Evidence for evolutionary creationism

[Burrawang]

Hi, I’m a born again Christian who has been observing and studying the Creation/Evolution debate for the past fifty years. I find it difficult to comprehend these days how honest people who profess to be Bible believing Christians can accept evolution as the means that our Creator used. Once upon a time many decades ago, I was blind to the truth and I believed precisely that; but thanks to God’s grace my eyes were opened and now I see the Truth. Jesus is our Saviour and our Creator; indeed He is the Creator of all things.

I now understand that Genesis is accurate historical narrative and means exactly what is states. Evolution is perhaps one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated on mankind. For me after studying this subject for many decades the evidence is overwhelming. God created in six normal 24 hour days just as it states in Genesis. God spoke into existence the Creation just as the Word states in Genesis. The evidence against evolution is overwhelming and can be found everywhere. The Bible can be trusted to mean exactly what it says…

It is probably useful to understand a bit about this websites organisation and so the following article is offered to explain the situation more succinctly than I can at short notice:

Evolutionary syncretism: the problem with theistic evolution

by Lita Cosner

Biologos evolutionary syncretism

[copyrighted content removed by moderator, please see link above for article]

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All the best,

God Bless,

jon

[Mervin_Bitikofer]

Hi, Jon! And welcome to the forum. You provide a nice and thoughtful post that will no doubt provoke a range of responses - may they be as thoughtful as yours. For my own part I’ll just make this one comment. Biologos doesn’t really have any formal “membership”. I guess one could think of financial supporters of it as ‘members’ of a sort - and it certainly does have a few full-time staff (which does not include most of us moderators here by the way - we’re volunteers.) And there are those long-time forum lurkers and posters around here that themselves are quite a diverse group all the way from atheist to YEC. If those familiar presences here were to be considered our ‘membership’, then we would be a highly diverse group indeed! And none of us (that I’ve heard about so far anyway!) would claim to be part of some “Biologos syncretistic religion” as distinct from our own many and diverse traditions that so many of us do identify with. It is a common misconception for outsider critics of Biologos to think this is some special religion percolating here. The only official beliefs one can truthfully ascribe to Biologos are those they post on their official “What we believe” page. Feel free to read that if you want to know more accurately what the organization itself promotes. And this forum meanwhile, is a free-ranging public meeting place where all are welcome to interact respectfully (within the given subject areas of interest) even if they don’t align themselves with that same mission or belief set.

So again - thanks for your opening post! May there be fruitful discussion to follow.

[BTW - I took the liberty of removing your duplicated post over in the ‘Catholic’ thread so that any resulting discussion or responses don’t get confusingly spread across the two threads, but can all just be found here instead. You can always start of new thread of your own too if you want to just start up your own discussion about something. There should be a grey “+ New Topic” button near the top of the forum window when you are just browsing threads generally. ]

[Dale (evolutionary providentialist)]

Hi, Jon, and welcome.

Interestingly (or not ; - ), my journey is the reverse of yours, and actually has been going on a bit longer (over a decade more). I don’t know how long you have been observing the forum – maybe you have not been looking at it any longer than since you have just joined and have not had any more firsthand experience than that, or maybe you have been ‘lurking’ a while. If the latter, you may have seen some of this already, but here is an excerpt from a recent post that might help you understand my perspective if you looked at it a little more fully:

Struggling With My Faith

I grew up in a YEC home and church culture (if I ever grew up anywhere ), and never bought into the explanations of light’s existence before the sun was created in Genesis 1 – they always seemed lame and contrived and without any solid biblical support. But I didn’t know there was any other way, since I was also taught that ‘believing’ in evolution necessitated atheism. My most recent reference to my ‘journey’: And similarly: I have been shown much grace because my coming to endorse…

[Burrawang]

Hi Mervin, thanks for your prompt response. I will try and address the points you made.
I only stumbled upon this website this morning,so have not really had a chance to read much at all of the forum, but I take your point about the open structure of Biologos consisting of a diverse cross section of peoples with widely differing views. I must admit that I do not know great deal about Biologos but after reading through “What We Believe” I can offer the following:
Points 1 to 7 Are accurate and consistent with the Bible and with my beliefs.

Point 8 We believe that God created the universe, the earth, and all life over billions of years.
This part is a faith position that I do not share. I believe that the universe, the Earth and life were created precisely as described in Genesis around about 6,000 years ago. I must admit that once upon a time many years ago I did believe in the ‘deep time’ myth but after extensive research, I came to understand that the millions of years is a false construct that has been forced upon the masses over the past 175 years or so.

I have worked in applied science laboratories in universities, performing atomic absorption spectroscopy when it was new technology in the 1970’s well before gas chromatography technology had been invented, I have worked for state and federal government agencies conducting regional and state scale natural resource projects with scientists of various disciplines, and as an analyst using remote sensing to monitor water use in irrigated areas to mapping extant oyster reefs in estuaries in NSW Australia.

Suffice to say I have a good handle on the scientific method and have studied this subject enough to be able to state without fear or doubt that the Earth is indeed young, the global flood of Noah did occur as stated in Genesis, the Creator (Jesus the Son, the Word, the Logos, our Saviour) created the creation in six ordinary days as we know them. I have no problem with having light before the sun. Who knows perhaps the light came from our Lord Himself, or perhaps it came from elsewhere, but I see no logical reason whatsoever to question what the Bible clearly says.
The rest of Point 8 is fine, accurate and consistent with the Bible.

Point 9 is where I must object on the grounds of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The entire planet is covered in sedimentary rock in places many miles thick and on continental scales both on land and under the sea. The geologic record is not one of consistent change over eons of time but rather the result of rapid geologic processes that occurred over a very short time of unparalleled cataclysm and devastation involving huge volumes of sediments transported and laid down in bedding planes that we now observe as rock strata. The eruption of Mt St.Helens in Washington state USA is a perfect scale model of how this happened. There is ample documented evidence of thousands of layers of fine sediment being laid down in minutes and hours and in the time from 1980 to the present that sediment is now solid rock. I believe that it is quite possible that God has given us the event at Mt St.Helens to show us what occurred on a much larger scale globally when Noah entered the ark.

Points 9 and 10 are also fine; thus it is really only Point 8 ‘deep time’ and Point 9 belief in ‘evolution’ where we differ, but that is an enormous difference.

I know enough about radiometric dating to know it is a flawed procedure that is governed more by the analysts worldview than it is by empirical science.

Where are all the billions upon trillions of transitional forms???

Where are all the people, alive and buried???

How can life have evolved via natural selection when all natural selection can do is select from pre-existing information at the genome level, it is not a creative force, it cannot write novel information that codes for new structures as required by belief in evolution to have generated us from a single celled organism in the proverbial primordial soup???
Furthermore, mutations do not improve, they destroy complex coded information at a ratio of about 1,000,000 : 1 for every slightly beneficial mutation at the nucleotide level, there is an overall loss of fitness in the population as some of the complex coded information is lost, despite the very rare occurrence of a short term benefit that may be conferred to the organism, if it is even visible to natural selection as most mutations are near neutral to deleterious, i.e. they are not removed from the genome but continue to accumulate incessantly, until eventually mutational overload and extinction occurs. If life on Earth is millions of years old then we would all have become extinct a long time ago. Evolution is a falsified theory that is that rubbery, it is impossible to falsify it and thus it does not even qualify to be called a scientific theory!

Even more importantly how can the saving Gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus, make sense in a creation that has death and suffering existing as the means of creation over billions of years, rather than as the result of mankind’s fall in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve disobeyed God???

Jesus Himself believed in the account of creation as described in Genesis.
What possible reason is there to not accept the historical narrative as written except to bow down tot he court of public opinion, i.e. those that are fearful that they will be looked upon as being deluded by those that ascribe to evolution in the secular academic world. Such a reason to hold onto belief in evolution will always only end in tears, weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Jesus allowed Himself to be crucified by mere humans because of His enormous incomprehensible LOVE for us all.

[jammycakes (James McKay)]

Hi Jon, welcome to the forum. And thanks for saying a bit about your background. My own response to many young earth advocates getting involved in debates such as this is often, to misquote Shakespeare, “Get thee to a laboratory!” but it sounds like you’ve already done that.

Having said that, I will give you a word of caution here: since you’re well versed in the scientific method, that means you should expect to be held to a higher standard in terms of honesty and factual accuracy of your claims. Auntie Flossie who hasn’t set foot in a laboratory since finishing compulsory science education at the first possible opportunity in 1973 can be excused on the grounds of ignorance if the claims she makes in support of her position are confused, misleading or untrue. You and I do not have the luxury of that excuse.

In particular, you should be expected to know the basics of how measurement works—for example, what error bars are, how they are calculated, what they do and do not justify, and so on and so forth. This is important because one thing that the Bible is abundantly clear on is the need for accurate and honest measurement in everything. Deuteronomy 25:13-16 says this:

¹³ Do not have two differing weights in your bag—one heavy, one light. ¹⁴ Do not have two differing measures in your house—one large, one small. ¹⁵ You must have accurate and honest weights and measures, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you. ¹⁶ For the Lord your God detests anyone who does these things, anyone who deals dishonestly.

Any creation model, any interpretation of Genesis 1-11, any challenge to the theory of evolution or the scientific consensus on the age of the Earth, must obey these verses. Personally, I don’t view the age of the earth and evolution themselves as important theologically, but teaching falsehood and misinformation in the name of Christ about any subject is a very serious matter. For this reason any form of creationism that does not obey these verses is not Biblical, is not scientific, and is not honest.

This is where I for one have a problem with young earthism and Flood geology in particular, because most if not all of the claims that the young earth organisations make in support of their doctrine play fast and loose with the basic rules and principles of accurate and honest measurement, in some cases completely disregarding them altogether. In fact I’ve even had more than a dozen young earthists accuse me of taking these verses out of context by applying them to science—an accusation that is tantamount to outright demanding the right to tell lies.

Mount Saint Helens is a case in point here. Young earthists love to cite it as evidence that radiometric dating is “unreliable,” but one of the most fundamental rules of accurate and honest measurement is that unreliability must be quantified. This is what error bars are all about after all, and it’s one of the first things that you learn in the first practical class of an A level physics course. Steve Austin’s studies of the dacites yielded ages of between 350,000 and 2.8 million years using an older form of K-Ar dating that has since been superseded by more modern and accurate techniques such as Ar-Ar dating. Now that sounds like a lot, but the oldest of these results are just 0.05% of the measured ages of the oldest rocks on Earth. His results would justify claims that dacites dated by the same K-Ar technique to 750 million years might be as young as 747 million years but no younger. They do not justify claims that all radiometric dating methods could be consistently out by six orders of magnitude right across the board. That would be like taking a rusty old set of mechanical bathroom scales, seeing that it reads a kilogram or two when you aren’t standing on it, then when you stand on a shiny new set of electronic scales and see a weight of 75 kilograms, concluding that you could plausibly weigh nothing. It simply doesn’t follow.

Scientific research may uncover facts about God’s creation that we don’t understand, or that may make us wonder how to relate them to the Bible, but we do need to be honest about how we approach them. The issue at stake in these debates is honest reporting and honest interpretation of accurate information: bad arguments and falsehoods don’t uphold the Bible, nor do they honour our Lord and Saviour; on the contrary, they bring the Body of Christ into disrepute and drive people away.

[Burrawang]

Hi Jammycakes, thanks for your warm welcome and for your post.

Honesty is paramount for any Christian and it should go without saying in this forum that I expect is mainly filled with people who are Christians.

That said, as technology advances our measurement instruments get increasingly accurate, that is a given. The problems with radiometric dating, whether it be Uranium - Thorium - Lead , or Potassium - Argon, or any other type is that a precisely accurate measurement is obtained of the quantity of parent and daughter isotopes in the sample, no problem there at all, that is just straightforward empirical science performed in the lab. But that measurement is simply that, a measurement of the mass of the parent and daughter isotopes in the sample, it is NOT an age, far from it is simply how much of each elemental isotope remains in the sample. As you would be well aware, many assumptions are made to attempt to derive a date from the mass measurements. The problem with using assumptions is that there is no empirical way of accurately calibrating the calculation to acquire the derived dates, it is just not possible to know what has happened in the past to a particular sample be it organic matter or mineral rock. The ONLY way to proceed is to make assumptions and in a nutshell that is not very good science.

In the case of Carbon dating for instance:

• We do not know in the case of Carbon dating what the atmospheric ratio of Carbon 12 to Carbon 14 was in the distant past, i.e., thousands of years ago.
• We do not know if the sample had any Carbon leach out over the period since the organism died.
• We do not know if the sample had any Carbon leach in over the period since the organism died.

By altering the assumed values of the three assumptions above, just about any date can be derived.

It is as always, the worldview of the person doing the ‘dating’ that will determine what they consider to be an acceptable value or ‘contaminated’ value (because it does not fit in with the old Earth ‘deep time’ paradigm, that currently has a stranglehold on academia).

Although the instrument being used will provide a very precisely accurate figure of the amount of isotopes being tested for, this is NOT, I repeat NOT an age date, the age is forced onto the measurement via a convenient set of assumptions that frankly are nothing more than hopeful guesses that are known will derive the age required for the ‘deep time’ paradigm that of course is a prerequisite for evolution.

Nobody is going to accept evolution under any circumstances if it is clear that God created the universe around about six thousand years ago, so the powers and principalities of darkness that we wrestle against made certain that people in positions of influence in the media, academia etc all pushed the long timeframe, evolutionary myth upon millions of poor unsuspecting people who have swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

Carbon 14 has a half life of only 5,730 years.
Carbon 14 found deeply embedded within the hardest known naturally occurring minerals, i.e., Diamonds that are presently dated at 300+ million years old by mainstream secular academics uncover the lie for all to see, if only they would open their eyes and not be blinded by the ‘deep time, evolutionary mythology’.
This is because if we had a ball of Carbon 14 the size of the Earth, it would have all decayed away in far less than a million years,. Therefore, as considerable measured masses of Carbon 14 exists in Diamonds dated at over 300 million years old; you don’t need to be a scientist to see that something is drastically wrong here!
Real empirical science proves that the ‘deep time’ ages ascribed to diamonds is in error. There is no way that a diamond can be contaminated by atmospheric Carbon 14 as the extreme pressures required to form diamonds are only found hundreds of miles below the earth’s surface in the Crust to Mantle region. It is believed that the diamonds have been ejected to the surface by high speed volcanic eruptions such that the diamonds remained in their crystalline form and were not annealed by the extended time exposure to extreme heat in magma chambers.

It is time that the lie of deep time and evolution is exposed as evil deceptions of the worst kind, that are misleading millions away from the salvation of our Lord and Saviour. Children are being systematically brainwashed into ‘deep time, evolutionary belief’ at most secular educational institutions across the planet.
This must stop!

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I urge you to consider the honest valid information in the article below by Tas and the article after that by David:

The way it really is: little-known facts about radiometric dating

Tas holds a B.Sc. (Earth Science with first class honours), a B.Eng (hons) and a Ph.D.in mechanical engineering, all from the University of Queensland.

[copyrighted content removed by moderator, link above]

The article below further reinforces the straightforward fact that the creation is young. Six thousand years is still a very long time but not ridiculously long as the deep time mythology posits. Evolution is simply not a sustainable position for any honest scientist to maintain, if they truly research the facts without the ‘deep time’, evolutionary baggage to interpret it. If they just look at the facts without any preconceived belief system it is clear that the creation very young in currently accepted academic geological terms.

Dr David Catchpoole received his B.Ag.Sc. (Hons) from the University of Adelaide and a Ph.D. from the University of New England (New South Wales).

double decade dinosaur disquiet

[copyrighted content removed by moderator, link above]

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Apologies for the length of this post, but the subject matter is far too important, the harvest is plentiful but the workers are few…
I pray that all will come to realise the error in placing belief in current fallible science over the Bible.
The Bible must always be the primary source of truth and not wherever mankind has ended up in researching the creation.
To put today’s science above the Bible runs the risk of repeating the same error that many in the Church made with respect to Galileo when he stated that the earth moved around the sun and argued against the popular view that the sun moved around the earth.
I suggest that future generations will look back at our present society and wonder how and why so many otherwise highly intelligent people could get it so wrong with respect to the ‘deep time’ age of the Earth and the Neo Darwinian evolution mythology that is presently taken as fact by so many in academia to all intents and purposes.

May our loving God, full of grace towards us, open the eyes of the many presently deceived into not believing the straightforward historical narrative account that He has provided us with in Genesis in His Word.

God bless all,
jon

[Terry_Sampson]

@Burrawang

I find it difficult to comprehend these days how honest people who profess to be Bible believing Christians can accept evolution as the means that our Creator used.

• LOL! As a 75-year old, firm believer in the crucified, resurrected, and ascended Jesus of Nazareth, and as a U.S. citizen, a 37-year resident of Los Angeles, a married, child-free, white male, I find it difficult to believe that you could be so naive as to believe that–given our mutual belief in the same Jesus–we would be bosom buddies if you were a U.S. citizen.
• Here, in Biologos, graciousness is deemed by the authorities to be closer to Godliness than cleanliness which is unfortunate for me because I frequently get in trouble for my ungracious comments.
• As anonymous as you’d like to be, your first post tells me all I need to know: that you and I could be neighbors, but we would never be friends.
• Quoting Creation Ministries International’s Lita Sanders article, “Evolutionary syncretism”, you may not know it yet, but here in Biologos, a Catholic YEC, a Protestant YEC, and a Seventh Day Adventist each do not believe in Evolution and yet fail to believe that the others will spend eternity with Jesus, or am I wrong? Are you all YEC Syncretists?
• P.S. Are you aware that devout Muslims affirm that the Qur’an–in Arabic–is the infallible, inerrant revelation given by Allah to Mohammad, via the angel Jibr’il (a.k.a. Gabriel), which is why any written Qur’an is deemed sacred. Almost sounds like Young Earth Creatiionism notion of the Christian Bible. What’s the chance that God “wrote” two radically different books? How would you go about proving whic is a true revelation and which is not?

[knor (Kai)]

Dear Burrawang,

I have been following and thinking about the Creation/Evolution debate for the past 40 years, so a little less than you. I started by reading some books that favored YEC. The books seemed very convincing so I started to support the YEC views. Later, when I studied biology and learned a bit geography and geology, I started to realize that the seemingly convincing YEC books were full of misleading and false interpretations about scientific observations. I read more such books to get support to the YEC interpretations, until I finally stopped reading because I did not find a single YEC book that would have credible, sufficiently neutral and correctly presented interpretations about scientific observations.

During the last years, I have had the opportunity to study the basics of theology. That has opened my eyes to see that the theological basis of YEC interpretations is not credible. The interpretations seem to neglect all basic rules about how we should approach and understand the messages in the biblical scriptures.

So, I have come to the conclusions that the YEC interpretations about scientific observations and biblical scriptures are simply not credible. A very different conclusion than yours, although we are both born again believers.
Strange, given that we have both been observing and thinking about the topic for decades.

[Mervin_Bitikofer]

You give a lot of information - with extensive bibliography! Thanks for that. I don’t have time to give an equally lengthy response or address all your points here and now, so I’ll just address an early one - and I’m sure others like James (@jammycakes) and others besides can give responses then as well.

You wrote:

@Burrawang

It is as always, the worldview of the person doing the ‘dating’ that will determine what they consider to be an acceptable value or ‘contaminated’ value (because it does not fit in with the old Earth ‘deep time’ paradigm, that currently has a stranglehold on academia).

It’s a common misconception that all deep-time dating is done to accommodate needed evolutionary time-frames. But this is simply not the case. Well before any evolutionary theory of life was developed there were already people like “Steno” who, in studying geological layers were seeing that there must be a lot more age to the earth than the standard few thousands of years that had always been assumed. Many of these early geologists were Christians and were not motivated in any way or form to promote atheism or to put down scriptures. They were simply doing what scientists aspire to do - follow the evidence wherever it leads. This even caused a lot of problems later (when evolution was the fresh new kid on the block) as the highly respected (and very much Christian) Lord Kelvin had seemingly indisputable thermodynamic calculations near the end of the 19th century that put the earth at around 144 million years old (and some other earlier smaller figures too - but always still in the tens of millions of years). Evolutionary biologists at the time had fits about this because it did not match the kind of time they were just sure must be involved to match what they were seeing and postulating as necessary. But … the math was there. And it was highly respected - even by the new fundamentalists of the day (like W.J. Bryan) who - along with so many of his time - even while they did not accept the new evolutionary science, nonetheless thought it obvious that the deep time scales had already been well-established and were beyond controversy. You won’t read much about these histories among all the sources you draw from because, unfortunately YEC proponents too often dishonestly omit information like this that doesn’t fit their narrative. It’s why so many here have left YEC behind - because we believe God is a God of truth; not lies and deliberate omissions.

Back to Kelvin’s 144 million years - obviously a figure not accepted today! - but just near the end of Kelvin’s life, radioactivity was being discovered and that changed everything! Now there was a known heat source in the earth’s interior, which completely overturned Kelvin’s figures (of how fast a hot ball would cool in space), but it didn’t overturn it in any way that could possibly bring that figure down into YEC ranges! Quite the opposite. It gave rise to radioactive dating that gave more clues yet. You dispute those dating techniques by accusing them of running with assumptions (such as how much C-14 could have existed in earlier times), but (as others here will inform you in much more detail if you want), those dating techniques don’t depend on such assumptions. Dendrochronology (examining the carbon isotopic content of ancient tree rings) is used to confirm the isotopic mix of carbon going back - even over ten thousand years I believe). And besides that the various dating techniques overlap and cross-confirm each other. True - some are only good for millions or billions of years while others (like C14) are only good for tens of thousands of years. But that is no different than choosing an appropriate scale to weigh a truck, but knowing that you need to use another scale to weigh a mouse, and a different technique yet to weigh a few molecules. But there are enough overlapping scales (and even self-calibrating methods) that there simply is no way (beyond an extensive multitude of necessary miracles and Divine fiat to inexplicably cause things to falsely confirm) - no way that any of this is wrong by the orders of magnitude that you need it to be.

A former (and now passed) participant here, Glenn Morton, used to be a long-time YEC himself. And he worked in the petroleum industry where they depend on accurate information to help them drill in right places for oil. You can read here and in many other places what his experience was when YEC met with reality. He wouldn’t agree with everyone here on everything - but one thing he knew: the earth couldn’t be as young as YECs claimed. You would benefit from reading his story. I may not have linked the best post above to show this, but elsewhere he admitted that he joined the oil industry as a YEC, even hired other YECs … and none of them (or their YEC beliefs) survived being exposed to that reality. When big money is on the line, they can’t afford to stick with ideology against reality. They go with the evidence, or else they will be drilling a lot more expensive dry holes.

-Merv

[added edit (which you can do by clicking the pencil underneath any of your own posts) … here is a link to a short article of Glenn’s on another web site that is also good. And he (somewhere else yet - here is a talkorigins article that hits a lot of it) has a decent compendium of ways in which the fossil record and geological strata cannot possibly be explained by one massive flood event.]

[jpm (Phil McCurdy)]

Great overview, Merv. I need to bookmark that response for future reference.

We all have presuppositions, but these measurements are something that anyone with the funding and expertise can repeat and analyze. In addition, measurements in astrophysics can be done which also have to be explained and are confirmatory of an old universe. Lake varves and ice cores. All are consistent with and back up an old earth model. If they did not, it would be a real problem, but they do.

[Dale (evolutionary providentialist)]

@Burrawang

I have no problem with having light before the sun. Who knows perhaps the light came from our Lord Himself, or perhaps it came from elsewhere, but I see no logical reason whatsoever to question what the Bible clearly says.

That kind of non-answer illustrates why young people leave the church – because of YECism’s avoidance of good science and its because of its doctrinaire answers.

Barna is a Christian polling organization in the U.S. Note reason #3:

Six Reasons Young Christians Leave Church - Barna Group

[Dale (evolutionary providentialist)]

YECs have to smash and destroy all the elapsed time clocks that have been discovered in God’s very cool creation to get them to fit their fallible interpretation of the Bible and make a grossly distorted perspective of reality, not to mention injecting a bizarre array of non-biblical miracles in the process. An astonishing example:

@Burrawang

In fact, decay rates have been increased in the laboratory by factors of billions of times.1 Creationist physicists point to several lines of evidence that decay rates have been faster in the past, and propose a pulse of accelerated decay during Creation Week, and possibly a smaller pulse during the Flood year.2

 

@jpm

Lake varves and ice cores. All are consistent with and back up an old earth model.

Absolutely.

Testing and Verifying Old Age Evidence: Lake Suigetsu Varves, Tree Rings, and Carbon-14 (they validate each other).

PSCF6-18Davidson.pdf

And my favorite that no YEC has given an answer to that wasn’t obvious fantasy, the redoubtable girdled rocks:

The World’s Largest Rock Tumbler is an Unusual Testimony to an Ancient Earth

New evidence always supports the antiquity of the earth, and it continues to build. It is deplorable that YECism is so frequently so closely identified with Christianity as to be integral to it, thereby alienating intelligent young people in Christian homes and making the Lord a laughingstock to outsiders.

[jammycakes (James McKay)]

@Burrawang

But that measurement is simply that, a measurement of the mass of the parent and daughter isotopes in the sample, it is NOT an age, far from it is simply how much of each elemental isotope remains in the sample. As you would be well aware, many assumptions are made to attempt to derive a date from the mass measurements.

But that is how every form of measurement works. There are many, many quantities that can not be measured directly but where we have to measure something else and then do some sort of calculation to get the quantity we are after. Temperature is one example—you cannot measure temperature directly; you have to measure something else (such as changes in the volume of mercury, or a voltage from a sensor) and then do some calculations to figure out the temperature from that. But do we think we should throw out our thermometers just because there is some calculation involved? Of course not!

Nor can one dismiss measurement out of hand just because there are assumptions involved. Young earthists view assumptions as if they were some sort of get-out-of-jail-free card that let them dismiss any and every scientific finding that they don’t like. But it doesn’t work that way. If you want to challenge a scientific theory by attacking its assumptions, you must provide a coherent explanation as to how the assumptions could have been violated while still producing exactly the same end results, right down to the mathematical precision in the measurements.

For example, in the Hawaiian islands, radiometric ages increase linearly from the volcanic hotspot in the Big Island at exactly the same rate as that of continental drift as measured directly by GPS satellites. Young earthists must account for this by explaining how nuclear decay rates and plate tectonics could not only have increased in speed by a factor of a billion, but done so in complete lock-step with each other at all times and in all places. I have yet to see them even attempt this.

Smoking Gun Evidence of an Ancient Earth: GPS Data Confirms Radiometric Dating

@Burrawang

Long-age geologists will not accept a radiometric date unless it matches their pre-existing expectations.

And just how often does this kind of shenanigan happen? More specifically, exactly how many results are discarded in this way for every one that gets published?

If radiometric dating really were so unreliable that it couldn’t distinguish between thousands and billions, researchers would have to be throwing out dozens of results for every one that they published, because they would be basically cherry-picking random numbers. And radiometric dating is expensive. Getting a single measured age can cost thousands or in some cases even tens of thousands of dollars—and that’s just for the measurements, before you even start to consider the cost of collecting, storing, preparing and processing the samples. Are we really expected to believe that the entire scientific community has been engaged in such a massive wholescale fraud on an industrial scale for nearly a century at the cost of trillions of dollars? If so, where are the whistleblowers? Where are the politicians, and especially the young earthist politicians in the US Congress, demanding that this colossal waste of money be accounted for? Where are the other scientists, working in other fields, kicking up a stink about it because it’s diverting grant money away from their own, more honest lines of research? Where are the accountants and administrators in universities demanding that the money spent on all of this be accounted for?

I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to call “conspiracy theory” on this one. In fact, if such a thing really were happening, it would be the mother of all conspiracies. Aliens in Area 51, 9/11 being an inside job, chemtrails, the US Navy covering up the existence of mermaids … all of these would be child’s play by comparison. Conspiracies on that scale simply do not happen, it’s as simple as that.

@Burrawang

These include the assumption that decay rates have never changed. In fact, decay rates have been increased in the laboratory by factors of billions of times.1 Creationist physicists point to several lines of evidence that decay rates have been faster in the past, and propose a pulse of accelerated decay during Creation Week, and possibly a smaller pulse during the Flood year.2

1. Woodmorappe, J., Billion-fold acceleration of radioactivity demonstrated in laboratory, J. Creation 15(2):4–6, 2001.
2. Vardiman, L., Snelling, A.A. and Chaffin, E.F., Radioisotopes and the age of the Earth, Institute for Creation Research, El Cajon, California and Creation Research Society, St. Joseph, Missouri, USA, 2000.

I’m sorry, but this is where young earthists lose me completely.

Accelerated nuclear decay is science fiction. It didn’t happen, it’s as simple as that. For nuclear decay rates to change, the fundamental constants of nature such as the speed of light or the strength of the strong and weak nuclear forces would have to change. If that had ever happened, the consequences would have been extremely dramatic and extremely far reaching. Even the young earth RATE project that gets cited here admits that increasing nuclear decay rates by that kind of amount would have released enough heat to raise the Earth’s temperature to 22,400°C. The fact that we are still here is evidence enough that no such thing has happened at any time in the history of the Earth.

So what of this?

@Burrawang

1. Woodmorappe, J., Billion-fold acceleration of radioactivity demonstrated in laboratory, J. Creation 15(2):4–6, 2001.

The studies in question involved stripping ¹⁸⁷Re of all of its electrons, resulting in a bare nucleus, and heating ¹⁷⁶Lu to temperatures above two hundred million Kelvin. That does not help the young earthists’ arguments against radiometric dating in the slightest, because they need to somehow demonstrate that nuclear decay rates could have been accelerated by a factor of a billion without obliterating the samples in the process. It’s one thing showing that nuclear decay rates can be accelerated in the kind of conditions you would expect to find in the centre of a supernova. It’s a completely different thing to show that nuclear decay rates can be accelerated on Earth in conditions that would leave the planet in one piece.

@Burrawang

Dinosaur soft tissue

Two years ago, Schweitzer gazed through a microscope in her laboratory at North Carolina State University and saw lifelike tissue that had no business inhabiting a fossilised dinosaur skeleton: fibrous matrix, stretchy like a wet scab on human skin; what appeared to be supple bone cells, their three-dimensional shapes intact; and translucent blood vessels that looked as if they could have come straight from an ostrich at the zoo.

With dinosaur soft tissue, it’s important to make sure that your facts are straight about what the soft tissue samples actually consist of before you make any claims about what they do or do not support.

Young earthist claims about dinosaur soft tissue routinely portray them as being in a far better state of preservation than they really were. Mary Schweitzer did not find actual red blood cells, nor did she find actual DNA, or actual bone cells. She only found the ultimately stable breakdown products of those things.

We know what soft tissue looks like after only a few thousand years. It looks like this:

or this:

These are Ötzi the Iceman and Tollund Man respectively. Both had fully sequenceable DNA. And therein lies the rub: if the dinosaur soft tissue samples really were less than six thousand years old, we would have sequenced the entire T-Rex genome by now. Why haven’t we?

@Burrawang

Real empirical science proves that the ‘deep time’ ages ascribed to diamonds is in error. There is no way that a diamond can be contaminated by atmospheric Carbon 14 as the extreme pressures required to form diamonds are only found hundreds of miles below the earth’s surface in the Crust to Mantle region.

It can be contaminated by atmospheric carbon 14 in sample preparation and analysis. Carbon 14 can also be produced in diamonds if they are bombarded by radiation from nearby uranium deposits. This is not just some sort of “rescuing device” either: the effect is observable and measurable. Diamonds that were found close to uranium deposits have measurably more carboin-14 in them than those that were not.

Young earthists insist on hand-waving contamination away as if it were some sort of “rescuing device.” But one of the most fundamental rules of accurate and honest measurement is that contamination must be fully accounted for before you claim anything else. By dismissing contamination as a “rescuing device,” young earthists are insisting that the basic rules and principles of accurate and honest measurement do not apply to them. In other words, they are demanding the right to claim whatever they like.

[Dale (evolutionary providentialist)]

@jammycakes

the Hawaiian islands

Thanks for the reminder. This is well done about the Hawaiian Islands and Emperor Seamount chain and should be compelling evidence for the antiquity of the earth:

How Old are the Hawaiian Islands? - BioLogos

[Burrawang]

• Here, in Biologos, graciousness is deemed by the authorities to be closer to Godliness than cleanliness which is unfortunate for me because I frequently get in trouble for my ungracious comments.
• As anonymous as you’d like to be, your first post tells me all I need to know: that you and I could be neighbors, but we would never be friends. You see, here in the U.S., a Young Earth Creationist is–for all their fine words–a political beast who consorts with the Devil to achieve his or her goals.

If I have offended you please accept my apologies, that was certainly not my intention.
I see this as a matter of extreme urgency and vitally important to all. I am certainly no better than anyone else, when I was first saved I in the presence of the Holy Spirit, I saw myself as I really was, a worthless sinner, in filthy rags, (metaphorically speaking). Our Lord’s Love for all of us despite our fallen state is what keeps me going in tough times.

My firm belief that the Earth is as old as the Bible states, is not in any way motivated by any political reason, indeed it is a complete about face from what I once believed, when I was fully in your camp and erroneously thought that God used evolution to create over millions of years.
Our Lord made certain that His account that the creation was miraculously performed in six normal 24 hour days not that long ago in Genesis, “and there was evening, and there was morning the n day”; the claimed millions - billions of Earth years is a man-made construct that is unfortunately causing many to stumble.

As for consorting with the devil, I do not understand how you can make such a statement. All the Bible believing Christians that I know are good people who abhor anything to do with the occult that is ruled by the principalities and powers of darkness that unfortunately influence many in this present age.

I am certain that whatever a genuine Christian believes, evolution or creation, around 6,000 years or 14 billion years, that belief is not a salvation issue, all that matters is that the person believes that Jesus is the Creator, and Saviour who has paid the price for our sins by dying innocently on the cross as our kinsmen redeemer.
All the very best,
jon

[jpm (Phil McCurdy)]

Not sure if your were specifically replying to an individual, or if that was a general statement, but no one here should be accusing you of consorting with the devil, and if so will be edited if you will point it out, as I did not see it.
I have quite a few friends who believe in a young earth, and while I think they are in error, are sincere and loving Christians who I would trust with my life. I admit, I am not quite as charitable towards some of the authors of what I consider false statements, that they then knowingly promote. Perhaps that too is wrong, as I am sure many are sincere in their actions and admittedly, even many of those with advanced degrees are working outside of the area of their expertise and training so perhaps should not be held to same standards as those with degrees in the field, and perhaps the criticism should be geared more towards those publishing their opinions as being expert.

[Dale (evolutionary providentialist)]

@Burrawang

My firm belief that the Earth is as old as the Bible states,

The Bible does not state how old the earth or the cosmos is. That is YECism’s elevating modern science above scripture and trying to make the Bible ‘scientifically correct’, and bizarrely.

[Dale (evolutionary providentialist)]

@Burrawang

a man-made construct that is unfortunately causing many to stumble.

That is your own or YECism’s spin that you swallowed. You did not read, or at least you did not read well:

@Dale

Barna is a Christian polling organization in the U.S. Note reason #3:

Six Reasons Young Christians Leave Church - Barna Group

[Terry_Sampson]

[Terry_Sampson]

@Burrawang

I am certain that whatever a genuine Christian believes, evolution or creation, around 6,000 years or 14 billion years, that belief is not a salvation issue,

You can afford to be magnanimous … in Australia. But here, in the U.S., Young Earth Creationists are not so magnanimous, as a rule. Politically, they are “hunting witches”, and seem to be–effectively–determined to dismantle our constitutional democracy.