It's always so exciting to see a new creationist argument…until you actually look at it and see how silly it is. And they've been getting more and more desperately absurd as the years go by and the flaws in the old arguments get harder and harder to support. Once upon a time, they could just say it rained really hard for 40 days to flood the earth. When it was pointed out that you can't wring that much water out of the atmosphere, they had to contrive all kinds of elaborate conditions for earth prior to the flood, with deep reservoirs and a "vapor canopy" of crystalline hydrogen to keep huge volumes of water under pressure above the earth. That was awfully silly, so now this new argument tries to rescue it with "evidence" for some mighty weird conditions on God's earth.
The logic is a tortured, to say the least. Here's a simplified version of the new argument by a creationist called Ikester, and discovered by Pooflinger.
| Ikester's reasoning |
My reply |
| The water that bubbles up out of deep springs is blue. |
No, it's not, no more than any other kind of water. |
| It's blue because it contains hydrogen peroxide. This why the water is highly oxygenated. |
Hydrogen peroxide is not blue. Spring water does not contain significant amounts of hydroxen peroxide. Oxygenated water is not the same as hydrogen peroxide. |
| The hydrogen peroxide formed by exposing the water to a very high pressure, pure oxygen atmosphere. |
That's not how hydrogen peroxide is made. If only the chemical engineers knew that H2O2 could be synthesized by putting water and O2 together in a vessel at 2 atmospheres of pressure! |
| Therefore, spring water proves that the earth had a pure oxygen atmosphere and seas of concentrated hydrogen peroxide, exactly as the Bible says. |
Seas of a highly reactive oxidizing agent and rocket propellant in a lethally corrosive atmosphere? Sounds like paradise to me, all right. |
Poor Mr Ikester got brutally raked over the chemically lethal coals on that whole story, so he modifed his explanation a little bit. It wasn't H2O2 — the ocean was full of H2O3! Oh, that changes everything! I'm sure the little squidlets would have frolicked happily in that environment.
Somehow, I don't think this little example of free-associating pseudo-chemistry is going to get much traction in the creationist literature, but you never know … maybe he could write it up and get the ICR to publish it.
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"The logic is tortured. . ."
Surely as the sun rises in the East.
Wow, I think this makes the time cube guy seem rational. Just wow. Why are they so damn proud of their stupidity and ignorance?
In the spirit of "new" creationist arguments, I heard a doosey this week on NPR (might have been Wednesday). There was discussion of the importance to Republican voters of creationism/evolution (a "hot topic" after the recent debate), and they had called in one of the usual suspects from the Discovery Institute to blather.
Somehow, the guy managed to sneak in the suggestion that aspects of the human body (such as our eyes) considered to be "imperfect" and poor examples of 'intelligent' design are, in fact, perfectly designed after all! It's just that ... wait for it ... *biologists* aren't qualified to judge such things very well. "If you ask an engineer or a physicist, they will tell you that the eye is in fact perfect!"
How's that for shameless?
-Michael
A new tidbit for Ikester's Evowiki entry!
This is as stupid as his "Eternal Time Creation" idea.
AlanW
I followed your link to the time-cube page.
Of course he's rational. Or- are you part of the singularity worshipping academia who deserve to die because you deny the 4-cube nature of the world.
Next you'll be telling me that the Earth revolves around its axis in one day!
Go drink a cup of H3OOH2O2OHHO and tell me if I'm wrong.
The first line is really the one that had me rolling. Did he consider taking the water inside in a glass and setting it on a white table top? I wonder what his otherworldly explaination for its newfound whiteness would have been.
Let's see if I've got this new type of logic down right. The ocean depths are black. Therefore water under pressure is black. Crude oil is black. Crude oil reservoirs are evidence of the source of water before its elevation into the atmospheric water canopy by volcanic action when the hydrocarbon molecules are cracked and oxygen forcibly replaces carbon. Coal deposits are what remains of the stripped away carbon atoms after the crud oil 'changes' to water. I think I'll keep my day job.
One last thought, why not start a contest with scientifically literate individuals composing far-fetched creation stories-- any one of which would certainly 'hold more water' than the bilge from the Discovery Institute. Better yet, surreptitiously forward the results to DI. A Sokal style hoax. Prizes are awarded to the ones the DI actually uses.
After seeing Kirk Cameron's Crocoduck and Ray Comfort's divine banana, why can't this guy be part of the gang. Egnor is getting stale, let's have Ikester be the DI Dupe of the month.
The logic is a tortured, to say the least...
Logic? They don't need no steenking logic.
It's weird, isn't it?? They apparently have enough brains to try to figure out something that fits with their woo-woo, but they don't have enough brains to figure out that it's woo-woo!!! What a tragedy!
Ikester reminds me a twit I met during my two-year Army tour back in the early 60's. He thought he had invented a gravity defying machine and talked about it incessantly but without revealing his idea, lest someone rip it off and make millions, which he thought was his due. Eventually, I got his idea out of him. It was a gyroscope whose rotor's rotational speed exceeded the Earth's escape velocity. To his way of thinking, the gyroscope should simply rise from the surface and go off into space. It took me quite a long time to convince him--and I'm not sure I ever did--that the net velocity of the gyroscope was zero and that the best it could do (assuming one could actually build a rotor that wouldn't explode at such a speed) would be to drift across the surface of whatever it was resting on. We never discussed evolution but I always suspect he was a creationist too.
Sounds like kind of a crazy-quilt synthesis of YEC and "Oxygen Therapy" lore, which held that by pumping H2O2 into the bloodstream you could cure AIDS/cancer/insufficient gullibility. Disease was after all unknown to Adam & Eve, so an O2-rich environment matches the predictions of pseudoscience on two wholly separate fronts here. Some might argue that a highly flammable atmosphere would tend to be nonconducive to life but we have written evidence that Prometheus wouldn't get up to his tricks for another millenium or two. Clearly a non-issue.
Seconding the idea of flooding the DI with bogus theories, and awarding a prize to the first one published. First one to win a Templeton has to buy drinks for the group, though.
Well, now we know what killed the dinosaurs. One of them struck a spark, or knocked a bit of silver into the ocean, and that was that...
So I stopped reading for a while, because your blog depressed me too much.
And I came back to this.
I'm gonna need a reference on this one.
What is the Hebrew for hydrogen peroxide?
Oh.My.Fictional.God.
Don't these guys* ever give up? Heck, I get exhausted just by reading this.
*Have you noticed the fact that almost all vocal creationists are male? Are only men so incredibly stupid that they hang on to these twisted pretzels of logic, or are the creationist women all subservient housewives in accordance with The-Not-So-Good Book?
But this would mean that prehistoric birds had bleached feathers and resembled Vince Neil.
No, forsen, I've met some female rabid creationists.
Just as vapid as their male counterparts.
Ohh you guys got it all wroooong!
As a small boy I lurned about the flud from none other than Bill Cosby. God had commanded Noah to build an arc, but he had to quip back that the his flood plan would never work -the water bills would be astronomical.
So he convinces god of the folly of his original plan... and comes up with his own -rain for forty days AND forty nights, wait for the sewers to back up. Gods booming voice "RIGHT!"
And, Gary Larson showed me how the dinos went extinct. (cartoon with a bunch of dinosaurs smoking cigarettes).
These guys just don't do any research, otherwise they'd discover these perfectly delightful explainations.
Yes, but what will John A. Davison have to say about this new theory of water coloration?
There's just no excuse for that sort of stupid, man. It's damn funny, but it's also unbelievably terrifying that people can actually latch onto such lunacy. Ikester doesn't even make the slightest attempt to base his gibberish in anyone's definition of reality.
Michael,
I'm a physicist and I would like to explain why the eye is perfectly designed. Let me just clean my glasses, and we can get started...
I think this special theory of hydrogen peroxide creationism deserves a special name. Is anyone calling it the "HOHO theory" yet?
They even have proof that hell exists!
From http://www.yecheadquarters.org/hell.2.html
Media alert:
Hitch will be on Bill Maher's Real Time (HBO) in a few minutes.
I much appreciate this outstanding example of chemical stupidity. I see many examples of biological and physical stupidity, but chemical stupidity is rarer. I suspect that this is because most creationists don't know enough to exercise stupidity in the chemical domain.
Is this the same Ikester from Dispatches a few weeks ago? It sure sounds like it.
Dude's an idiot... check it out:
http://scienceblogs.com/ (link that shall not be named) /2007/04/creationist_lies_that_never_di.php#comment-394066
We were just at the hippie health-food store and saw bottled water with "six times the oxygen of regular water." Maybe that's what was in the oceans. Does Gos shop at Rainbow Grocery?
This may seem sort of OT, but does anyone else here remember the labels on Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Soap. The "cube" thing could have been written by the good Doctor his own self.
Old hippies will have used this stuff. My crotch tingles just thinking about it, and not in a good way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._H._Bronner
Just a few problems from my lay viewpoint, that might be fun querying about.
1. A pure oxygen atmosphere makes human babies blind. While this would make it unnecessary for anyone to wear glasses, how could humans survive if absolutely everyone were blind?
2. Wouldn't any fire for a sacrifice be a death-dealing blowtorch? Wouldn't it be impossible to get close enough to a fire to cook anything? How could people keep kosher under such circumstances?
3. A pure O2 atmosphere wouldn't shield any ultraviolet, right? Cinder city. [Oh, yeah -- that's right: The vapor canopy stops ALL UV light, and humans get rickets from a lack of vitamin D, instead . . . these guys lose no matter which way they squirm.]
4. With a pure O2 atmosphere, humans wouldn't have enough CO2 to trigger the inhaling reflex -- and hence, all humans would die.
Surely there are a hundred more problems with this bizarre scenario, any one of which should be clearly fatal to the hypothesis, even to woo-struck woozers.
@ john marley (#16)
i know you weren't expecting a real answer to this question, but it's מי חמצן (mey chametzon)
it comes from the words מימן (meymon - hydrogen) and חמצן (chametzon - oxygen). i'm not totally sure where those come from. i think the word for "oxygen" might be related to the words for "vinegar" and "fermentation" which are spelled similarly. instinct tells me that "hydrogen" is related to the word for water, מים (mayim), because they're only one letter different, and hydrogen is a component of water.
of course, if the words are put together in relation to their chemical composition like this, it means they're modern. they didn't know anything about chemistry in 600 bc when the torah was put together. "vinegar" and "ferment" of coure appear in the bible, but not anywhere in genesis.
but yes, i do love how they always say "just like it says in the bible!" and the rest of us are left saying, "uh, i've read the bible, and i must have missed that one..."
Cool!!! I just never know when I'm going to pick up some new Hebrew vocabulary...
*ponder* "Hydrogen peroxide"... Dunno when I'm ever going to get to use that one...
The best shot was from the commenter in Ikester's thread who said
Don't they all?
seas of pure hydrogen peroxide? now I understand why Eve is so often illustrated as a blonde!
Right, Dorid, I was thinking the same thing! It also explains why the CVS in the Garden of Eden didn't bother carrying Bactine.
"This may seem sort of OT, but does anyone else here remember the labels on Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Soap."
Yes! I love Dr. Bronner's! "All-One-God-Love! Dilute! Dilute! OK?" Some of the most entertainingly incoherent packaging ever seen on a soap bottle.
BTW, that was supposed to be "Does God shop at Rainbow Grocery?" I've got to start proofing my comments.
Zeno, it was only a HOHO hypothesis for a short while. It is now full of HOOOH-ey (trioxidane).
That is a laughably trite and damn near cute attempt to try even sounding like a creationist. Does anyone ask him if Oxygen is also blue then, since I can look over my head during a sunny day into the O-saturated void above me and see blue? But if Oxygen might be blue, then how come spring water is specifically blue? Wouldn't it be a different color since O2 is merged with all that Hydrogen? Ya know, the yellowish orange stuff from the surface of the sun? Since water is H2O, should it be a green trending blue?
Ikester has just made more work for them. Now they have to go back and redo all of their "Flood Geology" to search for traces of pure H2O2. Oh why had no one seen this before!!??
It is important to disclose truth about academical establishment - nowadays academic sorceres, "pundits" are Darwinists.
The same thing did Giordano Bruno.
Oxfords pundits ridiculed Giordano Bruno because of his teaching on solar system. Giordano Bruno had no mercy with them and denigrated Oxfords pundits in his famous work "Cena delle ceneri".
Darwinists do not like hear that their spokesman Dawkins - in mentioned connection - is Oxford pundit too.
Universities are full od neodarwinists - academical establisment promote neodarwinism the same way they once promoted ptolemaism.
Oxfords pundits ridiculed Giordano Bruno because of his teaching on solar system. Giordano Bruno had no mercy with Oxfords pundits and denigrated them in his famous work "Cena delle ceneri".
Darwinists do not like hear that their spokesman Dawkins - in mentioned connection - is Oxford pundit too.
mv.
But water is blue? qed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_of_water
Woah, man, that's Dadaist chemistry. I stand in awe.
BlueIndependent: liquid oxygen is indeed blue. Maybe the earth was covered with liquid oxygen then?
According to this creationist's logic, does that mean blue blood is full of hydrogen peroxide?
From the journal literature (Acta Chim. Slov. 2005, 52, 1-12) abstract:
Okay kids, now let's think about this for a minute. If you start with a billion liters of H2O3, then in one second, you have 1/(2^50) times that, or 9 * 10^-7 L if you started with 10^9 L. So I guess paradise was short-lived indeed...
The human eye is perfect. I tried to make an eye out of meat and it didn't work at all.
If only the chemical engineers knew that H2O2 could be synthesized by putting water and O2 together in a vessel at 2 atmospheres of pressure!
Not to mention that the seas would still be H2O2 at more than 10 m depth...
Actually, pure oxygen (O2) in its condensed liquid form is blue. Of course that has nothing to do with the color of H2O2 nor H2O3. This post made my day! We need to encourage the Ikesters of the world. Give them a platform to shout from. This way the whole world can see just how cracked their pots really are.
Greta, James Randi has a funny run-in with the purveyors of that scam water you saw at the health food store.
The company that sells the stuff has also been fined by the British Government for fraud.
Actually you *can* wring that much water out of the atmosphere, or you could, once.
The problem is that --- as usual --- the creationists have been outclassed by reality.
At the end of the Hadean, the oceans formed, likely largely from part of the volatile fraction of incompatible elements outgassed from the mantle. During that process, it may have rained for upwards of a million years (much of the early rain would have boiled away instantly as soon as it hit the hot rocks below, but it would come back).
As if forty days could flood the Earth. What a pathetic little shower. We've *been* flooded four kilometres deep for billions of years, and it's done us no harm.
#42 Ronald,
Don't you know anything? You gotta use dirt, man! Sheesh!
You may want to check out the following story from New Scientist. Researchers have claimed to have found that a single gene with one single mutation from thymine to adenine nucleotide changed the expression of neuropsin (ii) and which may explain the different learning capacities of humans versus *all* of our close relatives.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn11830&feedId=online-news_rs…
Here's an incredibly tiny, simple change with huge, huge consequences -- assuming the research held.
A perfect example of evolution at work.
OT but I just had to share this, talk about tortured logic.
Creative chemistry can't hold a candle to to this stuff.
http://www.openjesus.org/2007/evolution-v-creation
"The truth is that Dad placed you on Earth as monkeys, and over the span of a few thousand years has made numerous adjustments and modifications to your forms and your minds. Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, and all of those other evolutionary footsteps did in fact exist, and were simply God's early children. As time has gone on you have been tweaked by God less and less, mostly because He has learned to use a softer touch. Remember, even God was new at this whole creation and benevolent overseer thing when He first began by creating light just over six thousand years ago."
As a chemist I have to say that I feel extrememly unclean after having read that.
I am continually amazed at how incredibly stupid a person can be. The saddest part is that there is a percentage of people that will read that and just nod their head thoughtfully, saying, "Yes, that makes perfect sense."
Let's send this fellow a bottle of 30% H2O2. He can slather it over his skin and get a feel for what it would be like to swim in a sea of it.
The stupid... it burns! (literally)
OEJ
It's hard for mere scientific types to wrap their brains around theories on a higher plane of reality. But after one grasps that even the word "theory" is evolved from "god", everything becomes easier.
God is the universal solvent; he solves everything. With God, all things are possible; that's what makes him such a useful tool for the human brain.
Given an axiom that created heaven and earth out of nothing, who needs to argue about hydrogen peroxide?
H2O3, according to Wikipedia, has a half-life of milliseconds in water. Of course, God could be squeezing all those molecules together with his innumerable tentacles until the right moment to uncork a flood.
Wait, is June kidding or does he/she really not know the difference between "solvent" and "solve"? If God was the universal solvent then there wouldn't be a universe at all, everything would just be individual atoms, molecules, and ions floating around in God.
The Giordano Bruno argument is pretty puzzling, given that Bruno lived 250 years before Darwin.
I know only 2 ways how H2O2 is used.
1:Blonding hairs
2:Contact lens cleaning (NOT before putting back in...)
I am no chemistrymaestro or anything. And I know that I would not swim in H2O2. (It is propably The Way How Michael Jackson Is Made..)
By all that is squidly, I love this site! Where else could such a question be asked -- and answered?
Pharyngula: come for the science, stay for the humor.
Sheesh, you wimpy latte-loving libruls!
The rights of logic are nowhere mentioned in the Geneva Conventions (quaint & obsolete as those have been for the last 5.5 years), nor are they included in either Declaration (Independence or Rights o' Man), the US Constitution, or even your beloved U.N. Charter.
If - as you pointy-headed eggheads insist - logic has the answers to our important questions, do you really think it's going to give them up for a "pretty please" and a piece of candy, like that Girl Scout in the park last... oh, never mind.
Real Americans(tm) know that logic will have to be sleep-deprived, waterboarded, and stacked up naked in the hallways to protect Our Way of Life!
June makes an excellent point. The perfect point, actually. Why strain at a gnat when there is a camel in the living room? (I tend to render biblical aphorisms rather freely.) Last year I steeled myself to read an unintentionally hilarious creationist text titled Taking Astronomy Back (from real science, apparently). Author Jason Lisle holds a genuine doctorate in astrophysics but is still willing to make arguments like this:
Jiminy Christmas! All this work to gin up a creationist explanation for the observed magnetic field strengths in the solar system. If God is going to magically screw with the elements, why bother starting with water? He could just say "Shazam!" and set the field strengths at any arbitrary level. Dr. Lisle offers explanations that explain nothing. You need the eyes of faith to be this blind.
"While this would make it unnecessary for anyone to wear glasses, how could humans survive if absolutely everyone were blind?"
Probably quite well. We all survive in spite of being klent, because we haven't yet evolved lut and cannot detect mord at all. You don't miss what you never had.
Why strain at a gnat when there is a camel in the living room?
Because asking why an omnipotent God needs to rig up insanely complicated schemes to achieve anything may lead one to question the literal truth of the Old Testament? ;)
I'm pretty sure I've got some mord right here on the bottom of my shoe here. Sticky.
A creationist comparing himself to Bruno? Hahahaha.
Who was it that burned him for his opinions again? It wasn't the scientists you hate so much.
The way to store universal solvent is to store it in a vat of frozen universal solvent.
It's in the Bible: "The breath of God produces ice, and the broad waters become frozen." - Job 37:10
And after the flood subsided all the water went....???
I freely admit that it is difficult for us to do. That's because "higher planes of reality" don't exist.
Does hydrogen peroxide act differently up there? Also, does someone have a link explaining what kind of convoluted unlogic results in some mistranslated boogieboo from the Bible being interpreted as "the ocean was hydrogen peroxide"? 'Cause I really want to see that.
And apparently the idiot you're quoting isn't aware that *pure* water isn't that efficient a conductor (as I understand it, it's dissolved metal salts that make it conductive, which is why seawater is more conductive than freshwater), and it certainly isn't as conductive as, say, iron... O.o
Mothra @#7: The ocean depths are black. Therefore water under pressure is black. Crude oil is black....
Dude, don't give them ideas! ;-)
Tuomo Hämäläinen @#58: Eek, more diacriticals! ;-) H2O2 is als useful as an antiseptic, generally in much lower strengths than used for blonding and such. Its big flaw there is that unlike (say) rubbing alcohol, dilute H2O2 decays over time, so it has an expiration date.
Finally, one for the chemists!
All this gibberish, just to prove... er... what was the question again?! I guess I don't completely understand his point. Why is he talking about hydrogen peroxide in the first place? Is he trying to find biblical evidense for why "water is blue"? How does incorporating H2O2 into the story make anything about it more believable? I started typing a list of things wrong with this, but there are just so damn many that I gave up. This clown doesn't know when to quit.
It's interesting how religious fanatics seem to focus tTeh stoopid on certain branches of science more than others. Why are they drawn to biology, astronomy, and geology than chemistry? Sure, they won't hesitate to botch chemistry when they have to, but it's usually done only as a tangent in some much larger mash-up against natural history (this current story is a good example.) And sure, once in a while a true believer will come up with an explanation of water-into-wine or how LSD is a "demonic molecule", but these are rare compared to the kind of attention that the field of biology gets.
It's not fair, I tells ya! Chemistry is just as incompatible with their world view, but somehow they are able to compartmentalize that fact while reaping its benefits. I guess I should be grateful that my field isn't front-and-center in the culture war, but it still pisses me off.
"Nice try PZ, but us True Believers know that Peroxide Corrosiveness is only a _theory_"
Nitrogen is the work of the Devil. That's why they put it in Guiness.
What creationist trolls say:
What the sane among us hear:
Daniel Morgan: Thank you for that tidbit. I had no idea that HOOOH could actually be isolated.
See, one can actually learn stuff from creationists, albeit by accident.
@interrobang (#33):
i don't suspect there are a lot of natural blondes that speak hebrew...
@ed darrell (#60):
*shrug* the hebrew dictionary i looked it up in?
@windy (#65):
i'm not sure we need ockham's razor (however improperly applied) to determine that at least the vast majority of the old testament is not literally true. some of the historical-type stuff in kings might have shreds of truth here and there, based on real people and events, etc. but most of it's poetry, rantings by religious leaders against some foriegn power or another, lengthy philosophical arguments, legal codes, and folk mythology. any educated person reading the text with a healthy degree of detachment and rationality will see this immediately. can we look at the book of psalms and say it's literally true? or a collection of works of music?
@dustin (#70):
yeah, i'm really curious too. cause i've been debating the especially wacky fundamentalists -- the kind the other ones distance themselves from -- for a while now, and i've never heard that one before. i can't even imagine what it's an ad-hoc assumption in order to prove.
Does this guy's 'logic' remind anyone else of the 'she's a witch!' bit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail?
"If she weighs the same as a duck, then...she's a witch!"
"If some spring water looks blue, then...God exists!"
Yes, but what will John A. Davison have to say about this new theory of water coloration?
I know only 2 ways how H2O2 is used.
1:Blonding hairs
2:Contact lens cleaning (NOT before putting back in...)
I am no chemistrymaestro or anything. And I know that I would not swim in H2O2. (It is propably The Way How Michael Jackson Is Made..)