Another big difference. I believe there is roughly 8,000,000 scientists worldwide and just a few thousand are YEC. I don’t think YEC even makes up 0.1%, and I mean 0.1% and not 1.0%. We have several million scientists from all across the globe of many generations from all backgrounds including Christians that all say the evidence points towards a several billion year old universe snd earth.
Then you have a few thousand, almost all from America, saying they are wrong. Saying scientists are wrong about everything.
To believe in YEC here is a few things you have to automatically disagree with.
The fossil record which shows different species in different geological layers. Such as we don’t find chimps before the earliest monkeys. We don’t find humans with dinosaurs.
The fossil record shows morphological development within the same clade. So we see things like spines and knees developing differently.
They must ignore geothermal understanding. Such as a global flood is impossible. We could not have that much water in the air without superheating earth. It could not have been dusty ice either without freezing the world. That much water could not have been just below the surface of land because it would be to mushy. The water could not have came from deep enough in the earth because the rate and depth would mean it came out boiling hot like geysers.
They must ignore the speed of light, the sizes of stars and so on. Science says Icarus for example takes 8 billion years to reach earth. If the earth is 6k it would mean the light had not even reached us yet. Or either it means it’s a lot smaller and closer than we thought.
They have to ignore genetics that show how mutations altered us or preserved us.
Unfortunately, there are distortions and misrepresentations which can lead those unaware to false impressions of what it really means. Which is why you need peer review to keep the published papers honest. People do have biases and researchers do attempt to pass off poor research as valid, and standards must be in place to protect the ignorant and gullible from the manipulative and predatory. Sometimes it works better than others.
If we are to take young earth creationists seriously, Craig, they need to obey the basic rules and principles of accurate and honest weights and measures.
There’s something you need to realise here, Craig. Science has rules. Measurement has rules. More to the point, basic honesty has rules. And no, there is nothing “evolutionist” whatsoever about the rules. I’m talking about rules such as handling error bars correctly, accounting for contamination correctly, not exaggerating their extent or significance, and so on and so forth. These are rules that apply to every area of science, and that have nothing whatsoever to do with “evolutionism” or anything like that.
Sorry Craig, but I am considering that. Less funding may excuse a small quantity of data points, but it does not excuse a lack of quality.
The “YECs only produce flaky results because they have less money” line was put to the test by the RATE project. YEC organisations threw $1.25 million at an eight year project to try and debunk radiometric dating once and for all. That should have been more than enough for them to demonstrate a commitment to rigour, factual accuracy, and quality control.
What did we get? An admission that billions of years’ worth of nuclear decay really had taken place since creation after all. An admission that to squeeze all that decay into any time within the last six thousand years would have generated enough heat to raise the temperature of the Earth’s surface to 22,000°C. An admission that no known laws of physics could have removed the heat fast enough. And an insistence that, despite these insurmountable problems, that much accelerated nuclear decay must have happened anyway.
As for the studies that purported to provide evidence for this extraordinary claim, which would easily have qualified for a Nobel Prize if it had any merit to it? They were riddled with a total disregard for the most basic rules and principles of accurate and honest weights and measures. They misidentified rock samples. They did not account for pressure. They confused natural logarithms with base 10 logarithms. They “corrected” measurements by a factor of ten to fix “typographical errors” without providing any evidence that the measurements were in error in the first place. And worst of all – they dismissed contamination as a “rescuing device.” You do NOT dismiss contamination as a “rescuing device.” Ever. If you took that attitude in any other area of science, you would kill people.
Again, these are problems that have nothing whatsoever to do with “evolutionism” or “naturalism.” They are simply rules that every scientific study has to follow. Yet when the RATE team were confronted with these serious quality control problems, they dismissed them as “a mountain of minutiae.” In other words, they were basically demanding a free pass.
In any case, since RATE, Answers in Genesis has spent $100 million on building the Ark Encounter. With the young Earth organisations spending that much money on a theme park, they can’t blame low quality results on a lack of funding.
The “angst and anger” was because you were still blowing the errors completely out of proportion. 5.5 million years is half a percent of the half-life of potassium-40 and 0.12% of the age of the Earth. All you have demonstrated is that some radiometric methods can be out by that much when you push them to the limits. You haven’t come anywhere close to demonstrating that all radiometric methods are consistently out by up to a thousand times as much as that in every situation.
I’ve brought up the weighbridge analogy before and I’ll do it again. If you want to bake a cake, you use a set of kitchen scales. You do not use a weighbridge at a quarry, dishing your ingredients onto the back of a truck. Even if you did, when the results came back all mushy and inedible, you would not draw the conclusion that Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, Mary Berry, Nigella Lawson and Heston Blumenthal were all so bad at cooking that they could be teaching us to make rat poison on their TV shows for all we know. Yet that is exactly the kind of argument you are making here.
The material that Mary Schweitzer found was not fresh and it was not unpermineralised. She had to soak it in a demineralising solution for a week to get at it. Tiny round red microstructures are not “nucleated blood products.” DNA breakdown products are not “DNA fragments.”
If you don’t want to be accused of exaggerating, then don’t exaggerate. Before you can even start to make any claims about what the findings do or do not support, you need to get your facts straight about what the findings actually consist of in the first place.
What you are doing here, Craig, is taking a perfectly legitimate way that measurement works in every area of science, and twisting it to portray it as if it were some sort of circular reasoning when it is not.
Of course you need to know a ball park figure before you measure something! You simply need to know this in order to select the right tool for the job. If I want to measure the size of my desk, I need to know that it is somewhere in the region of 2 metres by 1 metre by 1 metre, so that I know to use a tape measure rather than an electron microscope, a micrometer, a GPS device in my car, or the Hubble Space Telescope. I then use the tape measure to get an exact size of 1.5 metres by 0.75 metres with a height of 0.72 metres. It’s nothing to do with getting the result that you want to get. It’s about starting off with a highly uncertain estimate (to within a factor of two or so) and narrowing it down (to within about one part in a thousand).
By YEC reasoning, the fact that I start off by making a finger-in-the-air estimate of 2 metres by 1 metre by 1 metre would mean that using a tape measure to check that estimate would be “cooking my conclusions” and that I should just accept the alternative narrative that my desk could be no bigger than the width of a human hair.
And if we didn’t have an historical record of when Novarupta erupted, then we couldn’t tell the age of the rocks, because the lab wouldn’t know how to begin measuring them. Thanks for the helpful insight into what you think of radiometric dating.
Yes they would. Have you ever heard of a technique called “bisection”?
It’s where you are trying to measure something but all you have to go on is “it’s more than X” or “it’s less than X”. You start off with a lower limit (say, zero) and an upper limit (say, 4.5 billion years), then find the midpoint of that range from your measurements to give you either a new lower limit or a new upper limit. Sooner or later you’ll have narrowed down the range to the point at which you can pinpoint the exact figure.
If radiometric labs didn’t have any indication whatsoever about the possible age range for a rock sample, they could use an approach something like that. It would be more expensive, but not impossible by any means.
I’m sorry Craig, but just because you don’t know how to measure things, it doesn’t mean that professional scientists don’t know how to measure things either.
Most invertebrate biology and paleontology researchers, whatever their subfield, are badly underfunded. I should know. My father, @paleomalacologist is one of them.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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Bless your heart. Yeah, they must have built the gas chamber I stood in. Right under the Nazi’s noses. I’m obviously lying and biased and Jewish even though I don’t know it. And the camp survivor I was with was lying about that too.
Of course, I am not serious. The Jewish people have obviously given us the best history of the Holocaust, even though they are “biased.” I am merely illustrating that people that are writing history from a “biased” viewpoint can and often do give us a truthful historical account while also teaching us moral principles at the same time.
The age of the universe issue is also an historical question. But in this forum, it seems that the drumbeat is that when young earth creationists are involved, they seldom if ever tell the truth because of their bias, while deep time advocates most often tell the truth, irrespective of their bias.
Bias has nothing to do with it, Craig. As I’ve said already, honesty has rules, and if young Earthers don’t want to be branded as people who “seldom if ever tells the truth,” they need to demonstrate a commitment to sticking to the rules as best they can.
The “drumbeat” that you are hearing is people explaining to you what the rules are, why they work the way that they do, and how and why specific young Earth claims fall far, far short of them.