Hi Courtney,
The experiments I was talking about take place with maybe a percent or two of water, so yes, they involve ACTUAL MELTED ROCK in an environment that includes a small amount of water vapor. (Why WOULDN’T natural magma have some water around? Water vapor comes out of volcanoes, after all.) This is FAR different than growing quartz in an autoclave, for heaven’s sake.
So part your argument is called a “straw man”, which is an actual term people use in rhetoric and logic (as opposed to “the Mingle”). This means that you disprove something your opponent doesn’t actually claim, and pretend they do claim it. You say that in “modern science’s paradigm,” igneous rocks are made from a “magmatic type (or heat only) melt.” However, this is patently false. Here’s a challenge for you. Go dig out a bunch of igneous petrology books from a university library, and find me a single one of them that says magma isn’t supposed to have any water vapor present. I’m betting you can’t do it, except maybe if you go back over 100 years. In fact, why don’t you look in Paul Hess’s book Dean Sessions quoted from? He obviously thinks that book is a representative source for the field of igneous petrology.
Another part of your argument is called “false equivalence.” Here’s how it’s explained on Wikipedia.
A common way for this fallacy to be perpetrated is one shared trait between two subjects is assumed to show equivalence, especially in order of magnitude, when equivalence is not necessarily the logical result. False equivalence is a common result when an anecdotal similarity is pointed out as equal, but the claim of equivalence doesn’t bear because the similarity is based on oversimplification or ignorance of additional factors.
For example, you say I am “using a Universal Model style experiment which includes water, pressure and heat to try to disprove the Universal Model and then claim that crystals really do come from melted magma.” Really? So growing crystals from a melt in the presence of a little water vapor is the same as growing them from aqueous solution in an autoclave? Please. And claiming minerals never come from a melt, when this is false, is equivalent to quoting a petrologist saying minerals come out of a hydrous melt, and then not bothering to specifically point out to readers that “hydrous” means there was water vapor present? I don’t think so.
So back to the original question. Why do you think Dean Sessions repeatedly says you can’t grow quartz and the other minerals in granite from melted rock, when his sources say you can, as long as a little water vapor is present?
I have a blog post up called “Quartz is Not Glass. So What?” if you want more info about this. I would link it here, but every time I try to link to my blog, the moderator here deletes the post.
