You can keep repeating this to yourselves as long as you want, but it is the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting “la la la la”, while the rest of us actually attend to all of what is really there to be seen. @jammycakes and others have repeatedly shown how and why the presuppositional assumptions you so badly want to take refuge in - those have all been soundly addressed. There is just too much other stuff that is explained, independently confirming, and consistent with the now well-measured deep-time. The vast majority cannot and will not just pretend none of that exists.
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You’re moving the goalposts. I didn’t say anything about the relevancy or legitimacy of creation science. I just made the obvious point that six-day creation could be true, even if nobody believed it. Whether it’s true or not has absolutely nothing to do with the scientific consensus.
In fact, as I’ve said over and over again, the secular scientists are unable to conclude six-day creation because methodological naturalism forbids supernatural creation by God. Even if all the evidence supported six-day creation, the secular scientists would still believe in evolution. It’s not as if the scientists looked at the evidence and found creationism wanting, it’s that they never considered it in the first place, and they never could consider it. This isn’t a “fair fight.”
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For your reading distress:
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No I wasn’t making that accusation and I did not intend to imply that you were on a par with somebody who denies that one plus one equals two. That completely misses the point that I was making. The point was simply that when you are dealing with facts or calculations, they do NOT depend on your worldview.
Not true. There is a test that can distinguish between isochron lines and mixing lines. Plot a second graph of \frac {^{87}\text{Sr}} {^{86}\text{Sr}} against \frac 1 {^{87}\text{Sr} + ^{86}\text{Sr}}. Mixing will give a straight line; true isochrons will not.
Besides, if mixing really were a legitimate explanation we would see as many samples giving negative isochrons as positive ones. We do not.
You need to realise a few things here:
- There is a difference between “doesn’t always work” and “never works.”
- There is a difference between “doesn’t work when you do it wrong” and “doesn’t work when you do it right.”
- There is a difference between “occasionally out by a few percent” and “consistently out by a factor of a million or more.”
- There is a difference between “doesn’t work at the limits of detection” and “doesn’t work anywhere at all.”
The fact remains that these anomalous results are very much in the minority. And in most cases, they are not as anomalous as YECs make them out to be. 270,000 to 3.5 million years is not a big deal for K-Ar dates when you consider that the half life of 40K is 1.25 billion years – a thousand times as much – and to get that level of sensitivity you need to use a high-end radiometric lab with state-of-the-art equipment that charges a lot more for the more advanced processing that’s needed.
In any case, there is a simple way to determine when isochron dating works and when it doesn’t: use multiple different methods whose assumptions are independent of each other. If radiometric methods really were so unreliable that they couldn’t tell the difference between thousands and billions, the different results would be wildly different. Every. Single. Time. Without. Exception. Yet in the majority of cases, they agree with each other to within a few percent.
So no, I’m sorry, the assumptions are not as unprovable as you think they are. And they are not just “naturalistic assumptions” either. Cross-checks such as these are how measurement works in every area of science. “Naturalism” or “worldviews” have nothing whatsoever to do with it.
But every form of measurement works by calculating things, and every form of measurement makes assumptions that could, at a stretch, be claimed to be unprovable. The distance from London to New York works by calculating things and assuming that the speed of light is the same today as it was yesterday. Police speed cameras work by measuring Doppler shift and assuming that they’ve been calibrated correctly and that the driver of the oncoming car isn’t operating some kind of jammer of other.
I’m sorry, but you can’t just cry “unprovable assumptions” as a magic shibboleth to challenge every kind of measurement that you don’t like. There are some assumptions that it simply isn’t reasonable to challenge.
No I wasn’t implying that all creationists are stupid people who don’t understand science and who don’t get degrees. That is a straw man mischaracterisation of what I said. My comment was referring to the kind of people who you yourself described as “lay creationists” who are “the low hanging fruit.” Besides, I was making the specific point that books and YouTube videos are not a substitute for hands-on experience.
Besides, I’ve also addressed the issue of “many eminent scientists who believe in six-day creation.” As I said, very few of the signatories of the Scientific Dissent from Darwin were YECs.
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If God was the creator of the cosmos then you are right, no scientist -whether Christian or secular- will ever uncover evidence of that through research. Because science studies what is and where possible what proximal causes led to what we find. We are only ever able to follow those proximal causes back so far. Science, so far as I can tell, is not interested in ultimate causes, though some may opine on occasion.
There isn’t any fight going on in science except on occasion between entrenched anti-theists and creation scientists. Regular science is not part of the fray.
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Well, we are in agreement if you make a more reasonable claim. Theistic evolutionism is an impossible task. It is nonsense ideology from the start. I fully agree about that.
But “mere theistic evolution” isn’t as demonic as you make it. And “old earth” isn’t such a “devil” as Fr. Seraphim Rose made it sound, in the shadow of “nihilism”. His disciples on this topic are marginal among Orthodox Christians.
Theistic evolutionists are simply lost because the evangelical Protestant tradition has betrayed them. Notice that born again Protestant Phillip Johnson wrote the Foreword to Rose’s posthumously published main text on this topic? Many of these evangelical ex-YECists used to be biblical literalists, and now they seem to have over-shot the other side.
I’m thankful just to watch and not to get stuck in that wrestling match. 
All the Saints of are Church rejected evolution. Even the modern ones, who lived during / after Darwin’s time. How can you say Rose’s view is marginal, if it’s the authentic Orthodox position? The Scriptures, the Church Fathers, the Saints, the hymnology, the iconography. It’s all in conflict with evolution and long ages.
If Rose is wrong, I’d like you to point out where he’s wrong. It isn’t enough to simply point out that a Protestant wrote his introduction. So what? What difference does any of that make? Rose cites hundreds of passages from the Church Fathers in defense of his thesis.
You aren’t a theistic evolutionist? Then what are you? What do you believe?
Questions:
- “Most Recent Common Ancestor” (MRCA) is a common concept in genealogy that refers to the most recent individual that a specified group of persons have in common. I assume that Creationists would say that Adam is the MRCA of all males living today. So what is the currently estimated, maximum number of generations between Adam and the average male living today?
- My understanding of the 23rd chromosome of a male (i.e. Y-DNA), is that it undergoes slow mutation over the generations. ’ As of 2015, estimates of the age of the Y-MRCA range around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, roughly consistent with the emergence of anatomically modern humans." Y-chromosomal Adam.
- How do Creationists reconcile their currently estimated, maximum number of generations with the Y-MRCA range of years between males living today and a Y-chromosal Adam?
This is how "jammycakes responded to my suggestion that she take a look at what Douglas Axe and Ann Gauger have to say:
Jammy Cakes,
You really need to stop writing before you dig yourself into a deeper hole. This post seems really bizarre.
Ann Gauger received her Bachelor’s degree from MIT and her Ph.D. from the University of Washington Department of Zoology. She held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, where her work was on the molecular motor kinesin.
Douglas Axe is a Professor of Molecular Biology at Biola University and received his PhD at Caltech. He held postdoctoral and research scientist positions at the University of Cambridge and the Cambridge Medical Research Council Centre. So yes, reading their books and watching their videos is a reasonable way to learn about genetics since we can’t all go get doctoral degrees in this subject and every other subject that is discussed in this forum.
Are these the people you think are brainwashed wannable experts that haven’t set a foot in a laboratory since they finished compulsory science education at age sixteen? In reality, these are the folks you need to interact with through their writings and videos, unless of course, you only want to mock and don’t want to expose yourself to differing points of view.
And just a word of advice. If you want to show the strength of your position, don’t shoot down the weakest of your opponent’s and their weakest arguments. Don’t think for a second that you have made an argument against creationism by refuting someone so ignorant as to say that evolutionists believe that cats evolved into dogs. Rather refute a creationist that is so ignorant as to say that evolutionists believe that hippos and whales evolved from four-legged, even-toed, hoofed (ungulate) ancestors that lived on land about 50 million years ago. Oops, that really is what evolutionists say.
Engage with the ideas from the best informed of your opponents, and either refute them or join them.
Yes, but neither is truth something that comes down to just beliefs or claims. Truth is knowable, even if it is only imperfectly knowable. Asserting that scientists can discover facts and that scientific facts are true is not asserting “truth is just a popularity contest.” Claims in the Bible that are contradicted by facts in the world need to be reevaluated, not just imposed as “truth” on a reality that testifies otherwise. I don’t agree that something can be true if doesn’t correspond with reality. (Known reality being what the scientific consensus models very well.)
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No I do NOT think that Ann Gauger and Douglas Axe are brainwashed wannabe experts that haven’t set foot in a laboratory since they finished compulsory science education at age sixteen. That comment did not refer to Ann Gauger and Douglas Axe. You’ve made exactly the same mistake as @DavidS here in totally missing my point. My point was simply that reading books and watching videos are not a substitute for hands-on experience.
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Read the applicable pages in Walton and you will see that all of those issues are there, except of course, “metaphysical naturalism.” And also please re-read what I wrote so that you can quote it accurately–“methodological naturalism.” You should quote accurately if you want to posit intentional dishonesty or gross misuse of vocabulary.
My bad, but only partly. You said “philosophical naturalism,” which is a synonym for “metaphysical naturalism” and means the belief that the natural world is all there is and the scientific method is capable of investigating all of reality. It is not the same thing as “methodological naturalism” which is the acknowledgment that the scientific method only has tools to examine the natural world and cannot investigate the supernatural.
Your words were “Walton spent about a third of his book defending the position of philosophical naturalism.”
Which is still false.
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Wow, this is a very demanding (or mean) forum. I try to correct myself, and the correction is not accepted, and I am painted as some kind of a horrible actor–“either intentionally dishonest or a gross misuse of vocabulary.”
So let’s start over. Walton spends 32.54% of his book, based on the text portion of the book itself, discussing in his words “metaphysical and philosophical questions” (as I clarified before.) Can we try to discuss so that we understand each others positions rather than to paint the other person as a bad actor? I am fully cognizant that it is unlikely that everyone on any thread will ever agree, but can we at least be respectful?
And by now we have lost the point of the illustration itself which is:
In this forum, there is a very strong emphasis by some BL folks that we must rely on scholars. But that is not applied evenhandedly. When Walton strays out of his lane (text analyst) into philosophy, no one calls him on that.
While I am dissing Walton, let me commit one more offense. He says, “This is the layer in which science has chosen to operate and where it is most useful.” (page 15 in The Lost World of Genesis One)
The context is hardly important at all. Science doesn’t “choose” anything. Scientists do. Nowadays when politicians and celebrities and others that pretend to speak with authority invoke the mantra of “science says” or “we follow the science.” Again, science is silent. Scientists speak, and when they speak nonsense, it is still nonsense.
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This sure reads like an attempt to paint your discussant as a bad actor, not an attempt at being respectful. May not be your intent but that is the way I read it.
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Sorry, I’m not trying to be mean or disrespectful, I’m trying to ensure that John Walton is represented fairly. You called me out for not quoting you correctly. I did reread the part I was referring to and it still said philosophical naturalism. I wasn’t aware there was an attempt to correct what you said about Walton, I thought you were just denying you ever said something inaccurate. I wasn’t painting you as a horrible actor, I was pointing out that either you were using philosophical naturalism incorrectly, or you were lying about what Walton said in the book, since he most definitely does not spend any time at all defending philosophical naturalism. If you are trying to clarify you should have said methodological naturalism, then all is well.
I think English speakers are capable of understanding this figure of speech, which is called metonymy. It’s like when we say, “No statement from the crown” or “The top brass is pushing for withdrawal.” Science is a stand-in for the scientific consensus of scientists or the agreed on methods of science. This is totally normal English usage and refusing to recognize figures of speech because of some kind of commitment to over literalism won’t help you communicate or convince people others are communicating poorly.
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That’s kind of how science works. Science can’t work when you include the supernatural because you can explain any possible observation as “God did it that way.” Why do we find nested hierarchies of pseudogenes that were predicted by common ancestry? God just made it that way. It is very difficult to predict beforehand as to how God would or should have done something supernatural.
A commitment of modern young earth creationism comes from one of its popularizers:
“We take this revealed framework of history as our basic datum, and then try to see how all the pertinent data can be understood in this context”
This commitment is fundamentally opposed to how science is done.
This is definitely not true. By default, early scientists of the 1600s or so held to two positions:
- the earth came into existence approximately 6,000 years ago
- Noah’s flood was global
It is a very interesting story of how scientists (who basically were all Christians) in England and the rest of Western Europe came to reject both of these ideas that they assumed were true by the mid 1800s (before Darwin mind you). Some had such a strong belief, that it led them to just assume evidence fit a global flood model like William Buckland in the early 1800s. He wrote at one point in his life:
“The grand fact of an universal deluge at no very remote period is proved on grounds so decisive and incontrovertible, that, had we never heard of such an event from Scripture, or any other, authority, Geology of itself must have called in the assistance of some such catastrophe, to explain the phenomena of diluvian action which are universally presented to us, and which are unintelligible without recourse to a deluge exerting its ravages at a period not more ancient than that announced in the Book of Genesis.“
But yet he ended up recanting this position as better evidence came in.
Here is a list of how prominent flood geologists of today try to explain the geological column. Do you happen to know how the boundaries between geological periods are defined? It really isn’t fair to ask flood geologists squeeze lots of history into a few major events.
Anything else with an appearance of antiquity can just be handwaved away with “oh the radiometric decay rates were faster in the past” or “oh, that wouldn’t destroy the earth or actually heat it to 22,000 degrees because there is a fifth dimension that opened up during Noah’s flood that the energy escaped through. However, Noah and everything on the ark would have needed to consume extra calories as they lost energy to this fifth dimension. Oh and by the way, I also solved all the outstanding questions of modern cosmology.” (these are actual paraphrases from Russ Humphreys from a few years ago- how is that for making things a “fair fight” when you get to invent extra dimensions and claim they solve mysteries of the universe but yet never need to bother doing experiments on them).
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OK then. Let’s take a look at the crown jewels of YEC science. The RATE project.
When I first came across YEC in the late 1980s, it became apparent to me that just about every argument they were coming up with was weak. Their sample sizes were too small, and their error bars were too large, to support the conclusions they were claiming. But I was told that this was only to be expected, because they only had meagre resources and limited funding compared to the “evolutionists.”
Then along came the RATE project.
With a budget of $1.25 million and a lifespan of eight years, this was the most expensive, extensive and comprehensive scientific study the young-earth organisations had ever attempted. It was a showcase of what they could do given some serious money. If anything should have come up with smoking gun evidence for a young Earth, it was RATE.
So what did they come up with? A claim that nuclear decay rates were higher in the past. Much higher. A billion times higher.
Now that in itself is an extraordinary claim. It would have required the fundamental constants of physics themselves to have been different in the past. Demonstrating that would win you a Nobel Prize hands down, and make you rich beyond your wildest dreams into the bargain because being able to replicate the process would open up a world of new opportunities.
But extraordinary claims such as that require extraordinary evidence. It doesn’t take a “secular worldview” to see this, and you don’t need to have “been there to see it happen.” If such a thing had ever happened, we would expect to see gobs and gobs and gobs of compelling, in-your-face, high precision evidence for it. Evidence based on principles that could be explained to A level physics students. Evidence that could easily be replicated by multiple teams. Evidence that is completely unambiguous, only has that one interpretation as a reasonable possibility. Anything less, and you would be giving everyone a free pass to basically make things up and create their own alternative realities.
And what evidence did they come up with? Let’s take a look:
- Helium diffusion in zircons: A very complex and (at the time) immature area of study requiring specialist expertise and experience to apply properly. In other words, easy to get wrong, difficult to get right, easy to fudge, and potentially difficult to check. Reviewers have pointed out numerous very serious failings of basic quality control, some of which can only be described as “fudging.” Fails to take into account significant factors such as pressure. Misidentifies rock samples. Uses an unrealistic model to calculate how much helium we should expect to find. Their study has never been replicated by anyone.
- Polonium haloes in granites. Basically a case of “we know that the Earth is young because there are things that we don’t know.” In any case, the polonium is now known to have come from part of the decay chain of uranium, with the polonium having been generated by decay from radon gas which had migrated away from its uranium source through tiny cracks in the crystals.
- Isochron discordances. I’ve dealt with this one already in this thread. A minority of results differing by a few percent (10-15%) do not justify claims that all results are consistently out by factors of a million. Furthermore, fails to account for the majority of cases where there is no discordance.
- Radiocarbon in ancient coals and diamonds. The results were consistent with known, measured and well studied contamination mechanisms. Yet contamination is hand-waved away as a “rescuing device.” if you hand-waved away contamination as a “rescuing device” in any other area of science, you would kill people.
So basically, what they have given us in support of their extraordinary claims that would have won them a Nobel Prize if it had any merit, is … more tiny samples, right at the limits of detection, with huge error bars. At best highly ambiguous and at worst outright fudged. About as underwhelming as you can possibly get.
But it gets even more extraordinary than that. They also admitted that such accelerated nuclear decay rates would have raised the temperature of the Earth to 22,000°C. That is four times as hot as the surface of the sun, and hot enough to vaporise the Earth’s crust many times over. To get round that, they had to invent new physics involving ad hoc invisible fifth dimensions – basically, they had to make things up – to try and explain where the heat went. On top of which, there were other things that they didn’t even attempt to explain, such as how this could have cooled rocks faster than water, or how some nuclear decay rates were accelerated but not others, or how stable isotopes didn’t become unstable as well.
And what evidence do they give for this even more extraordinary layer of complexity? None whatsoever.
Now at this point, they just threw their hands up in the air and said, “God must have done it.” I don’t have a problem with God doing stuff. But I do have a problem with people who expect me to believe that God went to to extreme lengths to make the Earth look older than it really is in the most complicated and convoluted way imaginable for no discernible reason whatsoever, which is what their claims amount to. It is not consistent with the character and nature of God that I read about in the Bible, who tells us in Romans 1:20 that His nature and character are made clear even to unbelievers by what they see in creation. On the contrary, it is a combination of Omphalos, Harry Potter, Star Trek, and The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Seriously, it’s stuff like RATE that makes me scratch my head and wonder whether I really am reading genuine creationist literature or some sort of parody of it.
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DavidS
The blog discussion has become far-ranging (far beyond my knowledge). I am unable to understand all the many topics of the YEC-OEC debates. As I have studied and listened I came across a Kent Hovind statement in one of his debates: I only need one solid proof to prove my point (or something like that). tI works both ways.
Turning this around, I have taken this to mean if I can find one solid proof that the earth is very old then all the arguments and technical books by those advocating a YEC position are wrong. If the earth is very old those arguments about genetic entropy, radiometric dating, sedimentry layers, fossils, etc. can be dismissed — even if they are from learned scholars. If there is ONE solid proof that the earth is very old, the YEC-OEC debate should be over.
Three simple ones for me to understand:
-
The varve layers in the Geen river and Lake Suigetsu areas (and many others). These are so clearly catstrophic to the YEC position that they have attacked with great effort — but have been clearly answered.
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The White Cliffs of Dover and other chalk layers
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Microscoptic shells always in their distinct layers
Now, before counter arguments are offered, consider the Flood and its theoretical conditions (from my collection of a few of PRO-YEC sources have suggested): 1. Heavy rain and water activity that makes anything modern people have experienced look trivial. Rain likely 60 inches an hour for over a month. 2. Super violent Tsunami driven waves over a mile high sweeping around the world. I cannot imagine any animal laying eggs or wandering about in such conditions. 3. Over 71 major meteor strikes in that short period. 4. Major (possibly 500) volcano eruptions all over the world. 5. Catastrophic tectonic places running rampant - .5 to 1 mile a year instead of one inch (thousands of times faster than measured today). The USA continent moved from Europe in half a year!) Imagine the incredible chaos and heat. 6. Radiation decay rates more than a million times higher than today. 7. The amount of silt in the waters would make a heavy slurry, combined with the above would kill anything (plant or animal). The entire earth would be in an incredibly violent washing-machine boiling mixture for a long period of time.
Now apply these to the above three simple age-related markers I mentioned. If these conditions proposed by YEC supporters existed NO life in or out of the Ark could have survived; There would be NO separation of any fossils, let alone microscopic fossils; NO sand or salt would be clumped together in any part of the world; Everything would be jumbled together, if not pulverized together.
I found it curious that even though the above conditions were suggested by various YEC advocates, they seemed to forget about them when they talked about the survivability of thousands of creatures on on an over-sized all-wooden boat packed with people, insects, and often fragile animals.
Thus, if indeed, the above (and many other findings) clearly point to a very old earth, the age game is over.
This doesn’t mean that I distrust the Bible. I now distrust the interpretation that was pushed on me and that I taught for so many decades.
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