It is a little known fact that scientists who argue that the paleontological record of life is hundreds of millions of years old, when confronted with astrophysical facts, must eventually rely heavily on the hypothesis of finely tuned, large scale global warming. The problem is known as the Faith Young Sun Paradox. A few claim they have solved the paradox, but many remain skeptical of the solutions. But one fact remains, it is an acknowledged scientific paradox. And beyond this paradox, the question of Solar System evolution on the whole has some theological implications.
Astrophysicists concluded that when the sun was young, it was not as bright as it is now. As the sun ages it creates more and more heat, eventually incinerating the Earth before the sun eventually burns out. This is due to the change in products and reactants in the nuclear fusion process that powers the sun. This nuclear evolution of the sun will drive the evolution of the solar system, unless Jesus returns…
As a brief aside, my favorite agnostic/atheist philosopher and mathematician, Bertrand Russell, made this observation that mentioned the evolution of the solar system:
Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief…all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins–all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.
Ironically Russell’s words inspired my re-acceptance of Christianity after I nearly left the faith in 2001-2003. There seemed little ultimate personal benefit over infinite timescales if there were no God. If I were to find personal benefit on infinite timescales, it would have to be something God himself provided, and thus from that time forward I sought to find evidence to support creation, Noah’s flood, and the historicity of the gospels.
To that end, any anomaly that challenges evolutionary theory caught my attention. One of them was the Faith Young Sun Paradox.
The faint young Sun paradox describes the apparent contradiction between observations of liquid water early in Earth’s history and the astrophysical expectation that the Sun’s output would be only 70 percent as intense during that epoch as it is during the modern epoch. The issue was raised by astronomers Carl Sagan and George Mullen in 1972. Explanations of this paradox have taken into account greenhouse effects, astrophysical influences, or a combination of the two.
The unresolved question is how a climate suitable for life was maintained on Earth over the long timescale despite the variable solar output and wide range of terrestrial conditions.[2]
If the Earth were an ice ball, there would be no Cambrian explosion. If the Earth were an ice ball, the shiny white ice ball Earth would likely reflect sunlight back into space and keep it an ice ball to this day. To solve the problem of how the Earth did not remain frozen during the pre-Cambrian and Cambrian, advocates of the billion-year-old fossil record invoke global warming!
Not only are there serious empirical and theoretical problems to solve the Faint Young Sun Paradox, but even assuming there is a solution to the paradox through global warming, it would be nothing short of miraculous.
The sun’s heat output is constantly increasing over time, and the necessary greenhouse effect would have to be finely tuned to spontaneously diminish itself to keep the Earth from incinerating as the sun got hotter. So this glorious global warming must walk a tight rope of fine tuning with no intelligent direction to prevent the Earth from either turning into an ice ball or becoming an incinerator.
Emeritus professor of Astronomy, University North Carolina, Danny Faulkner:
For instance, the current makeup of Earth’s atmosphere is in a non-equilibrium state that is maintained by the widespread diversity of life. There is no evolutionary imperative that this be the case: it is just the way it is. Thus the incredibly unlikely origin and evolution of life had to be accompanied by the evolution of Earth’s atmosphere in concert with the Sun. One could call this the Goldilocks syndrome, an obvious comparison to the children’s tale of the three bears.
….
The physical principles that cause the early faint Sun paradox are well established, so astrophysicists are confident that the effect is real. Consequently, evolutionists have a choice of two explanations as to how Earth has maintained nearly constant temperature in spite of a steadily increasing influx of energy. In the first alternative, one can believe that through undirected change, the atmosphere has evolved to counteract heating. At best this means that the atmosphere has evolved through a series of states of unstable equilibrium or even non-equilibrium. Individual living organisms do something akin to this, driven by complex instructions encoded into DNA. Death is a process in which the complex chemical reactions of life ceases and cells rapidly approach chemical equilibrium. Short of some guiding intelligence or design, a similar process for the atmosphere seems incredibly improbable. Any sort of symbioses or true feedback with the Sun is entirely out of the question. On the other hand, one can believe that some sort of life force has directed the atmosphere’s evolution through this ordeal. Most find the teleological or spiritual implications of this unpalatable, though there is a trend in this direction in physics.Of course, there is a third possibility. Perhaps the Earth/Sun system is not billions of years old…
So even assuming the glories of global warming solve the Faint Young Sun Paradox, it would do so in a way that is indistinguishable from a miracle. Like so many things, the Faint Young Sun Paradox adds to the view that we live on a privileged planet in a privileged universe. At some point privileged observations are statistically indistinguishable from miracles.
… I write, before I saw the post futher down. Never mind.
Perhaps it’s just the sample size.
I never said that, nor do I believe it. I was an evolutionist once upon a time, I believed in descent with modification, and that belief didn’t induce me to become a criminal or pathological liar, so I have no reason to believe it should necessarily do that to others.
In contrast, I should say, Muslims are taught they should lie to non-muslims if it will help further their interests.
I’ve actually defended atheists as having a pretty good moral compass compared to muslims and even Catholic priests who molest kids and Catholic bishops who keep the child molestors in church. I’ve also was appalled at Arrington going after materialists as if they are somehow less ethical than theists as a matter of principle. Would Arrington find a happier home with ISIS and Taliban theists than a materialist like Richard Dawkins? Come to think of it, I don’t know. 😯
So Harshman’s just making noise, so for comments like that that add little to the topic I ignored him until you (Rumraket) quoted him.
The list of things Rumraket listed are not things I’ve said nor defended. Personally I find such statements off-putting, so please don’t attribute those words to me, attribute it to YECs who actually profess such things.
If the facts don’t align with the Bible, then that is reason to not believe the Bible. We can give space for some figures of speech or interpretation of what is said. But to the extent special creation is more consistent with physical facts, to the extent it is possible the fossil record is young, then the Bible becomes more believable.
Personally, I think the facts suggest at least that life is of miraculous origins. That makes me more inclined to believe in the Bible.
Now you’re talking! How about a beer bet?
Actually I don’t like beer, I prefer a coca cola ice cream float with a tinge of 100 proof Jamaican rum. How does that sound? 🙂
You’ve basically quoted a piece of the discussion of a paper that tries to address whether this organism is 250 million years old though genetic testing. The entirety of the rest of the paper argues against this. They find it isn’t 250 million years old at all, and basically resembles a modern strain in every conceivable respect.
The simplest explanation is that the particular piece of salt crytsal the bacteria was isolated from, hasn’t been isolated and intact for 250 million years.
The best explanation isn’t that the Permian Salado formation in it’s entirety is somehow 6000 years old.
Remember, as you yourself would agree, a metabolism can’t last without nutrients for 250 million years, and neither can DNA. So what is the simplest explanation? That the 250 million year old Permian Salado formation has a halite crystal which has relatively recently been exposed to the environment with modern bacteria in it, before the researchers (if their sample preparation protocols really do eliminate in situ contamination) ever got to it.
Later on, researchers take the crystal back to the lab to study it, thinking it has been intact and unexposed to the environment for 250 million years. They are wrong in thinking that, even if they themselves did not cause it’s contamination.
What would have been a true paradox is if genetics tests revealed the 16s rRNA sequence to be 250 million years old. But they didn’t.
Thanks very much for taking the time to read it, but I don’t interpret what they say the way you do. But thank you for reading and responding nonetheless.
This seems to encapsulate what the authors themselves think:
That means an anomaly.
Now the authors don’t say, “God did it”, but the pardox can be solved by “God did it” and that He did it relatively recently, otherwise, “The Paradox of the “Ancient” Bacterium Which Contains “Modern” Protein-Coding Genes” remains a paradox.
The paradox is solved if God created life recently, and the fossil record is mostly (not always) a record of Noah’s flood, just as it says in the Bible. Personally, I think God put the paradoxes there as evidence the fossil record is young and evolutionary theory is false and the Great Flood was real.
But in any case, I wanted to post the article for interested readers. Thank you again for reading the article.
That assumes the 16s rRNA characteristics between speices (such as Woese discovered) were evolved rather than designed. But if they are designed, then this may not be a problem after all.
Here are the scenarios:
1 Fossils are 200 million years old but identical to modern bacteria, hence molecular clocks is wron
2 Molecular clocks tick from mutation (experimentally established) therefore fossils are young, but if fossils are young, then the age of the strata are misdated, furthermore, the hypothesis that MOST sequence divergence is due to descent with modification (versus specially created sequence divergence) is then cast into doubt.
I argue for #2, that the fossils are young and that sequence divergences used to mistakenly argue for molecular DNA clocks are created, not evolved. The divergences are misinterpreted because they are based on the false assumption that life on Earth is old.
Our 16s rRNA is different from bacteria because God made it that way, not because we evolved from bacteria. The lack of intra-group (like between prokaryote) 16sr RNA divergence compared to prokaryote-eukaryote divergence argues for common design, not common descent.
Apart from 16s rRNA, the aaRS genes in bacteria have too much intra-species and intra-group similarity for the evolutionary scenario to be true. All the intra-species analyses I’ve seen have intra-species mRCAs being very recent, even for supposedly ancient speices like certain trees and Sharks. I just don’t find the Old-Life scenario very believable. Too many anomalies like this.
stcordova,
Therefore C14 got into the sample (or was converted from atoms within it) some point later. How does this make it a clock? All it dates – if it is a single event, rather than continuous – is the age of the radioactive species.
Excellent point. Never thought of that before. You’re a genius. Thanks for the food for thought.
Salvador was an evolutionist once upon a time. Sounds like a fairy tale.
So, you were just as honest then as you are now?
Ok.
Then what was the cause?
As frequenters of TSZ understand very well, truth has very little to do with what people think about this issue.
Any issue, unfortunately.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story/2017/01/trump_sold_america_a_miracle_cure_it_will_fail_he_ll_get_off_for_free.html
walto,
Yes, I just read that myself this morning. It’s gotten me thinking a lot about how ideology functions — a long-standing interest of mine that I’ve shunted aside while figuring out my positions on conceptual and non-conceptual content.
Beginning with the first serious attempt at a theory of ideology:
“It may indeed be the highest secret of monarchical government and surely essential to it, to keep men deceived, and to disguise the fear that sways them with the specious name of religion, so that they will fight for their servitude as if they were fighting for their own deliverance, and will not think it humiliating but supremely glorious to spill their blood and sacrifice their lives for the glorification of a single man.”
— Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise
Yes, Spinoza was as savvy as any saint has ever been.
The Slate article may be a smidge too pessimistic though, When I mentioned the thesis to my wife, she made the point that we only need success on the margins: after all, a bunch of people who voted for Obama last time voted for Trump this time, so people’s views aren’t completely set in stone.
And a friend to whom I sent that link wrote this about it:
That Spinoza quote reminds me of “Viva las caenas” (Long life chains) which some of my spanish ancestors yelled when Ferdinand VII came back to put an end to the short lived democracy
http://www.arnalballester.com/en/news/la-pepa/
Apparently people were unleashing the horses of the king’s carriage to push it themselves while shouting “Long life to the chains!”
Still a popular expression used to mock those who vote political parties with hundreds of ongoing trials for corruption and negligence.
Thanks KN for the Spinoza quote, that’s a keeper:
3) The fossils aren’t fossils but are fairly recent contamination. The strata may not be misdated, exactly, but parts may have fairly recently been recrystalized, even if there was no contamination during sampling. Of course salt deposits aren’t dated directly but by dating of strata above and below. One anomaly, of course, can’t outweigh all the mass of other data, as you seem to imagine.
Then how do you deal with all those masses of data showing that the rocks are old and that life is old? You’re using an explanatory filter, not Dembski’s but a more pernicious one, looking only at what you want to see.
It might argue for separate ancestry of bacteria and eukaryotes, at the very most. It seems to me that common design would argue for identity among 16s rRNA throughout the biota. Why make them all a bit different in a nested hierarchy that coincidentally resembles the one we get from other sources? Isn’t that reinventing the wheel millions of times?
This is not the first time you have been confused on coalescence, and not the first time I’ve tried to explain it to you. In any finite population variation will be lost by drift (and also selection) and regained through mutation. Most species are likely to be at an equilibrium of variation. This is exactly what we expect. And “ancient species” is a silly misunderstanding of what those words mean.
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blockquote cite=”comment-160760″>
stcordova: John Harshman as quoted by Rumraket:
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blockquote>I find this snippet disturbing. You seem to be saying that non-Christians or non-IDists are inherently dishonest.
Then you should pay more attention to what you write, so as not to create a false impression. Go back and reread what I complained about, and see if you think I had reason to complain.
stcordova,
Just noticed this in John’s snippet. aaRS genes are actually much more likely to survive LGT than many others. This is because what they do is quite generic. If all you are doing is gluing glutamate onto a tRNA, every species on earth is doing much the same thing. There might be a problem because tRNA sequences are divergent, but this does not provide universal constraint. There does not need to be an E coli way of charging tRNA with Glu, and another for Streptococcus, and another for Salmonella … the lack of absolute congruence of aaRS genes upon other gene phylogenies is readily explicable by this generality of function, and hence greater inter-lineage transferability than many more taxonomically restricted genes (which, curiously, also argue against evolution for you!).
One of the pitfalls of resting your young-Earth-creationism on a gap in scientific knowledge, is that eventually that gap might be filled. On the preservation of ancient protein sequences:
Protein sequences bound to mineral surfaces persist into deep time
As scientists are discovering ancient biomolecules in places of ages they had previously assumed they could not survive to, they also invariably learn how and why they are able to survive to those ages. So rather than a case of ancient, but still relatively intact fragments of proteins proving the sample is young, they show that we just didn’t know everything there was to know about what conditions might serve to preserve biomolecules over geological time.
Yeah, but that has nothing to do with what Sal was talking about. He thinks that lineages should accumulate polymorphisms forever, so that “old species” should be way more polymorphic than “new species”. So since no species shows what he considers sufficient polymorphism, all species must be “new”. As in less than 6000 years old.
John Harshman,
Granted, but surely extensive LGT would make lineages appear younger, by eroding the signal of divergence?
Yeah, but he’s talking within species.
Sal,
I have posted this on UD.
There is evidence that the Earth had warmer climate in the arctic.
Antarctica once covered in palm trees, scientists discover. So, the climate on the Earth must have been much warmer…just like the Bible with scientific accuracy states…”
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2012/08/02/antarctica-once-covered-in-palm-trees-scientists-discover.html
“An intense warming phase occurred 52 million years ago“
The problem is however we have woolly mammouths near the arctic with tropical vegetation FROZEN in their stomach. Digestive chemicals should have degraded them unless of course they were frozen after being buried relatively instantly under piles of snow. So how is it that we have tropical climates one minute, and then buried in snow the next.
The answer:
stcordova,
Yeah, yeah, I know the drill. Cherry pick the evidence, explain away whatever doesn’t conform to the story. Yawn
according to that vid, Hydroplate Theory explains coil and methane deposits, the rapid continental drift, ocean trenches, canyons, volcanoes, ice ages, global warming (even if it doesn’t happen), layer strata, fossils… and… wait for it…
comets, asteroids and meteorites too!
:/
The supercontinent broke up and moved. The part that is now Antarctica could very well have been part of the tropics at one time. So the question would be where was Antarctica when it had palm trees and such?
Are we talking Ted Holden?
Or Antarctica has moved
To ask is to answer. Why should woolly mammoths be in a place where they could eat tropical vegetation? Why should mammoths in a tropical climate be woolly at all? And the solution is simple: that word “tropical” is is an invention, unsupported by the data. The mammoths in question had arctic vegetation (including, if I recall, buttercups) in their stomachs.
Reference please for the tropical vegetation part. This sounds like more AIG bullshit you’re mindlessly repeating.
ETA: Well watta ya know, Sal was lying.
Woolly mammoth diet mystery solved by DNA analysis
Everyone act surprised now.
newton,
Or aliens planted the evidence so that atheists who would not have to accept any evidence but the one that suit their faith and gives them something to work with…
So plate tectonics is not an reasonable explanation for you? Or does the Bible tell you that the continents are fixed?
FYI ,ID does not rule out aliens as the designer
OR your god does not exist at all.
Sal,
Do you accept your claim was wrong and will you be making it again in the future?
No.
The arctic was tropical and tropical vegetation was in in the stomach of the mammouths. The main issue however is that the food was undigested in the stomach indicating the creature was cooled very rapidly to prevent degredation, which means it was buried alive in snow after it had its meal and the freezing process was in a matter of hours. That would mean the death was due to a cataclysm, not just some blizzard where it keeled over and died and then slowly froze. It was quickly frozen.
Yeah, come on, Sal, species and modern distribution for the ‘tropical’ veg, ta. You wouldn’t just swallow a claim without verifying it would you?
If the arctic was tropical, I wonder what the tropics were like?
The arctic was tropical when the earth was flat. Everybody knows that!
stcordova,
This makes no sense either. You want to survive when it’s -50 outside, you dig a snow hole, where a couple of feet down it’s a snug 32F or so. Snow is a great insulator.
I understood what you meant,just wanted to know the specifics. Thanks
So simplistic slogans are simplistic, and Happy Days Aren’t Here Again?
I’m not sure Sal reaches that plane of greatness. A shame the Time Cube is gone.
A work in progress
Sal doubles down on his YEC lie. The Arctic was “tropical” during an event known as the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum which occurred about 55 million years ago. Mammoths didn’t evolve until the Pleistocene around 600,000 years ago.
That’s exactly the kind of lie Sal wants to abuse children with.
But if you condense the age of the Earth down to 6000 years, the difference between the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum and the appearance of mammoths is only 72 years!
(Assuming I did my Creationist Math right.)
So it had to be a cataclysm to be “buried in the snow”? Couldn’t have fallen into any deep snow anywhere? Does deep snow exist in the arctic?
Actually, if food was preserved in its stomach it seems more likely that it fell into cold water–which really does cool things off quickly, unlike snow in most cases–and then was frozen somehow. That’s not too unlikely.
It only has to be cataclysmic for the animal. Nothing indicates a global disaster, other than creationists’ imaginations.
Glen Davidson