23 days, 11 hours, 59 minutes until our Once and Future President, the Rightful President of the United States, is restored to his proper office.

Not that I’m counting, mind you.

[Assumes 0001 publication time. Wordpiss will be wordpiss and it’s unlikely to happen at that time.]

What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

Speaker Johnson: A Reminder.

And MTG is there to help make it stick.

January 6 tapes. A good start…but then nothing.

Were you just hoping we’d be distracted by the first set and not notice?

Are you THAT kind of “Republican”?

Are you Kevin McCarthy lite?

What are you waiting for?

I have a personal interest in this issue.

And if you aren’t…what the hell is wrong with you?

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot (i.e., paper) Prices

Last week:

Gold $2,623.40
Silver $29.58
Platinum $935.00
Palladium $948.00
Rhodium $4,850.00
FRNSI* 127.907– (Correction: 125.907-
Gold:Silver 88.688+

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, Kitco “ask” prices. Markets have closed for the weekend.

Gold $2,621.30
Silver $29.45
Platinum $930.00
Palladium $939.00
Rhodium $4,850.00
FRNSI* 125.805+
Gold:Silver 89.008+

Not a whole lot of movement this week, but enough to push gold:silver over 89! It continues to suck to be heavy on silver and light on gold. Unless, of course, you think this is a buying opportunity for the white metal.

*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.

More Fallout from the Final Experiment

Flerfs seem to fall into two distinct camps lately: 1) Those who claim the whole thing is faked, and: 2) Those who claim that they can shoehorn what happened into the Flat Earth model somehow.

First one first: As more and more footage is being uploaded the claims some make that TFE videos were shot in a soundstage somewhere are looking more and more ridiculous. Aircraft landing, rides on snowmobiles or other vehicles to and from the Union Glacier camp to Midway (the area they did most of their experiments at) show this is no sound stage. Another claim, that the sun was somehow fake: The sun was real by the testimony of even the Flerfs who were there. Jeran burned holes through paper with a magnifying glass, which counters the notion that it’s some sort of sun simulator (never mind the fact that no simulator is going to light up miles of terrain like that).

Second, we’re seeing two main lines of attack. One is that someone named Steven Alonzo allegedly used the flat earth model to predict the sorts of things that Will Duffy asked about, matching Globe Earth predictions. The problem is he used globe based mathematical models to do so! (The sincerest form of flattery being imitation.) Alonzo has allegedly founded a “Flat Earth University” where he lives in Belize.

@2:43 (meaning 2 hours and 43 minutes):

The other is a new flat earth model by someone named Hanvey who has added yet more layers to the “firmament” in order to try to get reflected suns to behave the way seen. So far his videos haven’t impressed anyone except some Flerfers. However, it’s supposedly a work in progress.

Flerfs are counting on these guys to rescue them.

McToon (“Where are the guns, Nathan?!?!”) is going to be able to demolish both, or so he promises. He’s waiting to see which way the Flerfs (those who don’t wake the hell up) jump; to Alonzo or Hanvey.

Also in that video shortly after the bit about Alonzo (at about 2:46:15), is the story of the presentation they gave to the staff of Union Glacier Camp about the Final Experiment. Flerfer Austin Witsit spoke and was seen by the full time meteorologist at Union Glacier. That meteorologist was pissed at Witsit’s condescending attitude and eventually just left. McToon makes a very trenchant point here, which is that if the meteorologist is wrong, people die. If Witsit is wrong, he’s just a lying turd on the internet and his followers won’t die from it. Witsit can be wrong and suffer no consequences because he has no responsibility. The meteorologist can’t be wrong.

2:48:05: “That’s always the thing. They can spout their nonsense because they have zero responsibility. You have responsibilities, you don’t get to be wrong, and continue to be wrong, right? You’re done. You’re done. That’s how it works.”

But someday, someone will die from this crap, just as surely as DEI hires have caused lives to be risked or even lost.

Some Go-Backs

Regarding my article from five weeks ago, where I discussed trans-Neptunian objects (as well as Centaurs) as a class before diving in and looking at the ones that qualify as dwarf planets the following week. I really didn’t tie things together, and I saw something that made it clear.

The TNOs or Kuiper Belt Objects plus “Scattered Disk Objects” orbit just outside the orbit of Neptune. Why not closer? Because Neptune or some other object would eventually get too close to them, and change their orbit–possibly flinging them out of the solar system just like it did with Voyager 2; otherwise putting it into a smaller orbit. And why aren’t they further away? They seem to get as close as they can without Neptune mucking them up, no closer…but they exist right up to that line. Well, go back in time. Maybe there were plenty of these sorts of objects at varying distances…and once Neptune came on the scene, it took care of all of the ones too close to the Sun. In other words, it’s not a coincidence that the Kuiper Belt’s inner boundary is near Neptune’s orbit, rather Neptune caused the boundary to be where it is.

So what happens when Neptune manages to perturb one of these objects? It either gets a speed boost and goodbye…or loses energy and drops into an orbit closer to the Sun. Well…those are the Centaurs! And a Centaur will eventually interact with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, or maybe go for a second round with Neptune. And at that point, it could either be flung out, or become a short term comet.

So now I’ve tied TNOs, Centaurs, and comets together in a way that takes a bunch of different conceptual “buckets” of things and relates them to each other.

(I’m not sure whether to add this to the article from five weeks ago…or to the one on comets…or both.)

Another thing I saw was someone throwing a bunch of solar-system objects (none of them moons) into a table, stripping the names off and considering things like: number of moons, orbit shape (eccentricity), orbit tilt (inclinations), distance from the sun, mass, size, and composition (gas, rocky, rocks with ice, ice with rocks). Of course this looks like a mess, but then he plotted one against another to find trends. For instance eccentric orbits tended to correlate with high inclinations. That’s kind of interesting (unlike most of the ones he showed at first). It got very interesting when he plotted size (diameter) against distance from the Sun. At that point, he got four distinct clumps. Not only that, but those four lumps tended to have the same compositions! So: the largest objects tend to be medium-far from the sun, and they’re all gaseous. The next larger group is closest to the sun and tends to be rocky. Then there’s a distant group–the most distant–of objects that are ice with some rock. Finally the smallest group, farther then the rocky groups, but closer than the gaseous group, that are rock and some ice. The four groups tend to have more things in common within the group: The gaseous objects tend to have more moons. The groups that are rock-ice mixes tend to have those elliptical, inclined orbits.

Of course, he cheated. He put the largest bodies in each of the four groups into the table to begin with. But he insists that even after he adds more and more objects, the groupings persist.

The implication is that the solar system has four different kinds of objects (aside from however you want to handle moons). In the order I described them: Gas giants, terrestrial planets, trans-Neptunian objects, and the asteroids. Now this doesn’t account for “round” versus “lumpy.” Everything except gas giants can be small enough to be lumpy.

Could this illuminate the path to classifying objects in the solar system? No one is satisfied by the current state of affairs, that’s for sure. One thing that has to be accounted for that isn’t, here, is the moons.

Geology

Geology has, until recently, been the study of Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and how they change over time. In the last few decades, it has become extended to cover the other objects of the solar system, even though the word comes from the Greek γῆ (gê) ‘earth’ (in particular) and λoγία (-logia) ‘study of, discourse’. This is because much of what we have learned down here has served as a basis for studying what is up there, despite a myriad of fascinating differences. (Perhaps it would have been more useful for me to write this before doing the rest of the solar system.)

Geology is a gigantic subject, and since even today it has to do mostly with that ball of rock we stand on every day, it tends to have a ton of practical applications, everything from telling us where to dig or drill to get the good stuff, to advising us where to put buildings, to watching out for hazards like volcanoes and earthquakes. There are a lot of sub-specialties including mineralogy (the study of the actual mineral constituents of rocks), seismology, vulcanology, glaciology, speleology (caves), and so on.

In general outline, one goes from studying minerals, to rocks (composed of mixes of minerals), “unlithified material”–the sorts of things that end up on top of bedrock, like gravel and soil, but also magma (liquid material under the surface of the earth). And then there’s the whole earth, including tectonic plates, the structure of the earth (which I touched on last time).

And then there are landforms like mountains, streams, sand dunes, glaciers, hogbacks, alluvial fans (i.e., the deposits that form near the mouths of streams), and on and on.

A gigantic field with a lot of places where one can do a deep dive.

And to be honest, NOT something I have strong knowledge of. I’ll be learning a lot in doing this series. In the past I’ve had to look up details but at least I had a broad mental outline from which to proceed. With geology, though I know some things, the outline is much sketchier. I’m trying very hard not to get out ahead of my skis here.

It’s best for all of us if I start at the beginning. But before I do that, there are a couple of absolutely basic concepts I have to explain.

Rock Types and the Rock Cycle

Rocks come in three basic types.

The first is “igneous” rocks like granite and basalt. These are rocks that formed directly from cooling magma (and magma is the term for lava that is still underground). This can happen either deep underground as the magma cools (e.g., granite) or above ground when the magma spills out onto the surface during an eruption (e.g., basalt). You can tell how quickly the magma/lava cooled by the size of the crystals–big crystals mean it cooled slowly, so basalt, being the result of an eruption, tends to have smaller crystals than granite, which is formed deep underground and thus tends to cool slowly.

The second is “sedimentary” rocks, examples being shale, limestone and sandstone. These are rocks that form when other rocks erode, are carried elsewhere by water (usually) or wind (sometimes), and are deposited elsewhere as sediment, silt, sand…and then something other than heat or pressure happens to transform it into rock. Perhaps water with a lot of dissolved minerals flows through and the minerals out of solution, acting as cement.

Finally, there is metamorphic rock. This is rock that used to be one of the other two types, but was subject to heat and pressure–not enough to melt it, which would result in igneous rocks–but enough to make it change in structure. Marble is metamorphosed limestone, and slate is metamorphosed shale. Schists can form from either sedimentary or igneous rocks.

There are numerous ways rocks of one type can become rocks of another type, and the full picture is known as the “rock cycle.” A lot of geology’s “big picture” is encapsulated right here.

All three types can erode and form sediment (even sedimentary rock can go through it all again). Metamorphic rock can “cook” too long and go molten and become magma which can only become igneous rock. And so on.

OK, so maybe now some of the things I will have to refer to in the history will make more sense. I had to do this, because geology started when people started looking at rocks.

Early History of Geology

The ancient Greeks wrote some works on stones, in particular Theophrastus (372-287 BCE), and Aristotle, who made many observations on the slow rate of geological change. And then Pliny the Elder (who seems to have written on just about everything) wrote on minerals and metals. He died in the eruption of Vesuvius, 79 CE, a fitting way to go for a geologist…which was only one of his many interests. But Aristotle gets additional credit here because he tried to be strictly evidence-based when he said that geological change was slow. During the middle ages, the mantle was taken up by people in the Islamic world, with Ibn Sina (Avicenna in translation) proposing explanations for mountain formation, earthquakes and other topics. Also in China Shen Kuo (1031-1095) came up with a hypothesis of land formation based on observation of fossil shells in a mountain hundreds of miles from the ocean. He inferred that land was formed by the erosion of mountains and the deposition of silt–in other words, the creation of sedimentary rocks.

The first person considered a truly scientific geologist, however, was Georgius Agricola (1495-1555). He wrote De Natura Fossilium in 1546. This was the first systematic attempt to classify minerals, rocks and sediments since Pliny. He also wrote De Re Metallica (published 1556), which focused more on mineralogy, ores, and mining (and was considered authoritative for almost two centuries afterwards). The two books together made geology a scientific subject for the first time.

Nicholas Steno (1638-1686) gets the credit for some key laws of geology that underlie stratigraphy (roughly the study of rock layers). These are so important that it’s worth hitting the pause button and talking about them. They are:

Steno’s Laws of Stratigraphy

The law of superposition. In undeformed stratigraphic sequences, the oldest layers or strata will be on the bottom, with progressively newer deposits stacked upon it. This can be a bit tricky to apply as sometimes the layers are later flipped over at least 90 degrees, putting the newer layers on top. But there are ways to tell this has happened. Below is an example from Svalbard, Norway of layers of sediment–which eventually hardened into rock–with the oldest layers at the bottom.

The successive layering of rocks like this is known as stratification, and when the information is gathered from all over the world and assembled into a whole, it’s called “the geologic column.”

The principle of original horizontality. Layers of sediment are originally deposited horizontally (not at a slant) under the action of gravity.

Here is an example from the Colorado Plateau (this part of the plateau is actually in Utah). Layers are horizontal.

We now know that in special cases sand (for instance) can be deposited at a slope of up to fifteen degrees, particularly in sand dunes.

Getting ahead of ourselves, these layers were deposited in the Permian through Jurassic times. They show up in widely separated areas. Which brings us to:

The principle of lateral continuity. This states that layers of sediment initially extend laterally in all directions (but not forever). Based on this, rocks that are otherwise similar but are now separated by a valley or something else caused by erosion, were originally “connected.”

In the picture above those layers are seen in Capitol Reef national park and the Canyonlands national park. The different layers are named, from top to bottom: The Navajo Sandstone, layerd red Kayenta formation, red Wingate sandstone which forms cliffs, the sloped purplish portion is Chinle formation, the lighter red stuff further down is Moenkopi formation, and the white layer at the very bottom is the Cutler Formation. This picture isn’t from either of those two parks, rather it’s from Glen Canyon. The point being that these same layers can be identified and named even though they appear in differing places, separated by canyons that were cut through them after they were deposited.

You might get the impression that stratigraphy is purely about sedimentary rock, but lava flows can spill out over sedimentary layers, harden into (usually) basalt, and then be overlain later on by more sediment. This is going to turn out to be very useful, in fact. Also, sometimes igneous rock manages to penetrate through a vertical crack in sedimentary layers. When we see that it’s called a “dike” and it’s obviously newer than any of the layers it cuts through.

Another thing that make things a bit tricky is that a bunch of strata can be deposited, then whatever body of water lays there might disappear for whatever reason, and already-deposited layers can be eroded away. Much later, sediments can start depositing again, but now there’s a time gap at least as long as the dry spell. This is called an “unconformity.” Sometimes it’s obvious because the land tilts during the dry spell; you end up with non-parallel layers when that happens.

Sedimentary rock tends to form very extensive layers, called “formations.” This is different from popular usage where a “formation” might be a distinctive outcropping of exposed rock, like for instance these:

(Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs). The big double-humped rock on the left is popularly called a “rock formation” but is actually part of at least two different formations in the geologic sense (and I am unable to find their names), as you can tell by the different colors. And this is an instance where the rock layers have been tipped on their sides, in this case by the events that formed the Rocky Mountains.

Geology Gets Going

OK so returning at last to the historical narrative, we are now in the 17th century and things started to take off here.

The Christian world at this time was starting to notice that different translations of the Bible could be significantly different, but the one thing they all agreed on was that the Noachian deluge had formed the world’s geology and geography. So the quest was on: prove with scientific evidence that the Great Flood had in fact occurred!

Yes: Many of these early geologists were what we would today call “Young Earth Creationists.”

So what happened when they went and looked?

In the early 1600s many people began to notice fossils…but there were arguments over what they were. Some thought they were legitimate preserved forms of actual creatures, and others thought they were somehow something that just happened as rocks formed, “sports of nature,” funny rocks that happened to look like things. As crazy as this sounds today, no one had any concept of how a dead animal or plant could somehow be transformed into a rock of the same size and shape. Robert Hooke (1635-1703), Steno, and John Ray (1627-1705) did much of the work to explain how this could happen.

One important thing is to note that fossils appeared only in sedimentary rocks, or possibly (if we were lucky) were still identifiable in metamorphic rocks that were originally sedimentary. Another is that fossils are usually formed from hard body parts, bones, shells, and exoskeletons. You’ll find fossils of clams, but not of jellyfish–not unless you’re extremely lucky. And this means that for those creatures who have their hard body parts on the inside (like vertebrates) it’s uncommon to get any impression of the skin. We are getting better at detecting such things even when they’re extremely subtle.

Hooke, Steno, and Ray rejected the notion that all fossils resulted from the Great Flood. In their minds there were too many of them, scattered throughout the geologic column all over the world, for it to have happened all within one year.

But others disagreed, and we had a school of thought in geology called “Diluvialism,” where the Great Flood is considered responsible for (at least) the fossils. This was a real hypothesis, being investigated by many responsible geologists, and was taken quite seriously for a number of decades.

During the late 1600s and early 1700s, diluvialism and a young Earth was most geologists’ starting point. It isn’t any more. What changed?

Diluvialists collected a lot of fossils, but they were “small stuff.” Dinosaur and mammal fossils had not yet been noticed–that would start rolling in the early-to-mid 1800s. In looking for fossils, mid 1700s geologists like Giovanni Arduino (1714-1795), Johann Gottlob Lehmann (1719-1767) and many others started noticing things about the rocks that contained them. Namely mountain building, volcanism (meaning igneous rocks), deposition (sedimentary rocks), etc. There were so many different kinds of processes they simply couldn’t have been all due to some single uniform process like the Great Flood. So, many reasoned, the recent stuff was due to the Great Flood, but other items in deeper, older strata were perhaps created from nothing or were products of the chaos that God put order to in Genesis.

Enter Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), who eventually became hugely influential. He saw the huge array of things that those prior geologists had found, and decided to do some experiments. Buffon reasoned that the Earth as a whole was once hot (and is known to still be hot on the inside) so he heated spheres of minerals and recorded how long it would take for them to cool off. Extrapolating from this he determined that Earth was roughly seventy five thousand years old. He wrote that up in 1778, and the Sorbonne forced him to retract the claim.

James Hutton (1726-1797) was coming to a similar conclusion. He was a doctor by training but had become more and more interested in geology. He eventually wrote a book “Theory of The Earth” in 1788. He argued that nothing “special” had to be invoked to explain the Earth, just the same processes we see around us today, erosion and deposition. This was known as uniformitarianism, He also was the first to recognize metamorphic rocks as a distinct group.

However other geologists held out for catastrophism, brief catastrophic episodes, and not necessarily only the Great Flood; and they had good arguments for this. I’ll say more later.

By the end of the 1700s, due to these and many other lines of investigation, geologists were coming to accept that the Earth was far older than one would think, based on an absolutely literal reading of Genesis. They had to be dragged to this conclusion by the weight of what they were seeing. They didn’t want it to be true. They were Christians…and believed the Bible could not be wrong. They had to conclude that they were misinterpreting Genesis.

So now we had a couple of competing theories as to what was going on throughout this extended time. We already had the notions of uniformitarianism and catastrophism, which refer to the rates of changes, but what about the nature of the changes? We had the neptunists led by John Walerk, Johan Gottshalk Wallerius and Abraham Werner who thought all of the geographic strata–including igneous rocks! had formed from an ocean that had covered the entire Earth (sort of like a slow Flood).

The other competing theory was Plutonism, whose main proponent was Hutton. Here the Earth was formed through the gradual solidification of a molten mass (which was also what Buffon believed), volcanic processes were king. Hutton was convinced that the Earth was “immeasurably” old. (Which was certainly true…he couldn’t measure it!)

The truth of course is that both water and volcanism are important. “And” logic definitely applies. And this turns out to be true of uniformitarianism vs. catastrophism, too. Both happen. Remember Eugene Shoemaker and his asteroid and comet impacts? And remember the really bad day a lot of dinosaurs had ‘way back when.

As time went on, more and more evidence piled up. The Earth is old. We didn’t know how old, precisely, but figures in the range of a few thousand years rapidly became untenable. The evidence has only gotten much, much more weighty and our ability to date things much more precise, since then.

I’ve elided much in this account and I should be a bit more specific because I know some people simply won’t believe what I just wrote. So here’s just one avenue of investigation, out of many.

Mount Etna, on Sicily, overlooks the city of Catania, and it is the largest volcano in Europe. Furthermore, it’s always simmering, and erupts often enough, and usually mildly enough, that to the locals it’s just another aspect of the weather.

Scottish geologist Charles Lyell (1797-1875) visited Etna in the early-to-mid 1800s and realized he could estimate how long it had taken to build up to its present size. He was able to determine the size of the mountain, from the lowest lava layers which rest on limestone (which has fossils in it). He also knew that Etna erupts regularly, and that we had records of those eruptions clear back to Roman times.

Etna is about 3km high, and circular, with a radius of 25 km, so it roughly forms a cone, and the volume is approximately 2000 cubic kilometers. Going through the records, the average lava flow was about 0.02 cubic kilometers though there had been a larger eruption in 1669. On average, eruptions have been happening at a rate of 5 per century. So since Roman times (2000 years ago), we’ve seen a total of 2 cubic kilometers come out of Etna. If the rate of the last two thousand years is typical, then Etna is two million years old.

Of course, there’s an assumption there that the rate has held constant for two million years. But based on the distribution of the smaller cones on the slopes of Mt. Etna, and the fact that we can distinguish different lava flows, it looks pretty steady. If it were ever (say) a hundred times more active than it is now, we’d see fewer and bigger lava flows further down into the volcano. It probably has varied some, but not by nearly enough to make the difference between 2 million years and six thousand years. Consider: 99.9 percent of the lava happened over two thousand years ago; for 6,000 years to be the maximum age of Etna, that 99.9 percent would have to have happened within a span of 4,000 years–in other words five hundred times as fast on average, as the 2000 years we have historical records for. We’d know if Etna’s activity had changed that much, the volcano would look very different below the surface than it actually does.

[Modern dating methods apparently show an age for Etna of 500,000 years or so. Lyell was off by a factor of four, which isn’t bad given what he had to work with.]

There’s more to this particular sub-plot…but it will have to wait until I lay some more groundwork.

In particular, the next thing to talk about is the geologic time scale.

Final Thoughts

In the meantime, I’m going to drag out my soap box.

Today, Young Earth Creationists like to complain that no one will take them seriously when it comes to the age of the Earth, because the mainstream geologists have a “presupposition” that the Earth is old. They have to fight against a “mainstream” that is just predisposed against them. And no one will give them a chance.

What is a “presupposition,” anyway? Well, to start with let’s just say it’s basically walking through the door into nature’s classroom–a figure of speech meaning going out into the world and examining it–thinking you already know the answer to the question you want to (pretend to) ask.

Recall, though, that in the 1700s geology must have looked like a present-day Young Earth Creationist’s idea of paradise. The mainstream geologists thought just like they do, that the Earth was 6000 years old.

The geologists from the 1700s had a presupposition too, one that said the Earth is 6000 years old (give or take). I don’t fault them for it. They had nothing else to go on. It fell to them to find something. So what happened when these people and their presupposition went “through the door” and into nature’s classroom, went out into the field, got dirty and sweaty climbing hills and mountains, crossing ravines, wading in streams so they could look at rocks, take copious notes, making as many drawings, and finally, lugging samples?

These people realized their presupposition was wrong. The weight of the evidence was simply too great to bear. I alluded to Mount Etna, but that’s only a minuscule fraction of a percent of what has come to light both before it and after. It simply made no sense to people who had actually been there and done that with their eyes open and their brains engaged, to cling to a young Earth age.

They were good scientists. They didn’t let their preconceived notions force them to ignore what they saw. They didn’t behave like today’s Flat Earthers, cramming their fingers into their ears, squeezing their eyes shut and saying “Nuh-uh! I know it’s flat, anything else must be fake.”

And this was only the beginning. It’s now two centuries later, and the weight of now centuries of unearthed (literally) evidence points in the same direction.

Is someone aware of all of this holding onto a “presupposition” when they refuse to take seriously those that are ignorant (often willfully so) of that evidence?

Or is it the other way around? Is it the Young Earth Creationists who are the ones with the presupposition? Are they projecting? I maintain that the answer is yes. And today, I can fault them for it, because we have more than enough info to counter the presupposition. It’s worse than that though: The YECs from two centuries ago were willing to abandon their presupposition in the face of the evidence; the modern YECs will do their damnedest to come up with scenarios ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous to torture the data to make it somehow conform to the presupposition. They desperately cling to it in a way the prior YECs did not. And it is, right now, pushing many of them to a breaking point, as much of a breaking point as The Final Experiment is for the flerfs.

I’ve just made some strong statements in that paragraph, but I will be backing them up over the next few posts.

For those of you who haven’t just rage quit, see you next week.