Oh my, not the profoundly stupid, ICR nonsense. Fundies really should understand that real science will castrate the really, really absurd creationist arguments that rely on profound stupidity to be believed.
A Visit to the ICR: Part 8
Miscellany and Conclusions
A few concepts from the Institute for Creation Research's Museum of Creation and Earth History did not fit neatly into any previous category, but deserve some analysis.
This is the ICR's treatment of the First Law of Thermodynamics:
The law of conservation of energy (also known as the first law of thermodynamics) is the best-proved and most universal law of science. It states that energy (capacity to do work) can change forms, but can be neither created nor destroyed. Energy includes everything in the physical universe (even matter); therefore nothing is being created. This reflects the completion of God's work of creating and making all things (Gen 2:1-3) and refutes the evolutionary concept of ongoing 'creation'.
In another misguided appeal to authority (this time, interestingly, an appeal to scientific law), the ICR distorts the First Law to convince its largely scientifically illiterate patrons that even science precludes evolution. It is interesting to me that the ICR chooses to use science in this manner. Is it possible that even the ICR realizes that the public, though distrustful and even perhaps fearful of science, realizes that it has a credibility beyond that of the Bible?
The concept of "ongoing creation" (or "continuous creation" or possibly even "steady-state-theory") may refer to the now-defunct hypothesis proposed in the 1950's by astronomer Fred Hoyle: the universe was expanding, and "as the space between the galaxies stretched, new galaxies were being continuously created, out of nothing at all, to fill in the gaps" (Gribbin 1993: x). This hypothesis was disproved not by Genesis 2, but by scientists of the 1960's who accrued evidence supporting an alternate cosmology commonly known as The Big Bang (which the ICR doesn't like any better than "continuous creation").
"Ongoing creation" was never a concept related to biological evolution. Possibly what the ICR is trying to get at here is the theory that species don't evolve; they assert that there is no ongoing creation of species. If so, why not just say it? The First Law only refers to heat flow. Energy being converted to other forms is in no way inconsistent with evolution (or even special creation, for that matter). It's not really germane at all.
Another topic that I found fascinating was the concept of apparent age, or "functional maturity" -- the old "Omphalos" argument. This was even more interesting because I had just sat through a lecture by ICR geologist Steve Austin which dealt with, in part, attempts to date rocks. (Why does the ICR bother to do it at all if they know that the rocks just "look old"?).
Creation of a functionally mature creation (sometimes called "apparent age") necessarily implies that the objects and living systems exhibit the appearance of a prior history or process involved in their formation. Fruit trees were mature, fruit-bearing trees, not seeds; Adam was a full-grown man; the land had a fertile topsoil covering to it; the rocks would possess a variety of isotopes and elements, et cetera. If one denies the true revealed history of the world, and attempts to date the object or the world, this functional maturity could be mistaken for age. (Emphasis added)
There is no logical reason why a god would impart "the appearance of age" into a creation, unless that god's purpose was to deceive the "created" (and that says a lot about the god). We would be completely comfortable emotionally if all dates did converge on 6-10,000 years, and if this were consistent with scientific data. There is no reason why 'rocks would possess a variety of isotopes and elements'; our particular isotope mix is simply whatever was there when the solar system began to coalesce. I invoke the Goldilocks principle here -- if it hadn't been "just right", or at least "OK", we wouldn't be here arguing about this on the internet. Note the emphasis on "true revealed history" as the only accurate dating method -- and make sure it is the revealed history as given to fundamentalist Christians and the ICR, not that of Hindus, Buddhists, or Australian Aborigines. This dependence upon revealed history spills over into the age of the earth debate:
If the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 are taken literally, the Creation must have been relatively recent, about 6000 to 10,000 years ago. There are no firmly documented historical accounts older than this. Older ages must be derived from some physical process (eg., radioactive decay), and based on at least three untestable and unreasonable assumptions.