It’s always so exciting to see a new creationist argument…until you actually look at it and see how silly it is. And they’ve been getting more and more desperately absurd as the years go by and the flaws in the old arguments get harder and harder to support. Once upon a time, they could just say it rained really hard for 40 days to flood the earth. When it was pointed out that you can’t wring that much water out of the atmosphere, they had to contrive all kinds of elaborate conditions for earth prior to the flood, with deep reservoirs and a “vapor canopy” of crystalline hydrogen to keep huge volumes of water under pressure above the earth. That was awfully silly, so now this new argument tries to rescue it with “evidence” for some mighty weird conditions on God’s earth.
The logic is a tortured, to say the least. Here’s a simplified version of the new argument by a creationist called Ikester, and discovered by Pooflinger.
| Ikester’s reasoning |
My reply |
| The water that bubbles up out of deep springs is blue. |
No, it’s not, no more than any other kind of water. |
| It’s blue because it contains hydrogen peroxide. This why the water is highly oxygenated. |
Hydrogen peroxide is not blue. Spring water does not contain significant amounts of hydroxen peroxide. Oxygenated water is not the same as hydrogen peroxide. |
| The hydrogen peroxide formed by exposing the water to a very high pressure, pure oxygen atmosphere. |
That’s not how hydrogen peroxide is made. If only the chemical engineers knew that H2O2 could be synthesized by putting water and O2 together in a vessel at 2 atmospheres of pressure! |
| Therefore, spring water proves that the earth had a pure oxygen atmosphere and seas of concentrated hydrogen peroxide, exactly as the Bible says. |
Seas of a highly reactive oxidizing agent and rocket propellant in a lethally corrosive atmosphere? Sounds like paradise to me, all right. |
Poor Mr Ikester got brutally raked over the chemically lethal coals on that whole story, so he modifed his explanation a little bit. It wasn’t H2O2 — the ocean was full of H2O3! Oh, that changes everything! I’m sure the little squidlets would have frolicked happily in that environment.
Somehow, I don’t think this little example of free-associating pseudo-chemistry is going to get much traction in the creationist literature, but you never know … maybe he could write it up and get the ICR to publish it.
“The logic is tortured. . .”
Surely as the sun rises in the East.
Wow, I think this makes the time cube guy seem rational. Just wow. Why are they so damn proud of their stupidity and ignorance?
In the spirit of “new” creationist arguments, I heard a doosey this week on NPR (might have been Wednesday). There was discussion of the importance to Republican voters of creationism/evolution (a “hot topic” after the recent debate), and they had called in one of the usual suspects from the Discovery Institute to blather.
Somehow, the guy managed to sneak in the suggestion that aspects of the human body (such as our eyes) considered to be “imperfect” and poor examples of ‘intelligent’ design are, in fact, perfectly designed after all! It’s just that … wait for it … *biologists* aren’t qualified to judge such things very well. “If you ask an engineer or a physicist, they will tell you that the eye is in fact perfect!”
How’s that for shameless?
-Michael
A new tidbit for Ikester’s Evowiki entry!
This is as stupid as his “Eternal Time Creation” idea.
AlanW
I followed your link to the time-cube page.
Of course he’s rational. Or- are you part of the singularity worshipping academia who deserve to die because you deny the 4-cube nature of the world.
Next you’ll be telling me that the Earth revolves around its axis in one day!
Go drink a cup of H3OOH2O2OHHO and tell me if I’m wrong.
The first line is really the one that had me rolling. Did he consider taking the water inside in a glass and setting it on a white table top? I wonder what his otherworldly explaination for its newfound whiteness would have been.
Let’s see if I’ve got this new type of logic down right. The ocean depths are black. Therefore water under pressure is black. Crude oil is black. Crude oil reservoirs are evidence of the source of water before its elevation into the atmospheric water canopy by volcanic action when the hydrocarbon molecules are cracked and oxygen forcibly replaces carbon. Coal deposits are what remains of the stripped away carbon atoms after the crud oil ‘changes’ to water. I think I’ll keep my day job.
One last thought, why not start a contest with scientifically literate individuals composing far-fetched creation stories– any one of which would certainly ‘hold more water’ than the bilge from the Discovery Institute. Better yet, surreptitiously forward the results to DI. A Sokal style hoax. Prizes are awarded to the ones the DI actually uses.
After seeing Kirk Cameron’s Crocoduck and Ray Comfort’s divine banana, why can’t this guy be part of the gang. Egnor is getting stale, let’s have Ikester be the DI Dupe of the month.
The logic is a tortured, to say the least…
Logic? They don’t need no steenking logic.
It’s weird, isn’t it?? They apparently have enough brains to try to figure out something that fits with their woo-woo, but they don’t have enough brains to figure out that it’s woo-woo!!! What a tragedy!
Ikester reminds me a twit I met during my two-year Army tour back in the early 60’s. He thought he had invented a gravity defying machine and talked about it incessantly but without revealing his idea, lest someone rip it off and make millions, which he thought was his due. Eventually, I got his idea out of him. It was a gyroscope whose rotor’s rotational speed exceeded the Earth’s escape velocity. To his way of thinking, the gyroscope should simply rise from the surface and go off into space. It took me quite a long time to convince him–and I’m not sure I ever did–that the net velocity of the gyroscope was zero and that the best it could do (assuming one could actually build a rotor that wouldn’t explode at such a speed) would be to drift across the surface of whatever it was resting on. We never discussed evolution but I always suspect he was a creationist too.
Sounds like kind of a crazy-quilt synthesis of YEC and “Oxygen Therapy” lore, which held that by pumping H2O2 into the bloodstream you could cure AIDS/cancer/insufficient gullibility. Disease was after all unknown to Adam & Eve, so an O2-rich environment matches the predictions of pseudoscience on two wholly separate fronts here. Some might argue that a highly flammable atmosphere would tend to be nonconducive to life but we have written evidence that Prometheus wouldn’t get up to his tricks for another millenium or two. Clearly a non-issue.
Seconding the idea of flooding the DI with bogus theories, and awarding a prize to the first one published. First one to win a Templeton has to buy drinks for the group, though.
Well, now we know what killed the dinosaurs. One of them struck a spark, or knocked a bit of silver into the ocean, and that was that…
So I stopped reading for a while, because your blog depressed me too much.
And I came back to this.
I’m gonna need a reference on this one.
What is the Hebrew for hydrogen peroxide?
Oh.My.Fictional.God.
Don’t these guys* ever give up? Heck, I get exhausted just by reading this.
*Have you noticed the fact that almost all vocal creationists are male? Are only men so incredibly stupid that they hang on to these twisted pretzels of logic, or are the creationist women all subservient housewives in accordance with The-Not-So-Good Book?
But this would mean that prehistoric birds had bleached feathers and resembled Vince Neil.
No, forsen, I’ve met some female rabid creationists.
Just as vapid as their male counterparts.
Ohh you guys got it all wroooong!
As a small boy I lurned about the flud from none other than Bill Cosby. God had commanded Noah to build an arc, but he had to quip back that the his flood plan would never work -the water bills would be astronomical.
So he convinces god of the folly of his original plan… and comes up with his own -rain for forty days AND forty nights, wait for the sewers to back up. Gods booming voice “RIGHT!”
And, Gary Larson showed me how the dinos went extinct. (cartoon with a bunch of dinosaurs smoking cigarettes).
These guys just don’t do any research, otherwise they’d discover these perfectly delightful explainations.
Yes, but what will John A. Davison have to say about this new theory of water coloration?
Yes, but what will John A. Davison have to say about this new theory of water coloration?
There’s just no excuse for that sort of stupid, man. It’s damn funny, but it’s also unbelievably terrifying that people can actually latch onto such lunacy. Ikester doesn’t even make the slightest attempt to base his gibberish in anyone’s definition of reality.
Michael,
I’m a physicist and I would like to explain why the eye is perfectly designed. Let me just clean my glasses, and we can get started…
I think this special theory of hydrogen peroxide creationism deserves a special name. Is anyone calling it the “HOHO theory” yet?
They even have proof that hell exists!
From http://www.yecheadquarters.org/hell.2.html