How can we trust the Gospels to tell the truth about Jesus? After all, they were written by followers of Jesus. Won’t these be ideological documents? Of course, but it is a mistake to say that because of this, they are not true. They are ideological in the sense that each of the authors have particularly truths they wish to teach.
Well, you ask a similar question. How can we trust young earth creationists to tell the truth about science? After all, they are biased. How can we trust Jewish people to tell the truth about the Holocaust? They are biased. Ad naseum.
But deep time advocates—that is different. Let every evolutionist be true, and every young earth creationist be a liar. Consensus science has more data points, more precision, you say, and many more trained scientists that hold our view. Yet you don’t even stop to consider that almost all the billions of dollars going to taxpayer funded “research,” almost all of the billions of dollars going to publically funded educational institutions, and the mainline media are gatekeepers that allow only the evolutionary message. Of course, billions of dollars of funding creates more data points. You also tout the fact that most people who are educated (indoctrinated) into the evolutionary and deep time worldviews hold the evolutionary and deep time worldviews, as though that validates those views. And you note that a lot more evolutionary research is done. What a surprise! Who woulda thunk that billions of dollars would make that kind of difference?
There are peer reviewed journals, reviewed by other deep time advocates and evolutionists to make sure that the writers stay on message. After all, a person could jeopardize their professional standing in the evolutionary community, lose funding, and even lose their livelihood if they don’t stay on message. So peer review is a gatekeeper to keep everyone on message. And if the wrong message is published, heads may roll—and economic slaughter of the dissidents. And yet you consider “peer review” your gold standard when you should really be ashamed of that behavior. Or maybe you aren’t aware of this or have had your head in the sand.
Let’s talk radiometric dating: The theory behind radiometric dating is that during the immense heating of the volcanic event that produces these rocks, all the daughter products are heated or boiled out, and all that remains is the parent element. How do we validate that theory? We certainly don’t have eyewitness data for rocks formed many millions or billions of years ago. But we can check out the theory against rocks of known age.
A few months ago, I wrote about an expedition to Novarupta, a volcano on mainland Alaska that erupted about a hundred years ago. The purpose of this expedition was to bring back sample volcanic rocks from that eruption to have them radiometrically dated. These rocks were taken to an accredited laboratory for analysis. When they were submitted, they were asked how old they thought the rocks were. Why did they want that information? Because, the lab employees said, that would tell them how long to heat the rocks prior to testing. Really? So much for your narrative about unbiased reporting of the evidence. How much of the data that you are relying on for your conclusions is cooked, both figuratively and literally?
Well, from memory, I reported that the lab results were that the rocks were dated at 100,000 years. Oh the angst and anger that came back on the forum, as though “Argument from personal indignation” or “Argumentum ad indignatione personali” was somehow a valid form of argument. Well, going back to the source, the actual date given by the lab was 5.5 million years. Sorry for the angst experienced by my incorrect information. But the actual number is far outside even where you would place the error bars—not just three orders of magnitude, but more than four.
You’all claim that when dating rocks radiometrically from the inaccessible past, we can know the dates are accurate. But when dating rocks from known events, over and over, when these measurements are not accurate, it is because they are contaminated, collected by creationists who obviously don’t know what they are doing, ad naseum. Who has their heads in the sand, metaphorically speaking?
And then—and then—you dismiss the data from “fresh” unpermineralized material in dinosaur fossil bones. Creationists have exaggerated, you say; the data is nowhere near as pervasive or convincing as we seem to present it. Really now! Soft stretchy tissue—check. Nucleated blood products that Mary Schweitzer initially called blood cells–check. Intact valves in arteries–check. DNA fragments when there should be zero, because DNA is so fragile—check.
The following from Discover Magazine, hardly a YEC publication: “One day a collaborator brought a T. rex slide to a conference and showed it to a pathologist, who examined it under a microscope. “The guy looked at it and said, 'Do you realize you’ve got red blood cells in that bone?” Schweitzer remembers. "My colleague brought it back and showed me, and I just got goose bumps, because everyone knows these things don’t last for 65 million years."Even Schweitzer was shocked at what she saw, and said that it required rethinking about everything.
Discover Magazine states in the article Schweitzer’s Dangerous Discovery: “When this shy paleontologist found soft, fresh-looking tissue inside a T. rex femur, she erased a line between past and present. Then all hell broke loose.
“Ever since Mary Higby Schweitzer peeked inside the fractured thighbone of a Tyrannosaurus rex , the introverted scientist’s life hasn’t been the same. Neither has the field of paleontology. 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 fossilized 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.
“By all the rules of paleontology, such traces of life should have long since drained from the bones. It’s a matter of faith among scientists that soft tissue can survive at most for a few tens of thousands of years, not the 65 million since T. rex walked what’s now the Hell Creek Formation in Montana."
And YEC scientists exaggerate the extent of the findings? Really? Absolutely not, as the findings are incredible as they stand—no need to exaggerate.
Do you realize how much credibility is shot with a post like this in BioLogos that misrepresents so much?
Except that this would blast off the surface (and everything else).