April 5, 2007
Radioisotope dating has demolished the notion that Earth is merely 6,000 years old. In retaliation, young-earthers wage an all-out smear campaign against mountains of evidence in the public domain. Their level of denial is exceeded only by the likes of Flat Earth Society. For example, the CSEM FAQ page says:
The only thing that these dating methods have proven is that they (Carbon, Ar-K, Isochron, etc.) are completely unreliable.
Right. And I suppose this is borne out by the ~900-page graduate text sitting on my desk, Isotopes, Principles and Applications. Funny I can’t find this point in there anywhere. Nor does it appear in a truly vast refereed literature (137 selected references for the K-Ar chapter alone). Ah, but CSEM explains this too:
Typically a wide range of ages are given by these methods with the date selected being the one which matches the Geologic Column.
Ok, this is really not obvious from the text; they never taught it to me in grad Geochemistry at Caltech either. I guess that’s because geochemists secretly throw out all the “bad” measurements before they report them. I’m glad a creationist was available to explain this to me - I’m sure they know better, having spent untold hours undercover as mainstream geologists witnessing the discarding of all that “bad” data. As a mere professor in planetary science with a Ph.D. from a Geological Sciences Division, I probably wouldn’t have been allowed to witness such a plot. Or could it be this is a great big fib? I thought that was against the ninth commandment. Surely biblical literalists would never act thus!
Alas, creationists do in fact lie about even published radio-isotope data. Blatently. And often. And in whole books no less. I guess they think it’s for a good cause. For example, John Woodmorappe (a pseudonym) selectively quote mines the geologic literature to “prove” its unreliability (Schimmrich). He will quote one scientist out of context as disagreeing with another’s result but conveniently leave out the magnitude of the discrepancy, which is typically a few percent in the very worst cases (Hencke). I guess this is what is meant by “wide range of ages.” Indeed. “…completely unreliable.” Right. Frequently off by as much as 1%! Terrible. Proof that reported measurements of billions of years could easily refer to material no older than 6,000 years. Of course, such contextomy is a favorite creationist trick (together with misquoting altogether) going back to Henry Morris. Did you know, by the way, that the Bible actually says, “There is no God?” We have it on God’s own authority that He doesn’t exist. The reference is Psalm 14:1. There’s a simple word for this technique as practiced by creationists: lying. Future posts that compare facts about particular techniques with creationist claims will illustrate this all too well. 
March 4, 2007
My rejection of YE Creationism owed a lot to weak arguments like this one from the CESM FAQ page: “Animals and plants must be buried quickly to become fossils, further proof of the global deluge. Polystrata fossils traverse multiple strata layers proving their rapid formation.” No geological knowledge is required to see the non sequitur in the first sentence. Since when does it take a global flood to bury an animal or a plant?! A minor local flood like ones we see today will do just as well! My home insurance company apparently agrees, since they will charge me a lot extra or refuse a policy altogether if my house is in a “100 year flood plain,” i.e., a place where a lot of mud may be deposited rapidly once every 100 years or so. Fact is, the existence of fossils poses no problem for even the strictest form of uniformitarianism (i.e., “the present is the key to the past”). As for the second point, the term “Polystrata fossils” (more commonly spelled “polystrate”) is a concoction of YE Creationists and not used by mainstream geologists. It is most often invoked to imply that multiple layers traversed by a “polystrate” fossil had to be deposited in the short period of the Noachian Deluge (less than a year), else the organism would have decayed before fossilization. But geologists believe episodic local floods are quite up to the task of rapid burial, so this argument is a big “straw man.” Unless, perhaps, you could find some humungous organism that traversed layers believed to represent the passing of many thousands of years. Perhaps a whale fossilized in an orientation with its length perpendicular to rock layers? Such an example so enticed young-earthers that they felt obliged to make it up! See A Whale of a Tale for the full story. After finding out that the alleged “vertical whale” was actually buried horizontally in layers that were later tilted by 40 or 50 (but not 90) degrees, Darby South comments: “What was found to be most disturbing was the tendency for creationists to deliberately omit specific locational data and references… It almost seems that the people making the claims about this whale being evidence for a catastrophic or Noachian Flood wanted the reader to take their claims as a matter of faith and wanted to make it impossible for anybody to check the veracity of the story. This is propaganda, not science, in the form of paragraph- to page-size versions of media sound-bites.” Note to self: Don’t take any YE Creationist “facts” at face value without checking them out. So are there any “polystrata” fossils with documentation? What YE creationists are usually referring to is fossilized vertical tree trunks. None of these pose any problem for mainstream geologists who simply call them “in situ trees.” In situ forests have been buried and sub-fossilized in historic times! Trees as tall as 20 feet and tree-ring dated between 1479 and 1857 were buried by lahar flows at Mount St. Helens and exhumed by mudflows in the 1980 eruption. See Don Lindsay on “Polystrate” Fossils, OE creationist Neyman’s rebuttal of John Morris’s Q&A #81, and Andrew MacRae’s “Polystrate” Tree Fossils. Most damning, perhaps, are fossil forests that could not have formed in the time allotted for the global flood, since successive forest horizons appear that would have required time for the growth of several generations of trees! See Fossil Forests and the Flood. The larger botanical fossil record contradicts flood geology over and over. For example, any Colorado Plateau tourist can view a petrified forest of conifers and tree ferns in the Chinle Formation, another within the Morrison Formation, and thousands of feet of rock in between these layers, including the desert Navajo Sandstone. There are no fossils of land plants at all in Cambrian rocks at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, or in Cambrian rocks anywhere on Earth for that matter. Thousands of feet of marine limestones overlie Grand Canyon Cambrian rocks. Above these, fossil fern leaves can be seen along the Kaibab trail in the Permian Hermit Shale . This layer is capped by a desert sandstone, then a limestone reef deposit. These all lie underneath the Chinle to the east, which is full of petrified wood. There are no flowering plant fossils (angiosperms) in any of this. For those you must go near to the top of the Grand Staircase. All this rock is interpreted by YE Creationists (and CESM in particular) as deposited in a single global flood! Why, then, are the major plants on Earth today never found in rocks below those with primitive tree ferns and cycads, for example? YE Creationists nit-pick about upright tree trunks but make no effort to square with the major features of the record. This calls to mind the phrase “strain at a gnat and swallow a camel” by somebody or other. 
So where are we? YE Creationists effectively say that stubby vertical fossil tree trunks prove a single flood was responsible for 2 vertical miles of rock near where I live. Even though these fossil localities are quite limited in extent, they conclude the flood was global. I’m frankly astonished that anyone would think this leap of irrational imagination is persuasive! Nevertheless, I suspect the argument will stay around and provide another iota of false comfort to those who believe YE Creationism for reasons that have nothing to do with empirical evidence and everything to do with wishful thinking.
March 1, 2007
My young earth creationist friend says: “We all have the same evidence. Our worldview defines how we interpret that evidence. Remember that not too very long ago we were being taught gradual accumulation. Now it is “lots of floods”. I think there is lots of global flood evidence. Keep in mind the earth’s surface is more than 70% covered by water.” Do modern geological theories really distort facts because of a “worldview?” Are “lots of floods” incompatible with “gradual accumulation?” Do todays oceans and local floods (e.g., tsunamis, monsoon floods, Katrina, etc.) support a past global flood. No, No, and NO! So what facts support flood geology? From the CESM FAQ page: Some of the facts which prove that the earth endured a worldwide flood include the sedimentary strata layers which comprise the crust of the earth. These layers found in a mixed order of deposition around the globe were laid down by water and have marine fossils throughout. Do sedimentary rocks really show the global demise of all fiat-created organisms save their Ark-borne representatives? Nah! Fossils appear in an order that is decidedly un-mixed. Trilobites are never found above Permian rocks, for example, while flowering plants are never found below. Ammonites and dinosaurs are never found above lowest Paleocene rocks, while large mammals are never found below. The number of sequentially appearing and disappearing organisms is actually quite large and mushrooms rapidly when you include micro-fossils like pollen and dinoflagellates (See UCMP web page). William Smith created the first geologic map in 1799. He noticed that strata were arranged in a predictable pattern and always in the same relative positions. Each particular stratum could be identified by fossils it contained; the same succession of fossil groups appeared in many parts of England. Between 1820 and 1850, geologists used this observation to produce the sequence of geological periods still in use today. This was before Darwin’s “Origin of Species.” The original framers of the geologic column were mostly creationists! In a very small fraction of cases, structural deformation or faulting overturns or offsets part of the sequence. When this happens, the tectonic context is discernible and presents no problem for basic stratigraphic principles. This is what YE creationists typically interpret as a “mixed order” that supports a flood origin. Nonsense! In the case below, for example, the rocks are in temporary reverse order (not “mixed” order) for obvious reasons. 
Recumbent Fold Are all sediments “laid down by water” as required by flood origin? Even if they were, does that mean they all indicate a global flood? No and No! Certainly, a lot of sediment transport is done by water even today. But last time I checked I was still breathing air. River and lake deposits account for much “water” sediment transport, but chemistry, grain sizes, shapes, and sorting differ radically from what you’d expect in a one-year global flood. For example, limestones are marine chemical precipitates of calcite from the shells of dissolved organisms. The current deposition rate in oceans is about a million times lower than needed to create ancient limestones in a single flood “year.” Moreover, the associated calcite formation would release enough heat to boil the oceans on the YE Creationist timescale. But not all strata are waterborn deposits! Windborn (”eolian”) sediments like Saharan dune complexes have quite distinct features and are easily identified in the rock record. The Coconino Sandstone in the Grand Canyon and the Navajo Sandstone in Zion Canyon are just two, but they are hundreds of feet thick. That’s hundreds of feet of eolian desert deposits laid down right in the middle of the flood. These and other land deposits show surface features like mudcracks, fossil tracks, salt casts, ripples, and dune structures that simply could not exist at the bottom of a global flood. What about the last point? Are “marine fossils” found “throughout” the rock record? They are frequent, but marine fossil layers are often interrupted by thick terrestrial sequences without marine fossils. These often have good assemblages of land-dwelling paleo-flora and fauna. Such evidence led Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) to shift from a single global-flood view to multiple limited floods and multiple creations some 200 hundred years ago! Today, we detect in the order of marine/non-marine fossils an ancient tale of rising and falling sea levels, punctuated with catastrophic extinctions. The Grand Canyon records three such in-and-out coastal migrations. This is absolutely contrary to what you’d get from a single one-year flood! In sum, modern geologists don’t reject global flood geology because of their wordview. They reject it because it is an inadequate explanation of geological data. Contradictions of flood geology are legion. For more detail, see OE creationist David Siemens’ Non-technical Problems with Flood Geology, Ed Babinski’s Creationist “Flood Geology” Vs Common Sense, and Mark Isaak’s Problems with a Global Flood.
February 25, 2007
The litany of errors on the Creation, Evolution, and Science Ministries FAQ page contains this little gem:
“The sun is shrinking. This causes a host of problems for old age believers. One is that as the sun shrinks, its gravity weakens. Earth’s orbit around the sun is held in place by the sun’s gravitational pull. If we were a fraction closer to, or further from, the sun, life could not exist on earth. The solar system can’t be old.”
Where to begin? Even if the Sun was shrinking, its gravitational pull on Earth would not “weaken.” This reminds me of Star Trek Season-one, Episode 7 where the ancient planet “Psi 2000″ contracts and “grabs” the Enterprise out of its orbit - quite a howler to anyone who passed high-school physics! The gravitational pull of a spherically symmetric body is equivalent to that of a point mass located at its center - its radius is irrelevant, shrunk or otherwise. But it seems this is Russ Miller’s own idiosyncratic gaff. Other creationist versions like that of ICR, make no mention of weakened gravity.
The ICR tale of the “Shrinking Sun” is more in tune with other YE arguments that use a reported measurement (often wrong), assume it’s constant, and extrapolate back in time with contradictory conclusions for an old earth. Other examples include changes in earth’s magnetic field, sea floor sediment accumulation (without plate tectonics!), and the amount of helium in the atmosphere. Not surprisingly, Russ Miller cites all of these embarassingly wrong claims in his FAQ page.
The “Shrinking Sun” was born in 1979, when astronomers John Eddy and Aram Boornazian presented an abstract at an AAS meeting called, “Secular Decrease in the Solar Diameter, 1836-1953.” This over-interpretation of historical data was subsequently withdrawn by the authors (who never imagined extrapolating their result far back in time) and never submitted to a professional journal for publication. Nevertheless, ICR picked it up immediately and naively extended the shrinkage rate into the indefinite past. This led to a Sun too bright for life sometime within the last million years. The “Shrinking Sun” thus quickly became a part of YE creationist legend under the dubious assumption that it had always been shrinking at the claimed rate. I would address the obvious flaw in this reasoning, but it’s not necessary, because:
The Sun is not shrinking. YE creationist Andrew Snelling chronicles some of the ensuing “debate” on the topic here, as does Old Earth creationist Howard J. Van Till. More important, high-precision studies of helio-seismology have weighed in on the “shrinkage” question. Sverker Johannsson looked at the Shrinking Sun in the light of these observations here. It appears that the Sun has stopped shrinking! But don’t expect YE creationists to stop preaching the Gospel of the Shrinking Sun anytime soon.
November 17, 2006
Welcome to the first post of NAU Astrobiology Blog. This site exists to foster discussion about astrobiology issues, including news items and politically sensitive topics. To get going, I will start a series of discussions relevant to the recent lecture of Creationist Russ Miller in the Cline Library. He gave a standard talk - Fifty Facts vs. Evolution - that he has given at many churches in the area. I will introduce discussion topics from this lecture in the approximate order that they appear in my notes. Meanwhile, what did you think of this material overall (either in the lecture or the enclosed video link)? Did you find anything compelling? Objectionable?
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