Re: RATE Vol. II

Troy, thanks for this interesting report. The best explanation of the data
from radioactivity, an earth billions of years old, may be too big a Goliath
for this company of Davids to slay. We'll see if they can find convining
evidence for an accelerated rate of decay; I'm skeptical.

What was interesting to me, as I begin to write an annotated essay on Young
Earth Creationism, is the image of the YEC scientists praying for "a
miraculous way" to understand the problems; and using the story of David as
inspiration. It gives an insight into how thoroughly religious are their
activities.

Bob

----- Original Message -----
From: "Troy Britain" <troybritain@att.net>
To: <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Monday, May 15, 2006 8:49 PM
Subject: 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 Tue May 16 09:30:05 2006