YEC's Heat Problem is Not Cooling Off

Faith & Science Conversation
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Remember that Satan was telling Jesus that He should do more miracles. In the biblical accounts, and in other data on history, including personal experience, it is clear that miracles setting aside natural laws are rare. John refers to miracles as “signs” - they have specific theological function of pointing to God. In crossing the Sea, Exodus records God sending a wind - the miracle was in having just the right timing of just the right wind to set up a seiche exactly when needed. Axe heads don’t naturally float, but it had to be picked up and fastened on better. There is a fish in the Sea of Galilee that tends to pick up shiny things, but Jesus knew where one was with exact change. People sink if they try to walk on water, but even if you don’t sink, trekking across a few miles of waves would not be easy. Bread and fish were multiplied, and the leftovers carefully saved. The pattern is minimizing the miraculous component to what is necessary. Even for spiritual things - an angel and a vision are used to get Peter talking to Cornelius, not direct revelation of the gospel. We should not invoke miracles all over the place, but rather take seriously whether they are theologically reasonable.

That doesn’t mean that a “natural” explanation is inherently better. Even the relatively liberal commentary I saw it mentioned in was skeptical of the claim that Elijah was actually pouring lighter fluid, not water, over his altar. Where did Elijah get the technology to refine hydrocarbons? A study noted that springs in the Sea of Galilee mean that local patches of the lake are fresher (and thus could freeze more easily) than average for the lake. True enough. But the proposal that such would allow apparent walking on water is ridiculous. The storm would not only mean that the water would be mixed around (not promoting forming a patch of ice), but also would make trying to use a small bit of ice as a surfboard impossible.

As ID advocates admit when they are trying to claim that their position is purely scientific, finding some sort of gap within the course of creation would not indicate who the designer(s) were. But that does not fit with the purpose of miracles being signs specifically pointing to God.

The miracles claimed by creation science are not in the Bible, but rather are what is needed to cover over the problems with their scientific claims. The reality is that the scientific evidence plainly supports a vast age for the earth. The physical evidence is that the miracles claimed in young-earth sources did not happen. Even more problematic theologically, the entire function of many of the miracles is to make it look like the supposed young-earth event did not happen.

If God did create the earth instantaneously a few thousand years ago, there would be no need to produce a huge number of features that make the earth look like it has a lengthy history. Why stick atoms in rocks that fit the decay patterns for billions of years of history? There’s no point.

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This reminds of well-meaning attempts to explain discrepancies in the Biblical text that go beyond the text to explain what was “actually going on.” I am specifically thinking of someone who came to the conclusion that Peter had not denied Jesus three times, but six times, to reconcile discrepancies between the different Gospel accounts. I don’t see a problem with trying explain or reconcile discrepancies in the Biblical text, but it can go too far and give the impression that it is the scenario that we create behind the text and not the text itself that is authoritative, which in a way is self-defeating to those who are trying to defend the authority of scripture. A lot of YEC scenarios have whiffs of this thinking, for example explaining the flood with miracles with “scientific” models that are not supported by current data and rely on invoking miracles that are not in even in the Bible. It would be one thing if YEC models for flood geology, baraminology, etc., were actually making correct predictions and giving better explanations than consensus models, but the fact that YECists have to resort increasingly to explicit extra-Biblical miracles suggests that they are not really talking about the authority of scripture at this point. They are talking about the scenario they have constructed with their theology which they are trying to fit into scripture and into the natural world.

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For what it’s worth, this is one of the things that bugs me the most about young earthism. Time and time again I find that when I’m confronted with young earth claims, it’s not philosophical or theological questions that I’m having to address, nor is it complex and arcane postgraduate level science. Rather, it’s very elementary basic principles that apply to every area of science and that I would expect any reasonably intelligent high school student to understand.

I sometimes even find I’m having to make such elementary basic points to people who have (or at least claim to have) far more experience and education in various scientific fields than I do myself. On one occasion I had to point out to a young earthist who claimed to have forty years’ experience at a top US nuclear research laboratory the simple, basic fact that nuclear decay generates heat.

The problem with this is that it sows confusion in people’s minds about the very nature of the concepts involved or even the core, basic principles by which science operates. And because it undermines your understanding of principles that apply to every area of science, it can have far-reaching and damaging effects on subjects that are not directly concerned with the creation and evolution debate. Including your ability to do your job, to progress in your career, to function properly in the workplace, and to keep yourself and your loved ones safe.

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What you are saying is that the facts are trivial. It would be very refreshing if you would admit this on a more regular basis. The evidence doesn’t support YEC which is why miracles have to be invented in order to make the contradictory evidence go away.

YEC’s are not interpreting the same data. They are inventing miracles as a way of justifying their rejection of the data.

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That’s an insightful observation! It fits with how God isn’t recorded as doing miracles all over the place but only in times that are critical for His people. Miracles abound around the Exodus, but pop up only occasionally during the times of the kingdom(s) and the prophets, then practically explode during the Incarnation, primarily during the Ministry period, and that continues into the expansion of the church.

C. S. Lewis said something quite similar.

It’s impossible anyway: an area of ice the size of a surfboard can only support someone if it is on the order of two meters thick. Twenty centimeters of ice will hold a person up, but only if it is part of a large solid sheet – and either of those cases it takes weeks of sub-freezing temperatures achieve.

Which makes them “science fantasy” – an interesting genre, but not one that was found before the last century.

Not only no point, but it’s deceptive – such an entity would not be Yahweh but Satan.

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A very astute observation! I’ve heard it as defending the original text, but if that’s so then the original text had to have been drastically different than what we have, and there’s no evince for that.

Well stated.

That waste of life is one that bugs me. I think that if the money spent on YEC enterprises was instead spent to provide every Christian with $5 worth of materials that actually prsent the Gospel then – assuming those all got used! – the results would be millions of new Christians . . . whereas I have yet to see one person brought to Christ because of YEC but plenty driven away.

Sociologically this is because in popular movements everything gets dumbed down to the typical level of understanding. In the U.S., the average/typical literacy level is equivalent to sixth grade (eighty percent lack the vocabulary to read a regular newspaper!); science literacy falls below even that. I read not long ago that for a populace to be able to make decisions concerning matters of science a functional equivalent of a high school sophomore education is an absolute minimum – yet in the U.S. the typical adult is over five years below that (which statistically puts the population overall a good ten years short).

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Heh – that facts are trivial is inherent in the AiG statement of principles (or whatever they call it). It is indeed nice to see that pop up!

Good way to put it.

I don’t know if it’s late COVID brain fog or what, but many people seem to me to be brilliant today!

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I think that ark encounter would make a fantastic church. Punch a bunch of stained glass in the hull.

I like churches with big exposed beams inside …I always think, yes I’m in the ark, thank you God!

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It would be better if they’d actually make an ark, which in Hebrew (and the rest of the ANE for that matter) was a box, chest, or coffin – rectangular all around.

I’m thinking a giant stavkirke. :grin:

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I heard a great description of a church building from an Antiochene Orthodox priest: it’s an embassy, where the ground and floor inside are legally the soil of the country that owns it, where the laws of that country prevail rather than those of the host country. It struck me because I once had occasion to visit the German consulate in San Francisco, and the receptionist had the duty to inform everyone that across the threshold it was German territory, and thus German law was in force, not U.S. or California law.

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If you have hung around YEC for a while, you will probably encounter some reference to polonium halos. These were championed by the late creationist Robert Gentry who asserted that they were premoidial and made in the creation week, although nothing in particular to do with the flood. That idea was refuted by mainstream scientists, but the spike through the heart was really driven by AiG head of research, Andrew A. Snelling, who had designs on halos as evidence for accelerated nuclear decay during the flood.

Radiohalos in Granites: Evidence for Accelerated Nuclear Decay

The implications of these conclusions are highly significant, because they are fatal to Gentry’s fiat Creation hypothesis for the origin of the Po radiohalos.

Snelling’s argument is long and technical, which likely suited his purpose, because to his audience it looks scientific and thorough, so I was interested in how he dealt with the heat that is ground zero when it comes to these halos. After all, halos are damage from alpha ( Helium nucleus ) particles that are emitted at around 5% of the speed of light and crash around until all the kinetic energy has been spent to heat. Given billions of years there is plenty of time for that heat to dissipate, and that heat budget presents no problem to geology. Concentrated within a few months however, and the picture is very different.

This is equivalent to a temperature rise of more than 22,000°C, which is sufficient, of course, to vaporize a granitic pluton many times over. … The biotite crystal and the zircon grain included in it would be vaporized! So whichever way the calculation is made, there is no denying that there is a genuine heat problem associated with accelerated nuclear decay. … Incredible amounts of heat must have somehow been removed rapidly by a process or processes that we have not yet discovered or understood, for otherwise these rocks and the radiohalos in them would have been vaporized!

Note that this statement is from the RATE project itself. Of course, Snelling still maintains that halos are evidence of accelerated decay, and leaves solving the heat problem for a rainy day, even though in his own paper he maintains that halos must form below a threshold of 150°C, let alone an gaseous 22,000°C. It has been almost two decades, and the heat problem has proved intractable even to the fervid imaginations of YEC.

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Science by wishful thinking – yay.

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What I was not expecting was an even more flagrant self contradiction than the heat problem. Snelling lays out his idea here. Bold mine:

Thus if the Po radiohalos were formed in just a few days while the fully-formed 238 U radiohalos were simultaneously generated by at least 100 million years worth (at today’s rates) of radioactive decay, radioisotope decay had to have been accelerated. Therefore, conventional radioisotope dating of rocks based on assuming constancy of decay rates is grossly in error. Accelerated radioisotope decay of 238 U in zircons within the biotites rapidly formed the 238 U radiohalos and produced large quantities of the short-lived 222 Rn and Po isotopes. Hydrothermal fluids released by the cooling granitic magmas then transported those isotopes along the biotites’ cleavage planes to deposit the Po isotopes in chemically conducive, adjacent lattice defect sites, on average only 1 mm or less distant. The hydrothermal fluids progressively replenished the supply of Po isotopes to the deposition sites as the Po isotopes decayed to form the Po radiohalos.

So let’s assume that decay was accelerated, and all this hydrothermal fluid flow was happening as Snelling describes:

As the 238 U decays some of the 238 U decay products (222 Rn and the Po isotopes) diffuse out of the zircon crystals. These are then transported by hydrothermal fluids flowing along the cleavage planes between the biotite sheets distances of 1 mm.

The key point to keep in mind is that diffusion and transport takes time.

Because of the 3.8 day half-life of 222 Rn and the brief half-lives of 3.1 minutes and 164 microseconds for 218 Po and 214 Po respectively, temperatures from the peak of metamorphism have to fall extremely rapidly to below 150°C for the Po radiohalos to form before the supply of 222 Rn and Po isotopes from the zircons is exhausted, and the hydrothermal fluid flow ceases.

Yes, more of the heat problem to get hand waved away. But notice the more immediate problem? This whole exercise is to explain away uranium series dating by acceleration of radioactive decay by a factor of about a billion. So I kept going over the above quoted paragraph again and again, asking myself, am I reading this right?

In arguing for accelerated nuclear decay by orders of magnitude, Snelling is actually using the standard published half lives for radon and polonium isotopes, to allow time for transport. He does not apply any acceleration factor! Were he to do so, there would be less than one second for the entire radon and polonium decay chain to complete, meaning no diffusion or transport.

Spoiler alert, Snelling knows this and has yet another ad hoc rescuing device.

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A few small observations regarding a verbatim reading of Genesis:

  1. Chapter 1 verse 1 says “In the beginning” which forces us to believe that G*D, in creating the heavens (space) and the earth (matter) also created time itself. Then verse three completes the act of Creation by introducing light.
    Creation does not mislead or fib or lie; and close study of the marvel of Creation shows that it must have begun just as this reading of Genesis 1:1,3 suggests. In other words, those two verses sound just like 21st Century fact and science.
    But verse 2 and the rest of the first ten chapters and the first ten verses of chapter 11 disagree with Creation on every point.

  2. Saying, “Because GD is omnipotent He could have created the World exactly as described when we read Genesis verbatim. And since there is so much Divine Truth laid out in those chapters, why would GD choose any other form of material creation. This view of G*D’s Word has been accurate and sufficient for the past four thousand years, so why change now?”
    If the entire narrative in Genesis 1:1 - 11:10 is factual, how do we explain the separation between Creation as given in Days 2, 3, and 4, verbatim, and Creation as it reveals itself today?
    Earth is a globe with a thin crust of continents surrounded by films of water (seas.) Earth rotates on its axis and orbits the nearest star. These facts have no relationship the forever supply of rainwater set above the vault of the heavens yet the sun, moon, and stars sit beneath that; do they get wet when it rains? And how pluck up Earth from the depths of the seas?
    Yes Genesis describes Creation as it must have appeared, and does appear, to young children in Sunday School and semi-literate Hebrew survivalists. Appearances such as these cannot be read as verbatim, can they? Creation has a different version of the physical details in Genesis.

  3. Why might GD have Created this Universe precisely as the verbatim text illustrates? In short sentences, why would GD create a lie? What purpose could have drawn the Spirit to inspire this text?
    On the one hand we observe the difficulty of YEC believers when confronted with a dissonant version of Creation; consider the semi-literate survivalists of Mesopotamia. Genesis 1:2 grandfathers in their cosmology, reinforced by Days 2, 3, and 4. The Spirit appears, to these human eyes, to reinforce the primary difference between pagan thelogy and Truth. YEC believers today endure the same quandary.
    In other words Genesis teaches us about G*D as Creator, without swamping the boats of any believers rooted to the ancient pagan cosmology.
    Ditto the Flood. Significant evidence in the soils and hillocks of Mesopatamia document a “thousand year” flood that drowned an entire, and very flat, floodplain, in places up to 30 feet deep. Survival required being afloat for a week or more, and during that time it was water from horizon to horizon, just due to the curvature of the earth.

The pagan myth rationalizing that Flood:

  • Began with a lower class of godlets, chained to work at irrigating to raise both grain and cattle.
  • These they burned on altars and the smoke fed all the gods.
  • The lower godlets, burdened by hard labor, conspired to kill a god then mix blood with dust to create seven breeding pairs of droids (er, humans) to do that work.
  • Alas the humans reproduced much too often, until the sheer noise deprived the gods of not just sleep, but the ability to think.
  • The gods solve this problem via a planned flood to erase all humans.
  • One crafty goddess harangues a wealthy human to build a huge boat then load it with family, seeds, tools, and livestock. He also loaded up with gold. The crafty human had various names in the differing versions if the Flood story - Utnapishtim, was such a figure. He also appears in the Gilgamesh epic.
  • Comes the flood and all plant and animal life dies.
  • Utnapishtim runs aground, emerges, and offers a grain and meat sacrifice to the gods.
  • Realizing that they barely escaped suicide via starvation, the take counsel on how to keep humans, thus also themselves, alive - while solving the population surplus; they decide to introduce drought and disease to keep humanity in check.

Genesis had to offer a Flood narrative, but this time one that glorified GD. Utnapishtim had to be harangued at length while Noah did GD’s bidding at once.
Utnapishtim loaded livestock and seeds. Noah loaded seven pairs of each food animal plus one pair of every other animal GD had made; GD cared for all of His creation.
Utnapishtim was afloat for a week or two, whereas Noah spent over a year aboard. Utnapishtim’s narrative was a series of simple events, while Noah’s tale is detailed and symmetrically arranged - each time period matches another, all of them centered around “And G* remembered Noah,” which means, "To GD it was Noah time."
When Utnapishtim got out of his boat and offered up a sacrifice the odor showed the pagan gods that they had almost died, so they resolved never to do that again. When Noah got out of the ark and offered sacrifice, the odor pleased GD.
The pagan gods valued humans as useful tools, and lamented their absence. GD had endured the deaths of all His Children save Noah, and resolved to endure paganism rather than repeat the Flood experience.
Noah’s Flood story showed great craft in its symmetry, the forethought of GD to preserve all Created animals, and such tenderness of heart that G*D surrendered His disgust of paganry rather than kill again.

At end, Genesis shows a pattern of understanding and respect. The pagan gods eventually numbered about 3,000, and all of them embodied one or another human shortcoming. GD was invulnerable, intentional, and caring. The Flood narrative, set alongside the pagan version, is persuasive theology by showing the effect of sin (paganism) and GD’s tender heart.

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Buried in the appendix of Snelling’s RATE chapter, he writes: (bold mine)

Of course, for 218Po and 214Po radiohalos to be generated in the same biotite flakes in which 238U radiohalos around zircon grains also occur, these processes would have to have occurred at very much faster rates, as governed by their very much shorter half-lives. However, because this model for Po radiohalo formation requires 238 U decay to have been grossly accelerated by a factor of at least 10^6 , it might be expected that the decay of the Po isotopes and their precursors wouldlikewise have been accelerated by a similar factor, thus placing even tighter time strictures on these processes described above. This may not be the case. Austin [2005] and Snelling [2005] have argued that the discordances between the isochron ages obtained on the same rocks by the different radioisotope systems can only be resolved if the acceleration factor was a function of the decay half-life (and perhaps the atomic weight), such that the longer the half-life of a radioisotope, the more its decay was accelerated. If this were the case, because the half-lives of the Po isotopes and 222 Rn are so fleetingly short compared to the half-life of 238 U, the decay of the Po isotopes and 222 Rn would hardly have been effected by the acceleration of 238 U decay.

So to patch up his proposal, already doomed by the unsolvable inherent heat problem, Snelling proposes that isotopic half life depends on … half life.

Nuclear decay is not fully understood, but there is also much that is confidently known. Akin to electron shells, energy levels for nucleons involve the count of neutrons and protons, and some configurations are favored. Nature prefers a comfortable lower energy if possible to get past any barrier. Decay and stability is quite involved, but ( putting aside weak force decays ) beneath it all is the repulsion of electric force against the binding of the strong force. While the RATE team included Liberty University physics professor Eugene F. Chaffin to buttress the theoretical creds, despite the centrality of accelerated decay to YEC, they have never produced a theory or mechanism that applies generally to all isotopes, including those that may cease to be stable if the strong force is diminished - after all, what longer half-life is there than essentially infinite?

Creationist organizations are studious in avoiding talking about this, because it suits their rhetoric to have their followers think of half lives as independent variables, that can be adjusted without further consequence.

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Additionally, the only way to identify the polonium halos as polonium halos is if the laws of radiometric decay have not changed. The whole argument is contradicting itself.

The details of forming halos from radiometric decay are not fully understood. But the basic idea is that a certain decay energy produces a hole of a specific size. That can only be calculated and use to identify the source isotope if the laws of decay have not changed. But accurately measuring the size of the hole is a challenge, also. It’s based on taking a thin section of rock and looking for holes in crystals. But if the slice did not go through the center of the spherical hole, the size measurement would be off. Likewise, if the hole got squashed, measurement is a problem.

Gentry claimed that the polonium halos proved that all granites were primordial, instantaneously solidified during creation week. The RATE alteration of Gentry’s claims has moved that to during the Flood. Neither fits with the diverse range of granite masses and their relationships to surrounding rocks, including younger granites cutting older granites and granite being clearly older or younger than a variety of other rock deposits.

However, the polonium halos are only characteristic of groundwater-altered granites, not all granites, despite YEC claims that the granites are pristine, and do not seem to be telling us about rock formation at all.

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Yes, and should the Geiger-Nuttall alpha decay law hold, which establishes a relation between half-life and energy of emission, if uranium decay was accelerated a much greater degree than polonium, the expected halo size difference would narrow, making identification even more challenging.

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While the heat problem exists for Po haloes, there is also the fact that the rocks containing these haloes intrude into fossil bearing rocks which means either the Earth was created with fossils already in the ground, or there was accelerated nuclear decay with all of the heat problems.

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When reading creationist literature, I first start with, ok, let’s assume this is true. What are the consequences? Are they self consistent? Much of the time their argument is self-contradictory or conflicts elsewhere in the YEC model, and it is just a matter of marking the mess.

CMI recently reposted an old article by Sarfati Helium gives evidence that the earth is young.

On earth, it is produced mainly by radioactive alpha (a)-decay. … Radioactive elements in rocks—like uranium and thorium—produce helium this way, and it leaks out into the air.
Scientists can work out how fast helium is forming, how fast it escapes from rocks, how much enters the air, and how much can escape from the air into space.

True so far. I live in a region that is rich in uranium, and radon gas basement ingress is commonly above guidelines. As the radon - polonium - lead decay chain emits 5 alpha particles, helium is produced. Ultimately, the amount of helium in the atmosphere is an equilibrium between helium production and the light noble element escaping to space.

For a while, it was a recognized problem that given the calculated rates for production and escape, there was a deficit of helium in the atmosphere. For science, this presented a problem to solve. For YEC, this presented an argument for a young earth - if the earth were old, there would be more helium.

A simple solution is that the earth is not nearly as old as the evolutionists think!

This is why creation scientists are useless. They do not want to solve problems; solving the problem just ruins a good argument.

Eventually, the mechanism for increased helium escape was convincingly demonstrated by mainstream researchers, and YEC mostly retired the argument. But it raises an interesting point.

If a billion years worth of accelerated radioactive decay happened in a burst 4500 years ago, there is no way all the helium produced that made it into the atmosphere would have escaped to space by now. Where is it? Hard volley return.

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This makes me wonder if this can also be applied to secular equilibrium in general.

How much would accelerated nuclear decay change the ratio of elements in these decay chains, and how long would it take to get back to the expected values based on the decay rates we measure today? Are there examples that would take much more than 10,000 years to reach equilibrium?

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