RE: RATE Vol. II

Hi all,

I'll drop out of lurking long enough to post the following since it is very
relevant to this thread, and since I just happened to transcribe and post it
to another forum just last night.

Here is an interesting admission [look for the ***] by Larry Vardiman from a
couple weeks ago in Fullerton, CA. It is a transcript of only part of the
presentation he gave that I recorded while attending the event (see below
for details). I include a fair amount surrounding the admission in an
attempt to avoid taking him out of context.

Troy Britain

***************
I'm going to tell you some of the results of three of the major components
that came out of this project [RATE]. The basic thrust of this project was
the trust of the issue of radio isotope dating. Not just the simply uranium
into lead but potassium/argon and the various ah, types of isotopes as they
go from the parent product, the parent element, which, lets talk about
uranium and lead, the uranium would be the parent element that is unstable
and decays into daughter products, and in this case it would be lead which
we've normally heard of, that's the daughter product which is stable and
does not decay further.

You may not know this but there are other elements that are produced in that
process called a chain of decay and one of the final products as well is
helium, and that is one of those that we stressed in this particular
project.

We started off this project very uncertain of what we were going to find. In
fact we were quite concerned because we could do irreparable damage, not
only to our own reputation but to the church in general, if we found things
we could not explain and they actually argued against our position.

But we were so committed to be able to address this issue that we laid it
before the Lord and asked God to be able to provide in a very special way, a
miraculous way, in order to be able to understand these problems. And to
encourage us we took as an example David when he was before Goliath.
Remember David was a teenager, and he faced this giant, and we felt like
that. We felt we were faced with a giant problem. And we asked the Lord to
provide like he did for David. It's amazing when you read the story, back in
2nd Samuel, and you find that David went before Goliath and he made some
statements before the whole country to take care of this giant, and I'll
give you a quote from the actual scripture verse at the end of my
presentation.

But David had the audacity to do this and I came to the conclusion of my
study over the last eight years of that passage and I think I understand why
he did this. It's because he started back as a young man earlier, probably
he was only twelve, I don't know exactly his age, and a lion attacked his
sheep, the Lord allowed him to kill that lion, he gain confidence, a bear
attacked his sheep, the Lord provided for him to kill that bear, so that he
had enough confidence in answered prayer previously to be able ask that kind
of question and go before the Lord.

That was the kind of experience we had at ICR. We had some major issues that
happened at our graduate school over the past, that we had enough confidence
to ask the Lord to assist us in this problem and he provided.

And I want to share with you three of the big answers that came out of this
particular project I think they are very exciting, and they relate to
specifically to this issue of the age of the Earth. ***Because if in fact
you take the data at face value the best explanation is that the Earth is
billions of years old.*** So something else must be going on and we wanted
to have a look at the data.

We did a two phased project. The first phase of the project was three years,
which was basically the hypothesis developing and literature searching
stage, and we developed the questions we were going to ask and try to
answer. And we had a five year research phase. And we had to raise the money
for this project, and we raised, not only did we get answers, but people
responded to the tune of a million and a half dollars to help support this
project. There has never been a creationist research project of this
magnitude in history. And the Lords people provided for us to be able to do
this.

We started the project with basically three hypotheses, and this came out of
the first phase experiment, ah the first phase of the project, in which we
did the literature search, met annually, interacted with each other to
develop the questions we felt we needed to answer. And we believe the answer
after that first three years was some type of accelerated decay process.
When we started the project we had never even heard of this concept, but we
came to the conclusion that there had to be some kind of accelerated decay.

Now the reason we didn't have that at first was because we weren't confident
that the conventional literature was correct in saying that there ah, had
been a lot of decay there. In other words there wasn't evidence of a lot of
decay. Maybe there isn't a lot of lead, maybe there isn't a lot of material
that can be explained in another way.

As we went through that first three years we became confident, yes there has
been a lot of decay. There is a lot of lead there; there is a lot of fission
tracks there; there is a lot of radio-halos there. All of that giving an
indication that there has been a lot of decay, radioactive decay. So we
couldn't explain it away that way.

So, the only way we could fit a short period of time which we believe from
the Bible, [?>] is the verdict of the Bible, a young [<? garbled] period of
time based upon biblical interpretation, and we've got a lot of decay, that
means at somewhere in the process you had to have an accelerated rate of
decay. That is the decay had to happen a lot faster than it is going on
today.
***************
Source: Larry Vardiman, April 29th 2006, "Question of Age: Conference on
Creation, the Bible and Science", at the First Evangelical Free Church of
Fullerton, CA.
Received on Mon May 15 20:50:41 2006