The Myth of Millions of Years - Creationist cosmology is full of wormholes

[-Cp]

Okay - to show I'm "Fair and Balanced" (®2005Foxnews) - here's an article proposing that the Earth is 6000yrs old case made by many Christians is "full of holes"...



Lynchburg, VA—Things really went wrong for people of faith 200 years ago, when modern science got going. So says Dr. Terry Mortenson in his lecture on "Two Hundred Years of Christian Compromise on the Age of the Earth." In his book, The Great Turning Point, Mortenson details how 19th century Christian theologians fell for the arguments of secular geologists who were pushing an "old Earth" interpretation of the geological record. The dreaded geological doctrine that undermines faith is "uniformitarianism"—the notion that processes occurring in the present are the same processes that operated in the past. The father of geology, James Hutton declared, "No powers are to be employed that are not natural to the globe, no action to be admitted except those of which we know the principle."

This restriction rules out supernatural catastrophes like Noah's Flood as the shaping force for rocks, fossils and landscapes. However, modern geologists do acknowledge that there have been essentially global catastrophes in the past. The extreme volcanism of the Siberian Traps nearly wiped out all life at the end of the Permian period 251 million years ago and there is evidence for a Snowball Earth between 600 million and 700 million years ago.

Mortenson fully recognizes that the notion of an old Earth existing for millions of years tilled the soil in which the seeds of Darwinian natural selection could later germinate. Mortenson argues that modern creationists must defeat not only biological evolution, but also geological and cosmological evolution. If there is "deep time" then there is perhaps time enough for the processes of descent with modification combined with natural selection to produce new species.

Mortenson excoriates fainthearted Christian theologians for accommodating themselves to the idea of an old Earth by reinterpreting Genesis to incorporate the "gap theory." The gap theory basically posits that the earth was created whole in the first verse and that chaos followed as described in the second verse. All geologic events of an old earth including possibly evolution occurred in the "gap" between the first and second verses of Genesis.

Mortenson reveals the goal of creationism with a telling quotation from the Apostle Paul: "We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ." (2 Corinthians 10:5) Interestingly, Mortenson did not go on to quote the next verse which reads: "And we are ready to punish all disobedience, whenever your obedience is complete." (Perhaps a better and fiercer translation of the verse reads: "And we will punish those who remained disobedient after the rest of you became loyal and obedient.") Mortenson once again explained why creationists are so eager to overthrow evolutionary theories, "If the history in the Bible is not reliable, then its morality and theology are not reliable."

So what "speculations" do creationists wish to destroy? In his talk, "Fossils, the Flood and the Age of the Earth," Dr. Tas Walker, a former Australian mining engineer, takes a whack at old Earth geology. Walker says that Noah's Flood is needed to produce fossils. Why? The conventional explanation for how fossils form is that, say, a dinosaur dies, falls into a swamp or ocean, and sinks to the bottom; there the bones are covered by layers of silt and eventually turn into stone.

Walker says that this scenario is very unlikely. He illustrates his point with the humble example of what happens to a dead fish in an aquarium. Dead fish don't sink; they are eaten by other aquarium denizens, leaving nothing to fossilize. As further evidence, Walker adds that nature documentaries showing the bottom of the oceans do not find it littered with the bodies of dead fish waiting to be fossilized. The only way to fossilize a dead fish in an aquarium is to dump a bunch of concrete on it before it's eaten. QED, Noah's Flood was the moral equivalent of dumping concrete on all the fossilized animals found in rocks today.

Walker also notes that the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 created several feet of layered sediments and gouged out a canyon one-fortieth the size of the Grand Canyon in a single day. He argues that this supports the claim that the Flood is responsible for nearly all of the layered sediments we see today as well as landscape features like the Grand Canyon. He even has an answer for where all the water from the Flood went. You see, the pre-Flood world was much flatter than the post-flood world. If the earth's surface were flat the world's water would cover it to a depth of 2 miles. But the weight of the Flood's waters caused mountains to rise and drained into deeper ocean basins that were left behind. Walker has similarly inventive explanations for radioactive dating, comets and the salt content of the oceans. He concludes by reminding the Creation Mega-Conference attendees that "the Bible is the history book of the universe."

On to cosmological evolution in the next session with Dr. John Hartnett and his talk "Hubble, Bubble, Big Bang in Trouble." As conference organizer Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis introduced Hartnett, he noted that he'd been told that a "skeptic plant would be here today." Could he be talking about me? In any case, when he's not moonlighting as a creationist, Hartnett does actual research dealing with very precise atomic clocks.

Hartnett does a good job of explaining how astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding by observing that the light of distant stars and galaxies shifted toward the red end of the spectrum. Hubble also observed that the further away a galaxy was the more its light shifted toward the red end of the spectrum, which he interpreted as meaning that it is receding from us more quickly. Blowing up a balloon with dots on its surface is the standard two-dimensional analogy for this universal expansion. Hartnett also noted that the latest measurements of supernovas indicate that the expansion of the universe is accelerating . In any case, running the tape of the universe's expansion backward implies that it exploded into being in a hot Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago.

Hartnett then cites the research of controversial astronomer Halton Arp, who claims to have identified physically close objects (usually a galaxy and quasars) manifesting very different red shifts. Such a situation should be impossible, and many astronomers claim that Arp's objects are optical illusions in which two widely separated objects are superimposed on one another and only appear to be close together. If Arp is right, that means red shift is not evidence of an expanding universe. Arp hypothesizes that some galaxies are producing more matter, which is ejected as quasars. In his view, quasars are actually white holes that are spewing newly created matter, which will eventually evolve into normal galaxies. Who needs a Big Bang when matter is being continuously created by quasars?

I am not competent to judge Hartnett's theories, but whether or not the universe began with a bang or somehow replenishes itself continually with new matter is not a supernatural question—it can in principle be answered by conventional naturalistic science. If Hartnett's evidence is strong enough, presumably even committed Big Bangers will eventually conduct research to either debunk or confirm it. Nevertheless, Hartnett concludes, "We're seeing God's creative process right now. We're looking back 6,000 years ago in time." Huh? Even a close quasar is 600 million light years away—to see it means that we're looking at light that left it that many years ago, which is a considerably longer period of time than 6,000 years. Hartnett left it to other creation "researchers" to deal with the problem of distant starlight.

Dr. Jason Lisle took up the challenge distant starlight poses to young Earth creationism. Lisle has astrophysics Ph.D from the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he apparently researched solar physics and black holes. "We are told that galaxies are so far away that it should have taken billions of years for their light to reach earth," notes Lisle. "We see these galaxies, so it is argued that the universe must be billions of years old."

Lisle declared that distant starlight "is the best argument against a young universe, but it is not a good argument against a young universe." Lisle noted that according to Genesis the stars were created on Day 4, after the land, seas and plants were created on Day 3. He affirmed his belief that God created the world in six 24-hour days. Nevertheless, Lisle admitted, "We do see galaxies that are many billions of light years away." He hastened to warn his fellow creationists against adopting some overly facile and seductive "solutions" to the distant starlight problem. For example, Lisle warned against arguing that perhaps those stupendous cosmological distances aren't real. "Science does confirm that galaxies are that far away," he insists. But what about the idea that when God created the stars He created the beams of light emanating from as though they had had already traveled billions of light years across the universe so that they would reach the Earth by Day 4 of Creation? In other words, the universe was created "mature" as though it had experienced history. This brings to mind the old conundrum: How do you know that you, your memories, and the whole universe with its "history" weren't called into existence just 5 minutes ago?

Lisle agrees that God could have created a mature universe, but he harbors reservations about that "solution." Why? Supernova 1987A. Lisle points out that the star that exploded into Supernova 1987A is 170,000 light years away. Since the universe is only 6000 years old that means that the light which appears to be a supernova is actually from an object that never existed depicting an event that never happened. Lisle declares, "God would not create little movies of things that never happened." However, I am wondering how Lisle knows for sure that the heavens are not just a divine planetarium projection on a gigantic crystal sphere enclosing the solar system? Never mind.

So what are possible creationist solutions to the distant starlight problem? First, Lisle suggests that perhaps the speed of light was not constant over time and that when God created the universe it was so much faster that it could travel across nearly 14 billion light years to arrive at the earth by Day 4 of Creation. He does acknowledge that if the speed of light had been significantly greater in the past, there would have been dramatic changes in the energy and mass of everything in the universe. Remember Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 (Energy = mass multiplied by speed of light squared).

Lisle also offers "gravitational time dilation" as a possible solution to the distant starlight problem. He claims that the Milky Way might really be the center of the universe and thus at the bottom of a deep universal gravity well. In which case time would pass much more slowly in our galaxy—perhaps only thousands of years elapsed on earth while billions of years of physical processes occur in the universe. Something like the above scenarios must have happened because according to Lisle, "We know from the Bible that the light got here in thousands of years."

Considering the earnest arguments of creationists presented above, ask yourself which sounds more mythical—that the universe really is billions of years old or that it is 6,000 years old but was created to look just like it is billions of years old?


http://www.reason.com/rb/rb072005.shtml

 

[8236]

Excellent creationist demolition quote. Keep up the good work

 

[-Cp]

"Fair and Balanced" (®2005Foxnews)


Evidence for a Young World
by Russell Humphreys

Here are a dozen natural phenomena which conflict with the evolutionary idea that the universe is billions of years old. The numbers I list below in bold print (often millions of years) are maximum possible ages set by each process, not the actual ages. The numbers in italics are the ages required by evolutionary theory for each item. The point is that the maximum possible ages are always much less than the required evolutionary ages, while the Biblical age (6,000 to 10,000 years) always fits comfortably within the maximum possible ages. Thus the following items are evidence against the evolutionary time scale and for the Biblical time scale.

Much more young-world evidence exists, but I have chosen these items for brevity and simplicity. Some of the items on this list can be reconciled with an old universe only by making a series of improbable and unproven assumptions; others can fit in only with a young universe. The list starts with distant astronomic phenomena and works its way down to Earth, ending with everyday facts.

1. Galaxies wind themselves up too fast
The stars of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, rotate about the galactic center with different speeds, the inner ones rotating faster than the outer ones. The observed rotation speeds are so fast that if our galaxy were more than a few hundred million years old, it would be a featureless disc of stars instead of its present spiral shape.1

Yet our galaxy is supposed to be at least 10 billion years old. Evolutionists call this ‘the winding-up dilemma’, which they have known about for fifty years. They have devised many theories to try to explain it, each one failing after a brief period of popularity. The same ‘winding-up’ dilemma also applies to other galaxies.

For the last few decades the favored attempt to resolve the dilemma has been a complex theory called ‘density waves’. The theory has conceptual problems, has to be arbitrarily and very finely tuned, and lately has been called into serious question by the Hubble Space Telescope’s discovery of very detailed spiral structure in the central hub of the ‘Whirlpool’ galaxy, M51.

2. Comets disintegrate too quickly
According to evolutionary theory, comets are supposed to be the same age as the solar system, about 5 billion years. Yet each time a comet orbits close to the sun, it loses so much of its material that it could not survive much longer than about 100,000 years. Many comets have typical ages of 10,000 years.

Evolutionists explain this discrepancy by assuming that (a) comets come from an unobserved spherical ‘Oort cloud’ well beyond the orbit of Pluto, (b) improbable gravitational interactions with infrequently passing stars often knock comets into the solar system, and (c) other improbable interactions with planets slow down the incoming comets often enough to account for the hundreds of comets observed. So far, none of these assumptions has been substantiated either by observations or realistic calculations.

Lately, there has been much talk of the ‘Kuiper Belt’, a disc of supposed comet sources lying in the plane of the solar system just outside the orbit of Pluto. Even if some bodies of ice exist in that location, they would not really solve the evolutionists’ problem, since according to evolutionary theory the Kuiper Belt would quickly become exhausted if there were no Oort cloud to supply it. [For more information, see the detailed technical article Comets and the Age of the Solar System.]

3. Not enough mud on the sea floor
Each year, water and winds erode about 25 billion tons of dirt and rock from the continents and deposit it in the ocean. This material accumulates as loose sediment (i.e., mud) on the hard basaltic (lava-formed) rock of the ocean floor. The average depth of all the mud in the whole ocean, including the continental shelves, is less than 400 meters.

The main way known to remove the mud from the ocean floor is by plate tectonic subduction. That is, sea floor slides slowly (a few cm/year) beneath the continents, taking some sediment with it. According to secular scientific literature, that process presently removes only 1 billion tons per year. As far as anyone knows, the other 24 billion tons per year simply accumulate. At that rate, erosion would deposit the present amount of sediment in less than 12 million years.

Yet according to evolutionary theory, erosion and plate subduction have been going on as long as the oceans have existed, an alleged 3 billion years. If that were so, the rates above imply that the oceans would be massively choked with mud dozens of kilometers deep. An alternative (creationist) explanation is that erosion from the waters of the Genesis flood running off the continents deposited the present amount of mud within a short time about 5000 years ago.

4. Not enough sodium in the sea
Every year, river and other sources dump over 450 million tons of sodium into the ocean. Only 27% of this sodium manages to get back out of the sea each year. As far as anyone knows, the remainder simply accumulates in the ocean. If the sea had no sodium to start with, it would have accumulated its present amount in less than 42 million years at today’s input and output rates.9 This is much less than the evolutionary age of the ocean, 3 billion years. The usual reply to this discrepancy is that past sodium inputs must have been less and outputs greater. However, calculations which are as generous as possible to evolutionary scenarios still give a maximum age of only 62 million years. Calculations for many other sea water elements give much younger ages for the ocean. [See also Salty seas: Evidence for a young Earth.]

5. The Earth’s magnetic field is decaying too fast
The total energy stored in the Earth’s magnetic field has steadily decreased by a factor of 2.7 over the past 1000 years. Evolutionary theories explaining this rapid decrease, as well as how the Earth could have maintained its magnetic field for billions of years, are very complex and inadequate.

A much better creationist theory exists. It is straightforward, based on sound physics, and explains many features of the field: its creation, rapid reversals during the Genesis flood, surface intensity decreases and increases until the time of Christ, and a steady decay since then. This theory matches paleomagnetic, historic, and present data. The main result is that the field’s total energy (not surface intensity) has always decayed at least as fast as now. At that rate the field could not be more than 10,000 years old.

6. Many strata are too tightly bent
In many mountainous areas, strata thousands of feet thick are bent and folded into hairpin shapes. The conventional geologic time scale says these formations were deeply buried and solidified for hundreds of millions of years before they were bent. Yet the folding occurred without cracking, with radii so small that the entire formation had to be still wet and unsolidified when the bending occurred. This implies that the folding occurred less than thousands of years after deposition.

7. Injected sandstone shortens geologic ‘ages’
Strong geologic evidence exists that the Cambrian Sawatch sandstone — formed an alleged 500 million years ago — of the Ute Pass fault west of Colorado Springs was still unsolidified when it was extruded up to the surface during the uplift of the Rocky Mountains, allegedly 70 million years ago. It is very unlikely that the sandstone would not solidify during the supposed 430 million years it was underground. Instead, it is likely that the two geologic events were less than hundreds of years apart, thus greatly shortening the geologic time scale.

8. Fossil radioactivity shortens geologic ‘ages’ to a few years
Radiohalos are rings of color formed around microscopic bits of radioactive minerals in rock crystals. They are fossil evidence of radioactive decay. ‘Squashed’ Polonium-210 radiohalos indicate that Jurassic, Triassic, and Eocene formations in the Colorado plateau were deposited within months of one another, not hundreds of millions of years apart as required by the conventional time scale. ‘Orphan’ Polonium-218 radiohalos, having no evidence of their mother elements, imply either instant creation or drastic changes in radioactivity decay rates.

9. Helium in the wrong places
All naturally-occurring families of radioactive elements generate helium as they decay. If such decay took place for billions of years, as alleged by evolutionists, much helium should have found its way into the Earth’s atmosphere. The rate of loss of helium from the atmosphere into space is calculable and small. Taking that loss into account, the atmosphere today has only 0.05% of the amount of helium it would have accumulated in 5 billion years. This means the atmosphere is much younger than the alleged evolutionary age. A study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research shows that helium produced by radioactive decay in deep, hot rocks has not had time to escape. Though the rocks are supposed to be over one billion years old, their large helium retention suggests an age of only thousands of years. [See also Blowing Old-Earth Belief Away: Helium gives evidence that the Earth is young.]

10. Not enough stone age skeletons
Evolutionary anthropologists say that the stone age lasted for at least 100,000 years, during which time the world population of Neanderthal and Cro-magnon men was roughly constant, between 1 and 10 million. All that time they were burying their dead with artefacts. By this scenario, they would have buried at least 4 billion bodies. If the evolutionary time scale is correct, buried bones should be able to last for much longer than 100,000 years, so many of the supposed 4 billion stone age skeletons should still be around (and certainly the buried artefacts). Yet only a few thousand have been found. This implies that the stone age was much shorter than evolutionists think, a few hundred years in many areas.

11. Agriculture is too recent
The usual evolutionary picture has men existing as hunters and gatherers for 100,000 years during the stone age before discovering agriculture less than 10,000 years ago. Yet the archaeological evidence shows that stone age men were as intelligent as we are. It is very improbable that none of the 4 billion people mentioned in item 10 should discover that plants grow from seeds. It is more likely that men were without agriculture less than a few hundred years after the flood, if at all.

12. History is too short
According to evolutionists, stone age man existed for 100,000 years before beginning to make written records about 4000 to 5000 years ago. Prehistoric man built megalithic monuments, made beautiful cave paintings, and kept records of lunar phases. Why would he wait a thousand centuries before using the same skills to record history? The Biblical time scale is much more likely.

<a href="http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/4005.asp" target=_blank"></a>

 

[8236]

Great: im reading it. As a Physicist I love this sort of stuff.

 

[Zhukov]

"Creation Physicist" D. Russell Humphreys, and his Questionable "Evidence for a Young World"

by

David E. Thomas

version of January 16, 1998



Self-styled "creation physicist" D. Russell Humphreys, an adjunct faculty member of the Institute for Creation Research, often lectures on "Evidence for a Young World" at creationist seminars and fundamentalist churches around America and the world. He claims to provide evidence that the Earth is not billions of years old, but just a few thousand years old, as required by some Biblical literalists. Humphreys says that if the universe and Earth are as old as scientists think, then spiral galaxies would be wound up into balls, there would be no comets, the sea floors would be choked with sediments, the ocean would be much saltier, and there would be billions of tombs of dead cavemen.

In his lectures and brochures, Humphreys tells his audience that he will show how various processes provide maximum ages for the Earth. Some of these `maximum ages' can be as long as 100 million years, but they are invariably less than the scientifically-determined age. Humphreys claims that the true age of the Earth is set by the smallest such maximum age, which conveniently turns out to be just a few thousand years. That is, he looks at several very dubious age estimates, and declares the youngest such "estimate" to be correct. It's like looking at three estimates of the "maximum" distance from Albuquerque to Los Angeles: a thousand miles, 100 miles, and 10 feet. By Humphreys' logic, the smallest "maximum" distance (10 feet) is the best, most accurate value, because it "fits comfortably within the maximum possible" values!

When Humphreys talks at churches or creationism seminars, he is introduced as a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories, a respected federal science institution. But Humphreys' conclusions on the age of the Earth are not supported by Sandia. His work in an engineering group responsible for designing bomb fuses is completely unrelated to his creationist activities. And Humphreys doesn't present his young-earth arguments to Sandia colleagues, even though many Sandia programs involve radiometric dating and the age of the Earth. In fact, when a Sandia colleague recently requested his data on problems with radiocarbon dating, Humphreys refused to supply it because it was "non-work related." Humphreys' employment at Sandia certainly does not mean that this prestigious institution endorses his radical views on the age of the Earth.

Here are brief discussions of Humphreys' five favorite young-earth arguments, and of his attack on radiocarbon dating.

(1) Galaxies wind themselves up too fast (maximum age: a few hundred million years). Humphreys shows off a computer simulation in which a very simple "galaxy," a line of stars about a center point, develops a spiral shape. This spiral then winds up and disappears in just a few hundred million years. In this way, Humphreys claims to "prove" that galaxies can not be billions of years old. In his super-simple simulation, however, the stars are attracted to a "galactic center" - but not to each other! As a result, more distant stars move more slowly about the "galactic center," just as planets do around our Sun. But Humphreys fails to mention that the situation in real galaxies is far more complex than this: for one, real stars attract each other with large gravitational fields. Only the outermost stars of real galaxies have the "Keplerian" orbits he assumes, while the inner stars of a galaxy can move very differently, often almost as a rigid disk. Humphreys dismisses one of the modern theories of spiral formation, "density wave theory," as too complex, but it's really his ideas that are far too simple. Humphreys' strawman galaxy does not prove that galaxies are young.


(2) Comets disintegrate too quickly (maximum age: 100,000 years). Humphreys notes that comets lose some mass with every trip around the sun, claims that there is no source of new comets in the solar system, and then concludes that comet lifetimes (10 to 100 thousand years) provide an upper limit to the age of the solar system. But Humphreys' comet theory fell apart recently because a source for new comets, the Kuiper Belt (predicted by astronomer Gerard Kuiper in 1951), has been actually photographed and confirmed by several teams of astronomers. Humphreys responds to these discoveries by saying that the supposed "Kuyper Belt" [sic] doesn't help scientists because it must be supplied by the unproven Oort Cloud; and that even if what he calls the "Kuyper Belt" existed, it would exhaust itself of comets in a short time (say, a million years). But he has his astronomy backwards - the Kuiper Belt contains the remains of the "volatile" (icy) planetesimals that were left over from the formation of the solar system - numbering in the hundreds of millions. If anything, it is the Kuiper Belt that supplies the more remote Oort Cloud, as some icy chunks are occasionally flung far away by interactions with large planets. There is a source for new comets, and the fact that we still see comets does not prove the solar system is young.


(3) Not enough mud on the sea floor (maximum age: 12 million years). Humphreys mentions reports that 25 billion tons of sediment erode from the continents each year, and that plate tectonic subduction removes only 1 billion tons of sediment from the ocean floor per year. He then claims that it would only take 12 million years at most for the excess 24 billion tons per year to produce the current amount of sediment - at an average depth of about 400 meters. But once again, Humphreys' model is far too simple. The depth of sediments on the ocean bottoms is not a uniform 400 meters, but varies considerably. And much sediment never gets to the oceanic floor, but is trapped instead on continental slopes and shelves, or in huge river deltas. Over the years, some of these continental slopes can accumulate several kilometers of sediment, while others can even become part of mountain ranges in continental plate-to-plate collisions. Neither erosion nor subduction are expected to be constant processes over millions of years, and they are simply not very good clocks. Humphreys' strawman ocean floor does not prove the Earth is young.


(4) Not enough sodium in the sea (maximum age: 62 million years). This is another example of processes which vary greatly being used as "constant-rate" processes for dating the Earth. Humphreys finds estimates of oceanic salt accumulation and deposition that provide him the data to "set" an upper limit of 62 million years. But modern geologists do not use erratic processes like these for clocks. It's like someone noticing that (A) it's snowing at an inch per hour, (B) the snow outside is 4 feet deep, and then concluding that (C) the Earth is just 48 hours, or two days, in age. Snowfall is erratic; some snow can melt; and so on. The Earth is older than 2 days, so there must be a flaw with the "snow" dating method, just as there is with the "salt" method. (Several other creationist "proofs" of a young Earth involve similar extrapolations.)


(5) Not enough stone age skeletons (Upper limit for duration of Stone Age: 500 years). Humphreys assumes that the Stone Age had a constant population of about 1 million, with 25 years average between generations. Thus, if the Stone Age lasted for 100,000 years (like those "evolutionists" think), then there should be 4,000 generations, times one million people per generation, for a total of 4 billion buried bodies to be found. Humphreys notes that only a few thousand have been found, and concludes that the actual duration of the Stone Age is only 500 years. He provides no justification for his model of grave discovery rates as a "clock." Perhaps, in a thousand centuries, some of those burial sites might just have been eroded away, or covered with tons of soil or debris. Predators or vandals might have disturbed some of the graves, and subsequent generations of cavemen may have even re-used some of the same traditional burial sites. In any event, it is clear that the number of discovered Stone Age graves does not provide a very accurate "clock" for finding the age of the Earth.


Finally, Dr. Humphreys rejects scientifically-accepted methods for determination of the Earth's age, such as radioactive dating. He often shows a slide indicating that carbon-14 (C-14) radioactive dating methods are inaccurate because "the ratio of radioactive (C-14) to normal (C-12) carbon was at least 16 times smaller before the flood [of Noah]," and therefore that "Evolutionists overestimate C-14 ages." Humphreys' statement on carbon ratios is based on a short piece in the journal Nature (C. J. Yapp and H. Poths, Vol 355, p. 342, 23 Jan. 1992), which refers to a 16-fold increase in atmospheric carbon in rocks from the Ordovician Period. These rocks are actually about 440 million years old. Now, the relatively rapid decay of carbon-14 prevents its use as a clock on anything older than about 50,000 years. Using C-14 to find the age of a rock which is millions of years old is a lot like trying to look at Mars with a microscope instead of a telescope; it's simply not the right tool for the job. Humphreys has presented this "analysis" of radiocarbon dating for years, even though he cannot point to even one age estimate which has been incorrect because of the "pre-flood" carbon dioxide levels.


Humphreys creates a slick, scientific-sounding argument for a "young" Earth, but in the process seriously misrepresents modern consensus. All serious dating methods (radiometric age dating, dendrochronology, ice core analysis, varve deposition, and more) yield ages far older than Humphreys' methods.


D. Russell Humphreys breaks all the rules of science. He uses flawed logic, overly simple models, and twisted data to sell his young Earth. Caveat Emptor!

http://www.cesame-nm.org/Viewpoint/contributions/Hump.html

 

[-Cp]

How old is the earth?
by Jonathan Sarfati, Ph.D., F.M.
First published in Refuting Evolution


For particles-to-people evolution to have occurred, the earth would need to be billions of years old. So Teaching about Evolution and the Nature of Science presents what it claims is evidence for vast time spans: man’s existence is in such a tiny segment at the end of a 5-billion-year time-line that it has to be diagrammatically magnified twice to show up.

On the other hand, basing one’s ideas on the Bible gives a very different picture. The Bible states that man was made six days after creation, about 6,000 years ago. So a time-line of the world constructed on biblical data would have man almost at the beginning, not the end. If we took the same 15-inch (39 cm) time-line as does Teaching about Evolution to represent the biblical history of the earth, man would be about 1/1000th of a mm away from the beginning! Also, Christians, by definition, take the statements of Jesus Christ seriously. He said: ‘But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female’ (Mark 10:6), which would make sense with the proposed biblical time-line, but is diametrically opposed to the Teaching about Evolution time-line.

This chapter analyzes rock formation and dating methods in terms of what these two competing models would predict.

The rocks
The vast thicknesses of sedimentary rocks around the world are commonly used as evidence for vast age. First, Teaching about Evolution gives a useful definition on page 33:
Sedimentary rocks are formed when solid materials carried by wind and water accumulate in layers and then are compressed by overlying deposits. Sedimentary rocks sometimes contain fossils formed from the parts of organisms deposited along with other solid materials.
The ‘deep time’ indoctrination comes with the statement ‘often reaching great thicknesses over long periods of time.’ However, this goes beyond the evidence. Great thicknesses could conceivably be produced either by a little water over long periods, or a lot of water over short periods. We have already discussed how different biases can result in different interpretations of the same data, in this case the rock layers. It is a philosophical decision, not a scientific one, to prefer the former interpretation. Because sedimentation usually occurs slowly today, it is assumed that it must have always occurred slowly. If so, then the rock layers must have formed over vast ages. The philosophy that processes have always occurred at roughly constant rates (‘the present is the key to the past’) is often called uniformitarianism.
Uniformitarianism was defined this way in my own university geology class in 1983, and was contrasted with catastrophism. But more recently, the word ‘uniformitarianism’ has been applied in other contexts to mean also constancy of natural laws, sometimes called ‘methodological uniformitarianism,’ as opposed to what some have called ‘substantive uniformitarianism.’
It should also be pointed out that uniformitarian geologists have long allowed for the occasional (localized) catastrophic event. However, modern historical geology grew out of this general ‘slow and gradual’ principle, which is still the predominantly preferred framework of explanation for any geological formation. Nevertheless, the evidence for catastrophic formation is so pervasive that there is a growing body of neo-catastrophists. But because of their naturalistic bias, they prefer, of course, to reject the explanation of the Genesis (global) flood.

However, a cataclysmic globe-covering (and fossil-forming) flood would have eroded huge quantities of sediment, and deposited them elsewhere. Many organisms would have been buried very quickly and fossilized.

Also, recent catastrophes show that violent events like the flood described in Genesis could form many rock layers very quickly. The Mount St. Helens eruption in Washington state produced 25 feet (7.6 meters) of finely layered sediment in a single afternoon!1 And a rapidly pumped sand slurry was observed to deposit 3 to 4 feet (about 1 meter) of fine layers on a beach over an area the size of a football field.2 Sedimentation experiments by the creationist Guy Berthault, sometimes working with non-creationists, have shown that fine layers can form by a self-sorting mechanism during the settling of differently sized particles.

In one of Berthault’s experiments, finely layered sandstone and diatomite rocks were broken into their constituent particles, and allowed to settle under running water at various speeds. It was found that the same layer thicknesses were reproduced, regardless of flow rate. This suggests that the original rock was produced by a similar self-sorting mechanism, followed by cementing of the particles together. The journal Nature reported similar experiments by evolutionists a decade after Berthault’s first experiments.5
So when we start from the bias that the Bible is God’s Word and is thus true, we can derive reasonable interpretations of the data. Not that every problem has been solved, but many of them have been.

Conversely, how does the ‘slow and gradual’ explanation fare? Think how long dead organisms normally last. Scavengers and rotting normally remove all traces within weeks. Dead jellyfish normally melt away in days. Yet Teaching about Evolution has a photo of a fossil jellyfish on page 36. It clearly couldn’t have been buried slowly, but must have been buried quickly by sediments carried by water. This water would also have contained dissolved minerals, which would have caused the sediments to have been cemented together, and so hardened quickly.

The booklet Stones and Bones6 shows other fossils that must have formed rapidly. One is a 7-foot (2m) long ichthyosaur (extinct fish-shaped marine reptile) fossilized while giving birth. Another is a fish fossilized in the middle of its lunch. And there is a vertical tree trunk that penetrates several rock layers (hence the term polystrate fossil). If the upper sedimentary layers really took millions or even hundreds of years to form, then the top of the tree trunk would have rotted away.

Ironically, NASA scientists accept that there have been ‘catastrophic floods’ on Mars7 that carved out canyons8 although no liquid water is present today. But they deny that a global flood happened on earth, where there is enough water to cover the whole planet to a depth of 1.7 miles (2.7 km) if it were completely uniform, and even now covers 71 percent of the earth’s surface! If it weren’t for the fact that the Bible teaches it, they probably wouldn’t have any problem with a global flood on earth. This demonstrates again how the biases of scientists affect their interpretation of the evidence.
Radiometric dating

As shown above, the evidence from the geological record is consistent with catastrophes, and there are many features that are hard to explain by slow and gradual processes. However, evolutionists point to dating methods that allegedly support deep time. The best known is radiometric dating. This is accurately described on page 35 of Teaching about Evolution:
Some elements, such as uranium, undergo radioactive decay to produce other elements. By measuring the quantities of radioactive elements and the elements into which they decay in rocks, geologists can determine how much time has elapsed since the rock has cooled from an initially molten state.
However, the deep time ‘determination’ is an interpretation; the actual scientific data are isotope ratios. Each chemical element usually has several different forms, or isotopes, which have different masses. There are other possible interpretations, depending on the assumptions. This can be illustrated with an hourglass. When it is up-ended, sand flows from the top container to the bottom one at a rate that can be measured. If we observe an hourglass with the sand still flowing, we can determine how long ago it was up-ended from the quantities of sand in both containers and the flow rate. Or can we? First, we must assume three things:

1. We know the quantities of sand in both containers at the start. Normally, an hourglass is up-ended when the top container is empty. But if this were not so, then it would take less time for the sand to fill the new bottom container to a particular level.
2. The rate has stayed constant. For example, if the sand had become damp recently, it would flow more slowly now than in the past. If the flow were greater in the past, it would take less time for the sand to reach a certain level than it would if the sand had always flowed at the present rate.
3. The system has remained closed. That is, no sand has been added or removed from either container. However, suppose that, without your knowledge, sand had been added to the bottom container, or removed from the top container. Then if you calculated the time since the last up-ending by measuring the sand in both containers, it would be longer than the actual time.

Teaching about Evolution addresses assumption:
For example, it requires that the rate of radioactive decay is constant over time and is not influenced by such factors as temperature and pressure—conclusions supported by extensive research in physics.
It is true that in today’s world, radioactive decay rates seem constant, and are unaffected by heat or pressure. However, we have tested decay rates for only about 100 years, so we can’t be sure that they were constant over the alleged billions of years. Nuclear physicist Dr Russell Humphreys suggests that decay rates were faster during creation week, and have remained constant since then. There is some basis for this, for example radiohalo analysis, but it is still tentative.
Teaching about Evolution also addresses assumption 3:
It also assumes that the rocks being analyzed have not been altered over time by migration of atoms in or out of the rocks, which requires detailed information from both the geologic and chemical sciences.
This is a huge assumption. Potassium and uranium, both common parent elements, are easily dissolved in water, so could be leached out of rocks. Argon, produced by decay from potassium, is a gas, so moves quite readily.
Anomalies
There are many examples where the dating methods give ‘dates’ that are wrong for rocks of known historical age. One example is rock from a dacite lava dome at Mount St Helens volcano. Although we know the rock was formed in 1986, the rock was ‘dated’ by the potassium-argon (K-Ar) method as 0.35 ± 0.05 million years old.9 Another example is K-Ar ‘dating’ of five andesite lava flows from Mt Ngauruhoe in New Zealand. The ‘dates’ ranged from < 0.27 to 3.5 million years—but one lava flow occurred in 1949, three in 1954, and one in 1975!
What happened was that excess radiogenic argon (40Ar*) from the magma (molten rock) was retained in the rock when it solidified. The secular scientific literature also lists many examples of excess 40Ar* causing ‘dates’ of millions of years in rocks of known historical age. This excess appears to have come from the upper mantle, below the earth’s crust. This is consistent with a young world—the argon has had too little time to escape.10
• If excess 40Ar* can cause exaggerated dates for rocks of known age, then why should we trust the method for rocks of unknown age?
Another problem is the conflicting dates between different methods. If two methods disagree, then at least one of them must be wrong. For example, in Australia, some wood was buried by a basalt lava flow, as can be seen from the charring. The wood was ‘dated’ by radiocarbon (14C) analysis at about 45,000 years old, but the basalt was ‘dated’ by the K-Ar method at c. 45 million years old!11 Other fossil wood from Upper Permian rock layers has been found with 14C still present. Detectable 14C would have all disintegrated if the wood were really older than 50,000 years, let alone the 250 million years that evolutionists assign to these Upper Permian rock layers.12
According to the Bible’s chronology, great age cannot be the true cause of the observed isotope ratios. Anomalies like the above are good supporting evidence, but we are not yet sure of the true cause in all cases. A group of creationist Ph.D. geologists and physicists from Answers in Genesis, the Creation Research Society, and the Institute for Creation Research are currently working on this topic. Their aim is to find out the precise geochemical and/or geophysical causes of the observed isotope ratios.13 One promising lead is questioning Assumption 1—the initial conditions are not what the evolutionists think, but are affected, for example, by the chemistry of the rock that melted to form the magma.
Evidence for a young world
Actually, 90 percent of the methods that have been used to estimate the age of the earth point to an age far less than the billions of years asserted by evolutionists. A few of them:
• Red blood cells and hemoglobin have been found in some (unfossilized!) dinosaur bone. But these could not last more than a few thousand years—certainly not the 65 million years from when evolutionists think the last dinosaur lived.14
• The earth’s magnetic field has been decaying so fast that it couldn’t be more than about 10,000 years old. Rapid reversals during the flood year and fluctuations shortly after just caused the field energy to drop even faster.15
• Helium is pouring into the atmosphere from radioactive decay, but not much is escaping. But the total amount in the atmosphere is only 1/2000th of that expected if the atmosphere were really billions of years old. This helium originally escaped from rocks. This happens quite fast, yet so much helium is still in some rocks that it couldn’t have had time to escape—certainly not billions of years.16
• A supernova is an explosion of a massive star—the explosion is so bright that it briefly outshines the rest of the galaxy. The supernova remnants (SNRs) should keep expanding for hundreds of thousands of years, according to the physical equations. Yet there are no very old, widely expanded (Stage 3) SNRs, and few moderately old (Stage 2) ones in our galaxy, the Milky Way, or in its satellite galaxies, the Magellanic clouds. This is just what we would expect if these galaxies had not existed long enough for wide expansion.17
• The moon is slowly receding from earth at about 1-1/2 inches (4cm) per year, and the rate would have been greater in the past. But even if the moon had started receding from being in contact with the earth, it would have taken only 1.37 billion years to reach its present distance. This gives a maximum possible age of the moon—not the actual age. This is far too young for evolution (and much younger than the radiometric ‘dates’ assigned to moon rocks).18
• Salt is pouring into the sea much faster than it is escaping. The sea is not nearly salty enough for this to have been happening for billions of years. Even granting generous assumptions to evolutionists, the seas could not be more than 62 million years old—far younger than the billions of years believed by evolutionists. Again, this indicates a maximum age, not the actual age.19
A number of other processes inconsistent with billions of years are given in the AiG pamphlet Evidence for a Young World, by Dr Russell Humphreys.
Creationists admit that they can’t prove the age of the earth using a particular scientific method. They realize that all science is tentative because we do not have all the data, especially when dealing with the past. This is true of both creationist and evolutionist scientific arguments—evolutionists have had to abandon many ‘proofs’ for evolution as well. For example, the atheistic evolutionist W.B. Provine admits: ‘Most of what I learned of the field in graduate (1964–68) school is either wrong or significantly changed.’20 Creationists understand the limitations of these dating methods better than evolutionists who claim that they can use certain present processes to ‘prove’ that the earth is billions of years old. In reality, all age-dating methods, including those which point to a young earth, rely on unprovable assumptions.

Creationists ultimately date the earth using the chronology of the Bible. This is because they believe that this is an accurate eyewitness account of world history, which can be shown to be consistent with much data.

http://answersingenesis.org/home/area/re1/chapter8.asp

 

[8236]

Good god so much to read. Point 3 Not enough mud on the sea floor. Tectonic plate activity, oceans choked with sediments. This (non)explanation leaves out the crucial role that subduction plays in generating volcanic activity which regenerates the earths crust (and also concentrates minerals for us to mine- like copper and silver in the Andes). Check out the BBC tv series called 'Earth story' on all this.

 

[8236]

How old is the earth?
by Jonathan Sarfati, Ph.D., F.M.
First published in Refuting Evolution


This is graphically illustrated in a chart on pages 36–37:

Oh, come on, you are not even reading your own BS now! graphically illustrated! I should have thought that someone who posts as much as you would be an internet trawling spammer.

You really havent the faintest idea about CNO cycles or SHO have you.

 

[-Cp]

Oh, come on, you are not even reading your own BS now! graphically illustrated! I should have thought that someone who posts as much as you would be an internet trawling spammer.

You really havent the faintest idea about CNO cycles or SHO have you.

HUH? I've cited the links and sources.. what are you inferring?

 

[8236]

HUH? I've cited the links and sources.. what are you inferring?

I am asking: Have you read it all, and since you didn't write it, where do you stand on it.

Anyone can copy and paste. Just quoting internet references doesn't mean much!

 

[8236]

A layman could poke holes in your pseudo scientific creationist mumbo jumbo post, -cp.

1: Earths magnetic field: Oscillates on a regular basis: see Paleomagnetism.
2: Supernove remnants too small: The older ones are fainter because... they have almost dissipated...! laughable
3: recently formed rocks of age 0.35+-0.05 million years: Clearly the author either doesnt understand or is deliberately misinterpreting the concept of the standard deviation (in one of which most errors are quoted). In any case, go read on statistics to understand how they, by cumulative measurement increase our certainty wrt. the accuracy of measurements.
4: The moon slowly receding from earth: His quote of 1.37 billion years as to its age is a damn sight proportionally closer to the estimated 4.7 billion years than the 6000 of the bible. (he is shooting himself in the foot with this argument!)
5: Salt pouring into sea: Yawn. If the sea were fresh and theere were still salt deposits on the planet, then this would stack. Go check on the ratio of Sodium and Chlorine in the earth's crust to that in the oceans. its in equilibrium.lol

The most laughable bit is denouncing evolutionary theories because their ideas change slowly as new evidence comes along. This solely displays a complete lack of understanding as to the nature of science. Just as Einstein was proved to be 'more' right than Newton. i.e. Newton's view of the universe was an approximation, but superceded by Einstein's. However, his was a damn sight better than what came before.

This is probably why creationist have already lost the argument. They can't appreciate that the bible was no more than an early, very flawed attempt at explaining the nature of reality. We now know better. We have grown, developed and evolved.

 

[Nuc]

Some of the knuckleheads on this board are over 6000 years old and their ideas are older.

 

[Hobbit]

In the end, I can always fall back on, "Hey, God's frickin' OMNIPOTENT. Maybe he made this world *look* really old to test our faith. Maybe he played around with it a while before creating man 6000 years ago. Who knows? Personally, I don't care how God did it, just that he did."

I try not to specualte on such things, though. They make my head hurt and leave too many unanswered questions on both sides of the argument.

 

[Powerman]

So you think that God put a bunch of 4.5 billion year old rocks here to test your faith in Genesis? The creation story is in fact one of the most absurd things ever. I didn't even believe that load of garbage when I was a kid. If there is some sort of omnipotent being out there he didn't create the earth in the manner described in Genesis. Let's remember folks the alleged author of Genesis was Moses not God. The creation story is so silly that several Christian faiths have outright rejected it themselves. Including catholics and they pretty much invented Christianity....

 

[theim]

So you think that God put a bunch of 4.5 billion year old rocks here to test your faith in Genesis? The creation story is in fact one of the most absurd things ever. I didn't even believe that load of garbage when I was a kid. If there is some sort of omnipotent being out there he didn't create the earth in the manner described in Genesis. Let's remember folks the alleged author of Genesis was Moses not God. The creation story is so silly that several Christian faiths have outright rejected it themselves. Including catholics and they pretty much invented Christianity....

I'm a Catholic, and we have not rejected Genesis. And several Christian faiths have also endorsed abortion, homosexuality, etc. I'll bet even believing in God is optional in a few of them.

 

[Powerman]

I'm a Catholic, and we have not rejected Genesis.

Then someone needs to tell wikipedia and answers.com to quit publishing fiction.

http://www.answers.com/creation+theory?gwp=11&ver=1.0.7.177&method=3


Scroll down till you get to the wikipedia reference.

 

[dilloduck]

Then someone needs to tell wikipedia and answers.com to quit publishing fiction.

http://www.answers.com/creation+theory?gwp=11&ver=1.0.7.177&method=3


Scroll down till you get to the wikipedia reference.

You're right---someone needs to correct them on this immediately or they will lose thier status of always being right about everything.

 

[007]

So much science and information, much of what is highly questionable, and we STILL don't know much for SURE.

That's why people that take the "I'm right and you're wrong" approach, which can be either side in this debate, are the real morons.

 

[rtwngAvngr]

I'm a Catholic, and we have not rejected Genesis. And several Christian faiths have also endorsed abortion, homosexuality, etc. I'll bet even believing in God is optional in a few of them.

And to be a christian who believes christ is the only path to god is a big nono. Exclusivity they call it. The left wants to persecute christians who believe in christ.

 

[Nuc]

That's why people that take the "I'm right and you're wrong" approach, which can be either side in this debate, are the real morons.

Smartest thing anybody's ever said on this board. Bravo!