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 19, 2006
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 an example of how the Big Bang theory was in trouble. But the origin of the solar system from a circumstellar disk around the early Sun has nothing to do with Big Bang theory. It is a separate theory that is strongly supported by observations of craters on planetary surfaces and disks of dust and gas around very young stars. Protoplanetary disks of gas and dust are detected around virtually all of the youngest stars. I have carried out observations of these disks myself with the Owens Valley Millimeter Array, Keck Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope, and the Very Large Array. Currently I have a project to observe debris disks in the last phase of planet formation with Spitzer Space Telescope. Debris disks are composed of dust generated by the planetesimal collisions that Miller ridicules. Computational studies by George Wetherill contributed to our understanding that terrestrial planets, the presence of asteroids and comets, and crater density on old planetary surfaces like the moon are consequences of a similar period of heavy bombardment in the early solar system. For further proof of the prevalence of impacts, one need only travel about 40 miles down I-40 to see a very fresh meteor crater. Flagstaff’s own Eugene Shoemaker played a key role in its intepretation and in our understanding of the importance of impacts. Miller’s criticism of impact explanation for solar system features flies in the face of mountains of evidence. His use of this criticism to refute the Big Bang is logically absurd. His undue criticism of distinctly Flagstaff science (both Slipher and Shoemaker) strikes me as strange for a Flagstaff native! What do you think? 
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?
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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