WHY YOUNG EARTH CREATIONISM IS WRONG: PART II

WHAT IS EVOLUTION ?

Young Earth Creationism [YEC] is a pseudoscience based on a literalistic reading of the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. Defining a pseudoscience is a difficult task, but generally it has several characteristics. Usually its practitioners are chiefly involved in propagandising it rather than actually doing observational or experimental work involving the natural world. But the chief defining attribute is the total inability of anyone to argue against a pseudoscience - rational argument based on evidence from observation/eexperiment will not change a pseudoscientist's world-view. Once a counter-argument is nearing success it is often said to be part of a conspiracy against the pseudoscientist, which is verging on paranoia. Hence it is irrationality that really defines pseudoscience.

YE Creationists are amongest the worst practitioners of pseudoscience because they have a commitment to one literal reading of the Genesis text. Several 'historical' events are described in the first 11 chapters of Genesis with global significance - the Creation, the Fall, the Flood and the Tower. In YEC speculations these all have varying significance.

Most see the Creation as contributing very little to the geology of the Earth, focussing their discussions on the Flood. Just when the Flood 'begins' in the geological record and when it ends is greatly debated. Some hold that the Flood has formed all geological structures 'prior' to the last glacial advance [commonly called the 'Ice Age'], which was itself caused by the changed conditions following the Flood. Chief proponents of this view are Henry Morris, head of the Institute for Creation Research, and flood geologists like John Woodmorappe [a pseudonymous author.]

Others point out immense difficulties with such a view, namely the presence of trackways, burrows, nests, and similar biogenic structures, in the rocks. Dinosaur trackways are the most obvious and famous of these, and are known world-wide. YECs who acknowledge these lines of evidence have differing theories about where they fit in time, but usually posit a few hundred years of 'residual catastropism' following the Flood. Just when the Flood begins is still problematic since biogenic 'trace fossils' are known from the beginning of large-scale fossilisation in the rocks [the late Pre-Cambrian era.]

What makes such conflict amongst YECs interesting is the fact that similar considerations led to the original abandonment of Flood geology in the early 1800s, and ultimately the total abandonment of the 'Global Flood' concept amongst believing geologists. They argued for some localised event which wiped out all humans in that time, since the Bible uses 'world-wide' language in situations that are obviously not global. No such event is known by modern geology, but that doesn't stop people from searching for it.

YOUNG EARTH CREATIONISM,as we saw, was revived in the sixties after the lone efforts of Macready-Price in the 1930s. Henry Morris, Gary Parker, Duane Gish, Melvin Cook and others kicked off the modern YEC Crusade. They sought to discredit the dating systems of modern geology to make the likelihood of EVOLUTION even less. To date none of their arguments for a Young Earth or Universe has stood up to serious scrutiny.

So what are some standard arguments of the YECs, and why are they wrong? There are many processes in Nature that are in "STEADY STATE" which means that their inputs and outputs are, on average over the ages, balanced. Often a measurement of input or output and some simple calculations gives a supposed age - only if the balancing input/output is ignored.

EXAMPLE... (a) INFLOW OF DISSOLVED SALTS INTO THE OCEANS

Last century a scientist estimated the Earth's age by estimating the flow of salt into the oceans and combining this figure with their saltiness to estimate how long this process took from a fresh-water beginning. There's a lot of hidden traps in this approach and this scientist was well aware of them - he just wanted an estimate, which was ~ 100 million years.

YECs use this figure and the accumulation times of many other elements to claim that the oceans - and the Earth are young. This ignores a multitude of removal processes for the various elements. For example carbonate and silicon both accumulate rapidly, but they are almost immediately removed by microscopic animals that use these in their shells and skeletons. These then die and their remains fall to the sea floor forming thick layers of "ooze". Other elements are removed either by formation of nodules on the sea-floor [eg. manganese], incorporation into living things [eg. calcium], by chemical reactions with the volcanic mid-ocean ridges [eg.sodium], by transformation into gases that then drift away [eg. sulphur] and by being captured in lagoons and crystallising out as salt-deposits. In fact many buried salt deposits are known from around the World, which is a fact sufficient to suggest that salts don't just accumulate in the oceans. The oceans are in a dynamic steady state that has been shown to have only varied by a factor of two for the past few billion years.

EXAMPLE... (b) RISE AND EROSION OF MOUNTAIN RANGES

Mountains rise and mountains are eroded. These are measured and observable facts, but the YECs have actively ignored the combination of these two processes in order to gain a few points. Often they will point out a mountain range with a known rate of rise, then calculate some ridiculous height for that range after just a few million years. Or they will point out that mountains are being rapidly eroded, and will disappear in just a few tens of millions of years.

The solution to this puzzle is two fold and fairly obvious when we acknowledge both processes don't run at the same rate all the time. Mountains rise and often rise faster than they are eroded, but not always. And as they are eroded the rate of erosion decreases. Why? Erosion takes energy and this energy comes almost entirely from the cascading of water down a mountain's slopes. As the slopes get lower so does the erosion rate, if rainfall is roughly constant [no guarantees there.] YECs will say erosion takes 15 million years at a constant rate. In fact that 15 million is roughly the half-life of a mountain range - the time it takes to halve in height. To go from, say eight kilometres to a mere 300 metres takes ~ 70 million years. In that time things may change - the mountains may rise once again, or the sea might flood the land. Anything might happen. This seriously undermines the assumption that erosion and uplift of mountains is constant, and so effectively destroys any argument based on mountains.

EXAMPLE... (c) COMET DECAY

Comets come in several varieties. Some orbit the Sun in smallish orbits that take decades, or less, and they orbit in roughly the same plane as the planets. These are SHORT PERIOD COMETS and Halley's Comet is one example, orbitting the Sun roughly every 76 years. LONG PERIOD COMETS can take hundreds to thousands of years to orbit the Sun and are often highly inclined to the plane of the planets. Comets, the visible part, are clouds of gas and dust boiled off the surface of the invisible comet nucleus by the Sun's heat and solar wind. The nucleus is a lump of ice and rock several kilometres or so across and so only has a finite amount of volatiles to lose to space on each close approach to the Sun. For most of their orbit comets are in deep freeze and lose nothing. But either group of comets have only a finite amount of time to remain active before they run out of VOLATILES and finally become invisible, break up, fall into the Sun or are thrown out of the Solar System entirely via a close encounter with Jupiter.

YECs claim that because comets can last only so long then the Solar System must be only as old as the lifetime of comets, some thousands of years. This might sound good, but the question must be asked "where do new comets come from?" New comets are found every year and while some may have only just been discovered, but present all along the majority must come from some kind of cold storage.

Two kinds of comet storage are now known. One is the Oort Cloud, a vast spherical cloud of hundreds of billions of comets orbitting the Sun in orbits thousands of times wider than the Earth's orbit [a standard measuring unit - the Astronomical Unit, or AU, is just that distance. Oort Comets are about 10,000 to 100,000 AU out, and their orbits are 1,000,000 to 3,000,000 years.] The other cold storage is a disc of comets just beyond the planets and extending gradually outwards towards the Oort Cloud, known as the KUIPER BELT.

YECs naturally have tried to rubbish the Oort Cloud as an unobserved fantasy concocted to solve the "comet problem", but in truth the Cloud was first proposed to explain the origin of long period comets, based on the statistics of their orbits. Oort Cloud comets won't ever be observed in 'cold storage' except by future space probes, but when astronomers turned their telescopes towards the expected location of the much closer [40 - 50 AU] Kuiper Belt what did they find? So far dozens of very large comets in deep freeze, and hints of more comets spread out towards the Oort Cloud. Using the same statistical techniques used for the Oort Cloud astronomers predicted and found the Kuiper Belt. Problem solved. The assumption of no input of fresh comets has been decisively disproven.

Naturally occurring radioactive elements, like Uranium and Thorium, in the Earth's crust under-go decay through sequences of various unstable elements until they become lead. In the process each atom of uranium or thorium produces Alpha Particles, which are just Helium nucleii. The amount of helium in the atmosphere can be measured and the amount that the Earth's crust should produce over time can be estimated. Combining these [amount present/ rate of production] gives an "age" of just a few million or thousand years. If the Earth was 4.56 billion years old there should be a lot more Helium...

Unless Helium is escaping from the Earth. Helium is the second lightest gas and in the Earth's upper atmosphere there are regions where gases are very hot indeed - up to 2000 K [one K is the same as a degree Celsius, but the Kelvin scale starts at minus 273.15 Celsius. So "Room Temperature", 27 degrees C is actually 300 K.] Gas temperature is a measure of how much energy the gas has on average and at 2000 K quite a high proprotion of Helium atoms have enough energy to escape the Earth's gravity. This is called THERMAL ESCAPE.

About half the Helium produced escapes via thermal escape, SO there's still a problem if [and only if] there's no other way for Helium to escape. Creationists claim there's none, but actually a lot of energy rains down on the outer atmosphere in the form of the SOLAR WIND. This is a stream of charged particles ejected by the Sun at hundreds of kilometres per second. The Earth's magnetic field deflects most of it into belts of radiation around the Earth, but a lot is channeled via the belts into the upper atmosphere around the Poles. This is the power source for the Northern and Southern Lights [Aurora Borealis & Australis] and provides sufficient energising of Helium to send the excess off into Deep Space. To this day the YECs ignore this process and still claim that Helium is proof of a young Earth. They're wrong and deceitful for continuing to claim otherwise.

***DIRECT FROM NASA***

FOR THE FIRST TIME THE POLAR WIND IN ACTION, EJECTING ATOMS FROM THE UPPER ATMOSPHERE, HAS BEEN DIRECTLY IMAGED BY AN ORBITTING NASA SATELLITE. THIS IS A PHENOMENON IGNORED AND DENIED BY THE YECs, NOW FOR ALL TO SEE.

NASA NEWS REPORT

In 1959 Hans Patterson measured the infall of dust from space using a device for measuring smog particles. He placed it at the top of a Hawaiian volcano and hoped he was above most of the dust in the Earth's atmosphere. From that data he estimated that about 14.3 million tons of dust fell to Earth each year from space. Taking into account the smaller size of the Moon this means that in 4 billion years the Moon should be about 153 feet deep in Interplanetary Dust Particles [IDP]. As YECs love to point out the Apollo Moon missions only found a couple of inches of fine powder, implying a much younger age for the Moon and maybe the Earth.

Patterson's original experiment is forty years old, but his results continue to be quoted as accurate by the YECs. When IDP were directly measured in space, and studied in sea-floor sediments, in the 1960s, Patterson's estimate was found to be way too high. Patterson himself thought that the total amount was probably lower than his initial estimate, and the modern figure is about 30,000 tons of IDP per year [see S.G.Love and D.E.Brownlee, Science, Vol. 262, pg. 550-553.] Measurements of the amount of dust stored up in deep sea-floor sediments shows that our current era is experiencing about three times the average amount of dust infall. In our very recent past several asteroids must have broken up in the inner Solar System producing a surge in dust production and infall.

SO WHAT DO WE CONCLUDE? BASED ON THE CONTINUED USE OF THESE AND SIMILARLY OUT-DATED ARGUMENTS THE YOUNG EARTH CREATIONISTS CAN BE SEEN TO BE LESS INTERESTED IN TRUTH AND MORE INTERESTED IN POINT SCORING AGAINST SCIENCE. FOR THE SAKE OF WINNING CONVERTS THEY HAVE SACRIFICED TRUTH.

In a similar vein less extreme forms of Creationism have misrepresented the facts to disprove the case for Biological evolution. The arguments they use are often word for word the arguments of the YECs, and I'll be taking issue with moderate Creationism at...

Some annotated Web-Links on various YEC arguments...

For some more excellent material on why Creationist Dating arguments are wrong, check out Glenn Morton's Web-site

GLENN MORTON

For a really cool evolution site, by Ken Harding, here at Geocities, click here

EVOLVE

On this site you'll find some good models of ancient humans and lots of links.

The next site contains arguments against YEC claims, provided by David Matson. Very detailed and well worth looking at.

A key YEC argument against radioactive dating is based on supposedly multi-million year dates for Hawaiian lava that had erupted a mere 200 or so years ago.

Ever wondered why the Global Super Flood - GSF for short - is considered ridiculous by mainstream scientists?

Several rather technical arguments that seem really impressive because they involve radioactivity are Robert Gentry's arguments about POLONIUM.

The attraction of Lorence Collins is that he's not one of the usual sceptical agnostics who's out to get YECs. He's a practicing Christian with a passion for truth.

Another link of importance is to Donald Wise's 'American Scientist' article. This appeared in the March/April 1998 issue, and covers in detail some pertinent data on the Flood and Geology.

WHAT IS EVOLUTION?

Who Is God?

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