So, my last comment used a meme, and perhaps you mistook it for a joke. It was not really a joke.
Rather, my point is serious, and it’s not a minor one. I think it actually goes to the very heart of why you keep posting so vehemently about your beliefs here.
You have mistaken scientific conclusions based on observations and logic for religious convictions based on some sort of blind insistence on atheism or “New Age” cosmology. This bears little resemblance to the beliefs of anyone here at BioLogos or in the scientific establishment in general.
Good news is, you’re here, so you can get to know us, find out what we really believe, and correct all that! To me that’s good news. I hope you stick around long enough to figure out what makes us tick. (Hint: It has nothing to do with anything “New Age.”)
But there’s not. Can you name one maybe? Let’s start there.
No. It. Wasn’t. Holy Cow. Where do you get these crazy ideas from? All geologists were pretty much Christian in the 1900s and they took the Bible seriously. Extremely seriously.
I have heard it is always best to try and use updated sources when debating scientists. Please do this. Note: young earth creationist articles often have sources that are decades old.
The conclusion that a large amount of decay has occurred had been denied or ignored previously by many creationists. However, the evidence is overwhelming. The magnitude of the nuclear decay indicates that, independent of initial conditions, the equivalent of billions of years worth of nuclear decay has occurred during earth history.
LXX, billions of years worth of nuclear decay has occurred on Earth.
When a dating labratory puts large error bars on the data, it means the measured date is less reliable. In fact, this was to be expected because the error on measuring Argon for this sample in a lab is larger than the age of the sample. In other words, the YEC geologist deliberately abused a radiometric dating technique (that cannot date anything so young) to mislead his readers and this makes it into the new movie Is Genesis History.
A nice discussion can be found @jammycakes 's blog on about dating methods that disagree with each other:
Is this 20 questions? Look it up. There is plenty of creation literature out there.
There were no animal “species” on the ark. In fact, that word is not found in the Bible.
Of course you would.
I assume you mean published in a PAL-reviewed publication. I am not sure about one on paleomagnetism. I posted some of Humphreys’ bio in a previous post, including his professional career at General Electric and Sandia National Laboratories.
Dr D. Russell Humphreys . . . has about 30 published articles in mainstream technical journals from 1968 to the present. In the last eight years a lot of his work has been classified, so there has been less of it in the open literature.
His most recent unclassified publication is a multiple-author article in Review of Scientific Instruments, Vol. 63(10):5068–5071, October 1992, “Comparison of experimental results and calculated detector responses for PBFAII thermal source experiments.” I understand that a more recent unclassified article will be published in the near future. Here is just a sampling of some of his earlier articles:
“Uranium logging with prompt fission neutrons”, (Principal author) International Journal of Applied Radiation and Isotopes, 34(1):261–268, 1983.
“Inertial confinement fusion with light ion beams”, (Multiple-author) International Atomic Energy Agency, 13th International Conference on Plasma Physics and Controlled Nuclear Fusion Research, Washington D.C., 1–6 October 1990.
“Progress toward a superconducting opening switch”, (Principal author), Proceedings of 6th IEEE Pulsed Power Conference (Arlington, VA June 29 – July 1, 1987) pp. 279–282.
“Rimfire: a six megavolt laser-triggered gas-filled switch for PBFA II”, (Principal author), Proceedings of 5th IEEE Pulsed Power Conference (Arlington, VA June 10–12, 1985) pp. 262–2265.
“The 1/gamma velocity dependence of nucleon-nucleus optical potentials”, (Only author) Nuclear Physics, A182:580–592, 1972.
Again, this is all above my paygrade, but I suspect Dr. Humphreys has no problem making the types of measurements in question.
It really doesn’t matter to a die-hard evolutionist. Anyone who commits the heresy of refusing to bow to the god of Darwinism cannot possibly be a “real” scientist, right?
I recommend everyone read the above article by David Buckna.
There were no assumptions? There are always assumptions, and there are always alternatives. Are you familiar with this research?
“Radioactive dating is claimed to prove that the earth is billions of years old, but the methods are based on a number of unprovable assumptions. For example, it is assumed that radioactive decay rates have not changed in the past. Specifically, geochronologists assume that radioactive decay rates are unaffected by physical conditions like temperature and pressure. They also assume they are independent of the chemical environment.” [Tasman B Walker, “Radioactive decay rate depends on chemical environment.” Creation Ministries International, 2000]
He cited: “Huh, C.-A., Dependence of the decay rate of 7Be on chemical forms, Earth and Planetary Science Letters 171:325–328, 1999”
Is he lying?
Okay, enough on “assumptions”. How about this statement:
“Drawing any conclusions from the above depends, of course, on actually measuring the rate at which helium leaks out of zircons. This is what one of the RATE papers reports on. The samples were sent (without any hint that it was a creationist project) to a world-class expert on helium diffusion from minerals to measure these rates. The consistent answer: the helium does indeed seep out quickly over a wide range of temperatures. In fact, the results show that because of all the helium still in the zircons, these crystals (and since this is Precambrian basement granite, by implication the whole earth) could not be older than 14,000 years. In other words, in only a few thousand years, 1.5 billion years’ worth (at today’s rates) of radioactive decay has taken place. Interestingly, the data have since been refined and updated to give a date of 5,680 (± 2,000) years.” [Wieland, Carl, “Radiometric dating breakthroughs.” Creation Ministries International, 2004]
Is he lying?
LXX
gbrooks9
(George Brooks, TE (E.volutionary T.heist OR P.rovidentialist))
85
And so you walk right into a swinging door… and you don’t even say ouch?
If the fossils of Egypt were laid down by the Flood… then the hundreds of thousands of Egyptians would also become eligible for fossilization, right? But we don’t find any in the same strata as the dinosaurs, and the proto-bears, and the proto-whales… nothing. Zip. And it’s not just the humans of Egypt that are missing … we are missing thousands of fossils made from millions of human dead, all over the Earth.
Hominid and human fossils are reserved to the very uppermost layers of strata… Which makes your flood scenario quite implausible. You are saying that humans were able to tread water better than giant marine reptiles, and long extinct giant sharks and the forms of proto-whale and whale that would have become extinct during the flood - - because they no longer exist on this planet.
The global flood did not happen; it could not happen.
Now you are just joshing me, right? You think the sons of Noah could replenish the missing hundreds of thousands in 500 years? And how would they know how to live like Egyptians? Why don’t we see a totally foreign shift in cultural norms? We don’t see such a shift, because there was no Flood.
Why are you here on this list? Conclusions like this are the product of fantasy.
Vehement? You have not been paying attention. Did you not consider that there may be a reason for my “vehement” attacks, for example, defending against vehement attacks on my religious beliefs? Have you bothered to read first few posts on this thread? The “I am right and you are an idiot” ones? Those posts are the reason I signed up.
The first sentence is an overly broad generalization. The second, especially the part about the scientific establishment, is right on the money, I hope.
I actually “stumbled” across this forum while doing a search; but I am familiar with Biologos. I have one of Francis Collins books, and a while back I watched a Youtube video of a speech by Collins during which he said he was forming the Biologos Foundation: Francis Collins - The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence of Belief
In that segment Collins complained about two extremes which “occupy the stage”
atheists who are arguing that science disproves God
fundamentalists who say that science can’t be trusted because it disagrees with their interpretation of particular scripture
There is a third category: those who trust both science and the scripture. I fall into that category. My difference with those who believe in evolution is that I believe the founding tenant of Darwinism, the origin of the species, to be both unbiblical and unscientific (frankly, scientifically impossible), nor do I (now) believe an old earth can be scientifically justified.
For the record, my scientific conclusions are not mistaken; and your schoolmarm-type lectures will no longer be recognized.
He’s exaggerating the significance of the effect. You only have to read the abstract of the paper he cites to see that the effect is only 1.5%. That is far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far too small to demonstrate that nuclear decay rates could have changed by a factor of a billion under the kind of conditions you would expect to have seen during the Flood. In any case, if nuclear decay rates ever had been high enough to squeeze all the evidence into just a fraction of six thousand years, they would have released enough heat to raise the temperature of the earth to 22,000°C – and that was the RATE team’s own admission.
Walker’s claim that constant decay rates are an unprovable assumption is simply not true. There are several ways to test whether radioactive decay rates could have varied in the past, and to what extent. One way is to cross-check multiple independent dating methods (both radiometric and non-radiometric), whose assumptions are independent of each other. What we find is that 90-95% of the time, when multiple dating methods are used, they agree with each other to within one or two percent, and often much closer than that.
One particularly spectacular example is the cross-checks that we see between radiometric dating at tectonic plate boundaries and volcanic hotspots (e.g. in Hawaii) with GPS measurements of continental drift:
YECs love to make a song and a dance about cases where they don’t, but these only account for 5-10% of samples, and the discrepancies are usually no more than about 20-30% or so, and typically have good, testable explanations. Again, this falls far, far short of demonstrating that radiometric dating is so out of whack that it can’t distinguish between thousands and billions. It merely demonstrates that radiometric dating mostly works with the exception of certain well-studied corner cases.
Two other points worth noting. First, we are talking about vast swathes of data here. Tens of thousands of new radiometric results are published in the scientific literature every year. Given that radiometric dating can cost as much as $10,000 per sample, depending on the method used, claims that the data could be cherry-picked to give the right results are unrealistic.
Second, radiometric dating plays a crucial role in finding oil. Petroleum geologists have to know both the ages and thermal histories of oil deposits. If the oil is too young, or too old, they won’t be able to get anything out fo the ground. This means that they are under pressure to make sure that their models are correct, not that they are ideologically convenient.
Ah, the good old RATE study on helium diffusion in zircons.
The thing about this particular study is that it is very, very complex, both theoretically and experimentally. At the time of the RATE project, it was also a fairly new area of research, and only a tiny handful of papers had been published in the subject up to that point. What that means is that it’s easy to get wrong, difficult to get right, and easy to fudge in ways that can be difficult to spot. In other words, it needs to be tested by fire by subject matter experts.
The subject matter experts who have examined it have noted numerous serious irregularities with the RATE team’s work, many of which have not been addressed. From the critique by Kevin Henke, here are just a selection of the worst howlers:
They did not take either pressure or anisotropy into account. Studies by Dunau and Roselieb (1996) and Reich et al (2007) note that these could easily push the results up from thousands to billions.
They interpreted an equation from a 1970 paper by Magomedov as being based on base-10 logarithms rather than on natural logarithms, despite the fact that it was abundantly clear from Magomedov’s paper that natural logarithms were what he intended.
They changed one column of figures from some older by a factor of ten to account for “typographical errors” without providing any evidence (e.g. in the form of the original lab notes) that such corrections were actually warranted. Without providing evidence to support their case, this is tantamount to scientific fraud, pure and simple.
They used a model that did not accurately represent the sizes of the zircons.
They misidentified rock samples, labelling gneisses as granodiorites, and using unrecognised terminology to describe them.
They misread a graph of the thermal history of the rocks, believing it to show that their temperature had been much higher in the past than the graph actually indicated.
They interpreted an Arrhenius plot as having a “knee” and a “defect line” when there were simply not enough points on the graph to unambiguously warrant such an interpretation.
They made several claims that various other approximations and errors would only affect the results by “a factor of two or so” without providing any calculations to support their assertions that these errors would really be that small.
Their work also contained a number of arithmetic errors, and equations that were simply made up with no basis in reality whatsoever.
The RATE team responded to Henke’s criticisms by claiming that they were all “petty and nitpicking,” but they did not provide any calculations or other evidence to show that they really were as “petty and nitpicking” as they claimed them to be.
Here’s a more detailed summary of the helium diffusion study that I wrote up a while ago:
LXX, you need to realise that the age of the earth is determined first and foremost by measuring things. I know you’ll probably say that it’s just a matter of interpretation, but there are strict rules that interpretations of the evidence have to follow – rules that are simply about honesty, integrity and factual accuracy (see Deuteronomy 25:13-16), and as such have nothing to do with worldview or “secular science” or “evolutionary presuppositions” or anything like that. Rules such as not quote mining, not exaggerating nor downplaying the extent of discrepancies and errors, not fudging or cherry-picking data, citing accurate error bars, peer review, reproducibility of findings and so on. Old-earth interpretations for the most part respect these rules. Young-earth interpretations, on the other hand, do not.
These fossils are all one species. The word doesn’t have to be in the bible. There are too many individuals to have all been alive at the same time. Which I assume would have been required if they all died during the global flood. You really don’t want to read the article do you?
Nothing you provided gives any indication he is capable of passing judgement on a leading researcher in paleomagnetism. I am not casting aspersions on Dr. Humphreys but like you this is outside his area of expertise.
Probably a fair point. I didn’t really mean to be nasty with you, so forgive me for the tone of “vehement” if it rubbed you the wrong way.
How is it overly broad? You used the term “New-Age” twice to refer to established science. This is essentially a slur, in Christian circles, and then you failed to back it up. It seems you think evolutionary creationists have been hoodwinked by New Age theology, but then when confronted about it, you’d like to make it as if you didn’t insult us all.
So do I! Glad we agree on something.
Well, hopefully you’ve found this a bit less schoolmarmish. But no matter. I don’t feel any need for you to respond, and honestly I don’t have time for deeper engagement at the moment. All I really wanted to do was point out that your use of “New Age” is inaccurate, insulting, and telling… It shows us that you completely misunderstand evolutionary creationists… your extensive readings of Francis Collins notwithstanding.
Okay, let us start with the world-wide, fossilized strata.
Are you claiming Lyell and Hutton were Christians? Playfair? Darwin?
I haven’t noticed, and my software library has a date field. Perhaps you should subscribe to the Journal of Creation. A couple of recent ones from the 40 or so articles for January and February are:
The publication also states there were three general geophysical conclusions drawn from the RATE research:
A large amount of radioactive decay has occurred.
Nuclear decay processes were accelerated during episodes in earth history.
Conventional radioisotope dates are therefore incorrect by large factors.
If I didn’t know better, I would think dating labs are practicing voodoo science. A counter-argument is (paraphrased), “How can you use that method on any rock, unless you were around to see the rock created?” See: Countering the critics: Radio-dating in Rubble
Thanks for the blog article. I placed it in my library for later reference. I particularily liked this statement:
Showing that one method fails under specific conditions does not prove that all methods fail everywhere.
How does one know when it fails, and when it does not? Circular reasoning? This is from one of the RATE reports:
"Interestingly, specimens which appear to definitely be pre-Flood seem to have C-14 present, too, and importantly, these cluster around a lower relative amount of C-14. This suggests that some C-14 was primordial, and not produced by cosmic rays—thus limiting the age of the entire earth to only a few thousand years.
"This latter suggestion about primordial C-14 appears to have been somewhat spectacularly supported when Dr Baumgardner sent a diamond for C-14 dating. It was the first time this had been attempted, and the answer came back positive—i.e. the diamond, formed deep inside the earth in a ‘Precambrian’ layer, nevertheless contained radioactive carbon, even though it ‘shouldn’t have’.
"This is exceptionally striking evidence, because a diamond has remarkably powerful lattice bonds, so there is no way that subsequent biological contamination can be expected to find its way into the interior.
"The diamond’s carbon-dated ‘age’ of <58,000 years is thus an upper limit for the age of the whole earth. And this age is brought down still further now that the helium diffusion results have so strongly affirmed dramatic past acceleration of radioactive decay.5
“C-14 labs have no real answer to this problem, namely that all the ‘vast-age’ specimens they measure still have C-14. Labelling this detectable C-14 with such words as ‘contamination’ and ‘background’ is completely unhelpful in explaining its source, as the RATE group’s careful analyses and discussions have shown. But it is no problem or mystery at all if the uniformitarian/long-age assumptions are laid to one side and the real history of the world, given in Scripture, is taken seriously. The C-14 is there, quite simply, because it hasn’t had time to decay yet. The world just isn’t that old!”
Dig in the continental shelf strata. You may find some there.
I explained it in an earlier post.
Well, I guess that settles it! How can that high level of proof be countered?
Using the population growth formula, PGR = P(t) - P(t0)/(P(t0) * (t - t0)), and assuming a growth rate of 2.3 percent, an initial population of 6 would reach 500,000 in 500 years. The population would double every 30.6 years.
According to the scripture, the various family clans all lived in the Mesopotamia area before the Babel incident, which means, with regional constraints, they would have similar cultures, but with some variation between the clans. Once they scattered, those regional constraints disappeared, allowing each clan to develop its own culture. By the time Abraham arrived, Egypt had a well-established and unique culture. According to Josephus, Abraham taught them Math and Astronomy, further solidifying cultural uniqueness.
Of course, that is all theory.
I joined the forum because of the nastiness and poor research that I read in the first few posts of this thread.
LXX
gbrooks9
(George Brooks, TE (E.volutionary T.heist OR P.rovidentialist))
92
This is an amateur conclusion. You are completely ignoring Pedigree Collapse.
The only way your math works is if you can make sure nobody marries their cousins for 500 years… and I don’t mean first cousins… I mean 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th cousins. And this is impossible. This is why the theoretical population of Charlemagne’s descendants in the present day, of over hundreds of millions since he lived in 800 AD, never actually occurred.
Your discussion of the Babel incident is completely irrelevant, if you place the flood anywhere in the middle of the existing dynasties. Before the Flood, Egypt has continuity in art, language, writing, architecture. If you wipe out every living Egyptian and replace it with a handful of new people, the continuity cannot be maintained. Your explanation, a whole paragraph, simply ignores any of these dynamics.
Your comments about digging in the continental shelf strata makes zero sense. We don’t have to do that to find fossils of your “drowned animals”. And they live out in the wilderness. Why would we have to go out into the ocean to find fossils of drowned humans, who drowned in the Nile Valley ?
And finally, saying you explained how the animal fossils got sorted out “in an earlier post” is not really adequate. You have to at least tell me which posting has the desired explanation. As I recall, your explanations along these lines were akin to waving your hands around in the air … suggesting this or that possibility.
But this is actually the core of the entire problem. There is no mechanism, known or theorized, that can sort out drowning animals the way you are attempting to say it did.
Wow? That is a little harsh, is it not? This is how Walker cited Huh’s paper:
“In the recent paper, geochemist Chih-An Huh reported that the decay rate of 7Be depends on its chemical form. [4] The measurements were done at the unprecedented high precision of ±0.01%, some ten times better than any reported previously. An extremely sensitive and stable spectrometer was used to monitor gamma rays from the decay of 7Be. Three different chemical forms of 7Be were measured, the hydrated Be2+ ion in solution surrounded by four water molecules ([Be(H2O)4]2+), the hydroxide (Be(OH)2), and the oxide (BeO). The measured half lives were 53.69 days, 53.42 days and 54.23 days respectively—a 1.5% variation from the shortest to the longest. The variation is much greater than previously considered.” [Tasman B Walker, “Radioactive decay rate depends on chemical environment.” Creation Ministries International, 2000]
Perhaps you will show us where he exaggerated
No solution thus far, that I am aware of.
How does that disprove his claim?
That is an interesting theory. I added the article to my library.
You will need rock-solid evidence to convince former old-earthers, like me.
I don’t believe many old-earthers realize how all the past (and present) fraud, in particular by way of manipulations of the fossil record, has damaged their credibility.
That will never happen as long as the establishment shuts them out.
** 03/2005, Kevin Henke, Disputed about % retention, source of helium, and minor issues
R.H. “Effects of all of these issues turn out to be vastly smaller than the factor of 100,000 discrepancy observed.”
** 11/2005, Kevin Henke, Alleged that in situ hydrostatic pressure effect is significant.
R.H. “Zircons are so hard that pressure or vacuum doesn’t affect helium diffusion significantly.”
That is still over my paygrade.
Your article is now in my database. I will check out your other articles when I get some free time.
Old-earth theories are not nearly as credible as you seem to believe. Even after a half-century of force-feeding evolution and old-earth theories down our childrens throats, while excluding much of the opposition by the power of the state, a substantial percentage of Americans still believe evolution is false and Noah’s flood happened exactly as written.
Bible believers are also bound by the scripture, which is not easily explained away. For example, how can this verse be used to prove either an old or young earth?
“He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.” – Eccl 3:11 KJV
You say the earth is old according to observational evidence, but God says it took 6 days. God said he sent a flood that destroyed all earthly flesh, except for those on the ark; and I suspect you would say it didn’t happen, at least not according to the way the text is traditionally interpreted. Jesus said the first man and woman were alive at the beginning of creation, and so forth . . .
That is a novel theory, but it only becomes relevant if you can apply it to 2,000 BC family clans. Besides, a 2.3% growth rate is reasonable for a time prior to the onset of widespread disease and warfare between the nations; and it is even reasonable now.
Egypt again? Okay, I give in. What do you know about Dudimose? Are you familiar with this?
I tell you what… I give you a fact and you call it a novel theory. All the while, you are trying to tell me that a couple of people can re-populate the Egyptian Nile Valley in 500 years. If that were true, LXX, why didn’t all of Africa BUST OUT with millions of Egyptians in 1000 years?
Then you give me this excuse about how hard it is to find things that support your view. Well, no kidding!
What’s the point of me looking for Your Article? How would I know if it is the one you like or not?
Why don’t you find someone else who will discuss all your amazing information… Good luck to ya.
George
1 Like
gbrooks9
(George Brooks, TE (E.volutionary T.heist OR P.rovidentialist))
97
You are asking me? Sure. I’ll answer. Because the fossils we see in the ground were not laid down when humans existed. They were laid down over millions of years, mostly when humans didn’t exist.
So… expecting a proportional number of human fossils along with all the other fossils is based on the assumption that the flood scenario is valid.
But if it isn’t valid… then you end up with what we actually find!
[quote=“gbrooks9, post:96, topic:5302”]
I tell you what… I give you a fact and you call it a novel theory. All the while, you are trying to tell me that a couple of people can re-populate the Egyptian Nile Valley in 500 years. If that were true, LXX, why didn’t all of Africa BUST OUT with millions of Egyptians in 1000 years?"
Let me guess; because I assumed a growth rate of only 2.3%? Don’t forget the later wars, famines, death of the first born, Pharoah and his armies at the bottom of the Red Sea, the “invasion” of the Hyksos?
I used the term “invasion” loosly because the Hyksos, which went into Egypt after the Exodus, met virtually no resistance from the army-less Egyptians. This is Josephus quoting Manetho on the “invasion” of the Hyksos:
“Now this Manetho, in the second book of his Egyptian History, writes concerning us in the following manner. I will set down his very words, as if I were to bring the very man himself into a court for a witness: 'There was a king of ours whose name was Timaus. Under him it came to pass, I know not how, that God was averse to us, and there came, after a surprising manner, men of ignoble birth out of the eastern parts, and had boldness enough to make an expedition into our country and with ease subdued it by force, yet without our hazarding a battle with them. They afterwards burnt down our cities and demolished the temples of the gods, and used all the inhabitants after a most barbarous manner. Nay, some they slew and led their children and their wives into slavery… This whole nation was styled Hycsos, that is, Shepherd-kings” [Flavius Josephus, “Complete Works: Against Apion.” Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 1934, Book I, pp. 1555-56]
If you read carefully, you will see the Egyptian Manetho mention “God” and “the gods”. Was Manetho hinting that Egypt was punished by the Almighty? According to Egyptologist David Rohl, the name Timaus is the Greek variant of Dudimose, the possible king of the Exodus who Rohl believes ended up in the bottom of the Red Sea.
For the record, the descendents of the 3 sons of Noah and their wives “populated” all nations, not re-populated.
For the simple reason that observed variations of just ±1.5% do not justify claims that rates could vary by a factor of a million or more.
Seriously, this is measurement 101.
Because the only alternative explanation is that rates must have varied in complete lock-step with each other. As the number of cross checks increases, the possibility of any such thing having happened becomes absurd. Furthermore, if any two rates are related in a non-linear fashion (for example, one being the square of the other, or one being linear and another exponential), it becomes mathematically impossible.
The success of old-earth methods in finding oil, for starters.
Please bear in mind that in order to support a young earth, you need to prove that all old-earth results are fraudulent, not just a cherry-picked handful of them. I’ve just given you two reasons why such a claim is simply not credible.
Or perhaps you would care to explain how a fraud costing billions of dollars a year to perpetuate could be perpetuated for the best part of a century without anything about it appearing on Wikileaks?
Anyone can quote mine the scientific literature in any discipline to uncover isolated examples of fraud and sloppiness. But that’s why we have things such as peer review and the need for reproducibility. When results have been replicated multiple times, and when they have a whole lot of other science depending on them, the possibility that they could all be fraudulent becomes vanishingly small to the point of absurdity.
Then they need to come up with some claims that are simple enough that they can be fact-checked with no more than undergraduate level science and a search engine. If the evidence really did support a young earth, they would have no trouble in doing so. When claims get complex and require specialist knowledge to fact-check them, critical peer review and replication of their studies are a non-negotiable must-have, it’s as simple as that.
Besides, do you really think it is surprising that “the establishment shuts them out” when their claims are riddled with sloppiness and hand-waving? It’s one thing being discriminated against for being a Christian; it’s a completely different matter being discriminated against for sloppiness, incompetence and dishonesty. It doesn’t take a “secular” or “evolutionist” mindset to see that when a paper does things like “correcting” data to account for “typographical errors” without providing any evidence that such “typographical errors” are actually a thing, any peer reviewer who accepted it simply wouldn’t be doing his or her job properly. The same thing goes for citing random errors of just ±1.5% as evidence for systematic errors of a factor of a million or more.
These responses are dated 2005. The version of Henke’s article that I linked to was written in 2010 and contains responses to them. In particular, he pointed out that Humphreys failed to provide any calculations to justify his claims that Henke’s criticisms were really as small and insignificant as he claimed them to be. Furthermore, Henke cited a 1996 research paper by Dunai and Roselieb that showed that Humphreys’ claim was simply not correct. Garnets and zircons have similar levels of hardness, and Dunai & Roselieb showed that at high pressures, it would take helium tens to hundreds of millions of years to diffuse out even at temperatures as high as 700°C.
It may be above your pay grade to spot errors in Humphreys’ work in the first place, but it doesn’t take advanced degrees and years of experience to see that once purely technical errors have been pointed out in a research paper, there are only three legitimate responses. Either (a) correct them, (b) prove (for example, by providing calculations) that they do not significantly affect the results, or (c) retract the paper. Humphreys’ responses do none of the above.
You haven’t adequately explained how hundreds of thousands of rigorously cross-checked results, some of them with a precision better than one part in a thousand, could consistently be in error by factors of up to a million. I brought up oil exploration and the sheer expense that falsifying that much data would require, and you haven’t addressed either of them.
Force-feeding things down our children’s throats, and “opposition by the power of the state” have nothing to do with it. It’s about making sure your facts are straight. And about not accepting technical standards that are so low that in any other branch of science, they would kill people. It’s as simple as that.
God also says that a day with the Lord is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like a day. (2 Peter 3:8; Psalm 90:4). I realise that some people think that’s not a lot to go on, but at least in terms of long ages the Bible gives us something. The only other scientifically honest alternative is the suggestion that God could have created everything with the appearance of age and evidence for a history of events that never happened. In support of that, the Bible gives us nothing.
As for the Flood, personally I believe that it was a real historical event, though I can’t say for certain where, when, or how extensive it was. As far as I can tell, a regional (rather than a global) Flood is consistent with the Hebrew text, but even if the Flood was global, there is nothing whatsoever in the Bible that tells us that it created the fossil record, nor that it reshaped the continents, nor that it was accompanied by accelerated nuclear decay, nor that Noah had dinosaurs on board the Ark, nor that it was followed by a 200 year ice age, nor that it was followed by a few hundred years of hyper-evolution. These ideas are not a part of the Genesis account itself, but are a thick layer of science fiction plastered on top of it. They are not God’s infallible Word, but man’s fallible wisdom.
Finally:
You’re quote mining Scripture to make a point here. (The technical term for that is “eisegesis” btw.) This verse does indicate that we can’t know everything (incidentally, you may want to read up about Gödel’s Incompletelness Theorem on that one) but it doesn’t mean that we can’t find out anything. Consider Psalm 111:2 (which is quoted above the entrance to the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge):
The works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein.
The NIV translates it as “pondered by all”; ESV, NASB and others translate it as “studied by all.” Some people call it “the Research Scientist’s Psalm.”