Questions Dave refuses to answer
From RnRWiki
Dave Hawkins is legendary for ducking tricky questions, so here are a few he's ducked.
Many, many times.
With a hat tip to Silent Dave for composing the original list.
BIBLICAL INERRANCY (B)
1. Having admitted that you’ve never seen the supposedly “inerrant” originals of the Bible, how do you know they’re inerrant? If it’s because the admittedly flawed copies tell you so, why do you believe them?
2. You claim that humans have been literate since the Flood. Why did none of them have anything to say about an ice age that froze most of the planet solid? Why is there no evidence of it in written history?
3. You claim that humans have been literate since Adam. If Adam and the universe both came to exist about 6,000 years ago, then why don’t we have any written records dating back 6,000 years?
4. You claim that Adam had “secretaries” who followed him around with stone tablets, taking dictation. Whatever became of those tablets?
CREATOR GOD HYPOTHESIS (C)
1. Why are you unable to provide a means of falsifying your “hypothesis?”
2. . . . . . . .
(There’s not much point in a second question in this category until the first is answered, is there?)
STANDARD DATING TECHNIQUES (D)
1. Given your stated position that scientists in general are, as a whole, neither incompetent nor dishonest, how do you explain the conscilience in dating methods that shows the Earth to be many orders of magnitude older than 6,000 years?
2. For that matter, how do you explain even a single dating result in excess of 6,000 years?
3. Are discordant dates published, or is the conscilience obtained by hiding all the discordant dates? If the latter, how come the program managers and accountants haven’t noticed?
4. Is Snelling’s inclusion of xenoliths in his Ngauruhoe dating study fraud? If not, would it have been fraud to inject argon into the samples? What difference exists between the two scenarioes?
5. An Earth that is 5 billion years old, or 10 billion, or 50 billion, or a trillion years old, presents no problem to advocates of what you call the “deep time” theory, and yet no object native to the Earth has ever been dated beyond 4.55 billion years. Why do you suppose that is?
6. Given your stated position that isochrons are meaningless and invalid, what is your estimate of the probabilities that they would ever converge on any particular values?
7. What, specifically, are the problems with Mike PSS’s Isochron Summary?
8. What, specifically, are the problems with the dendrochronology for Catal Huyuk?
9. Given your stated position that only three layers have been dated, are you willing to admit, both on the Internet and at your church, that you are wrong if you are given links to more than three layer dating results? If not, why not?
10. What are the “bad assumptions” used during C14 calibration, and how do those “bad assumptions” cause all the independent C14 calibration curves to agree?
11. Have you finished reading Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective yet? When can we expect you to actually discuss it?
EVOLUTION AND MISC. BIOLOGY (E)
1. Given your stated position that there is zero evidence for macroevolution, what, in your opinion, do these graduate and undergraduate courses teach for 13 weeks?
2. How, exactly, was macroevolution falsified? Please include your definition of macroevolution when answering this question.
3. How does the human coccyx not constitute evidence for macroevolution?
4. What observable aspect of the coccyx would make it incompatible with special creation?
5. What part of Theobald’s sentence “The coccyx is a developmental remnant of the embryonic tail that forms in humans and then is degraded and eaten by our immune system (for more detail see the sections on the embryonic human tail and the atavistic human tail)” did you not understand?
6. What reproductive advantage does tree-climbing afford to humans?
7. Are humans mammals?
8. How can you claim to be fairly teaching evolution to kids, when you omit any mention of selection? Is your only justification still just a single mined quote from a guy who was complaining about that very same practice?
9. In February of ‘07, you claimed that you were going to “take on” nested hierarchies soon. When can we expect that to actually happen?
10. What were the names of the “leading evolutionists” who predicted that there would be living societies of “ape-men” on Earth today, and in which works did they make this prediction? Moreover, how would this constitute a prediction made by the theory of evolution as a whole?
11. Which skulls in this chart are fully ape, and which are fully human?
12. Given that your position on macroevolution being impossible is based on your alleged knowledge of genetics, what is the precise genetic mechanism, or barrier, that prevents macroevolution from occurring?
GLOBAL CATASTROPHIC FLOOD HYPOTHESIS (F)
1. What, precisely, was the source for the “waters of the deep?”
2. How much water was involved in the flood?
3. How much of that water was underground, and how deep? Was it uniformly spread, or localized in reservoirs?
4. Where did all that sediment come from? (Hint: it didn’t wash down from the mountains.)
5. Where did all that water in your “global flood run-off” run off to?
6. How does a 5,000-foot deep flood produce over 8,500 feet of sediment?
7. How do you date the Grand Canyon, and is there any independent corroboration of its age other than the assumption that it was formed during the Flood?
8. Since the Bible makes no mention of the Grand Canyon (or any canyon), what is your justification for saying it was formed during the Flood?
9. Which sediment layers were laid before the Flood, which were laid during the Flood, and which were laid afterwards? Or do you still maintain that all sedimentary layers worldwide were laid during the Flood?
10. Since sandstone can’t dry out in the middle of a flood, nor can the animals in question survive underwater, nor would their tracks survive the pressure of the layers above . . . how did those tracks get in the coconino sandstone?
11. How do you explain the presence of eolian and evaporite deposits between fluvial or marine deposits?
12. How do you explain coal?
13. Why are there clear cycles of regression and transgression present in the rock record?
14. Why are large shale formations consistently oxidized and red, while others are consistently black and unoxidized?
15. How did the mile-high cliffs of the Grand Canyon harden enough in a single year so that they didn’t slump under the weight of the deposits over them?
16. If there was extensive volcanic activity following the flood, why are there no large ash layers or igneous layers in the upper Canyon stratigraphy showing it?
17. What is the scientific methodology and evidence that lets you date Flood sediment to 2500 BCE?
18. How did the Flood produce vertical folded sediment layers?
19. How do you explain the dichotomy between freshwater and saltwater fishes that exists today, with the majority of species being stenohaline (i.e., restricted to a particular narrow salinity range) with phylogenetically traceable evolved osmoregulatory machinery for their respective biotopes (e.g., Amazonian blackwater rivers, marine coral reefs), along with aquatic invertebrates and higher aquatic plants belonging to whole swathes of taxa that would have been exterminated wholesale if the purported "global flood" had actually taken place?
20. How did dimetrodon footprints get into the hermit shale?
GENETIC INFORMATION (G)
1. Which has more information content, a 100kb digital recording of broadband white noise, or a 100kb encrypted file containing the text of a Winston Churchill speech?
2. Does an amoeba genome of 670 billion base pairs have hundreds of times the “genetic information” of a human genome of 3 billion base pairs?
3. How much genetic information is contained in 600 tandem repeats of the nucleotide sequence CATG?
BROWN’S HYDROPLATE THEORY AND THE SOLAR SYSTEM (H)
1. How could the earth have stored and thereafter released enough energy — in any form whatsoever – to launch the asteroids into space without annihilating all life on the planet?
2. Why does this “theory” require that all water in the solar system come from Earth?
3. Do you really believe that no water beyond the solar system exists?
4. How does it make logical sense that, via isotropic differences, terrestrial water could not have come from comets but the reverse is not true?
5. Most comets are 20,000 to 50,000 AU away from the Sun. How did they get there within five thousand years?
6. Of all the water in the solar system, which do you think has been reliably detected, which do you think is speculative, and what’s the difference?
NOAH’S ARK (N)
1. How did a maximum of 35,000 “kinds” on the Ark end up proliferating into over ten million species in the space of 4,500 years? How does this differ from super-ultra-mega-stupendo-fantastico-enormo-macroevolution?
2. For that matter, exactly how many “kinds” were on the Ark, and how do you know which modern-day species came from which “kind?”
3. Who on the Ark had syphilis?
4. How does the destruction of a single mating pair of unclean animals, seven mating pairs of clean animals, and four mating pairs of humans not cause an almost complete loss of genetic diversity in these organisms?
5. If Noah, his wife, sons and daughters-in-law were the only huamns left, how many children, on average, would each female have to have in order to achieve a global population of 6 billion, in less than 4,500 years.
6. If only eight humans were left after the Flood, how do you account for the large numbers of human genes that have many more than 10 alleles in the current population?
7. How did 10 alleles of the HLA gene become 500 alleles in only 13 generations?
8. How did animals that can only live within a very narrow temperature range get from Palestine to, say, Antarctica?
9. Why, in the entire history of the world, is there no record of an explosive increase in biodiversity?
10. Why on Earth do you insist on having living dinosaurs at the end of the Flood?
11. How is it that each “kind” on the Ark radiated into, on average, a thousand species living today, but humans haven’t radiated into any new species at all? What makes our genome so much more resistant to mutation?
12. For that matter, how about providing a rigorous and robust definition of "kind" that is capable of withstanding critical scrutiny?
RELIGION (R)
1. Would another god have to demonstrate itself physically to you in order for you to consider abandoning belief in the Christian god?
YOUNG EARTH THEORY (Y)
1. How many companies in the Fortune 1000 use the 6,000 year old Earth paradigm as the basis for a business case? How many use the old Earth paradigm?
2. How do we see light from stars up to 14 billion light years away?
3. How did a solar system, much less a galaxy or a galactic supercluster, manage to form in 6,000 years?
4. The half-life of Uranium 238 is 4.5 billion years, meaning virtually none would decay in 6,000 years. Why are there so many decay produces of it, then, scattered over the Earth?
5. How do you explain the Oklo natural nuclear reactor?
6. How does the surface of an iron sphere massing over 1024 kg cool to room temperature in less than 6,000 years?
7. How could there be a 24,000 year long gorge cutting event occurring between 31,000 and 7,000 years before you contend there was an earth to be cut?
MISCELLANEOUS (Z)
1. If you answer any of the above questions by appealing to the miraculous, then what makes science so useful that you pretend to appreciate it so much?
2. Do you honestly believe that your actions are serving the cause of Jesus Christ, rather than your own vanity?
3. Why did you claim to read “ALL of Popper” (caps yours, not mine) when, in fact, you only read two of his books at the most?
4. Given your definition of “machine,” can you name any object in the universe that is neither a machine nor part of one?
5. Charles Darwin : Evolution :: ____________ : Modern Geology?
6. Why do you think that science’s “materialistic bias” is unwarranted, given its incredible success over the centuries and millennia?
7. Using your intuition, which you say is reliable in detecting design, can you spot the created tool in this picture?
8. From what polls did you, through Wilson, take the statistics that evolution-doubters have risen eight percent in the 13 years since AIG came into existence?
