Creation vs. Evolution: Paradigms

[pevaquark (Matthew Pevarnik)]

@DavidS

Actually, that isn’t true: Creation scientists have made testable predictions . While not six-day creationists, ID scientists made the prediction that further study into the human genome would reveal functional uses for “junk DNA.” This is a prediction that fits well with the creationist paradigm too. By contrast, before the Human Genome Project, the mainstream Darwinian establishment believed “junk DNA” was vestigial - which was based on their worldview presuppositions, not science. In this case, the Darwinian assumption was preventing further investigation into so-called “junk DNA.”

This is a strawman. Next…

@DavidS

Another prediction made by creationists is the strength of the magnetic fields of Uranus and Neptune. Dr. Russell Humphreys correctly predicted the strength of those magnetic fields based on Biblical assumptions (the secular scientists got it wrong, by the way).

Because you talk about magnetic fields of planets as a strength of YEC, this also lets me know that you are lacking the relevant physics background and a lot more knowledge from various subfields like paleomagnetics. Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about.

First, do you trust the ICR article you linked? Let’s walk through a few of its claims one by one and see how it stacks up to scientific literature…

What did “evolutionists predict” about Uranus’ magnetic field?"

First of all, evolutionists didn’t predict anything about the magnetic field of Uranus because evolutionists don’t work on planetary geophysics. None-the-less, the ICR articles states:

In contrast, many evolutionists had predicted that Uranus would have a much smaller field, or none at all.7

Here, the ICR article references one paper as to what “many evolutionists” predicted about the field. Let’s look at that paper… the reference they list is:

Dessler, A.J. “Does Uranus have a magnetic field?” Nature, 316 (16 January 1986), 174-175. Rossbacher, L. “Voyager II encounters Uranus,” Episodes, 9 (March 1986), 17-21.

It turns out that we have open-access to a PDF of this particular article. Keep in mind, this article was cited 4 times and is a bit of a strange one to cite. It’s sort of an overview article of some of the calculations of Uranus’ magnetic field. It turns out, that there was an active debate in the scientific community over how strong Uranus’ magnetic field was based upon a number of different potential models.

First, we have a number of models that predicted a magnetic field of 4-13 Gauss, with a minimum magnetic field of 0.6 Gauss. Some other scientists tried to argue that the magnetic field is 0.01 Gauss if Uranus’ magnetic field originates in an “Earth-sized core.”

It turns out the actual strength of Uranus’ magnetic field varies between 0.1 and 1.1 Gauss. So that is very consistent with papers written before we measured it like this one:

Remote sensing of the magnetic moment of uranus: predictions for voyager -...

So it is inherently dishonest and mistaken to say that “evolutionists” predicted the magnetic field of Uranus would be basically zero. Sure, some astrophysicists made that argument, but most argued for a stronger magnetic field like here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/310755a0

So how did Russ Humphrey’s “predict” his magnetic field?

Well, it’s pretty simple really. He just took data from the other planets, and extrapolated that to “predict” what the value of Uranus’ magnetic field would be. So basically, he was just data fitting. There was no fundamentally young earth creationist “prediction” that was actually made. And the astrophysical literature is ripe with a number of predictions that were much more specific than Russ Humphreys who “predicted” "the magnetic moments would be between 1 x 10^23 and 1 x 10^25 A m^2.

First of all, how do his units compare to what “evolutionists” were predicting? Well, they were writing their magnetic moments in Tm^3 which are different units than Humphreys who write his in Am^2. It’s not weird to write a magnetic moment like Humphreys because the first formula that physics students learn for the magnetic moment of current flowing around a loop is:

m=iA

It’s a little bit of a pain to convert between the two units, but you can use the relation:

m=\frac{1}{\mu_0} BV

In other words, to go from the units that astrophysicists use Tm^3 to Humphreys, you need to divide the value in astrophysical literature by \mu_0 which is the permeability of free space.

Essentially what you can do also, is convert Humphrey’s prediction of the magnetic moment into a prediction of the average strength of the magnetic field which gives you Humphreys predicted the magnetic field would be between (by data fitting mind you, not some YEC special model): 0.075G-7.5 G (where G is the units of Gauss). The actual value of the magnetic field is 0.23G. His prediction… was okay by data fitting, but the thing is that astrophysicists were also close to this value.

In conclusion

It is a lie to say that “evolutionists” predicted a very small magnetic field. They did not, and the paper that is linked at ICR even says there are many predictions that have larger magnetic fields! Their predictions were based upon actual models, instead of data fitting. To understand why Humphreys was just data fitting, that requires a much longer post.

I hope that is enough, for now, to help you understand why its not a good argument to say that “young-earth creationists” have made accurate predictions about Uranus and that “secular scientists” were wrong.