(Tier 1) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXXVIII: Wherein We Are Deluged with Nonsense

Having made a complete hash of telling us the old-earth geologist’s story, the Earth Science Fourth Edition authors now proceed to tell us what the young-earth story is. It’s a very good thing I’m not in a classroom reading this book right now, because I’d be falling out of my chair laughing. Watching adults somberly relate the details of an ancient myth as Totally Tru Science Facts™ is too hilarious.

I mean, they even have this timeline of these old Bible men. They have actually printed this thing in all seriousness in a science textbook. I am dying.

Timeline has an X and Y axis. From the bottom left to the bottom right, Years After Creation are marked in increments of 200 starting from 0. The ages and dates of Noah's ancestors start from the top left, with black bars marking their lifespans. They are: Adam - 930 years. Seth - 912 years. Enos - 905 years. Mahalaleel - 895 years. Jared - 962 years. Enoch - 365 years. Methuselah - 969 years. Lamech - 777 years. Noah - 950 years.
Timeline from page 106

They talk about how “The Bible documents” God creating the earth and then it was so good, but then humans sinned, and God got so mad that he fucked everyone and everything’s shit up, including animals and “also the physical earth.” Then all the good times were gone, and it was “a struggle to simply survive in a world of weeds, thorns, and probably increasingly dangerous animals.” Continue reading “(Tier 1) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXXVIII: Wherein We Are Deluged with Nonsense”

(Tier 1) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXXVIII: Wherein We Are Deluged with Nonsense
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(Repost) Adventures in ACE VIII: Senseless About Sedimentary

Please tell me you’ve set up a padded room so you can read these posts in safety. I’d be inconsolable if you did yourself an injury because of these explorations in the whacky world of ACE.

I’m telling you right now: don’t keep reading until you’ve rage-proofed your room.

You know enough Flood “geology” bullshit by now to know that nothing good can come of creationist ignoramuses talking about sedimentary rocks. So let’s ease in by noting some good news: turns out you can be a dentist if you’re a brown person in ACE world, as long as you’ve got the proper equipment. No, not that equipment – I mean the biological stuff. Y’know, the ol’ meat-n-taters. You cis women are supposed to be too busy squeezing out babies to drill teeth. You trans folk are either miserably in the closet or you’ve gotten the heck out of that toxic Dodge. Regardless, the only dentists in ACE world are the cis men.

Image shows a two-panel comic. First panel shows a dentist's office with the chair and dental equipment. A South Asian or African American dentist is poking in a blond white boy's mouth, asking, "Well now, Happy, what kind of filling would you like in your tooth?" Second panel is a close-up of the boy and the dentist. Happy is saying, "Strawberry! Ha-ha." The dentist says, "Ha-ha!"
Cartoon from ACE PACE 1086.

And what a horrible dental joke has to do with sedimentary rock, I’ll never know. I suppose it’s what happens when you’ve rotted your brain with too much Bible.

Anyway. The spectacularly ignorant Mr. Wheeler will now proceed to explain about sedimentary rocks. He tells us that the ocean floor’s lots like the continents. It’s got “mountains, hills, valleys, and plains as features of [its] surfaces.” He then says that “the ocean floor is covered mainly with sedimentary rock.” Which is a little deceptive. Yeah, the floor’s covered in lots of places with sediments, but those sediments aren’t all lithified, and the floor itself, along with most of the mountains and islands, is overwhelmingly basalt. Continue reading “(Repost) Adventures in ACE VIII: Senseless About Sedimentary”

(Repost) Adventures in ACE VIII: Senseless About Sedimentary

(Tier 1) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXXVII: Wherein It’s All Relativity

The Science of the Physical Creation folks, having given us a rainbow of God nonsense, now buckle down to tackle relativity. Are you excited? I’m excited.

They do just fine explaining the basics. It’s not easy to unpack the oddness of relativity in a few short pages, but they do their best, including a helpful (and rather cute) cartoon:

Image is a cartoon strip showing a cute drawing of a blond astronaut boy floating above the moon with the Earth peeking over the horizon. In the top panel, he's drifting off to the left with one foot kicked out, looking very surprised. He's holding a stopwatch that says 00:01. Another stopwatch at the bottom right reads 00:10. There is an arrow below him pointing left, with 99.5%c written in digital-style letters beside it. The caption says Time dilation. In the second panel, the same astronaut boy has been squished into a narrower version of himself, and he is holding a ruler that has been squished with him. There is another ruler at the bottom right that is regular size. The speed is the same. The caption reads Lorentz contraction. The bottom panel shows the boy straddling a rocket that's flying to the left at 99.5%c. He's holding a sign that says 10 m/s squared, 100 kg. There is a computer hooked to an antenna at the bottom, and its screen says 1 m/s squared, 1000 kg. The caption reads Mass increase.

I was really hoping they’d tackle the speed of light in a young universe problem. See, in a young universe, we shouldn’t be seeing objects beyond around 10,000 light years (give or take a few millennia because God couldn’t be arsed to write down the actual date of creation). But we can spot galaxies and quasars and such that are billions of years old. Some of them we’ve even seen out to thirteen billion years and beyond. Everything we’ve found in the cosmos points to a very old universe indeed.

Young earth creationists have to explain that science away. Some of them claim the speed of light is slowing (c-decay). Unfortunately for them, the length of the year hasn’t changed since ancient times, as it would have if the speed of light was slowing. Even worse, if the speed of light was really that much faster in the past, “the earth would have melted during the creation week as a result of the extremely rapid radioactive decay.”

Oops. Continue reading “(Tier 1) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXXVII: Wherein It’s All Relativity”

(Tier 1) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXXVII: Wherein It’s All Relativity

(Repost) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education IVc: Wherein the Climate Heats Up

Onward, Christianist weather! We’re warming up with some global warming talk today. While SPC was content to devote a mere text box to climate change, basically blowing raspberries at anyone who gives a shit about it and waving off dramatic increases in greenhouse gas emissions by proclaiming hey, plants love carbon dioxide!, BJU’s Earth Science 4th Edition isn’t satisfied with blurting a few facts and moving on. No, there’s a whole chapter on the subject. And, people, they are the totes reasonable ones. They’re right in the middle. Look: they sneer at both sides!

They begin with a very telling couplet of sentences: Continue reading “(Repost) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education IVc: Wherein the Climate Heats Up”

(Repost) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education IVc: Wherein the Climate Heats Up

Adventures in ACE XXVI: God Piles on the Pressure

We’ve survived a lot of atmospheric nonsense and learned that you should never allow anyone associated with ACE to water your lawn. Now things are about to heat up. Yes, they are on about temperature. And in looking it over, I don’t think this section has been updated since the Cold War.

Seriously. All their talk of thermometers and thermographs and such like make no mention of digital thermometers or computers. None of the equipment mentioned for monitoring temperature over time records observations electronically. The photographs look like they’re straight out of the 70s.

Image shows a double set of maximum and minimum mercury thermometers nailed to a wooden plank inside of a white slatted enclosure. There's a hand reaching toward the first set of thermometers. It all looks tres last century.
Photo from page 22 of ACE Science PACE 1088

It’s pretty sad.

There’s some mildly-interesting history of the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales, but delivered in that pompous and pedantic ACE tone that sucks any joy out of it. Continue reading “Adventures in ACE XXVI: God Piles on the Pressure”

Adventures in ACE XXVI: God Piles on the Pressure

(Repost) Adventures in Creationist Earth Science Education IVb: Wherein I Forecast a Crisis of Faith

After the desert of Science of the Physical Creation, I’m hoping Earth Science Fourth Edition doesn’t let me down. When I read Christianist textbooks, I expect them to incorporate a bit more God into the instruction, but it seems like no one wants to admit that they think God controls the weather. Sad.

And the beginning of ES4’s chapter on Weather is positively crunchy. It’s all about wind as an alternative to fossil fuels. The authors insist we come up with better, cleaner solutions to humanity’s energy needs. Even the cross-box doesn’t gabble about God – it just wants us to consider the benefits and drawbacks of wind power. That’s… positively sensible.

Oy. Continue reading “(Repost) Adventures in Creationist Earth Science Education IVb: Wherein I Forecast a Crisis of Faith”

(Repost) Adventures in Creationist Earth Science Education IVb: Wherein I Forecast a Crisis of Faith

(Tier 1) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXXVI: Wherein Literally Everything is Wrong

We’ve just heard Earth Science 4th Edition’s rather inaccurate ideas about what they think we old earthers think about geologic history. Now they’re going to tell us what they think is wrong with our models. Buckle in, kids. It’s going to be rough.

Their intro explains the problem they have with getting their heads around this stuff.

The secular, deep-time story of Earth’s history up to this point can be summed up as being in disorder and lacking direction. The random events and motions of planetesimal collisions, drifting tectonic plates, and the ebb and flow of glaciers are natural and necessary to make their model fit the evidence.

See, they just can’t stand the idea of things just happening. Without a supreme head honcho telling everything what to do, all they can see is a frenetic jumble of events all happening willy-nilly. They don’t see the magnificent, undirected story unfolding. They don’t see the stately order of things progressing according to natural laws, everything happening according to the nature of the universe. On the scale of deep time, I see the universe and solar system and our beautiful planet following a self-choreographed routine.

And we know the broad reasons why stars and planets form and how they evolve. The motions the ES4 writers are talking about when it comes to moving plates and ebbing and flowing glaciers aren’t quite as random as they think. Shit doesn’t happen haphazardly. There’s a certain order to the chaos, patterns to the randomness, and we’re learning more about the laws driving those motions all the time.

I don’t even know how to address their other points. They try to debunk the lines of evidence we have for plate tectonics, such as paleomagnetism, fossils, and matching strata, but they’re so very terribly wrong that it would take pages to debunk every paragraph. And they’re just blurting creationist talking points that have already been debunked a thousand times. So no, I’m not going to reinvent the damn wheel. I’ll make a list of their claims and mostly just link you to where other folks have already handily disproved them. Continue reading “(Tier 1) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXXVI: Wherein Literally Everything is Wrong”

(Tier 1) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXXVI: Wherein Literally Everything is Wrong

(Repost) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education IVa: Wherein We Enjoy Nearly-Godless Weather

Have I told you lately that A Beka’s Science of the Physical Creation’s graphics are a touch tacky? They are. At the start of the “Earth’s Weather” chapter, there’s a grainy picture of a hurricane from space, and across the bottom are three photos that rather clash. There’s an iceberg inside a snowflake shape, a wispy waterfall surrounded by verdant green inside a raindrop shape, and something like a very red-orange Monument Valley inside a sunburst shape. This is the kind of stuff people with stunted imaginations do when they get their hands on a graphic design program.

At least they didn’t have Jesus up there making all that weather stuff happen. Small mercies, amirite?

Aside from a questionable definition of climate (which implies the climate of a place doesn’t change), the first bits aren’t bad. At least there’s no god-talk. We have to wait until they’ve finished with evaporation before we get any of that. Then we learn how “God designed our bodies” to use evaporation to keep ourselves at the right temperature. What, you didn’t think evilution did that, did you? Continue reading “(Repost) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education IVa: Wherein We Enjoy Nearly-Godless Weather”

(Repost) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education IVa: Wherein We Enjoy Nearly-Godless Weather

(Tier 1) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXXV: Wherein We Taste the Rainbow of Inanity

Can anything in Science of the Physical Creation’s unit on physics top their claim that our perception of color is a function of our souls? We can only hope.

(Content note: mentions of abuse and abusive behavior)

Unfortunately for connoisseurs of fine creationist crock, there are no shenanigans in the early bit of the next section, where they talk about the way light behaves. They do a really fine job explaining reflection. And we learn that paper doesn’t act like a mirror even though it reflects most of the light striking it because its roughness scatters the rays. Pretty neato! As I’ve said before, they’re super good at explaining science when they’re not indulging in creationist nonsense.

When it comes to refraction, they try a bit too hard to simplify: they say that “refracted light waves always bend toward the medium that slows them down.” But it’s more accurate to describe light as bending toward or away from the normal. Otherwise, they do a reasonable job explaining refraction, although with an inordinate focus on rainbows. We find out why when we reach the end: Continue reading “(Tier 1) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXXV: Wherein We Taste the Rainbow of Inanity”

(Tier 1) Adventures in Christianist Earth Science Education XXXV: Wherein We Taste the Rainbow of Inanity

(Repost) Adventures in ACE VII: Ignorant About Igneous

You’d think something as basic as the three basic rock types would be hard to screw up. But if there’s one thing the authors of ACE excel at, it’s abject failure to get anything right. I mean, a stray fact here or there sneaks in, but the poor lonely things are isolated, surrounded by vast tracts of utter wrongness. One wonders what they’re doing there.

So. Igneous. After the violence done to volcanoes, I’m sure you can’t wait to see what they do to the related rocks. Continue reading “(Repost) Adventures in ACE VII: Ignorant About Igneous”

(Repost) Adventures in ACE VII: Ignorant About Igneous