Was the World Created in Six Days?

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This might be a little bit long. I will still try to reply to any cogent reader responses. However, it is obvious that AiG is not participating. They have merely copied some standard YEC antiscience dogma and let it drop. But, this last load of AiG creationist “science” does invite a shovel to be applied.  

The AiG copyist makes many errors regarding radiometric dating, the most ridiculous being that the earth is not billions of years old. The RATE group was an operation sponsored by the Institute for Creation Research, not AiG. This didn’t make their fatally flawed conclusions any better. In the graphic below is a condensed version of how deep earth molten rock in moved up from the earth’s mantle forming the crustal rock where we live. So called “scientists” supporting YEC beliefs take geological samples that no competent scientist would use, and express surprise that their results are useless. For example, the YEC copyist’s claims that YEC scientists have “dated” recent lava flows to be millions of years old. In the attached illustration, you can see that molten rock (lava) flows through the entire depth of the crustal rock. This crustal rock ranges in age from ancient to relatively recent as we see that it flowed from the deeps to the surface. Volcanoes do not merely move material smoothly or cleanly to the surface- volcanic eruptions are the massive and violent movements of millions of tons of superheated, super pressurized mass. They shake whole continents, and can blow apart entire mountains. The rock they are blowing about is from many ages.

The only volcanic material that can be competently dated by radiometric studies is one which is thoroughly equilibrated at the time it is deposited. For example, the potassium/argon dating method is suspect when used on a volcanic sample that has not completely melted under a neutral pressure. This effectively restricted its use without careful corretions to volcanic ash, or tephra, and a limited class of deposited carbonates. This is because this radiometric method uses the accumulated argon that has been generated by the decay of radioactive potassium to calculate an age of the mineral deposit. For those readers interested in the technical details of over 35 radiometric decay methods which all are in agreement, I recommend reading Alan P. Dickin, “Radiogenic Isotope Geology.”

But, contrary to the false impression left behind like spoor by YE creationists, radiometric methods are not the only basis which we used to establish that the Earth is truly ancient. There are the well established multiple reversals of the earth’s magnetic field. These can be measured, and they are found to have been recorded in many   transitions with in the geological record. Then, there at least seven additional dating methods regularly employed by archaeologists which make no reference to radioactive decay (see Taylor and Aitken). The AiG copyist also mentions that the Institute for Creation Research RATE effort claimed to have detected radioactive carbon 14 in coal and diamond.   They made the weird and false claim that these creationist authors dated coal and diamond to mere thousands of years in age which is totally unconnected with the already dubious results. What they did not admit was their results all resulted from sloppy field work, and unavoidable minor laboratory contamination. This has been thoroughly exposed and debunked by Dr. Kirk Bertsche in “RATE’s Radiocarbon: Intrinsic or Contamination?”

The next ludicrous claim made by the YEC copyist is that, “decay rates were orders of magnitude faster in the past…” Anyone, seriously ANYONE, having passed a high school physics course should be able to smell the problem with this argument. It stinks!

All physical constants are derived from experiments that beyond all else tell us that in our   universe the physical behavior of matter is connected and stable. Even Holy Scripture tells us this, cf. Psalm 85:11 reads, “Truth springs from the earth; and righteousness looks down from heaven” (NASB). The Hebrew word for truth, emet, basically means “certainty and dependability.” AiG claimed that, “decay rates were orders of magnitude faster in the past, which shrinks the millions of years to thousands of years.” It is not a question of millions of years, the universe is securely dated to be 13.7 billion years old with a minor statistical range of less than five percent. The difference that AiG is demanding we swallow is 10^8 time more heat=energy in the universe. That is from the origin of the universe measured as 13.7 billion years ago. If the YEC “scientists” want to pack that in the last few thousand years, their problem is millions of times worse. Even more radically absurd is the crisis that the AiG YECs have now created for themselves, because if the radioactive decay rates have been advanced by many hundreds of times, the resulting heat would have burned the whole universe into a cloud of supercharged gas. That hot gas would violate “certainty and dependability” according to scripture. We couldn’t even exist.

The AiG copyist makes two final trivial jabs at the overwhelming evidence for an ancient earth. First, they messed up an argument about comets. There are two astronomical sources for comets reflecting their orbital period, or the frequency that they orbit the sun. Short period comets, which the AiG copyist referred to with life times in the hundred of thousands of years derive from collisions between massive objects in the Kuiper belt. These have been directly observed, unlike the lie told by AiG.. Their remains have been recovered from collisions with the earth millions of years ago. There are also the extremely long orbital period comets that are observed. These were hypothesized to originate in a very distant group of objects now called the “Oort cloud” that was far outside the Kuipler objects. Because we cannot directly see Oort objects around the earth with current technology, YEC propagandists claimed that these objects could not exist. We see in this debate that the YEC copyist claimed that the Oort cloud was, “just a convenient guess.” However, to the dismay of YEC dogmatists, we know Oort clouds exist around other stars and our own. See below.

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=OortCloud

http://www.phy.duke.edu/~kolena/cometko.html

You might also be interested in S. Alan Stern

Nature 424 , 639-642 (7 August 2003)

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v424/n6949/full/nature01725.html

--Not enough salt in the seas

This salt argument is fascinating to me. It is one of the oldest of the proposed methods to experimentally measure the age of the earth. It was refuted as a young earther argument many decades ago, but they never stop repeating the same falsehoods. Anyone that would like to stop these YEC lies should read, “The Age of the Earth” by G. Brent Dalrymple. He devotes six pages, 52-58, explaining why this is an utterly wrong idea. It was not stupid in 1715 when it was first published by Edmund Halley. To admit this level of error today is either stupid or dishonest.