I met a kid (claim, not verified) on G+ a few days ago. He called himself a Young Earth Creationist. I was fascinated. I thought that they were pretty much extinct. I sure hadn’t had one wander into a science forum for a debate in a long time.
After a few back and forth comments, it became clear to everyone that he was just regurgitating Answers in Genesis. Sadly, he appeared to have no real understanding of science, the topics under debate, nor the results of his ad hoc stories to answer questions. I was not surprised at all with his complete lack of evidence for anything he said.
For example, I asked where the water of the flood came from. According to legend, it rained for 40 days and 40 nights. The final water level covered the highest mountains.
His reply is that it was in the ice caps. That’s a cool story bro. But what would that mean?
First, just consider the Pacific Ocean, there’s roughly 180 million cubic miles of water in the Pacific basin. If you covered all of present day Antarctica and an equal surface area in the Arctic, then the total ice would reach almost 45 miles into the air. Yeah, image a column of ice in Antartica that reaches almost to space. If you consider the other major oceans, then it would reach into space.
Second, if the ice was 60+ miles in altitude, how did it get there? There are no clouds that reach nearly that high.
Then we have to consider the amount of energy needed to melt and then vaporize over 180 million cubic miles of ice. It takes 333 joules to melt 1 kilogram of ice (roughly a liter). The amount of ice is 7.50272729 × 1020 liters times 333 kilojoules… that’s 2.5 × 1026 Joules. That’s a lot. It’s roughly the amount of energy the sun puts out every second or about 1000 times more than the amount of energy in the asteroid strike at the end of the Cretaceous that wiped out the dinosaurs.
But the water is still very cold. Now we have to get all of it into a vapor. That takes another 419 kiloJoules to boil all that water. That’s pretty close to the same total amount of energy.
But then, all that water vapor is turned into rain. Since it takes energy to turn water into vapor, that energy is released when it rains. The temperature of the Earth would have been raised by that energy.
In conclusion, within 40 days and 40 nights, Earth would have experienced changes in energy equal to about 3,000 times the amount of energy that destroyed 75% of all life on Earth. And he thinks that a small wooden boat would have survived.
I don’t think he liked that answer. But it’s just the results of his just-so stories. Creationists, you might have noticed, rarely think about the next step. They just say whatever they think will get them out of the next pickle they are in without thinking about the results.
Anyway, I had a fair list of questions. We’ve talked about them previously here, so I won’t mention them unless someone asks. But each of those questions is devastating to the notion of a world-wide flood and/or a 6,000 year old Earth.
What is not surprising is the behavior of this kid. After two or three days, he stopped posting on that read and started posting the exact same OP in another group on G+. It was certainly a disappointing, but not unsurprising, performance.
I suspect that there are a lot more YECs. And like most creationists, they will huddle in their holes. Those few that dare come out will be squashed, again and again, until they retreat to those holes and are congratulated by their colleagues for being brave enough to show those evolutionists what for. None them having a single clue about what was said.
