I noticed that you didn't say exactly how science was misrepresenting the
observational data. I would be interested in finding out when I get back.
But my experience was precisely the opposite. As you might imagine, I read
a lot and check out the facts of what someone says, (including what I say).
I used to feel as you do but as I checked out the facts that I was taught by
the leaders in the young earth movement I found that very little stood up to
scrutiny and that observationally it was science that was getting it right.
This is an answer to Joe Reimers' question this morning about dating..
Some of this parallels parts of my book but I can't put the diagrams and
pictures into this post so you will miss some of the effect and there is
lots more discussion of the difficulites of the young earth arguments in the
book. As a former YEC, I would beg and plead with my young-earth brothers in
Christ to consider that what we are teaching our children is like giving them
rifles with blank bullets to fight the battle they will have to fight. It
isn't good to give our kids such a poor weapon to fight the naturalism they
will encounter..
The very first age of the earth argument I ever tried to check out was
Morris' juvenile water argument. Whitcomb and Morris present it on p 387-389
of The Genesis Flood. The argument concerns how long it would take for the
oceans to fill up from the brand new water produced by volcanoes. It seems
that a fellow figured out that a Mexican volcano, Paricutin, produced 1/1000
cubic mile of juvenile (brand new to the earth's surface) water. They state,
"In view of the fact that there are some 400 to 500 active volcanoes on the
continents of the world with several times that number known to have been
active in the recent geologic past, we feel it is not unreasonable to guess
that the average annual activity of volcanoes in the world has been such as
to produce at least one cubic mile of juvenile water each year." p. 388.
They then divide the 340 million cubic miles of water on earth by 1 cubic
mile per year and arrive at 340 million years to fill up the oceans. This is
1/10 of the age the oceans are believed to be. Thus they conclude that
scientists are wrong, evolution is wrong and the world is young. At the time
they wrote this you could go to a geologic text and find that there were 500
active volcanoes in the world. Today they believe that there are 1300 active
volcanoes in the world which would imply that the oceans could be produced
in 170 million years according to their model.
I thought this was a neat argument. So I went to the local university
and examined a few copies of the Bulletin of Volcanology. I was stunned to
find that there were only an average of 40 erupting volcanoes in the world
for any year I checked. What I found was that an active volcano, is not
necessarily an erupting volcano! There are about 30 active volcanoes in
California alone. But as of this moment, there are absolutely NO erupting
volcanoes there. The California active volcanoes are producing NO juvenile
water at all! I searched further and found that an active volcano is any
volcano which had erupted in historic times. This is quite different than an
erupting volcano.
When you use the 40 erupting volcanoes, adjusting their figures, you get
8.5 billion years for volcanoes to fill up the oceans. Considering that
there was probably more volcanism early in the earth history, this would fit
quite well with the evolutionist age.
The question I had, and still do have, is HOW COULD WHITCOMB AND MORRIS
BE SO WRONG?
Radioactive dating
There are a couple of brutal facts which must be noted about
radioactivity which are not covered very clearly by YEC writers. The first
it the decay chains. Certain radioactive isotopes produce a whole chain of
other radioactive isotopes. This can be best viewed as a set of basins into
which water pours, As the basin fills, it empties into the next lower basin.
Some chains have quite a number of radioactive products in the chain. I
will not draw the whole chain. Uranium 238 has 19 (if I counted correctly)
other isotopes which are produced as it decays towards Lead 206.
I-----I\ U-238
\
I___I\ Th 234
\
. . .
I----I\ Tl 206
\
I___I Pb 206
Consider a fountain made of basins like this. If you start filling the first
basin, it will be quite some time before you fill all the basins. Each basin
must fill before water will pour over into the next basin. If you find a
water fountain like the above and all the basins are full, you know that the
fountain has been running longer than the "fill-up" time.
Similarly, radioactive series reach equilibrium (which is a little
different than the fountain example) and it takes quite a long time for this
equilibrium to be reached. Of this Whitcomb and Morris state:
"We have already shown that the Bible quite plainly and irrefutably teaches
the fact of a 'grown' Creation - one with an 'apparent age' of some sort,
analogous to the 'apparent age' of a mature Adam at the first instant of his
existence. This Creation must have included all the chemical elements
already organized in all the organic and inorganic chemical compounds and
mixtures necessary to support the processes of the earth and of life on the
earth. These processes include the phenomena of radioactivity. It is
perhaps possible that only the parent elements of the radioactive decay
chains were originally created, but is is eminently more harmonious with the
whole concept of a *complete* Creation to say that all the elements of the
chain were also created simultaneously, most likely in a state of radioactive
equilibrium." Genesis Flood, p 344-345.
By doing this Whitcomb and Morris avoid having to explain the huge amount of
time (millions of years) for the decay chain to reach equilibrium. For the
moment let's grant that God created these needless isotopes in the interest
of "harmoniousness"
The second brutal fact you must know about radioactivity, is that if you
create an isotope, it is essentially decayed away in 10 half lives. Thus, if
you create Silicon 32, which has a half life of 650 years, it will almost all
be gone in about 6,500 years. Californium 251 has a half life of 800 years.
If the earth is 8000 years old, and Californium was part of the original
creation, we should still just be able to detect it. We don't.
Iron-60 has a half life of 300,000 years and should be detectable for 3
million years. There is no natural iron 60 on the surface of the earth. Does
this mean that the earth is older than 3 million years? Yes. There are 35
isotopes like iron-60 of various half-lives, which are not made by any
present process, which SHOULD EXIST if God created them at creation, and the
creation was a few thousand years ago. NONE OF THESE ISOTOPES EXIST
NATURALLY.
Now here is the problem. In order to escape the conclusion of an old
earth with the decay chain equilibrium, Whitcomb and Morris had God create
extra isotopes. But in the case of these missing isotopes, if you want to
have a young earth, you must assume that God DID NOT make any of them. Thus
the young earth position leads one to the conclusion that God created some
isotopes which make the world look old and didn't create other isotopes which
also makes the world look old!!! Is this fair of God? This is hopefully a
little clearer in my book.
John Woodmorappe wrote an article which is often cited by young earth
creationists because it is a list of over 300 radioactive dates which were
bad. (John Woodmorappe, "Radiogeochronology Reappraised," Creation Research
Society Quarterly," Sept. 1979, p. 102-129) He writes of his list :
"Many other dates could have been listed, but Table 1 is limited to
dates which approach 20% discrepancy: being either 20% 'too young' or 'too
old' for their biostratigraphical positions. Many are over 30% discrepant."
p. 113.
The fascinating thing to me is how often quoted this article is. Woodmorappe
lists the mistakes of radioactive dating. O.K. every body makes mistakes.
But what percentage of all dates do these mistakes represent? Woodmorappe
doesn't know because he simply combed the literature for dates he thought
were bad and put them in his list. He then concludes that radiometric dating
does not work. He writes:"Creationists and Diluvialists are not alone in
their disbelief of radiometric dating." P. 123
Using his technique of looking for errors, you could easily comb through
the numerous posts I have written, compile a list of my typos and
mis-spellings and prove that I can not spell worth a tinkers darn. Last
night I made a typo and spelled 'Chippewa' as 'Dhippewa". That is your first
data point towards proving I can not spell. If Woodmorappe had proved that
50% of all dates are wrong, then that would be one thing but he did not
collect the data to do that. What if the dates he listed are only .001% of
all dates? In that case I would say dating works.
There is a famous case of a "bad" date which is often used by
young-earth creationists and it is the Hualalai eruption of 1801. Paul M.
Steidl writes:
"In 1968 Naughton and Funkhouser attempted to use the potassium-argon method
to measure the age of some lava which had come from the eruption of the
volcano Hualalai in Hawaii. The eruption had occurred in 1801, making the
rocks 167 years old. The two scientists, using the radioactive method,
arrived at an age of between 60 million and 160 million years. This makes
the age too high by a factor of between 350,000 and one million." Paul M.
Steidl, The Earth, the Stars, and the Bible, (Presbyterian and Reformed,
1979), p. 25.
What is interesting is that Steidl does not reference the original article
but references the Bible Science Newsletter 14:2. If he had really looked at
the original article he might have noticed that the article's
title includes the term "inclusion". The rock they are dating is a rock
which was plucked from the side of the volcanic vent and INCLUDED in the lava
and then the lava cooled. They were not dating the lava, but something that
existed prior to the lava! Why can't those of us who want to support a
historical Bible get these little details straight?
This argument is also in Ackerman's _Its a Young World After All_ p. 81
Speaking of Ackerman, I unfortunately started one young earth creationist
argument from what was believed to be the slow flow of solid materials. It
involved the dating of lunar craters. It was duly published in the Creation
Research Society quarterly, and was used in Ackerman's book(p. 49). It was
wrong. If the material flowed as I suggested, then no Egyptian statue would
still stand. I am embarassed to have to confess such an error especially as
other people are now using it and won't listen to my objections to it. Think
about that--that they don't listen to the author's objection to his own
argument.
Steve Austin is now advocating the concept that the isochron dating technique
does not work. I will not go into the technical details of isochron dating
here but will show you how his methodology is wrong.
v /\ volcano
lava flow v v v / \
v -------------------
v v I 250 million year old rocks
v v v I------------------
v v v vI
v v v v I
v v v v I
____________________vvvvvv__I
1.07 billion year old basalt
v= lava flow
Austin is claiming to have dated the lava flow, which flowed over the Grand
Canyon's edge by isochron dating and arrived at a date of
1.34 billion years for the lava flow. Obviously this could not be since the
lava flow is much, much later than the rocks at the canyon's edge and younger
than the canyon bottom. So, does Steve have a proof that dating doesn't
work? (Steve Austin, Excessively old 'ages' for Grand Canyon lava Flows,"
IMPACT 224, Feb. 1992.)
I must confess that when I first saw it I didn't see any problem and I
wrote a friend asking if he knew of anything wrong with this. He did, but he
had had to consult an expert at the method. Here is what is wrong.
Steve writes:
"Here is how the isochron method works: If we select a number
of rock samples from a single geologic unit, we should be able to
claim that each rock formed at the same time, yet it is likely that
each rock will differ in the amount of both daughter and parent
isotope. We can construct a graph of the amount of daughter
plotted against the amount of parent. Each rock sample would be
represented as a distinct point on the graph. Figure 6.3a is such
a hypothetical plot. Often these plots of daughter against parent
form a linear array with strong linear correlation and positive
slope as indicated in this figure. We notice from this plot that
those samples of the geologic unit with larger amounts of parent,
have corresponding larger amounts of daughter. Those samples with
smaller amounts of parent, have correspondingly smaller amounts of
daughter."Steven A. Austin, "Are Grand CAnyon Rocks One Billion
Years Old?!, in Steven A. Austin, editor, Grand Canyon: A Monument
to Catastrophe, (Santee: ICR, 1994), p.117.
Notice that Steve has taken several rocks and used them to construct an
isochron. This is not the way the method works. Using multiple rocks creates
problems. You are supposed to create your isochron by using several minerals
in the same rock. George D. Garland wrote:
"The difficulty of correcting for common strontium was solved by Compston,
Jeffrey and Riley, who pointed out that isotope ratios could be determined
for several constituent minerals of the SAME ROCK." p. 313. Introduction to
Geophysics, Saunders, 1971. (Emphasis mine)
Steve created his date by using several rocks. Steve violates the
assumptions of the method.
Occasionally, you will see old C14 dates cited by creationist from modern
fresh water mussels. The problem with using those to discount C-14 is that
the assumption of C14 is that the animal gets its carbon from the atmosphere.
The problem is that freshwater mussels, get their carbon from the carbon in
the water. And if the river goes over an old limestone, very old calcium
carbonate is dissolved by the water and incorporated into the mussel. Since
the carbon used by the mussel is old, the date will appear old. This is well
understood and scientists today don't like C-14 dating freshwater animals.
But the young earth creationist never quite tells you about this.
Unfortunately, most young earth creationists are as suspicious of science and
scientists as Dave and this makes it doubly difficult to convince a person
that Christians are really doing things wrong here. You are told over and
over by YEC writers how the scientist is lying, hiding bad dates and is not
to be trusted. Speaking of the scientists belief in old Universe, Steidl
writes
"In fact, they will never give it up, even if it means compromising
their reason or even their professional integrity, for to admit creation
is to admit the existence of the God of the Bible. This is exactly
what the world system will not do."~Paul Steidl, The Earth, The
Stars, and the Bible, (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian and
Reformed Publishing Co., 1979), p. 94
In my opinion, no one should be trusted. Check out what I have said here.
Be sure that I am not misrepresenting things. There have been several valid
criticisms of thing I have written here so be sure to check me out. But be
sure that the YEC writers aren't misrepresenting things either. Unless you
question you will never know.
Glenn Morton
16075 Longvista Dr.
Dallas, Texas, 75248