First airing of our magma? program. (See the 2019 update!)
Before getting to the sad shocker of today's program, that creation groups are reinterpreting the "fountains of the great deep" to refer not to water but to volcanoes (?!), hosts Bob Enyart and Fred Williams report actually shocking science news about how far a hundred watts of energy will take your brain (and body), about our ability to see a single photon, and about crocodiles eating fruit! Real Science Radio today also airs audio from infamous anti-creationist Eugenie Scott to put the lie to the Junk DNA story, once again, now that some human retrovirus genes have been found to be, not junk but, essential to reproduction! But the big story today is that our beloved creation movement is headed down yet another tragic and obvious dead end, this one designed to save the failed creationist version of the secular Plate Tectonics theory, by claiming that the fountains of the great deep that flooded the globe were not water... but magma??? Oh boy! Here we go again...
* RSR Programming Notes: On Nov. 25 we aired our rsr.org/crossover-depth program with aerospace and defense industry engineer Bryan Nickel discussing four scientific problems with Catastrophic Plate Tectonics's "MAGMA (?) of the Great Deep" flood interpretation. One week earlier, on Nov. 18, we published RSR's YouTube video on the topic. This topic my intimidate some folks from commenting, but please feel free to share your thoughts. Thanks! Also, toward the end of this video, a notice points viewers to this page to see a second short video, the one embedded just below this first one:
* "Crossover Depth" Falsifies CPT & AiG Animation: Below 220 miles, called the "crossover depth", melted rock greatly compresses and so would not rise but sink. So aside from the biblical error of claiming that the fountains of the great deep were not water but magma, a physics error is that CPT has the magma impossibly rising through 1,800 miles of mantle up to the crossover depth. This and many other powerful scientific observations falsify catastrophic plate tectonics, AiG's animation, and also plate tectonics. (Just like the public hears very little about dinosaur soft tissue, because it exposes the falsity of old-earth paleontology, so too, the public hears little about the crossover depth, because it exposes the falsity of plate tectonics. See also rsr.org/flood and rsr.org/albright.) Consider further, the magma just beneath the mantle is approximately double the density of the mantle's solid rock that is sitting just inches above the liquid outer core.
The main reason for the sharp boundary between the liquid outer core and the solid mantle is the difference in density. And again, by the laws of physics that magma cannot rise through the nearly 1600 miles from the core up to the crossover depth, as claimed by Answers in Genesis, Plate Tectonics, and the Catastrophic Plate Tectonics theory. Geologists are not physicists; they've developed many stories that somewhat match their worldview and that somewhat match the data, but the harder part is getting those stories to fit in with the laws of physics, which they do not.
Further, if magma melted a path from the core up to the crust, its path could possibly be detectable today with seismic tomography. That now solidified path should have a sharp density contrast with the rest of the mantle. (Long, thin, straight lines are easy to detect. (Recall seeing from an airplane or satellite photos roads in jungles or bridges over rivers.) It seems that none of the theory authors of Catastrophic Plate Tectonics have ever predicted that such a path might be detectable. Contrast that with the many predictions made by Dr. Walt Brown, author of the Hydroplate Theory. See rsr.org/predictions for those, and for the many confirmations of stunning HPT-informed predictions.
* On Thermodynamics and Rising Magma: Consider also, to melt a path upward through the entire mantle and crust, rising magma loses heat to its surroundings. The magma would solidify long before it reached the crust. In a private conversation with Dr. Brown, RSR learned that in the 1980s he did a brief study for a geology professor, Troy Pewe, who happened to be a member of the National Academy of Sciences (and a good friend of Walt's friend, one of the father's of plate tectonics and the one who coined the misnomer, "seafloor spreading", Bob Dietz). The question answered was, How large would a plume of magma have to be to melt its way to the surface of the earth (assuming it would rise). It turns out that such a plume would lose so much heat that it would have to be bigger than the Earth to melt its way all the way up to the surface! Though the results stunned him, Dr. Pewe did not dispute the calculations. And further, of course the speed of the rising magma would be an important variable, because the slower it rises the more heat is lost to surrounding rock. Question: If the speed at which magma would rise from the core is zero mph, how long would it take to reach the surface?
* Reading Dr. Walt Brown's 1,000+ Scientific References: As RSR host Bob Enyart read Dr. Brown's book through for the second time, he read every one of Walt's references. Among those, on this topic, you can find the following:
- "A simple calculation shows that if ascent is governed by Stoke’s law, then the great viscosity of the lithosphere (about 1025 poise, if it is viscous at all) ensures that the ascent velocity will be about ten thousand times smaller than that necessary to prevent solidification. A successful ascent could be made only by unrealistically large bodies of magma." Bruce D. Marsh, "Island-Arc Volcanism," Earth’s History, Structure and Materials, editor Brian J. Skinner (Los Altos, California: William Kaufman, Inc., 1980), p. 108.
- "The question of where the magma comes from and how it is generated are the most speculative in all of volcanology." Gordon A. Macdonald, Volcanoes (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972), p. 399.
- "All the evidence that has been used so far to support the plume model—geochemical, petrological, thermal, topographic—is equivocal at best, if indeed not contrary. The plume idea is ad hoc, artificial, unnecessary, inadequate, and in some cases even self-defeating, and should be abandoned." H. C. Sheth, "Flood Basalts and Large Igneous Provinces from Deep Mantle Plumes: Fact, Fiction, and Fallacy," Tectonophysics, Vol. 311, 30 Sept. 1999, p. 23.
- "There are no chemical or isotopic data that require deep- plume origins or anomalously high temperatures, and no reliable seismic-tomography results have ever revealed a plume." Gillian R. Foulger and Warren B. Hamilton, “Plume Hypothesis Challenged,” Nature, Vol. 505, 30 Jan. 2014, p. 618.
- "Deep narrow thermal plumes are unnecessary and are precluded by uplift and subsidence data. The locations and volumes of ‘midplate’ volcanism appear to be controlled by lithospheric architecture, stress and cracks." Don L. Anderson, "The Thermal State of the Upper Mantle; No Role for Mantle Plumes," Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 27, 15 Nov. 2000, p. 3623.
Above the crossover depth of 220 miles, magma actually does rise, but it does so primarily through faults, not plumes. Magma rises along faults a million times faster because rising as a plume presents, "severe thermal and mechanical problems." Add to this observation another from our own rsr.org/atheism page, "the theory of plate tectonics begins with plates already in existence, and has no mechanism for the initial breaking of the crustal plates." While it may not be generally realized that the change in the volume of magma as it rises and sinks is the primary cause of shallow and deep earthquakes, geologists do agree that an earthquake is a sudden slippage along a preexisting fracture—a fault. Yet it takes much greater forces and energy to produce the preexisting fractures than to produce the slippage. So, what created the tens of thousands of fractures? Plate tectonics theory only tries to explain earthquakes that occur at plate boundaries, when plates rub against each other, but again, it never explains how those plate boundaries—fractures occurred. Further, most earthquakes occur inside or below plates and not at plate boundaries!
The hydroplate theory of the global flood provides an explicit mechanism for breaking of the major plates and for the crushed crustal rock found globally. Gigantic shifts of mass during the flood produced a myriad of fractures through earth’s crust and mantle. These shifts included the 1,400-mile widening by erosion of the 46,000-mile-long, 60-mile-deep rupture, the deposition of eroded sediments, the uplift of the Atlantic floor and the corresponding subsidence on the opposite side of the earth, the formation of earth’s core, and the compression event. (See rsr.org/flood!) Of course, the many flood basalts around the world could not be produced without the preexisting faults for the lava to travel through and spill out of. Abutting the RSR studio to the east, the comparatively small Colorado Plateau has thousands of faults which geologists have mapped without knowing how they were formed nor how the plates initially broke apart. A biblically-based understanding of the global flood provides satisfying answers to these and hundreds of other significant questions.
* RSR's List of Arguments Creationists Should Not Use: Bad arguments...
- Historical "science" is not science. Historically, creationists backed into this position regarding the "Demarcation Problem" of what qualifies as science to do an end run around the claims of paleontology, geology, and cosmology. For our rebual of this claim, please see rsr.org/forensics for our article and program titled, Historical & Observational Science Equally Good.
- The Second Law of Thermodyanics began at the fall. This claim, popularized by the father of the modern creation movement, the beloved Henry Morris, is biblically and scientifically indefensible. See rsr.org/entropy.
- When did unknown mechanisms become scientific concepts? This is an overtly unjustified criticism of a theory. For example, gravity itself works by an unknown mechanism.
- The plant kingdom is not a kingdom life. This is false. Before the fall, there was no death of nephesh life, that is, of any creatures that possessed a soul. But there appears to be no valid moral or theological objection to a virtually infinite destruction of organisms that have no capacity for suffering, including microbes, insects, fungi, etc.
- When did unobservable processes become scientific concepts? This is an obviously unjustified objection to a theory. Consider for example Einstein's thought experiments and other examples at rsr.org/math.
- With the exception of the arguments that by our judgment we SHOULD USE, listed just below, leading creation groups have otherwise fine lists of arguments to avoid, here and here.
- And of course, from above: The fountains of the great deep were volcanic fountains of magma. (See just above.) Thankfully, ordinary creationists haven't begun using that argument, and with God's help, we all can keep it that way! Please pray that the truth prevails among creationists on this matter!
* Arguments Creationists SHOULD Use: Answers in Genesis has claimed, as late as 2014, that we should not use the Moon Dust argument, but there is plenty of hard scientific data indicating that it's a solid argument for a recent creation. Various creation ministries have also argued against the following arguments, all of which RSR believes are valid arguments:
- Minimal dust on the moon indicates a young moon (see rsr.org/moon#dust).
- Mammoths were rapidly frozen during the global flood (see rsr.org/mammoths)
- The Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures has a reliable chronology (see rsr.org/septuagint)
- Human and dinosaur fossil footprints have been found together in Texas' Paluxy River Basin
- The division in the days of Peleg refers just as the Bible says, to the "earth" being divided (see rsr.org/peleg)
* A Place in the History of Molecular Biology: At Cambridge University, anti-Darwinist Douglas Axe worked for some of the world's leading molecular biologists in the laboratory established by four Nobel laureates including the guys who discovered DNA's double-helix. Decades after Watson and Crick broke the field of molecular biology wide open, evolutionists at Cambridge were still publishing the claim that the recipe for building proteins had just a couple of rudimentary requirements. Doug's groundbreaking research showed that the "simple model" of protein construction was false. Further, shocking to evolutionists, Axe showed that the very particular order of hundreds of various amino acids was a very specific sequence needed for standard protein function (with a specific, different sequence needed for each kind of protein). Real Science Radio host Bob Enyart is honored to interview Dr. Axe!
* Patrick Henry College Prof: Real Science Radio hosts Bob Enyart and Fred Williams interview Prof. David