Creationists confuse me. This is partly because I don't understand them, but mostly because I don't understand them -- by which I mean that I neither understand why they'd hold such illogical ideas, nor exactly what the underpinnings of these ideas are. I get that they calculate the age of the Earth by adding up the generations in the Bible, but where on earth do those numbers come from? Everyone up to Noah's sons has ages, but after that, it's mostly just begats with no ages listed. Some of the ones that do have ages had kids when they were 65 or 70; others, like Noah, didn't have their sons until they were 500 years old. That's a pretty big range, especially when you're figuring the Earth to only be a bit over six thousand years old. If you're off by the average -- about 200 years -- across only 6 generations, that's a 20% difference right there. I figure there are probably between one and two hundred generations being added up here, so that seems like a lot of room for error. It's still not going to get anywhere near the billions of years that radiometric dating calls for, but it does make it a bit silly to say that the Biblical flood occurred around 2348 BCE, as the Creation Museum does. It's impossibly specific.

In the grand scheme of things, though, that's really a minor nitpick. It confuses me that people get so adamant about the Earth being 6,000 years old when, by their own counting system, it could as easily be 9,000, or 4,000 -- but none of these numbers comes close to anything that seems reasonable. I, personally, can't conceptualize the idea of millions of years, and I assume that's the same problem creationists have with the idea. It's always seemed to me, though, that stalactites and basic math are all you need to poke a pretty solid hole in the theory.

I was at Luray Caverns not too long ago, a showcave fairly near me. The stalactites there grow at a rate of either an inch every 150 years, or an inch and a half every 100; I forget which they said, so let's go with the faster rate. Now, this isn't theoretical growth; Luray Caverns has been open as a showcave for over a hundred years now, so this is observable. Some of the stalactites are over 40 feet long. So, at an inch and a half every hundred years, that means it would take 800 years to grow a foot -- requiring 32,000 years to reach its actual length. I think the piece I'm thinking of might have been a column, meaning that half of that could have been forming up from the floor as a stalagmite, so cut that number in half. That's still over two and a half times the age of the Earth, according to the creationists.

Now, there's no reason why God couldn't have created the stalactites half-made -- but if that's the argument, it abandons all claim to science. There's no point in observing anything at all if things were created as elaborate fakes, with false ages built in; anything could be true, then, and there would be no way to ever know. That's fine for a philosophy, but not for science.

Mood of the Moment: happy
Auditory Hallucination: Ceann -- Johnny Jump-Up