God’s Old Earth Curriculum Chapter 3: In Which Minerals and God Aren’t Mixed

We’ve seen quite a lot of Christianist nonsense lately. I’m here to tell you, it’s about to get worse than you ever expected. We’ll be seeing the young earth creationist idea of a “research” paper next, and I’m afraid ya’ll are going to rupture yourselves laughing. It’s too much concentrated derp following the inanity that is ACE. So let’s cleanse our palates with a visit to the Old Earth section of our Christian educational explorations! Turn to Chapter Three with me, and we’ll see what’s in store.

I can hardly believe my eyes. Every chapter thus far has begun with a blurb about God. Here, that perfect record is broken. The pattern, it is unraveled. My psychic abilities, they do not exist. How could this be?

Image is a demotivational poster of a gray kitten with round blue eyes and one paw resting on its mouth, looking perplexed. Caption says, "You perplex me. I like it."

Stunned, I search the page for God. He only makes an appearance in the copyright tagline. His name is not in the chapter itself. The word creation doesn’t appear at all. I am shocked. Shocked, I tell you!

But I am also refreshed by the fact Greg has no compulsion to wedge God in any-old-how every single chapter. It’s a nice break.

So, let’s see about the science.

We’re on about minerals today. We’re advised earnestly that “A basic understanding of how minerals form, weather, and metamorphose is essential to a proper understanding of the earth.” This is so. Absolutely.

Talking about the “Molecular Structure” before we even get to the definition of a mineral seems a bit premature. But I’m amused by how it starts. “As you know, atoms are the basic building blocks of molecules.” As a writer, I’ve been conditioned to dissolve into derisive laughter every time I see “as you know” in a piece of prose. As you know, that phrase is used by one character explaining things they wouldn’t explain to their companion in real life: it’s an amateur or lazy author’s way of telling the audience something they need to know. They don’t want to just plop in a paragraph of straight-up authorial telling, so they have one character ‘splain to another, except there’s no way the other character would be ignorant of this stuff, so they slap an “As you know” onto the beginning of the monologue, and hey, presto! Problem solved.

It slays me.

But it’s not even appropriate here. There’s no guarantee these homeschooled kiddies know any such thing. So, Greg, just cut that phrase right out and start at atoms. This isn’t a novel. You’re totally allowed to tell rather than pretend to show, and the kids who didn’t actually know won’t feel belittled.

The definition of a mineral hits all the proper points, but his example of a seashell as not being a mineral isn’t the greatest choice – many shells are, after all, mostly calcium carbonate (CaO3). I’d have chosen something a bit less ambiguous, or explained further that while the shell isn’t a mineral, it has most definitely got a mineral in it. Of course, I’m quibbling.

Greg included a bonza website in the “Physical Characteristics” section – you can enter your streak color and find your mineral there. Awesomesauce! I love it.

Alas, the Mohs hardness scale Greg includes is not, actually, the complete one. This is:

Image is a chart of mineral hardness. It's the typical chart until the end, which shows a Nokia phone as hardness 50.

I kid, I kid.

Later, we’re introduced to crystal cleavage without a single blush. I’m suddenly wondering if SPC and ES4 will be as adult about it, or if they’ll hide behind euphemisms so as not to make the good Christianist boys and girls stumble…

His instructions for measuring specific gravity are murky. Here are much clearer ones, with pictures.

Greg does a good job explaining crystal growth by using lava as an example. That first paragraph is clear and concise:

Crystals grow when matter changes from a gaseous or liquid state to a solid state, and they are destroyed when they are heated. An easy way to picture this is with volcanic lava. As the lava cools, crystals can form. The longer it takes for the lava to cool, the larger the crystals become. Material that cools quickly produces small crystals… sometimes so small that you cannot see them with the naked eye.

Very nice. And that’s all critical information to understand. That’s one of the pebbles you have to remove from the master’s hand before you can advance in geology.

Alas, the next paragraph needs serious attention from an editor. He conflates melts with solutions and implies that crystals are overwhelmingly the result of melts, which rather leaves out things like salt and CaO3. I mean, yeah, okay, water and the minerals that can dissolve in it at human-friendly temperatures would be considered a melt by, say, Mar’s standards, but we don’t think of seawater or saturated ground water as a melt. Also, some clumsy sentence structure makes it look like pyrite needs to be heated to, not cooled below, 1180°C. Yikes.

“Other Properties” is fun, discussing things like fluorescence, magnetism, chemical reaction, and radioactivity. However, I’m disappointed that Greg advises against buying a blacklight since so few minerals fluoresce. Come on! There are so many reasons to own a blacklight! You can freak your friends out by making your teeth glow in the dark. You can hunt for scorpions. You can find cat urine, semen stains, and other bodily fluids! You can make Legos glow! Dude, look at all the possibilities for endless entertainment! Surely it’s worth shelling out a few bucks for a bulb, or even less than ten whole dollars for a nifty flashlight.

Greg ends the chapter with a bit on silicate minerals, because they are everywhere. It’s quite technical, and could have done with some more ‘splainin’ and illustrations.

You definitely need to have researched the minerals in order to pass the quiz. I missed one cuz I didn’t. Also, it seems you will need to memorize the Mohs scale. And know your mineral names, rather than the chemical name, for the chemical formulas. I can tell you from bitter experience that the formula question for SiO2 should be quartz, not silica.

Image is Rainbow Dash, wearing a bag and looking sad. Caption says, "I has a sad now."

As we get further into this curriculum, I’m getting itchy fingers. The native editor in me wants to rip this thing apart and rebuild it into a really-real textbook. My inner atheist sez, “Fuck that noise. Surely there’s a professional editor in the old earth creationist community who can do that work.” But, like I was telling B, I’d about be willing to spend my time polishing this for the Christian kiddos who’d otherwise be stuck with A Beka or BJU because, while their parents don’t believe in YEC nonsense, they insist on a “Christian” perspective over reality. If this text is the only way to get them to give their children something of a sound science education, then I want the damned thing to be professional and polished.

So, Greg, if you want my help – lemme know. My rates are reasonable.

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God’s Old Earth Curriculum Chapter 3: In Which Minerals and God Aren’t Mixed
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One thought on “God’s Old Earth Curriculum Chapter 3: In Which Minerals and God Aren’t Mixed

  1. 1

    I recommend against buying an incandescent bulb with a filter to make it a “black light”. Those suckers get super hot. I had such a bulb that I screwed into a pole lamp with a fiberglass shade that was fairly small and thus close to the bulb. So much heat collected that the bulb shattered spontaneously. Quite the surprise!

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