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 This over-interpretation of historical data was subsequently withdrawn by the authors (who never imagined extrapolating their result far back in time) and never submitted to a professional journal for publication.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!
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