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> I figure he doesn't know what the hydroplate model says, nor does he spend the minute or two it would take to find out. The crust would be around 30 miles thick according to Brown, since a significant portion would be removed during the early part of the flood. That's 48 km, i.e. he's wrong by a factor of 3.

On examination, you are right - the Mohorovicic discontinuity is at 20-90km depth under continents.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohorovičić_discontinuity

Thanks for the correction. For those that don't know - here is a summary of how we know the depth of the crust using seismology -

> Now I will turn to the outermost few tens of kilometres of the Earth, where the variation in seismic speeds is most complex. Junctions between one rock body and another are sometimes manifested by sharp changes in seismic speed, but on a global scale the effect is one of gradually increasing speed with depth. This is because of the dominating effect of increasing rigidity when depth, and hence pressure, increases. P-wave speed increases gradually from about 2 km per second just below the surface to 6 or 7 km per second. Below this, a sharp jump to a P-wave speed of 8 km per second is recognized throughout the entire globe, at an average of 30 km below the continents but usually 10 km or less below the ocean floor. This sharp change to denser rocks is known as the Mohorovicic discontinuity (after Andrija Mohorovicic, 1857–1936, the Croatian seismologist who first recognized it). It is usually called the Moho for short. Above the Moho are the rocks that belong to the Earth’s crust, and below it is the mantle, which extends all the way to the core.

Source: https://www.amazon.com/Geology-Complete-Introduction-Teach-Yourself/dp/147360155X

The average crust thickness under NA continent is 36.5km.

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/data/crust/nam.php

BUT the area of the North American continental plate is 75900000 km^2.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Plate

75900000km^2 * 36.5km =~ 2.8 billion cubic km instead of his written 3 billion.


I guess perhaps /u/guyinachair should amend the calculation - perhaps to enough kinetic energy to boil all the water only about 100 times (as originally stated! lol).

I think he made two mistakes - used the incorrect area of 24.71 million km² (which is the area of North America, but not the continental plate) as well as 150km instead of the average of 36.5km.

Which, when combined, hilariously gives him the correct answer!? (his joules calculation from kinetic energy is correct with simple eyeball/mental math - I have not checked the heating water math as I'm a bit tired and cbb after work).

Feel free to correct anything or calculate it yourself.

> He clearly meant an exercise in absurd calculations. The continents were slowed over some time, with the energy transferring into 1 the bottom of the plate and the mantle after the water cushion escaped and 2 into wide sections of the continent itself or sometimes the one it crashed into which caused kinetic uplift of mountains like the rockies, moved large quantities of still soft sediments which is why the great unconformity exists, and caused significant amounts of melting which is why the ring of fire exists.

Um, what time frame are we talking about? We are talking about plates moving at 20m/s - ie 72kph or 45mph...

Are there any predictions made and fulfilled from a plate running into another at 72kph rather than slowly as per standard plate tectonics? Like mass debris / broken off pieces of plates or something?

> So you get knowledge? Just so? directly into your mind?

Yeah, in this case.

>But this prophecy would only be fulfilled, if Jesus really is the messiah, correct?

So you are asking if we can confirm Jesus really is the Messiah. Yes, we can do that, because Jesus is the only person in all of history that has fit the description of Messiah we find all throughout the Old Testament perfectly, and he came at exactly the right time in history to make it possible for all the prophecies to be fulfilled as they were.

See:
https://www.amazon.com/Messianic-Hope-Hebrew-Studies-Theology/dp/0805446540

I think that Intelligent Design explains things at least as well as evolutionary theory, maybe better. I personally have trouble seeing that evolution has any explanatory power or benefit to science. The explanations seem to be almost always "just so" stories. How did birds develop flight? When the protobirds were jumping off of trees some had feathery mutations and they landed further away. Eventually this sort of thing led to perfectly formed feathers and wings. (The cursorial theory of flight is just as bad as this arboreal one). When one looks at biology and see some new enzyme or organelle, one always asks what it does, what it's purpose is. This is a tacit acknowledgement of underlying intelligent design. This is how we make progress in biochemistry. When we assume things are due to random evolutionary processes, then science stagnates - e.g. examining junk DNA for function. (But this is a bit of a tangent now and I don't want to get derailed too much.)

I think that the main answer to your question is that each organism has exactly what it needs for its job. An earthworm does not need anything that it doesn't have. Why should it have amazing eyesight? If it had amazing armour like a crocodile, then it would mess up the food chain as birds couldn't eat it. I don't know details about everything : for example the different digestive systems that you're talking about. A lot of the time, the answer is the main one that I've mentioned already, combined with the need to have a balanced ecosystem. (By the way, if you think designing one organism is complex, how about a self-sustaining self-healing ecosystem). Here are some examples:

If our noses were as good as dogs, we probably couldn't live in cities. We'd be appalled at the terrible smells everywhere. But dogs don't seem to mind. If we could digest cellulose like termites or cows and horses we would have had the current population explosion much sooner. People would have eaten every non-poisonous green plant there is. We are like that - short term self-preservation and self-gratification no matter what the long term consequences are - e.g. no more trees on the planet. We don't need the best of everything because we can compensate for it using our brain. We don't need to see better than we do. We need to be able to see up close - we can do very intricate needlework and soldering unaided (until we get old), we need to be able to read clearly and quickly, we need to be able to see well in the middle distance and reasonable well in far distance.

The other part of answering your question involves my viewpoint of God, which I rarely bring into these discussions, preferring instead to focus on science. I think that we have things like external testicles, good enough eyes, no photosynthesis in our skin, etc. to make us limited, to prevent us from being invincible like superheroes. I think that God has made it so that we need to eat plants instead of being an intelligent plant so that we are part of the ecosystem and look after it because it provides for us. We need to learn dependency because we always want to wrest control for ourselves and become superhuman. This dependency also manifests itself in the need for sleep. A supreme designer could have made it so that we (and animals) don't need to sleep, but the need for sleep makes us weaker. We are defenseless when we are asleep. There are also all sorts of social implications and benefits to sleep: homes, families, time off work, etc. Men are already stronger than women and the main aggressors and abusers; having external testicles that are incredibly painful when injured is a way of adding a bit more weakness. I mean, even having external testicles, why should they be so painful? After procreating it makes no sense. It would be better if it just felt like banging your elbow.

There are some things that I have issues with still. The main one being testosterone. Why would God make it so that the drive for sex is so strong that it results in the subjugation of half of the human race? Prostitution, sex trafficking. Why would be make it so that testosterone results in such extreme aggression, warfare, violence?

It's also hard to figure this out because we are moving away from biology (why does our thumb work how it does), to behaviour. When we move to behaviour (bringing God into things and the Christian world view), we need to consider human nature and the Fall. As part of humanity's initial rebellion against God, things broke and got shattered. This is probably when many parasites became harmful, diseases began etc. It's hard to know for sure as we don't know the details. And yet we still see that things are generally well designed (immune system, the eye, liver, etc). So while the Fall brought suffering and aging and death, it didn't radically degrade us biologically (oh dear, I really don't want to get into this, because we don't know that much about the details). The main thing is that human nature has changed. This is a vitally important thing that we need to recognize and account for. Human nature has a dark side that can't be erased, that can't be fixed by scientific progress and discovery. People thought that rationalism and the scientific revolution would fix all our problems. That we would be just, humane, noble. That there would be no more wars (the war to end all wars), that education could solve violence, crime, abuse, famine. But it doesn't work. This is why we are happily destroying our planet (see /r/collapse) and we won't act until it is too late. I don't think a non-Christian view of human nature works nor explains things as well as the narrative that has the Fall. We are a mixture of good and bad. We all have a shadow side. It's only by turning back to God, by looking at Jesus and following him that we can fix our human nature, that we can be transformed into new people, and even then it takes time and work. Religion (incl. Christianity) that just makes a bunch of rules cannot do this. We already have rules in society and they're broken regularly. Islam is all about rules, but they're filled with hatred and lust just as much as anyone else. The unbelievable spread of Christianity over the first 300 years from being only in Jerusalem to infiltrating the whole Roman empire happened because of changed human nature, not self-promotion, politics, campaigns. Something very unusual happened that we don't really see Christians doing any more today (at least in the West). The sociologist Rodney Stark explains it.

I hope that this was interesting. I need to get off reddit and do other work!