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.
February 22, 2007
Ad hominem, strawman, poisoning the well, and appeal to ridicule, all abound within the YE Creationist’s repertoire of clever retorts. These are most easily constructed by dredging up eccentric beliefs from over 50-100 years ago. When I recently told a creationist friend that I did not find modern scientists to be “fudging data in order to hide their fear of God,” I was informed: “These are the same people who taught about Piltdown man to Ramapithecus to the theory of recapitulation to … well you get the picture.” Well no, those people are dead; their claims were falsified and repudiated long ago by scientists who believe in evolution.
The Piltdown hoax was put forward early in the 20th century and definitively exposed as a fraud in 1953 when greater access was granted to the putative “fossils” (though many experts believed it was a forgery soon after it was published). It’s still not clear who carried out the forgery; suspects include Arthur Conan Doyle and the Roman Catholic priest Teilhard de Chardin. Most, however, believe it was the initial “discoverer,” Charles Dawson, acting out of a desire to gain prestige (rather than trying to “prove” evolution). Other suspects may have been motivated by British nationalism and racism. In any case, these people have all been dead for a LONG time, so what’s the point? Perhaps it is of value as a cautionary tale. If so, it applies alike to political, religious, business, and scientific institutions. It certainly doesn’t support a claim that modern scientists, as a group, are in a mass conspiracy to foist evolution on the public with falsified evidence!
Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) was a believer in Lamarckian (not Darwinian) evolution who, in 1866, first propounded his “biogenic” theory of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” i.e., that individual embryonic development retraces the steps of the evolution of species. He apparently embellished embryo drawings to drive home the point. Biology has rejected this view for some time; see Stephen Jay Gould’s 1977 book: Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Haeckel has been dead for nearly a hundred years. And the point is ….?
The classification of Ramapithecus as an ancestor of humans on the basis of a single jawbone find was more mistake than fraud. Biochemical studies and more fossil finds contributed to the reclassification of the specimens as Sivapithecus - a genus of extinct primates. Apparently some anthropology texts were slow to note the change. This is not fraud - just laziness. Shame on those textbook writers!
I guess I must admit that scientists I know are like many in these stories - the ones that repudiated the falsehoods, that is! Science’s greatest strength is the provisionality of its theories - these may be overthrown at any time if contradictory evidence is discovered. By contrast, a hallmark of pseudo-science is to retain belief in a theory despite strong evidence to the contrary. YE creationists are ardent protagonists of disproven theories (e.g., the “Genesis flood”). As we see above, they also dredge up and criticize extremely outdated ideas as if they were current. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the origin of their “theory” is 2-3,000 years old. On that timescale, a mere 50-100 years seems practically like the present!
December 10, 2006
The “Law,” of course, is the second law of thermodynamics, and the faux controversy between it and evolution was cooked up half a century ago by creationists and repeated almost verbatim by Russ Miller in his NAU/Cline lecture. Never mind that, in all that time, virtually no serious physicist thought there was a genuine conflict here! The idea was championed back in the 60’s by hydrologist/creationist Henry Morris, founder of the Institute for Creation Research. I first became acquainted with it in 1963 at about the age of 8 when my father handed me a copy of Morris’s “Twilight of Evolution” to counter my enthusiasm for plastic dinosaurs and children’s books about the history of life. At 8, I couldn’t understand thermodynamics or the flaws in Morris’s inferences from it, but neither can a large fraction of adults in our culture. This is probably what has led creationists to continue using this argument long after it has been soundly refuted. Thermodynamics flourished in the 19th century in support of theoretical efforts to define how to obtain maximum usable energy from heat flow. The second law has been articulated as, “The Entropy Inventory of the World Tends to a Maximum.” But what is entropy? The classic high-school chemistry answer – “disorder” – disguises a philosophically and mathematically sophisticated concept (see the entropy link for more). In a closed system (no exchange of matter or energy with anything outside), entropy either stays the same or increases. Miller repeated the creationist claim that evolution violates this principle, since it implies that entropy decreases. But every physicist knows that this is an incorrect inference. Life is not in a closed system! It is far from chemical equilibrium embedded in a system of heat flow from the Sun. Entropy reductions in evolution take place locally and do not completely compensate for large global increases. Indeed, nobelist Ilya Prigogine showed that all you need to produce spontaneous order in dissipative systems (like life) is an influx of energy. Miller did seem to try and address the fatal flaw in his own argument by claiming that the “raw energy” (as opposed to “cooked” energy?) of the Sun was of a type that could not produce local entropy decreases. In support of this creationist fiction, he gave no theoretical explanation, but provided suggestive and hand-selected examples of the destructive power of solar energy. Of course he left unmentioned any of myriad examples of local entropy decrease under solar energy, such as the spontaneous organization of cyclonic weather patterns. Alas, the Sun’s radiation is no different from any other type of energy flow with regard to its ability to drive local entropy changes. As the zoologist Dawkins wrote in the 70’s, “Morris’s point about the second law of thermodynamics is pathetic. Surely any chemist would accept that there can be local increases in order fed by energy from outside the local system. This is what happens when you synthesize something over a Bunsen burner.” 
Miller’s faulty reasoning prohibits not only evolution but life itself! Living systems routinely make use of the fact that, in an open system, local decreases of entropy take place in energy flow as long as they do not exceed total increases. Complexity increases dramatically in development from embryo to adult mammal. How does life do this without violating the second law? “Living organisms are open systems since they both take in and expel matter; further, they exchange heat with their surroundings…The organism discards matter with a greater entropy content than the matter it takes in, thereby losing entropy to the environment to compensate for the entropy produced in internal irreversible processes.” (Levine, Ira N. 1978; Physical Chemistry, New York: McGraw-Hill). The entropy deficit life gains for itself is clearly available to fuel one of its fundamental properties: evolution!
November 21, 2006
In his NAU Cline Library lecture, Russ MIller tried to redefine science in ways that excluded virtually all of astronomy and geology. No wonder, since these powerfully contradict his views of how we got here. His “operational science” is apparently confined to topics that can be studied in the laboratory by direct experiment. He derided “Big Bang” theory, for example, by rhetorically asking cosmologists, “Were you there?” This provoked hoots and hollers from fundamentalists in the audience. But is this a valid complaint? Especially since the Cosmic Microwave Background represents light that originated early in the Big Bang; we are literally seeing events from over 13 billion years ago! We can also study planet formation that is happening right now in neighboring star-forming clouds. In these cases, we really are/were there! But are scientific theories about the unwitnessed past somehow illegitimate as Miller implies? No! We can predict from theories what we ought to find in the geological record (for example) if our picture is correct. Then current experiments can be conducted on the rock record to falsify or confirm our theory. So the ideas of an ancient Earth and the evolution of life from a common ancestor are very “testable” in principle and in practice. J.B.S. Haldane once said: “I will give up my belief in evolution if someone finds a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian.” And of course, no one ever has! Even our legal system will convict a criminal on the basis of DNA evidence, though no one may have been there to witness the crime. Working scientists view this all as perfectly legitimate, but of course Miller is not and never has been a working scientist.
“Operational science” is an idiosyncratic construction devised originally by Miller’s true messiah, the recently deceased Henry Morris. Miller uses it as Morris did, to deceive the unknowing into believing that events of the ancient past have so little evidence supporting them that YE creationism works just as well to explain them. Nothing could be further from the truth! YE creationism has a good deal of evidence against it. If you take it as a scientific theory and predict what you’d find in the geological record and in astronomical observations, you will find it contradicted immediately and repeatedly in countless instances. 
November 17, 2006
Russ Miller began his Cline Fifty Facts lecture claiming that “Humanists have owned the [biology] textbooks,” and that scientists as a group are influenced by materialistic “religious beliefs.” He criticized scientists as a group for having an intense bias in favor of an atheistic “philosophical framework” from which they distorted evidence to support anti-fundamentalist views. I strongly disagree. As a former fundamentalist who wanted to believe the Bible literally, I eventually found the empirical evidence compelling for a 4.6 billion-year-old Earth and for the evolution of life from a common ancestor in spite of my fundamentalist bias. Since many prominent religious institutions (including the Catholic Church) now accept evolution as empirically supported, I find this claim even more spurious. What do you think? Does Russ accurately portray all evolutionary scientists as having an “atheist humanist” agenda for which they feel passionately enough to lie? Do you think Young-Earth Creationists look at empirical evidence objectively?
Powered by WordPress
Bad Behavior has blocked 233 access attempts in the last 7 days.