Age of the Earth Archives : Page 7 of 10 : Proslogion

Upset Atheists

As I have been surfing the blogosphere over the past few days, I have seen three stories that relate to atheists being upset. I’ll start with the first one, which is both ironic and hilarious at the same time. It seems that the Smithsonian Institute has produced a flyer (shown on the left) promoting its IMAX theater. To entice the reader, there is a prominent picture of a dinosaur on the front cover. I am sure the marketing department chose the picture because it is so realistic. Here’s the problem for the Smithsonian: the picture is of a model from the Creation Museum, which promotes young-earth creationism! I find this particularly funny, since the Smithsonian has attacked the museum on its blogs.

For example, Sarah Zielinski wrote a post discussing how a group of creationist students from Liberty University visits the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History every year. She then mentions the “other side,” where a secular group of students from Indiana University visited the Creation Museum. She posts a video that the students made, and not surprisingly, rather than trying to address the evidence set forth in the museum, the students simply try to mock it. After the visit, the students stop at a restaurant about 10 miles away, and one of them says:

If there is a nexus of all the misinformation and propaganda against science and progressive education it is about 10 miles…education in general…it’s about 10 miles down the road.

Well, when the Smithsonian’s marketing department wanted to depict a dinosaur, it chose one from this nexus of misinformation. Not surprisingly, this hasn’t gone over well with some in the atheist community. For example, “The Friendly Atheist” mentions the founder of the museum, Ken Ham, saying:

*Sigh*

You win this round, Ham…

Smithsonian people, I know it’s just a picture of a random dinosaur and you would never endorse Creationism garbage, but you’re getting the image from people who wrongly believe dinosaurs lived with people.

To me, it’s not surprising that the Smithsonian unwittingly used a picture from the Creation Museum. While there are things in the Creation Museum with which I strongly disagree, overall, I found it to be significantly more scientifically accurate than most museums, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Thus, it’s not surprising to me that they found one of the Creation Museum’s dinosaur models to be an accurate depiction of a dinosaur.

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The Evidence from Mercury: Inconclusive

Mercury is a difficult planet to study because of its proximity to the sun. As a result, there are only two robotic spacecraft that have visited it. Starting on March 29, 1974, the Mariner 10 spacecraft flew by Mercury a total of three times, but it never entered orbit. Then, on March 18, 2011, the spacecraft known as MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging) settled into a comfortable, near-polar orbit of the planet and has been studying it in detail ever since.

As a scientist, I am always excited to learn new information about God’s creation, so I have been watching MESSENGER’s progress with interest. As a young-earth creationist, however, my interest in MESSENGER was somewhat heightened, because its mission included collecting data on Mercury’s magnetic field. The young-earth model of planetary magnetic fields had made a prediction about what MESSENGER would find once it collected those data, so I was naturally very interested in the results of the measurement.

Since the previous measurement of the field was made more than 35 years ago, and since the young-earth model predicts that all planetary magnetic fields should decay fairly rapidly, the young-earth model predicted that Mercury’s magnetic field should have decayed by roughly 4 percent since Mariner 10’s previous measurement. By contrast, the old-earth model predicts no measurable change at all. Because the young-earth model has been successful in three other predictions,¹ I was hoping that MESSENGER would provide a fourth.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

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The New Creationism

Paul Garner is a British environmental scientist and Fellow of the Geological Society of London. He is a very active young-earth creationist researcher, currently doing original geological research in collaboration with Dr. John Whitmore and Dr. Steve Austin. He also recently authored a book called The New Creationism.

The word “new” in the title does not mean that he is offering some fundamentally new concept in creationism. Instead, the purpose of the book is to give the reader an understanding of the latest creationist models in the areas of astronomy, geology, and biology. In this purpose, Garner succeeds admirably. He is not only a very understandable writer, he is also very knowledgeable in a wide range of fields. As a result, this book is easy-to-read and (mostly) accurate.

There are many things l really like about this book, and one of them is that Garner makes sure the reader is not fooled by terminology. For example, in his second chapter (“The Sun, Moon, and Stars”) he discusses how astrophysicists think main sequence stars (such as our sun) eventually turn into different kinds of stars (like red giants, white dwarfs, and supergiants) and perhaps even supernovae. He then says:

Some creationists have instinctively reacted against this idea because the process of change is usually referred to as ‘stellar evolution.’ However, it is perhaps better to think of it as ‘stellar ageing’ because the changes are nothing more than an outworking of the law of entropy, the tendency of all natural systems to move towards a disordered state. (p. 37)

This is a very important point. What is generally referred to as “stellar evolution” has nothing to do with evolution as the term is generally used. It certainly has to do with change, and “evolution” can mean “change.” However, the general use of the term “evolution” implies an increase in complexity, and that is certainly not what goes on in stellar evolution.

Another thing I really liked about the book is that it concentrates on the evidence that supports creation and only discusses the evidence against evolution when necessary. Many creationist books are nothing more than attacks on evolution. While it is important to show a competing theory’s weaknesses, science should never be focused on shooting down opposing ideas. It should be focused on building up your own ideas. As a result, Garner gives the reader a lot of evidence that supports various creationist models.

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Yet Another Failure of “Geological Column” Reasoning

Skeleton of the titanosaur Epachthosaurus at the National Museum, Prague, Czech Republic. Note the plant, a cycad, in the display. (Click for credit)

If a display of dinosaurs or dinosaur skeletons includes plants, it usually shows the dinosaurs walking among ferns or cycads, like the picture shown above. There usually aren’t any grasses in the display. Why not? Because according to the geological column, grasses and dinosaurs didn’t live at the same time. After all, dinosaurs mostly died out by the end of the Cretaceous period, which was supposed to have closed about 65 million years ago. According to You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe, grasses didn’t evolve until much later:¹

Rabbits and hares appear 55 million years ago. The Himalayas begin to rise 50 million years ago. The face of the earth looks recognisably as it is now, except that Australasia is attached to Antarctica. Bats, mice, squirrels, and many aquatic birds (including herons and storks) appear during this period, as do shrews, whales, and modern fish. All major plants make their appearance and grasses evolve.

Notice how certain the author is. He is telling you the story of the history of life as if he is watching it happen. According to his “observations,” grasses didn’t evolve until about 50 million years ago, long after the dinosaurs went extinct.

This kind of certainty is rampant in evolutionary writings. For example, The Encyclopedia of Earth tells us:

The evolution and spread of grasses UNDOUBTEDLY resulted from their ability to adapt to seasonally dry habitats created as tropical-deciduous forests developed in the Eocene (58 to 34 mya, million years ago). Considering their importance and taxonomic diversity, grasses have a relatively poor fossil record. While the earliest potential fossil grass pollen was described from late Cretaceous sediments, the oldest reliable megafossil grass fossils were spikelets and inflorescences from the latest Paleocene (about 58 mya). These were PRIMITIVE proto-bamboos with broad leaves, QUITE UNLIKE the narrow-leaf modern grasses of desert grasslands and deserts. (emphasis mine)

Of course, as is often the case, current research is demonstrating just how wrong this evolution-inspired reasoning is.

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Science Will Survive. In Fact, It Might Even Improve…

Steven Newton is the Programs and Policy Director at the National Center for Science Education. He has a B.A. in History from the University of California at Berkeley and a M.S. in Geology from California State University at Hayward. Most importantly, he is a fervent believer in evolution. Because of this, he tends to watch trends in science education as well as the scientific community. His observations recently led to a very interesting article in New Scientist.

The article discusses the fact that young-earth creationists have been presenting at scientific conferences and publishing in the peer-reviewed scientific journals. Since he is a geologist, he is focused on meetings of the Geological Society of America (GSA), where young-earth geologists have presented papers and led field trips in recent years. While he thinks that this is a bad thing, he rejects calls to ban them from the meetings. He says:

Scientific organisations will continue to experience creationist infiltration; this week’s GSA meeting will include several presentations by creationists. But it is important for scientists not to overreact and to remember that science is far stronger than any creationist attempts to undermine it.

While his reasoning is deeply flawed, his final conclusion is correct. As a result, we should at least give him partial credit for his endeavors.

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Opals Refuse To Obey Scientifically-Irresponsible Theories

Some geologists are very fond of telling us that certain things take a long, long time to form. They confidently state that there is simply no other way for such structures to come about, and therefore is it simply ridiculous to assume that the earth is only a few thousand years old. If we currently see geological formations that we “know” took hundreds of thousands or millions of years to form, the earth simply can’t be a few thousand years old.

For example, in his book, The World of Opals, Allan W. Eckert says:¹

Throughout the study of opals, the scientific papers and textbooks have told that the process of opal formation requires tens of thousands of years, perhaps hundreds of thousands…and some have suggested even millions.

The very presence of opals on earth, then, indicates that the earth is at least tens of thousands if not millions of years old, right?

Wrong! It seems that opals simply won’t behave according to the dictates of scientifically-irresponsible theories.

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More Evidence That The Church Has Never Been United on Genesis

As I have pointed out previously, the oft-repeated claim that the church has always been united in its interpretation of the creation account is demonstrably false. It sounds reasonable to think that the church always read the creation account as historical narrative with 24-hour days, but then evolution or some other aspect of modern science “forced” theologians to reinterpret the creation account. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Even as early as 225 AD, Origen wrote:¹

For who that has understanding will suppose that the first and second and third day existed without a sun and moon and stars and that the first day was, as it were, also without a sky? . . . I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance and not literally.

So even in very early church, some influential people were interpreting at least parts of the creation account figuratively. It turns out that as church history progressed, a figurative interpretation of Genesis never lost its momentum.

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Oh Dem Young Bones

mososaur_osteocyte — An osteocyte-like structure found in a supposedly 70-million-year-old fossil (Click for credit)

In three previous articles (here, here, and here), I discussed bones that are supposed to be millions of years old and yet have soft tissue and large organic molecules in them. This is quite hard to understand if the fossils truly are that old, since soft tissue and large organic molecules are expected to decay fairly rapidly, even under ideal conditions. For example, an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how large organic molecules such as protein and DNA could be preserved over time suggested that even if a fossil were kept at the freezing point of water, collagen (a protein found in bone) should decay away so that it becomes undetectable in just under three million years.¹ Nevertheless, collagen has been found in fossils that are supposed to be more than twenty times that old!

Of course, if you are desperate to believe in an ancient earth and are therefore forced to think such fossils are really that old, you could hope that either very special conditions existed for the fossils in which the soft tissue and proteins were found, or you could hope that the soft tissue and proteins were the result of some kind of contamination. A recent paper in PLoS ONE has, in my opinion, laid both of those hopes to rest.

The paper examines samples from a mosasaur fossil that is 70 million years old, according to scientifically-irresponsible dating techniques. A microscopic analysis of this fossil showed all sorts of amazing things. For example, when the bone was etched with acid and then examined with a microscope, several structures that look like mature bone cells (called osteocytes) were found. In addition, all sorts of fibrous tissue was found, and amazingly enough, that fibrous tissue absorbed dye just like connective tissue from a modern bone!²

But what was the fibrous tissue made of? The authors show beyond all reasonable doubt that it contained collagen, which is a complex protein found in all bones. In my mind, their detailed analysis is part of what makes this paper so important.

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Yet Another Example of “Old” Fossils that Look Young!

This is a model of what a eurypterid might have looked like (Click for credit)

Scorpions are part of phylum Arthropoda, which contains all animals that do not have backbones but do have an outer coating of “armor,” which scientists call an exoskeleton. This exoskeleton is a complex structure that is formed primarily with proteins and a molecule called chitin (pronounced KY tin). While the scorpions we know today live on land, the fossil record holds remains of some very scorpion-like animals that most likely lived in water. They are called eurypterids, or sea scorpions.

As far as we know, sea scorpions are now extinct, but you can find their fossils in rocks near the bottom of the geological column. Using scientifically irresponsible dating techniques, paleontologists think that the oldest sea scorpion fossils are well over 400 million years old.¹ Evolutionists think that those sea scorpions eventually found their way out of the water and invaded land, evolving into modern-day scorpions.

So why am I telling you this? Well, a new report published in Geology tells us about a surprising discovery made by scientists who were studying a sea scorpion fossil they say is 417 million years old and a land scorpion fossil they say is 310 million years old. This discovery casts a lot of doubt on those outlandish ages.

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The Sun Is Not Shrinking

sunshrink — Although you can find information on the internet indicating that the sun is shrinking, the most reliable data indicate that it is not
(manipulated NASA image)

A commenter asked a question before I left on vacation. I gave him a brief answer as a reply, but now I want to go into the details of my answer. As the commenter mentioned, he was doing research for a sermon and came upon some information that indicated the sun is shrinking at a rate of about 5 feet per hour. While that’s not a lot for something as big as the sun, it indicates that the sun is rather young. After all, if we extrapolate the sun’s size backward over time using that rate, we would find that the sun would have been touching the earth a “mere” 11 million years ago.

If this were true, it would be a clear indicator that the earth and sun are not billions of years old. After all, the earth would not be a haven for life if it were anywhere near the surface of the sun! So if the sun is (and always has been) shrinking at anywhere near a rate of 5 feet per hour, the earth and sun could not be very old.

The problem is that this argument is based on faulty ideas about where the sun gets its energy and, more importantly, it is based on faulty data.

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