Where Did The Water Come From?

_{September 29, 2014

Astronomy, Geology, News}

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Having read the recent post here on where Earth’s water came from, I just stumbled across an interesting article over at ExtremeTech.com from June of this year, evidently commenting on a find that was originally reported in Science (at least, that’s what I’ve gathered from reading a bit about it elsewhere). I’m not sure if anything came of this or if it was mentioned here and I missed it (I couldn’t find it in a search), but I thought it might spark some interesting discussion.

From the article, titled Scientists discover an ocean 400 miles beneath our feet that could fill our oceans three times over:

After decades of theorizing and searching, scientists are reporting that they’ve finally found a massive reservoir of water in the Earth’s mantle — a reservoir so vast that could fill the Earth’s oceans three times over. This discovery suggests that Earth’s surface water actually came from within, as part of a “whole-Earth water cycle,” rather than the prevailing theory of icy comets striking Earth billions of years ago.

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This new study, authored by a range of geophysicists and scientists from across the US, leverages data from the USArray — an array of hundreds of seismographs located throughout the US that are constantly listening to movements in the Earth’s mantle and core. After listening for a few years, and carrying out lots of complex calculations, the researchers believe that they’ve found a huge reserve of water that’s located in the transition zone between the upper and lower mantle — a region that occupies between 400 and 660 kilometers (250-410 miles) below our feet.

….

Finally, here’s a fun thought that should remind us that Earth’s perfect composition and climate is, if you look very closely, rather miraculous. One of the researchers, talking to New Scientist, said that if the water wasn’t stored underground, “it would be on the surface of the Earth, and mountaintops would be the only land poking out.” Maybe if the formation of Earth had be a little different, or if we were marginally closer to the Sun, or if a random asteroid didn’t land here billions of years ago… you probably wouldn’t be sitting here surfing the web.

Thoughts?

Comments

Querious, this thread is so far down the pile now that I'm not sure you will pick this up, but here goes anyway @42 "So why are astronomers and cosmologists making these claims? Maybe you could explain to them why they’re wrong." I'm repeating myself, but I will say once again that one, I have not posted anything that a mainstream astronomer or cosmologist would disgree with, and two, I am not interested in trying to fit observed reality into the timeline of anybody's religious text. From the point of view of anybody on the Earth, we appear to live on a 4.5 billion year old lump of rock in a 13.5 billion year old universe. If Gerald Schroeder's semantics concur with this assertion there is nothing to discuss. If they don't then I would expect a man of such potential genius to have a great list of scientific papers to his name, detailing the implications of his new physics. Yet he chooses to use his genius to butress the faith of "believers". In particular I would ask him a hypothical question. If Genesis began "In the beginning God created a Caesium clock for the future Garden of Eden and a spare for his mantelpiece", what would both read now to either observer? (9192631770 *60*60*24)*(6+(365.26*approx 6000)) or 9192631770*60*60*24*365.26*13,500,000,000? @45 So Scientists make mistakes or misinterpret data. Then other Scientists become famous or even win Nobel prizes for pointing them out. What is the problem? @46 Once again you post a link to a webpage for "fact checking" with which I can agree, but which is totally at odds with your understaning. Did you read it? because it states star formation is started as 150 million years, not 400,000. I think part of you misunderstanding stems from conflating inflation and expansion. The former was postulated as a refinement to the original big bang theory to explain the fact the the CMBR was almost perfectly homogenous across the whole sky. Under this model, it must have lasted at least 10**-32 (that is MINUS 32!) seconds, but the end of inflation is effectively t=0 for our universe. What happened before is unknown. You ask "which came first, light or stars?" If you had read the page you linked to, you would know that the answer was light (assuming you meant "photons"), and by about 150 million years. Your 380,000 years seems to correspond to the age when the lifetime of a photon became long enough to ensure that some of them get to us in the CMBR. "Faster than light inflation" is an imprecise concept. What do you actually mean? To go back to your two stars example, if space is not expanding the light would take 40 million years to travel between them and it will be seen at the same frequency by sender and receiver. In expanding space it will take longer, and the receiver will see a red shift. Now for the sake of simplicity, let's say they were only 1 light year apart and a rate of expansion of 25% per year, then after each year the stars will be 25% further apart. So the distance between them in light years will be 1,1.25,1.56,1.95,2.44,3.05,3.81,4.76. So for 7 years the stars will see each other red shifting. A year later they will be 5.96 light years apart, and a year after will be 7.45 light years apart, i.e. the distance between them is expanding faster than the speed of light. They will eventually fall off the edge of each others visible universe and seem to red shift into oblivion.Tamara Knight_{October 13, 2014
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Tamara Knight, Ok, here's a better way to illustrate my point. In the Inflationary model of the universe, it is generally agreed that there was faster-than-light inflation for the first 380,000 years. The size of the universe had increased to about 43 million light years in size. According to this model, the first stars formed at around 400,000 years. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe for a handy illustration and fact checking. Now, at this time, there were likely two stars that were 40 million light years apart. How long did the light take to travel from the one star to the other? According to this model, which formed first, light or stars? -QQuerius_{October 6, 2014
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Tamara Knight wrote:
But if you feel yours is strong enough to be reconciled with scientific reality, can I recommend Gordon Glovers excellent YouTube series “Science and Christian Education”. I’m going to be away from Internet access for a week, but perhaps you could let me know what you think of them when I get back.
So far, I've watched the first one in the series and I agree with your assessment that it's an excellent presentation covering valid and important points. The world isn't as clean as Gordon Glover presents it---there's a serious problem when one encounters lousy science (or lousy theology) because of ideological contamination. Let me give you three examples. 1. In the 1950's Kathleen Kenyon dug a large trench at Jericho and as a result of not finding any collapsed walls during the supposed time period, announced to the world that the Biblical story was a myth. However . . . http://www.biblearchaeology.org/post/2008/06/The-Walls-of-Jericho.aspx#Article 2. In the 1960s, Graham Cairns-Smith proposed a theory that the life originated in crystals in a clay environment. His work was labeled "controversial," and continues to be generally rejected in favor of Oparin's earlier "warm pond" model, which itself has a lot of problems. I've read that the rejection of Cairns-Smith's idea was primarily for ideological reasons (Adam formed out of clay in Genesis). Then about 20 years later, we read http://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/03/us/new-finding-backs-idea-that-life-started-in-clay-rather-than-sea.html And over 25 years after that, there's this: http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/4784/20131106/life-evolved-clay-researchers-find.htm (https://cornell.app.box.com/clay) 3. Hawking's multiverse theory, which is a philosophical rather than scientific theory, again based on ideological repugnancy rather than compelling evidence. How would you falsify it? Things like this---and I'm not even considering the bogus "evolution" of social behaviors or speculations about the evolution of the moustache---really put a damper on people who just want to follow the data. I'm tired. More later. -QQuerius_{October 4, 2014
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Don't worry about it, Mung. We're used to your quacks, ;-) -QQuerius_{October 4, 2014
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I have to take back what I said. I was confusing one quack with a different quack!Mung_{October 4, 2014
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Gerald Schroeder has two PhDs from MIT, one in nuclear physics, one in oceanography, plus he's taught there. I try to imagine what his response to you would be if you said those things to his face---maybe he'd just shrug and walk away, or maybe he'd start asking you some questions about physics and time. From your responses, I still don't think you understand inflation. What he covers in his videos, especially video 7 and 8 is that there are two time clocks that are going on at the same time---that both are valid. His presentation was his view of the Bible and ancient (i.e. pre-scientific era) Hebrew commentary from his perspective as a PhD physicist. It turns out that the unlikely descriptions in Genesis are completely compatible with physics and cosmology as understood by physicists of his caliber. Then there's his PhD in oceanography.
But the stretching causes a red shift in the light we see, and with the sort of rates of expansion you were postulating it would cease to be anything you could call “light”.
I'm not postulating anything. Astronomers already tell us that the farthest galaxies are receding faster than the speed of light. Cosmologists tell us that there was a period in the big stretch in which the inflation of space was significantly faster than the speed of light. According to your latest post, these galaxies must not be visible. So why are astronomers and cosmologists making these claims? Maybe you could explain to them why they're wrong. ;-) Give it a shot. I'm listening. -QQuerius_{October 4, 2014
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Oh yes he is! Well at he very least having struggled through half of that video he is obviously a man who starts with his conclusion, and delivers his argument like a man selling the latest must-have widget at a Trade Show. At least Jason Lisle tries to justify his biblical literacy with some flawed maths. I've never understood why "believers" feel the need to find "proof" of their sacred texts. If faith is so weak that it needs proof, it is no faith at all. But if you feel yours is strong enough to be reconciled with scientific reality, can I recommend Gordon Glovers excellent YouTube series "Science and Christian Education". I'm going to be away from Internet access for a week, but perhaps you could let me know what you think of them when I get back. And a brief summary Schroeder's ideas would be good too, with particularly emphasis on how this "different perspective" better explains the universe than the standard cosmological model and good old-fashion relativity. As a developer of state-of-the-art electronic systems, I'm always looking for ways to gain an edge on the competition! And an order of magnitude improvement in the accuracy of my GPS receiver based systems would be a real winner. Back to the opening paragraph of your last post, you begin with a statement of the obvious, because of course distance in light years does not equate to time. That is Physics 101: both sides of an equation must have the same units. "time" can never be equal to "distance". However you finish with: "That light from a star 10 billion light years away does not equate to light actually travelling 10 billion years?" This is a trick question relying on semantics, or a typo? Did you mean to end it with "travelling FOR 10 billion years" or "travelling 10 billion light years"? Because as a sentence (in British English at least) its meaning is otherwise totally wrong! When an astronomer says a star is 10 billion light years away he means, BY DEFINITION, that the light we are receiving from it left that star 10 billion years (in the receiver's time) ago. Any object outside our galaxy, as an object now at this distance must be, was considerably closer when the light left it, ans is now considerably further away if it exists at all.Tamara Knight_{October 4, 2014
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No, he's not.Querius_{October 3, 2014
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Schroeder is a quack.Mung_{October 3, 2014
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Oh good. So now you agree that distance in light years doesn't equate to time? That light from a star 10 billion light years away does not equate to light actually travelling 10 billion years? The reasons you gave are exactly why I prefer to call the "big bang" the "big stretch" or the inflationary model instead. But how can one date the universe given relativistic effects? Dr. Gerald Schroeder provides an interesting perspective from both as a Jew and a physicist. If you're patient, and would like to understand a different perspective, watch the videos beginning with this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRxEeHFHc-Y -QQuerius_{October 3, 2014
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Sorry Querius, but the misconceptions must be all yours, as there is absolutely nothing in the link you posted that I disagree with. You are conflating "receeding faster" with "travelling faster". It is a common mistake because in our everyday world they are the same, and we naturally visualise the big bang like a big conventional explosion, hurtling things further apart at high speed through space. But the big bang created expanding space between essentially statiionary objects. Objects are not forced apart, but the fabric of space between them is stretching. So if a photon leaves a star when the star is one light year from us, in expanding space it takes it longer than a year for that photon to reach us. When there is a lot of space between, the distance that a photon has still to travel to get to us increases faster than the speed of light. That star will then be "receding faster" than the speed of light, and will seem to stop shining from our point of view as it speeds past the edge of our visible universe. But the stretching causes a red shift in the light we see, and with the sort of rates of expansion you were postulating it would cease to be anything you could call "light". The CMBR from the big bang is already red-shifted into the microwave band. Your light would need to be red-shifted to such low frequencies I doubt it would even make the grade as very long wave radio. Not to mention that everything else would also be receding from us so fast the even the Sun would have dropped of the edge of the visible universe. If you are interested, can I suggest you read through some old posts on Starts With A Bang at ScienceBlogs. I find it keeps me up to date with a practicing Astrophysicist's take on the latest science stories, but there are some excellent archive posts on the science of the big bang too.Tamara Knight_{October 3, 2014
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Sorry Tamara, Wow, I don't know where to start. I have trouble believing you studied physics, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Let's take just one of your misconceptions.
Your ten billion year old star example does not work. Nothing has ever been observed to travel faster than light. Even if the space between us and that star could somehow have expanded so quickly, the light from that star would be travelling towards us more slowly than the distance between us was increasing.
No, not true! Of course, I don't expect you to believe anything I say, so why don't you go ahead and read this article: http://www.universetoday.com/13808/how-can-galaxies-recede-faster-than-the-speed-of-light/ So, do you now agree that you were completely wrong about how some galaxies have been receding faster than the speed of light or do you think that astronomers and cosmologists are all wrong as well? Still not convinced? Do a google search using the string galaxies faster than the speed of light Let me know if you changed your mind. :-) -QQuerius_{October 2, 2014
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the bystander:
ID believes Earth is 4.5 billion years old and Universe is 13.5 billion years old.
If ID says anything about that it would say it all depends on how the universe and earth were designed as to how old they are. For example, as Querius pointed out in 32, if relativity played a role in implementation of the design formation of the universe, it would all depend on the frame of reference. And a massive white hole as a starting point would provide the initial condition to pull it off. As the event horizon became smaller, processes and objects away from it would be aging faster. A day on the EH would be a day but out away from it there would be billions of years worth of processes taking place, relatively speaking.Joe_{October 2, 2014
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@ the bystander "ID doesn’t say that. It is creationist theory. ID believes Earth is 4.5 billion years old and Universe is 13.5 billion years old." My comment was directed at what seemed like an attempt by Querius to match things to a literal six day creation, and I was obviously not making myself clear if it suggested my understanding of ID was any different to yours. I would however claim that a young universe with the appearance of age is Omphalos not creation theory. @ Querius #32 I'm still struggling to see where you are coming from. I'm pretty certain that ancient Hebrew as a language had no need to differentiate between reptiles and amphibians, even if the actual differences were significant to them, but the differences were obvious to science well before Darwin was born. Amphibians evolving from reptiles would be a disaster for Darwinian Evolution, because reptiles are amphibians that have evolved to reduce their dependence on standing water. An Intelligent Designer could design an amphibian, then get sidetracked into designing and building a sppecialised high performance dry skinned version laying eggs that hatch into air breathing young before going back and building his amphibians, but Evolution can't do that. Common ancestry requires a continuous time-line, where common design does not. Whales certainly share a common ancestor (or common design elements if you prefer,) with land animals. In an evolutionary scenario, if all land animals were to become extinct on a continent, the descendants of whales might well be able to recolonise that land (Though seals would probably get there first). But the ancestry of these new land animals would still be clear from their genes to an alien scientist comparing them with land animals on other continents. Darwin was just a man who joined the dots and gave his name to the idea of descent with modification. In the last one hundred and fifty years science has made huge amounts of progress, and we know things he could not even have dreamed of. We certainly know the direction of the evolution (with a small “e”) of life is determined by much more than the simplistic notion of survival of the fittest, including much we still don't understand. Your ten billion year old star example does not work. Nothing has ever been observed to travel faster than light. Even if the space between us and that star could somehow have expanded so quickly, the light from that star would be travelling towards us more slowly than the distance between us was increasing. It would be beyond our visible universe. I am a physics graduate, albeit from forty years ago and no longer a practicing physicist, and well understand relativity as it was of particular interest to me whilst a student with a professor actively researching that area. Einstein very elegantly explained so much from a simple initial postulation about accelerating reference frames. Every experiment ever done since has confirmed it, and probably to degrees of accuracy well beyond anything known in any other area of science. If you want to add layer upon layer upon layer of complexity to those equations, then those additions need to offer something more (actually much much more) that fitting a 13.5 billion year time-line to a six day creation. And I was not referencing the size of the universe as a factor in its age, but merely to illustrate that we are an almost infinitesimal part of it. You say “How the days in Genesis are interpreted is a matter of debate”. Well it is not one that interests me beyond the claims of any other religious creation story, other than my original point that any interpretation of it beyond metaphor requires the postulation of a very deceitful god in the light of what we now DO know about how the universe APPEARS to have formed.Tamara Knight_{October 2, 2014
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Tamara @ 29
If the Abrahamic God really did create the universe in six days a few thousand years ago, then it seems to me we can learn much more of his nature by asking WHY he worked so very, very, hard to make it appear 13.5 billion years old and at least 45 billion light years across
ID doesn't say that. It is creationist theory. ID believes Earth is 4.5 billion years old and Universe is 13.5 billion years old.the bystander_{October 1, 2014
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Hi Tamara, Let me try to provide you with a different perspective.
Not quite sure what you point is here, or even exactly what you mean by marine reptiles, but any evolutionary scenario requires a place for amphibians. They must live part of the time on land by definition, and must come before any reptile, marine or otherwise.
Marine iguanas are found in the Galapagos. There are also turtles, crocodiles, and caiman that are considered marine reptiles. “Amphibians” are a modern classification that I'm pretty certain were lumped together with reptiles in ancient Hebrew. But even so, why would amphibians necessarily have to come first? Isn't amphibianism a product of evolutionary adaptation? If the ancestor of the whale evolved from a land mammal, why is it impossible for amphibians to evolve from reptiles?
To me, science is making huge progress in answering the How Questions, and I don’t claim to know where the limits of the process are.
Science knows very little about the origins of life apart from imaginative speculation. In my opinion, once we can pry Darwin's cold, dead 19th--century hands from the neck of science, we can start making progress again.
If the Abrahamic God really did create the universe in six days a few thousand years ago, then it seems to me we can learn much more of his nature by asking WHY he worked so very, very, hard to make it appear 13.5 billion years old and at least 45 billion light years across
1. Of course you know that time is relative to velocity, right? Cosmologist Dr. Gerald Schroeder sees no reason why the universe couldn't be both about 14 billion years only and about 7 days old at the same time depending on your frame of reference. 2. Distance in light years is not any indication of age. For example, we believe that the inflation of the universe was much faster than the speed of light at one point. There's no reason that a star 10 billion light years distant couldn't have been only a few light years distant a few seconds ago (which is exactly what is thought to have happened during the initial rapid inflation of the universe). The book of Genesis makes no statement of the age of the universe. Archbishop Ussher made his famous estimate based on the lifespans of the patriarchs. How the days in Genesis are interpreted is a matter of debate. Again, one day in one frame of reference might be a couple of billion years in another. We simply don't know. -QQuerius_{October 1, 2014
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Also...
To me, science is making huge progress in answering the How Questions, and I don’t claim to know where the limits of the process are. Clearly it can’t answer the Why Questions. There seems to be almost as many religious creation stories as there are gods. Everybody is free to pick their favourite, but to believe that any is literally true in the 21st century raises for more Why Questions than it answers. If the Abrahamic God really did create the universe in six days a few thousand years ago, then it seems to me we can learn much more of his nature by asking WHY he worked so very, very, hard to make it appear 13.5 billion years old and at least 45 billion light years across
And what if the Abrahamic God really did create the universe 13.7 billion years ago and began preparing the earth for habitation and progressively creating life on it approximately 4 billions years ago, doing so over millions or billions of years that were later described as being divided into 6 basic creative periods in which certain types of creative acts either occurred or began? One of the grand mistakes of so many supporters of Darwin is that they think, talk and act like Young Earth Creationism is the only other horse in the race. In reality, Evolution is also in competition with at least some form of Old Earth Creationism (a religious competitor) and Intelligent Design (a scientific competitor).HeKS_{October 1, 2014
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@Tamara Knight
@HeKS “Where both theories predicts exactly the same thing it doesn’t help us much to figure out which theory, if any, is correct.” Which was exactly my original point. Bystander’s scenario was an inconsequential draw, possibly leaving a designer with some explaining to do. In your original response, you nevertheless seemed to see that as a humiliation for Darwinism.
You still seem to have misunderstood me. I wasn't saying that the mere fact that Darwinism predicts that animals living on land would not exist until there was land for them to live on is a humiliation for Darwinism. I was saying that to cite that fulfilled 'prediction' as a support of Darwinism would be a humiliation for the person citing it. To predict some scenario [animals living on land will not exist until there is land for them to live on] where the counterfactual [animals living on land will exist before there is land for them to live on] is impossible (logically and/or physically depending on how you look at it) is not impressive. It basically amounts to a tautology. To cite a theory's prediction of a tautology as support that the theory is true is silly. Furthermore, if the Neo-Darwinian mechanism is capable of effecting the large-scale morphological change that its proponents claim, it is not necessarily impossible that Neo-Darwinism would bring about animals that could live on land before land existed. After all, the phenotypic adjustments necessary for life on land could simply have been 'spandrels'; additional phenotypic characteristics that get carried along as the byproduct of the phenotypes that are the actual target of adaptive selection. So, if you change the wording of the prediction from one that involves actually living on land to one that merely involves having phenotypic characteristics suitable for living on land, then the prediction becomes less tautological, but then it also turns out not to be a hard prediction of Darwinian evolution. If organisms were found that had characteristics suitable for life on land prior to the existence of land, Evolutionary theory would easily handle the finding. And it would almost certainly be cited as further evidence that organisms weren't intelligently designed, that evolution is purposeless and that mutations do not arise out of a need created by the environment.HeKS_{October 1, 2014
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@HeKS "Where both theories predicts exactly the same thing it doesn’t help us much to figure out which theory, if any, is correct." Which was exactly my original point. Bystander's scenario was an inconsequential draw, possibly leaving a designer with some explaining to do. In your original response, you nevertheless seemed to see that as a humiliation for Darwinism. @Querius #27 "From an evolutionary syncretism then, fish, birds, and terrestrial reptiles evolved from marine reptiles." No quite sure what you point is here, or even exactly what you mean by marine reptiles, but any evolutionary scenario requires a place for amphibians. They must live part of the time on land by definition, and must come before any reptile, marine or otherwise. To me, science is making huge progress in answering the How Questions, and I don't claim to know where the limits of the process are. Clearly it can't answer the Why Questions. There seems to be almost as many religious creation stories as there are gods. Everybody is free to pick their favourite, but to believe that any is literally true in the 21st century raises for more Why Questions than it answers. If the Abrahamic God really did create the universe in six days a few thousand years ago, then it seems to me we can learn much more of his nature by asking WHY he worked so very, very, hard to make it appear 13.5 billion years old and at least 45 billion light years acrossTamara Knight_{October 1, 2014
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@Querius #26 I first came across the tablet theory a little over 15 years ago. I tend to agree that it seems to be a better fit to the evidence. The accounts in Genesis read as though they are very primitive narratives, in the sense of not being embellished with legendary elements. In addition to the presence of the colophons, it just seems far more likely that the accounts read as primitive because they are primitive rather than because all of the legendary embellishments have been stripped out after the fact.HeKS_{September 30, 2014
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KingRichard, You might also be interested in this, taken from a previous post on the subject: Interestingly, if you take a strict literal interpretation of the Genesis account of the appearance of animal life from the Septuagint, you would draw the following conclusions: DAY 5 - Life originated from the sea - Living creatures originated in separate clades - The first clades were marine reptiles (herpeton is the word used repeatedly) and featherless flying winged (peteinos) creatures - Clades of large sea monsters came next probably followed by fish - The next clades were feathered winged creatures that migrated to the land DAY 6 - Then came clades of four-footed land creatures, clades of land-based reptiles, and clades of other wild animals and cattle - Originating from clay, humans were the last to appear, and had the ecological purpose of managing all life on the earth - All living creatures were originally vegetarian From an evolutionary syncretism then, fish, birds, and terrestrial reptiles evolved from marine reptiles. -QQuerius_{September 30, 2014
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Some more wild and wooly thoughts . . . What if the Earth were originally all water (with a density similar to the four Jovian plants) and slowly gained mass by accretion? It would start out roughly the diameter of the moon. After absorbing a radioactive core of uranium, thorium, and potassium (which would explain how an element as light as K got there), other components would be added in layers depending on what was available nearby. At some point, this would include a layer of Ringwoodite that absorbed most of the water and served as a base for other captured materials. The atmosphere would be mostly translucent water vapor (steam) which would keep the sun, moon and stars an undifferentiated glow until the fraction of nitrogen and oxygen became sufficient to make the atmosphere transparent. ---- If the plasma cosmology is correct, then the planets would form from the outside in, with the sun being formed at the end. See http://plasmauniverse.info/ ---- Taken minimalistically, Genesis is a polemic against the deification of the sun, moon, and stars, and the anthropomorphic mythologies of the origin of the universe popular in ancient cultures. They're just lamps. Of course, Genesis could have come first. This view is facilitated by P.J.Wiseman's tablet theory, which I find far more compelling that the JEPD hypothesis. See http://remnantreport.com/cgi-bin/imcart/read.cgi?article_id=576 http://www.trueorigin.org/tablet.asp -QQuerius_{September 30, 2014
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@Tamara Knight #20 Hi Tamara, My point was not that the 'prediction' was wrong but that it was so obviously right as to be trivial, which I gather now was exactly the joke that the bystander was intending to make. An after-the-fact prediction that simply says that some situation won't occur until it is physically possible for it to occur (e.g. there will not be animals living on land until there is land for them to live on) is not saying much of interest, especially when it isn't capable of offering any causally adequate explanation for how that situation could occur. Now, if I read you correctly, you seem to be suggesting that as a prediction of ID, this prediction is not so trivial, since a designer could design land-dwelling animals before there was any land around. While this is true, it would not be expected that an intelligent designer would do such a thing, since these animals would have nowhere to live. This means that both theories would predict the same thing on this point: land-dwelling animals would only exist after land existed. At least ID offers an adequate cause for the emergence of land-dwelling animals in the form of intelligent agency, but any way you slice it, this isn't a very impressive prediction. In historical sciences, when looking at competing theories/explanations of some phenomenon or state of affairs, you're looking for discriminating predictions, where one theory predicts one thing and the other theory predict something different. Where both theories predicts exactly the same thing it doesn't help us much to figure out which theory, if any, is correct.HeKS_{September 30, 2014
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@tjguy My comment was addressing issues raised by HeKS's response to bystander's scenario. The Darwinian story of evolution certainly says life began in water and spread to land, but it says nothing about how much land and water there was, or where the water came from. Those issues are surely for geologists and astro-physicists to solve. Uniformitarianism definitely requires that scientific Laws were the same in the past, but that does not mean nothing changes. My grandma has grey hair, but I'm sure it was brown when she was younger, and the solar system has aged too.Tamara Knight_{September 30, 2014
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So... the Bible is correct: Genesis 1:7 "And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament" Genesis 7:11 "In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened." Interesting...KingRichard_{September 30, 2014
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Tamara says: "Whilst it is clearly absurd that an undirected process like Darwiniam Evolution could produce a land animal before there was land for it to live on, surely it is inconceivable that an intelligent designer would make the same mistake?" Tamara, I don't think the Darwinian story of evolution says that first there was water and later there was land. The Bible says that the earth was covered with water on day 1 after God created it and then the sun was created on day 4 so it does fit this scenario, but that is not the evolutionary story. The earth would have originally been a molten blob with water coming to earth at least, even later. How this watery planet got all it's water is a mystery in the evolutionary scenario. The claim is that meteors probably brought the water to earth, but this is simply a guess and seems a bit far out to me. It is hard to substantiate that idea with experiments., so if it is not testable .... Certainly we really don't see that happening today as far as I know, so to postulate that it happened in the past seems a bit far fetched. Isn't it a violation of the principle of uniformitarianism that so often guides evolutionists in their thinking? Of course the idea that God actually created the water is not a possibility in their eyes. But the creation week was a clearly a week with various supernatural events taking place, so it is not far fetched to see God as the Creator of the water. We're talking about a lot of water. There must have been some pretty huge meteors out there carrying a heck of a lot of water. I wonder how they came to have that much water on them!tjguy_{September 30, 2014
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Tamara Knight:
Whilst it is clearly absurd that an undirected process like Darwiniam Evolution could produce a land animal before there was land for it to live on,
Well undirected evolution, like Darwinian evolution, lives in the absurd. Floating mats of vegetation could offer opportunity...Joe_{September 30, 2014
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@HeKs Whilst I appreciate bystander was being sarcastic, your response puzzles me. Darwinian Theory would indeed predict that there would be evidence of this sequence of life honing events, but why would Intelligent Design Theory not predict a similar sequence with even more confidence? Whilst it is clearly absurd that an undirected process like Darwiniam Evolution could produce a land animal before there was land for it to live on, surely it is inconceivable that an intelligent designer would make the same mistake?Tamara Knight_{September 30, 2014
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Seeing how often the attempted humor of sarcasm backfires, I have learned to avoid it. It's better to be clear than to be clever.sagebrush gardener_{September 29, 2014
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bystander:
Of course I was being sarcastic I thought the ‘Hmm..’(Thinking :-) ) will make that clear!
Good joke. But given my experience with Darwinists, I thought the 'Hmm..' was a veiled attempt at mockery.Mapou_{September 29, 2014
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