Abbr. Enth.

A quote was given to me by someone who I’ve had a few Creation/Evolution debates with over the last year. The quote is from Donald Miller’s book Blue Like Jazz.

“I had no explanation [for my friend Laura’s questions about my faith in God.]My belief in Jesus did not seem rational or scientific, and yet there was nothing I could do to separate myself from this belief. I think Laura was looking for something rational, because she believed that all things that were true were rational.

But that isn’t the case. Love, for example, is a true emotion, but it is not rational. What I mean is, people actually feel it…but it cannot be proven scientifically. Neither can beauty. Light cannot be proven scientifically, and yet we all believe in light and by light we see all things. There are plenty of things that are true that don’t make any sense. I think one of Laura’s problems was she wanted God to make sense. He doesn’t. He will make no more sense to me than I will make sense to an ant.”

While I can see the argument that was being presented here, Miller apparently failed to do his research for this book. Saying that love is not rational is one thing, but saying it can’t be proven scientifically is an entirely different thing. Here is a good article explaining all of the chemical reactions that take place in our bodies when we’re feeling love. And love IS rational, it just doesn’t always seem that way all the time. Since love stems from various chemical reactions in our bodies which all fit within the bounds of reason, then their product must be rational too. I don’t know if Miller was buying into the idea that making love explainable takes something away from it or if he was just hoping his readers would.

Miller’s next example of something that’s not rational is beauty. I can see his line of thought, but I think he stopped a bit too early. What he’s missing is that beauty isn’t even uniform.  What was considered beautiful 100 years ago isn’t today, and what is considered beautiful to you may not be to me.  When I drive through a city I can’t help but gawk at the beauty and symmetry of the engineering marvels all around me, but to my parents it’s nothing but chaos. In the same respect my parents can watch wild deer and look at flowers all day, while I quickly grow bored after the first couple. It’s not that beauty is irrational, it’s that it’s ambiguous. There is no one standard of beauty that we all follow. If Miller is saying that God is open to interpretation and can be perceived differently by different people, just as beauty can (which I don’t think he is) then I may be able to jump on board with that.

Miller’s last example is light, which is quit confusing to me. Saying “light cannot be proven scientifically” is not a clear enough statement for me to understand exactly what he means. Physics knows a lot about light, from how it moves, to how it is perceived, to how it is created. There are very few aspects of light that are not well understood in physics right now, at least compared to any other particle or wave. We have formulas to describe light, and we’ve mapped out the reactions that take place in the retina and the brain to create our perceptions of light.We even know the constant speed of light, which plays into some of the fundamental laws of the universe. That we can see is enough evidence to prove the existence of light, and the only reason everyone believes in light is because we all see it. To compare this to a being which supposedly exists even though we don’t see or otherwise observe it is a faulty comparison.It’s hard for me to think that Miller would write something like this down that was so wrong, but I can’t think of any other way he could have meant it.

The claim that “there are plenty of things that are true that don’t make any sense” is not justified by his examples.  In fact I can not find any good examples of things that are irrational truths.  There are things that scientists are still working out the answers to, and by no means do I think that we have the answers to everything, but don’t confuse unexplained with unexplainable.

Since none of you seem to care about SCIENCE! these days (except for Tom) I’m giving you all a break from me today.  But fret not, for I’ve left you in the fully capable hands of The Foolish Grin, a site run by my better half.  Check out her post this week, and get used to seeing her around, ’cause shes going to be taking over for me any time I’m busy/lazy/procrastinating/bored/hateyouall. Since she’s a non-conformist and all she’s not going to be stuck with the same weekly schedule that I am, so make sure to check back often for updates.

Since I still feel like I owe you something,I’ll leave you with this link to the fascinating (yet a bit poorly drawn) webcomic, Russell’s Teapot.

Two weeks ago, in Part I, we looked at a video promoting the Expanding Earth theory and picked apart the arguments presented.  For those of you who need a refresher, here’s the video again.

While it is easy to find the logical fallacies presented in this video, making a bad argument doesn’t actually mean you’re wrong. In most cases just being able to point out the errors in the logic of the argument would be enough to dismiss it until someone comes up with a better argument, in this case I have decided to keep digging anyway. This week I’m going to look at the actual evidence for and against the Expanding Earth theory.

First of all, we have to ask why the Earth is expanding. What is causing it to grow in size? I have found two different reason that advocates of this theory will claim. The first idea is that all of the meteorites, asteroids, comets, and space dust that have been colliding with Earth have been adding enough to its mass to make the Earth measurably bigger. The second theory suggests that the expansion is causing the planet’s crust to stretch and expand, creating “rip-zones”. While these two ideas seem like they would be exclusive, proponents will often argue from both points of view depending on what suits their argument better at the time. Either way, we’ll look at both.

First off, let’s look at the claim that the planet is accumulating mass from an outside source. I’ll even do them a favor and ignore the obvious problems with gravity when we’re changing the mass of the planet. While space dust and meteors/asteroids are the most commonly claimed outside source of mass, some people also claim that the energy from the sun gets converted to mass by photosynthesis when it is absorbed by plants. Frankly, though, these people are dumb. Photosynthesis takes six carbon dioxide (CO2) molecules and 12 water (H20) molecules and converts them into one glucose (C6H1206) molecule, six oxygen (02) and six water (H20) molecules. For those of you who don’t feel like doing the math out, I’ll do it for you:

6 CO2 + 12 H2O
= 6 C + 6 02 + 12 H2 + 12 0
= 6 C + 12 0 + 24 H + 12 0
= 6 C + 24 0 + 24 H

That’s 6 carbon atoms plus 24 oxygen atoms plus 24 hydrogen atoms. Photosynthesis turns this into:

C6H12O6 + 6 O2 + 6 H2O
= 6 C + 12 H + 6 O + 12 O + 6 H2 + 6 O
= 6 C + 12 H + 24 0 + 12 H
= 6 C + 24 H + 24 O

That’s 6 carbon atoms plus 24 hydrogen atoms plus 24 oxygen atoms. Net change? Zero.  The energy from the sun does not create the glucose, it is merely a fuel for the mechanism.

So what about space dust and meteors? Well I couldn’t find any solid numbers about how much mass we accumulate from meteors, all the sources I saw said it was negligible without giving solid numbers. One source said that it was hard to calculate since a lot of the bigger meteors that would be adding more mass to Earth would also be sending a good chunk of dust into space, so even if there was a net gain it wouldn’t be the full mass of the asteroid.

As for the space dust concept, I knew this sounded familiar as soon as I read it, and as I was looking I found why. A common Young Earth Creationist claim is to say that the rate of space dust accumulating on the moon is high enough that if the moon was millions or billions of years old, there would be a layer of dust on it so deep our astronauts would have sunk in beneath it upon landing. This theory came about when in 1960 a scientist by the name of Hans Pettersson was in Hawaii trying to measure the amount of cosmic dust accumulation, and provided an upper limit of 39,150 tons per day. He suggested that this was a high estimate and that he preferred a number about 1/3 of that. In 1967 another scientist claimed that the number may be as high as 700,000 tons per day! Luckily, a few years later, we would have better technology available and in 1976 D. W. Hughes published a figure of 48 tons per day. So how much accumulation is that over the Earth’s lifetime? Somewhere around 1.5 inches of dust over 4.6 billion years. In 1993 another satellite recorded around 121 tons per day, but that’s still not nearly enough to accumulate what is needed to make this theory work. (The numbers and dates were taken from here).

Well I don’t know about you, but I consider that side of the argument debunked. Let’s move on to the idea that the Earth is expanding without the help of outside forces. I suppose someone who took a semester or two of physics may be quick to note the Ideal Gas law, which states that volume has an inverse relation to heat and pressure (as the volume goes up, heat and pressure go down, as the volume goes down, heat and pressure go up). A good example of this is the diesel engine, which compresses the fuel within a constant volume which causes a great amount of heat and ignites the fuel. The Idea Gas law was meant to be used on gasses, but the relation is there for solids and liquids too, just not as extreme.

If we apply this to the Earth, one can see that the liquid hot magma is creating heat, which would create more pressure, causing the Earth to expand. I think that’s the basic idea behind this approach to the Expanding Earth Theory. It does, of course, have its downfalls. First off, as the size of the Earth increased, it would alleviate that pressure build up, causing the magma to cool back down, which would then cause cause a decrease in pressure, making the Earth decrease in size again. This would produce a small cycle and would not have the ability to build up enough pressure to create such a huge change in the size of the Earth.

Even if you argue that the cooling would not create enough negative pressure to decrease the size of the Earth, this constant increase would be leaving a big gap between the crust and the magma, a gap which we can scientifically confirm is not there. I can’t find any more claims of evidence for this version of the theory other than how it’s “so obvious even a child could see it”.

There are also a ton of other reasons why this theory won’t work (where did the water come from?). The fact is, the theory looks good in a flashy video, but it doesn’t have the evidence to back it up unless you just ignore huge sections of science. Any theory that claims conspiracies and then cherry-picks its facts for evidence is well on the road to failure.

Since it’s a holiday week and all, I’m going to put off my Introduction to Pseudoscience Part II post until a later date.  For now enjoy this and shut up.

I think the article title says it all, but I’ll break it down a bit more anyway.  A month or so ago I accidentally clicked on an item in my spam folder when trying to check it off to be deleted.  Before I navigated back out I noticed a particularly funny sentence in it…so I decided to allow it to live for another week.  As the weeks passed I accumulated even more funny stuff, so I decided to share the wealth with you.

Most of the spam I get is for male herbal remedies, because somehow my computer knows that I have a tiny penis and an impotency problem.  Just kidding.  No really.  Cut it out guys, it’s not funny anymore.

Of course the messages have to find a way to convey their message in a way that’s not going to get picked up by every spam filter on Earth, which results in some pretty funny lines.  Here are my favorites, with my comments below each in italics.

• “You will reach deeper inside her with your new tool.”
• “Your new weapon will remove her undies.”
  I couldn’t help but make the connection to “Jack the Snipper”, a guy who crept into girls’ dorms at UNH and cut their undies off while they slept.
• “My wang dangles out of my boxers, you can be like me too.”
  I lol’d
• “Beat your man meat and let it wreck havoc among the girls.”
• “I enjoy the company of beautiful ladies in bed.”
  Simple, but gets the point across.
• “Unleash the awesome anaconda from your pants right now.”
  Wow, we’re using alliteration!
• “Your lady will appreciate the lengths you go to for her.”
  Simple puns. On the verge of cleverness.
• “She had a hard time stuffing her mouth with my giant pleasure snake.”
  The concept of a “giant pleasure snake” makes me giggle.
• “Get the big tits at school to admire how large you have become.”
• “Upgrade your organ into a monster size easily with these wonder pills.”
• “You can now be your very own Willie Wanker up the chocolate factory.”
  Eew…

In short, I don’t think we give these people enough credit.  I mean, you have to be somewhat clever and intelligent to be able to come up with a hundred different ways to grab someone’s attention while only alluding to the production you’re trying to sell.  Anyway, if this post doesn’t result in me getting arse-tons of spam, I’m going to be quite surprised.