Prompted by a Quoran Question Linking to Rational Wiki

1) Prompted by a Quoran Question Linking to Rational Wiki · 2) The Quoran Debate Which Prompted Previous and Some Others, on Evolution / Creation

Don Batten*

Examples of young ages listed here are also obtained by applying the same principle of uniformitarianism. Long-age proponents will dismiss this sort of evidence for a young earth by arguing that the assumptions about the past do not apply in these cases. In other words, age is not really a matter of scientific observation but an argument about our assumptions about the unobserved past.

Rational Wiki*

This is partially true, but there is a crucial difference: the uniformitarian assumptions of science have reasons behind them. For phenomena which are used in dating, such as the radioactive decay of potassium-40, the observed rate is constant and no known mechanisms of changing the rate exist. The vast majority of creationist assumptions of uniformitarianism, however, end up absurd because they ignore important known mechanisms of rate change.

Radiometric dating does not merely give age for an assumed constant rate of decay, but also relative age. Comparing, for example, a 10,000 y.o. fossil with a 100,000,000 y.o. one will show that the decay of carbon-14 in the latter sample is far more advanced than in the former. To believe that they are about the same age, i.e. that dinosaurs walked the Earth with men, requires that two different places be subject to vastly different rates of decay. If they are found in the same place, the problem is exacerbated.

HGL comments

For one thing, it seems "wikians" of rationalwiki, though a much more select group than wikipedians, are inaccurate about their opponents, even while trying to refute them. And for another, they are even ignorant of the "science" they defend themselves.

• With potassium argon dating, you are missing that the problem isn't the half life (for most creationists - I do have a haf life problem with so high half lives, though!), but the argon coming from air or not being expelled from lava, as well as potassium actually leaking.
  
  
• With C14 dating, you will never compare a piece of evidence dated to 10,000 years ago to one dated 100,000,000 years old : C14 is NEVER used for so old dates at all.
  
  When things routinely dated that old very expcetionally get a carbon date, it is radically younger. It is also routinely dismissed by non-creationists.

And for a third thing, you are presuming, without giving examples, that there would be no solid reasons to treat the young earth evidence in a uniformitarian way.

Don Batten

The assumptions behind the evidences presented here cannot be proved, but the fact that such a wide range of different phenomena all suggest much younger ages than are currently generally accepted, provides a strong case for questioning those accepted ages (about 14 billion years for the universe and 4.5 billion years for the solar system).

Rational Wiki

Indeed, the assumptions of constant rates used by many creationists cannot be proved — but they can easily be disproved by pointing out obvious mechanisms of rate changes. No such disproof is available for the assumptions behind mainstream methods of dating.

HGL comments

For C14 as well as for Ka-Ar, the main creationist attack is not rate change.

For geological factors, there are very obvious mechanisms of rate changes, especially if a world wide flood happened, as we certainly propose it did.

Don Batten

Also, a number of the evidences, rather than giving any estimate of age, challenge the assumption of slow-and-gradual uniformitarianism, upon which all deep-time dating methods depend.

Rational Wiki

This appears to contradict the article's support for uniformitarianism in previous paragraphs.

HGL comments

As if there could not be two different lines of evidence?

If part have good reasons for uniformitarianism, and land up young earth, part have good reasons against uniformitarianism, both lines contradict the idea that "all age related evidence is uniformitarian and lands up old earth".

Don Batten

Many of these indicators for younger ages were discovered when creationist scientists started researching things that were supposed to "prove" long ages. The lesson here is clear: when the evolutionists throw up some new challenge to the Bible's timeline, don't fret over it. Sooner or later that supposed evidence will be turned on its head and will even be added to this list of evidences for a younger age of the earth. On the other hand, some of the evidences listed here might turn out to be ill-founded with further research and will need to be modified. Such is the nature of science, especially historical science, because we cannot do experiments on past events (see http://creation.com/its-not-science)

Science is based on observation, and the only reliable means of telling the age of anything is by the testimony of a reliable witness who observed the events. The Bible claims to be the communication of the only One who witnessed the events of Creation: the Creator himself. As such, the Bible is the only reliable means of knowing the age of the earth and the cosmos. See The Universe's Birth Certificate and Biblical chronogenealogies(technical). In the end we believe that the Bible will stand vindicated and those who deny its testimony will be confounded.

Rational Wiki

Young-Earth Creationism is unanimously rejected by the scientific community. Deep time and the 4.5 billion year age of the Earth are not pet hypotheses of "evolutionists", a postulated faction of godless maverick scientists — they are uncontroversial and widely accepted facts, with consistent evidence from multiple disciplines.

Many of the scientists who discovered evidence for an Earth much older than the Biblical account were devout Christians and experienced crises of faith because the insistence that Ussher's 6,000-year timeline was inviolable strained consilience.

Many creationists make an artificial (and bogus) distinction between historical science, or science which makes them uncomfortable, and operational science, with which they claim not to have any problems.

This claim is that God is a reliable witness, although He did not physically inscribe the Bible himself. This was done by the hands of many over the course of centuries, with well-established** Biblical scholarship indicating tremendous amounts of editing and sources in older legends.

By this line of reasoning, no one would have any justification for estimating the age of another person; they might look elderly but unless they tell you their age or look up their birth records, they could be six days old for all you knew.

HGL comments

Let's break this one down a bit.

Rational Wiki

Young-Earth Creationism is unanimously rejected by the scientific community.

HGL comments

Answer, depending on their definition of "scientific community", would vary between "except those in it who are young earth creationists" and "as that scientific (alias evolutionist) community is rejected by Creationism.

Rational Wiki

Deep time and the 4.5 billion year age of the Earth are not pet hypotheses of "evolutionists", a postulated faction of godless maverick scientists — they are uncontroversial and widely accepted facts, with consistent evidence from multiple disciplines.

Many of the scientists who discovered evidence for an Earth much older than the Biblical account were devout Christians and experienced crises of faith because the insistence that Ussher's 6,000-year timeline was inviolable strained consilience.

HGL comments

Creationism is precisely claiming to deal, one by one, with the arguments for deep time - so also in the article Rational Wiki here pretends to refute.

As to those scientists, the description of them as "devout Christians" is arguably false.

Rational Wiki

Many creationists make an artificial (and bogus) distinction between historical science, or science which makes them uncomfortable, and operational science, with which they claim not to have any problems.

HGL comments

Though the links are to two articles, they both redirect to one.

Here is a part of it which is actually good:

History is not the only barrier to direct viewing and repeating in science. Many of the famous examples of solid scientific discoveries were, and are, not open to direct viewing and repeating. Things which are too small or too big, too fast or too short, or too distant or too hard to get to, are all subjects in science.

Newtonian science discovered that gravity applied to all of a space, not only to the surface of the Earth. Not until the 20th century was it possible to make repeatable tests of Newton's laws more than a few miles above the Earth. (And even today we can dig only a few miles down to learn first-hand about the interior of the Earth.) An opponent of Newton's physics could ask, "Are you there?" (only God is in outer space to see what is doing there).

Much of quantum mechanics relies on the reality of electrons and other sub-atomic particles and forces which cannot be directly observed. The chemical bond, electronics, and nuclear physics make sense only by these unobservables.

An early scientific discovery is that the Evening Star ("Hesperus") and the Morning Star ("Phosphorus") were observations of the same object, Venus. Direct observations of the transition change was not possible because the Sun would hide it, either as it happens on the far side of the Sun, or as it happens on the near side, in the glare of the Sun. The shadow was not seen until a transit of Venus was observed in 1639. (Of course, the identity was so accepted by everyone that this "confirmation by operational science" was not worth remarking.)[5]

In the early 19th century, August Comte wrote in The Course in Positive Philosophy (Cours de Philosophie Positive) that we could never determine the chemical structure of the stars.

I agree on some of those, and do not limit my science scepticism to deep time and evolution.

I think YEC is intellectually incomplete without geocentrism. See below too, for another reason.

The only problem with that passage from Rational Wiki is that they - as well as CMI - presume all of above should be taken with belief rather than scepticism and agnosticism.

Rational Wiki

This claim is that God is a reliable witness, although He did not physically inscribe the Bible himself. This was done by the hands of many over the course of centuries, with well-established Biblical scholarship indicating tremendous amounts of editing and sources in older legends.

HGL comments

That the physical inscription of almost all of the Bible text was done by people is not controversial, and to a Christian theologian no reason to discard it from being the inerrant word of God, seeing each book was documented as divine before the Church and it was documenting them as divine by miracles, mostly such involving intercession with miraculous outcome by the author.

As to Biblical scholarship of the modern kind, it is replacing a traditional account, claimed to be by a Church who was there when it was written, by yet another type of "historic science" or historicising reconstruction.

Rational Wiki

By this line of reasoning, no one would have any justification for estimating the age of another person; they might look elderly but unless they tell you their age or look up their birth records, they could be six days old for all you knew.

HGL comments

Except, with human persons we have extensive experience of person after person arriving at age 0 after birth as a baby and taking so and so many years to arrive at such and such a maturity.

Also, when Adam and Eve were six days old, they looked adult, because they were created adult, but that is another question.

Don Batten

(back to opening statement)

No scientific method can prove the age of the universe or the earth, and that includes the ones we have listed here. Although age indicators are called "clocks" they aren't, because all ages result from calculations that necessarily involve making assumptions about the past. Always the starting time of the "clock" has to be assumed as well as the way in which the speed of the clock has varied over time. Further, it has to be assumed that the clock was never disturbed.

Rational Wiki

Creationism starts from a single assumption: that the history of the Earth is accurately recorded in the Bible. It thus dismisses all scientific evidence that does not fit this credo.[1][2][3] The assumptions conventionally used in obtaining scientific estimates of the age of the Earth and the universe look supremely cautious compared to such a leap of faith.

The reference to the "way[s] in which the speed of the clock has varied over time" are a very thinly veiled attack on a bedrock assumption of scientific practice, uniformitarianism, in (for the sake of argument) contradistinction to catastrophism. Assuming good faith qua ignorance, this attack is simply a misconstruction of uniformitarianism - as a scientific assumption it does not claim that major disruptive events like ice ages, meteor impacts, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and so on have never happened (since plenty of people alive today have witnessed or been affected by one or more of them), but rather that the specific physical laws governing their causes and effects have remained constant over time. Assuming good faith qua scientific disagreement with uniformitarianism, none of the creationist theories predicated on alternatives to the constancy of physical laws over time can be valid without encountering big problems very quickly; cf.

• c-decay, which requires changes in fundamental properties of the universe for which no evidence exists;
• creationist ideas on the constancy of the rate of radioactive decay over time, which if valid would mean that the entire planet had been bathed for quite a while in far more radiation than would have been required to kill off all life - problematic because life does, in fact, still exist on earth; or
• white hole cosmology, which if correct would mean that Earth would experience a blueshiftWikipedia's W.svg of all incoming light from outside the solar system so colossal in scale as to fry the planet's surface like an egg on a hot sidewalk.

If we don't assume good faith, it appears that CMI is combining a false dilemma with the Nirvana fallacy - one theory can't yet answer all possible questions, so the other should be accepted unquestioningly. This logic is both fallacious (wrong in its pattern of reasoning) and incorrect (wrong in the facts it reasons with).

HGL comments

Here are a few things to be wrong on.

• "c-decay" and "white hole cosmology" both concern "distant starlight paradox" - for which a more elegant solution is found in geocentrism. With constant speed of light, and with no white holes. See also above, Heliocentrism is not operational science.
  
  
• "which if valid would mean that the entire planet had been bathed for quite a while in far more radiation than would have been required to kill off all life" - if radiometric dating depended mainly on "changes of decay rate", this might or might not be the case.
  
  I have ALSO heard this exact same argument applied to a rise in C-14 in the atmosphere.
  
  This triggered a series, in which the guess about rise which I consider the best, and where a "percent of modern carbon-14" of c. 3-4% at Flood adds to to a stable level of 100% about 2500 years ago, only has carbon 14 form twenty times as rapidly at Flood than now.
  
  With carbon 14 forming now under cosmic, rather than total background, radiation, this means the cosmic radiation was back in 2957 BC a bit higher only than total background radiation at Princeton - so high is that one, compared to cosmic radiation, and Princeton is not the highest.
  
  We would be talking about c. 6 - 7 - 8 milliSieverts per year, and the total background radiation at Princeton is about 6 milliSieverts a year.
  
  See: New blog on the kid : Avec un peu d'aide de Fibonacci ... j'ai une table, presque correcte ***
  http://nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2015/10/avec-un-peu-daide-de-fibonacci-jai-une.html
  
  Number eight in an article series, which was triggered about a month earlier by a conversation with freethinkers at Nanterre University - out on the campus. The comment about milliSieverts was added low in article, in a PS or a comment by author.
  
  Problem solved.

Did I miss anything important from original?

Don Batten

... Ages of millions of years are all calculated by assuming the rates of change of processes in the past were the same as we observe today — called the principle of uniformitarianism. If the age calculated from such assumptions disagrees with what they think the age should be, they conclude that their assumptions did not apply in this case, and adjust them accordingly. If the calculated result gives an acceptable age, the investigators publish it.

Rational Wiki

... A single observation of a wildly discordant estimate is not enough to overturn the concordant estimates, because observations are always subject to errors and outliers. A failure to understand consilience is why many creationists postulate a conspiracy amongst scientific investigators, as the author does here. ...

HGL comments

By now, there certainly IS a conspiracy to describe any attempt of describing a culture with flawed assumptions and routine dismissals of results seen in advance as flawed as a "conspiracy theory".

I am not sure how widespread this conspiracy is among science researchers, but it is very prevalent among those who pretend to "defend science" against Creationism, Geocentrism.

A normal person who thought he had a case, would be defending the assumptions of scientists as not being wild and leave it at that, or even as being proven. And leave it at that. But some seem to have tried that and failed for some time.

Don Batten

For example, the amount of cratering on the moon, based on currently observed cratering rates, would suggest that the moon is quite old. However, to draw this conclusion we have to assume that the rate of cratering has been the same in the past as it is now. And there are now good reasons for thinking that it might have been quite intense in the past, in which case the craters do not indicate an old age at all (see below).

Rational Wiki

The author misunderstands crater counting. It is not used to obtain absolute dates, but to compare the age of one region to another, whose age is known through radiometric dating. Its only assumption is that the bombardment of the moon was uniform over its surface (not necessarily over time).

We assume an approximately constant rate of meteor impacts on the moon, with variations depending on the stage of development of the solar system (e.g., the Late Heavy BombardmentWikipedia's W.svg 4 billion years ago). However, the "increased rate" that would be required to produce the observed craters is unrealistic: if the rate of impacts to the Moon was high enough to give it its characteristic surface in under 6,000 years — the standard[4][5][6] creationist time since creation, according to the chronology worked out by Archbishop James Ussher in 1650 — we'd expect a lot more craters on Earth; with a presumed abundance of meteors intersecting the shared orbit of Earth and the moon, it would stretch credulity indeed to suggest that something like 99.9% of them missed the larger target and hit the smaller one.

HGL comments

Assuming either craters or moon or Earth being just random objects.

If angels played cockshies with meteorites pointing at the Moon, they would hit the smaller target they were targetting and not hit the bigger target they were not targetting.

They might have done it when Satan fell from Heaven, or they might have done it when they were impatient with God's not punishing sinful men faster, or evil spirits may have done it while falling, with God not letting them impact Earth too much.

Some Creationists would no doubt be involving Flood event here. Perhaps I should too, it is at least one possibility.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre University Library
Octave of St Stephen Protomartyr°
2.I.2017

* Link to articles I comment in first two dialogue presentations "of speaker".

** That a certain theory is well established among the scholars of the field, only means as much as they presume if the scholars admitted by adhering to the well established scholarship are also meanwhile good ones. A bad theory which is well established will on some accounts (not all) ruin otherwise good scholars adhering to it, while those not allowing themselves to be so ruined will marginalise themselves from the core of that well established theory, or be marginalised.

*** In French, on this blog.

Otherwise, when I do creationism in English, I usually do it on my other blog here:

Creation vs. Evolution
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com

But since French speakers are "underdeveloped countries" as far as Young Earth Creationism is concerned, I often do that on my main blog or the philological one.

° I used to date the articles from Jan 2 to "Caesareae, in Cappadocia, depositio sancti Basilii, cognomento Magni, Episcopi, Confessoris et Ecclesiae Doctoris; qui, tempore Valentis Imperatoris, doctrina et sapientia insignitus omnibusque virtutibus exornatus, mirabiliter effulsit, et Ecclesiam adversus Arianos et Macedonianos inexpugnabili constantia defendit. Ejus autem festivitas potissimum agitur decimo octavo Kalendas Julii, quo die Episcopus ordinatus est." However, this seems to have moved to January 1st!