Re: As people become Christians

Glenn Morton (grmorton@psyberlink.net)
Fri, 13 Jun 1997 06:12:24 -0500

At 10:52 PM 6/12/97 -0700, Dario A Giraldo wrote:
>For a breath of fresh air, here is an excerpt for the current edition (June
>16, 1997) of US News & World Report magazine. The article begins with
>having a caption in the cover with the words "God's Geophisics".
>
>Read it all ye old earthers/universers and Noah flood doubters. This
>brother gets national exposure and has the academia credentials (EE from
>Princeton and PhD in Geophisics from UCLA).

Exposure is not indicative of truth. The alar scare on apples got lots of
exposure also.

>To top it off he works at Los
>Alamos Nat'l Lab of the US Dept. of Energy. So he can't be label an
>ignorant, unlearned and unskilled Christian as some here in this forum seem
>to think of us who literally believe The Bible and see the world in black
>and white.
>

I know John. He likes to ignore lots of geological data that contradicts
his position. His acceptance of the global flood, like my former acceptance
of the global flood is a matter of faith not evidence. If you would like,
this week end I will critique his model of the flood.

>Remembering than in latter days the redeemed will overcome the acussers of
>the brethren by the word of their testimony (among other things).
>
>Page 56...
>"Fifty three years old and 6 feet tall,
>he grew up on a farm near Lubbock, Texas,
>the eldest of four children. His father
>was a professor of animal nutrition at
>Texas Tech, and his family was, as he
>tells it, essentially agnostic...
>
>But that changed as he moved deeper into
>Christianity, which brought him to
>the "conviction ... that indeed there had
>been a major catastrophe in the Earth's
>past that accounts for a large fraction of
>the geological features we observe at the
>Earth's surface today:'
>
> Baumgardner believes that around
>6,000 years ago, when "God saw that the
>wickedness of man was great in the Earth"
>(Genesis 6:5), he caused an enormous
>blob of hot mantle material to come rush-
>ing up at incredible velocity through the
>underwater midocean ridges. The materi-
>al ballooned, displacing a tidal wave of sea
>water over the continents.

One fact that he ignores here is that measurements of mantle viscosity (the
trouble a liquid has in flowing) show that the mantle has a viscosity of
around 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 poise (10^22).

Thick honey has 10 poise
water has .01 poise

mantle has 10^21 times the viscosity of honey, you can see that it would be
quite difficult for mantle material to come rushing up from the deep at a
rapid speed. (see S.W. Carey, The Expanding Earth, Elsievier Publ. p. 97

This, Baum-
>gardner says, was the flood on which
>Noah sailed, the water covering the moun-
>tains and destroying "every living sub-
>stance ... which was upon the face of the
>ground, both man, and cattle:' Then, after
>150 days (Genesis 7:24), the bubble re-
>treated with equal speed into the Earth,
>and the continents began re-emerging
>above the water, sending the runoff back
>to the oceans at around 100 miles an hour.

Water has NEVER been observed to flow faster than 20 miles per hour.
Consider this:

"The mean velocity of rivers in flood varies from 4 to 10 feet
per second. the mean veleocity attained in large rivers tends to
be slightly higher than that in small rivers. There are, of
course, many local situations where, owing to constrictions or
rapids, velocity attains greater values. The figures cited above
include a large majority of river channels in reaches that have no
unusual features. For rivers of moderate size (2 to 100 square
miles of drainage area), the flow at bankfull stage will ordinarily
have a mean velocity on the order of 4 feet per second. If one had
to make a guess without any measurement data, that figure would be
a usable approximation.
"the U.S. Geological Survey has analyzed individual velocity
measurements made by current meter at the point of maximum velocity
in river cross sections. The data were from routine measurements
at 48 gaging stations on 27 large rivers throughout the country.
A frequency table of 2,950 maximum values was compiled. Analysis
showed the mean to be 4.84 feet per second, the medial 4.11, and
the mode 2.76 feet per second. Data on the Mississippi river
constituted 13 percent of the sample and had a median value of 8.0
feet per second.
"Less than 1 percent of the total measurements exceeded 13
feet per second. The highest velocity known to have been recorded
with a current meter by the U.S. Geological Survey was 22.4 feet
per second in a rockbound section of the Potomac River at Chain
Bridge near Washington, D.C., on May 14, 1932. Velocities of 30
feet per second (20 miles per hour) have been reported but were not
measured by current meter. No greater values are known."
Luna B. Leopold, A View of the River, (London, England: Harvard
University Press, 1994), p. 33

>(A very fast river with a huge erosion ca-
>pacity runs at only about 10 miles an
>hour.) Baumgardner says that this runoff
>would have been sufficient to create the
>Grand Canyon and other massive geologic
>features and to deposit the various sedi-
>mentary layers in about one week.

At water velocities that rapid, running OFF of the continent, the
sedimentary material should NEVER have settled on top of the continental
blocks. All the sedimentary material should be in the ocean basins. Yet what
we find is that the maximum thickness of sediment is on top of the
continents. Parts of Oklahoma have between 45 and 60 thousand feet of
sediment. The ocean has only about 1500 feet of sediment. Baumgardners
model fails to account for the sedimentary thicknesses.
>
> The science Baumgardner uses to ac-
>count for these extraordinary happenings
>is a sort of niche physics called runaway
>subduction. A theory proposed in the
>1960s under another name by a physicist
>at General Electric, runaway subduction
>posits that the potential energy in the cold,
>heavy crust of the Earth is like the poten-
>tial energy in a rock held above the
>ground. Drop the rock, and its potential
>energy is turned by gravity into kinetic en-
>ergy, and into heat when it hits the
>ground. As gravity pulls the rock, so it
>pulls the gigantic, heavy plates of ocean
>floor under the continents into the hot-
>ter, lighter mantle, which is silicate rock..."
>

The viscosity problem is what killed runaway subduction theory.

>On the other comments of atheists, long time ago I learned that the best
>approach with them is to pray for them (that is if one truly cares) and let
>God deal with them.
>
>Carl Sagan already met the God of Abraham he didn't believe in and the
>Jesus he rejected. Just like every other human will. The only detail is
>that finding this little bit of news after leaving earth is too late and it
>is a situation that is irreversible. But that is a decision that each
>human will make and will win or lose by the way he/she chooses.
>
>Too many souls are hungry and searching that are ready to receive Christ
>to waste time with individuals whose only purpose is just like Elymas with
>Paul. Besides The Lord sent His followers to be witness and to shake the
>dust off their sandals when they aren't welcomed and go on. We aren't soul
>winners or converters, that is the task of The Holy Spririt.

And too many christians leave the faith because of proposals like
Baumgardner's which can't account for the facts of science. See my post on
why people become atheists.

>One thing is to exchange ideas and another to go on and on and on with the
>same concepts back and forth without any clearly defined goal or objective
>? Will anybody really think than a fellow who stops believing in God
>because Genesis doesn't rime with his understanding of how it all came into
>existence will change because an extra e-mail ?
>
>My belief in God is based on a daily relationship with Him. The first 12
>chapters of Genesis aren't a doctoral paper on creation but a brief
>explanation of certain events. How it all began is a mystery and whether
>you are labeled an evolutionist, Darwinist, OEC or YEC doen't bring you any
>closer to solving the puzzle.
>
>As someone who was purchased by Christ and who no longer lives for me but
>for Him, I must give account of my time and how it is being used.

Dario, there are few here who do not have the daily relationship with Jesus
that you speak of.

glenn

Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm