Re: moon dust info - clarification

George Murphy (gmurphy@raex.com)
Thu, 05 Nov 1998 09:02:56 -0500

Robert L. Miller wrote:
>
> My memory is that the origin of the dust story was from Harold Urey who
> calculated the moon would be covered with 50 feet of dust. His speculation was
> some years prior to the space program
>
> Bob Miller
>
> Joel Duff wrote:
> ...........................
> > >>Now it may well be that since 1969, there is new information, that the
> > >>old mechanism and assumptions proved faulty. But it is sheer historical
> > >>revisionism to say that this was NOT a wide-spread assumption in
> > >>the 1950's and 60's. Therefore, Whitcomb, Morris, et. al., who pointed out
> > >>the fallacy in later books were not being deceptive, or selective in use
> > >>of evidence, but simply responding to a strain of thought that proved
> > >>fallacious on direct investigation.

This has been an interesting thread but an important point has been missed.
It's clear that some theories describing an evolution of the solar system over ~ 5x10^9
years which predicted a lot of moon dust were wrong because there isn't lots of dust.
But YEC theories contribute nothing at all to the matter because they make no prediction
about the amount of moon dust to be found. If we _had_ found lots of dust, YECs could
have simply said "It was created that way 6000 years ago."
This is the way it often works out. E.g., YECs sometimes say "Evolution
predicts a continuous range of organisms between taxa & special creation doesn't, so the
lack of fossil transitional forms favors special creation." But it does no such thing
because species _could_ have been created 6000 years ago with gradations as close to
continuity as you wish. The YEC view in itself requires no unique prediction.
I.e., if the YEC view isn't scientifically vacuous, it's pretty close to it.
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
gmurphy@raex.com
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/