http://www.astrobio.nau.edu/blog Soon to be written Fri, 06 Apr 2007 19:51:51 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://www.astrobio.nau.edu/blog/?p=18 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 ... http://www.astrobio.nau.edu/blog/?p=17 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 ... http://www.astrobio.nau.edu/blog/?p=16 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 ... http://www.astrobio.nau.edu/blog/?p=15 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 ... http://www.astrobio.nau.edu/blog/?p=13   As a fundamentalist in my youth, I became more and more uneasy about the huge discrepancy between modern geology and the Genesis account of a global flood. I read the literal Young-Earth (YE) view by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris ("The Genesis Flood"), but it raised more questions than it answered. Frankly, ... http://www.astrobio.nau.edu/blog/?p=12 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 ... http://www.astrobio.nau.edu/blog/?p=11 First things first. Whether the first cell arose from a natural or supernatural cause matters not one whit to Darwin's theory of the subsequent evolution of life. And yet, creationists routinely criticize theories of the origin of life as if these constituted some flaw in Darwin's theory. Miller was no ... http://www.astrobio.nau.edu/blog/?p=10 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 ... http://www.astrobio.nau.edu/blog/?p=9 In his NAU Fifty Facts talk, Miller continued to confuse Big Bang cosmology with a theory of planetary origins by criticizing "cosmic collisions" as an explanation for things like the high density of Mercury, Venus' retrograde rotation, and Uranus' high obliquity. He said that the need to invoke collisions was ... http://www.astrobio.nau.edu/blog/?p=8