbital period of 75,000 years, and Comet West has a period estimated at 500,000 years (and it must be at LEAST half that old, having already made half its journey, from the Oort cloud in.)) So, if we assume that West formed and began its trip inwards IMMEDIATELY after the beginning of the solar system (which it probably didn't, it probably took a while), and is now only near the middle of its lifetime, the Solar System must be over 250,000,000 years old, and probably much older.

Nice try, though.

9: Small, icy comets strike the atmosphere at an average rate of one every 20 seconds. Each one releases, on average, 100 tons of water into the atmosphere. If this rate is constant, and the Earth is several billion years old, then we should have several times more water than we do now, and RC theorists say that the rate of impact was higher in the past.

Lately, the above theory of minicomets is being looked upon with greater and greater skepticism. I'm not sure, but it may have been discredited entirely earlier this year. And IF this rate is constant is a big "if." However, there are mechanisms by which water vapor can leave an atmosphere.