From: hamilton@hydra.cs.gmr.com (William E. Hamilton CS50 CS/50)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: two questions for Jim Loucks (+digression)
Date: 15 Apr 92 18:41:20 GMT
Reply-To: hamilton@gmr.com (William E. Hamilton CS50 CS/50)
Organization: GM Research Labs, Warren, MI

Jim Loucks responded to my post by email and I tried to reply, but my mailer
can't handle his address. So I will post a few comments that I hope he
will read, and that others in this newsgroup will, I hope, find useful.

I am an evangelical Christian. I have had varying degrees of sympathy with
the creationist view over the years, and 10 - 15 years ago or so I even
became somewhat of a "scientific creationist". After all, if you're a Christian
you believe that God created the heavens and the earth and that He 
"upholds all things by the power of His word" That's Hebrews 1:3.
If you look at the Bible somewhat casually, without worrying about the
fairly clear warnings that God looks at time differently than we do, and 
without worrying about why God said "let the *earth* bring forth creatures
after *its*(that's a literal translation of the Hebrew word
that is normally translated "their") kind" in Gen 1:24, you could conclude
that a literal translation will give you the 7 literal 24 hour days and
the 7000-10000 year age of the earth. So when "scientific" creationists
come along and say, "the young-earth model is more plausible scientifically,"
you can get excited.

But my excitement didn't last long. The first blow was an article by
Barry Setterfield from an Australian creationist magazine called ex-nihilo,
which applied two abuses of approximation theory that would be recognizable
as abuses to any high school junior to "prove" that the speed of light 
has decayed since the creation so radically that the speed of light was 
infinite at the time of Adam. Essentially what Setterfield did was to take
perhaps a dozen measurements of the speed of light going back to Roemer's
figure from the 1700's, find an obscure tabulated function which fit
*all* the data points and extrapolate backwards until it blew up. As
I remember it didn't blow up in the "right" place, so he had to make
some handwaving adjustments to make it blow up at the time of Adam.
Interestingly, what Setterfield did, is just about exactly what
creationists accuse evolutionists of doing: inferring too much from
an inadequate baseline.

The next blow came when I began to read some of the responses of geologists
to the claims of creationists. The responses I read document that
1. Creationists have distorted the history of geology to make it look 
as though the geologists have adjusted their time scale under pressure
from evolutionists. Davis Young is a Christian geologist who does
not believe in evolution. But he is just as adamant as any geologist on this 
newsgroup about that point.

2. Creationists have quoted the findings of geologists out of context to
make it appear that they continue to trust flawed methods. Several
examples of this appear in  
Brent Dalrymple's 
response to creationist claims in geology. Let me quote just one example
from Dalrymple's report (Dept of the interior, U. S. Geological
Survey, Open File Report 86-110 available from Chris Stassen). 
On p 26 he says

	Slusher()1973, Morris(1974) and Kofahl and Segraves(1975) 
        have criticized
	the validity of the K-Ar dating method, citing 
        examples of "anomalous" ages
	from the literature. It is worth discussing a few of their examples
	to illustrate how little validity their criticisms have.

	1. The 1801 flow from Hualeli volcano

		Volcanic rocks produced by lava flows which 
                occurred in Hawaii in
		the years 1800-1801 were dated by the potassium-argon method.
		excess argon produced apparent ages ranging from 160 million
		to 2.96 billion years. (Kofahl and Segraves, 1975, p200)

		Similar modern rocks formed in 1801 near Hualalei, Hawaii,
		were found to give potassium-argon ages ranging from 160
		million years to 3 billion years. (Morris, 1974, p147)

	These authors cite a study by Funkhauser and Naughton (1968) on
	xenolithic inclusions in the 1801 flow from Hualelei volcano 
	in the island of Hawaii.

	The 1801 flow is an unusual flow because it carries very abundant
	inclusions of rocks foreign to the lava.  These inclusions, called
	xenoliths, (meaning foreign rocks) consist primarily of olivine,
	a pale green iron-magnesium silicate mineral. They come from deep
	within the mantle and were carried to the surface by the lava. In the
	field they look like large raisins in a pudding and even occur in 
	beds piled on top of one another, glued together by the lava.
	The study by Funkhauser and Naughton was on the xenoliths, not on
	the lava. The xenoliths, which vary in composition 
        and range in size from
	single mineral grains to rocks the size of basketballs do indeed carry
	excess argon in large amounts. Funkhauser and Naughton 
        were quite careful
	to point out that the apparent "ages" they measured were not
	geologically meaningful. Quite simply, xenoliths are one of the types 
	of rocks that cannot be dated by K-Ar techniques. Funkhauser and
	Naughton were able to determine that the excess gas resides primarily in
	fluid bubbles in the minerals of the xenoliths, where it cannot escape
	on reaching the surface. Studies such as the one by Funkhauser
	and Naughton are done to determine the cause of sometimes strange
	results. They are part of the continuing effort to learn.

   So here is a case of creationist authors either misrepresenting or just
   flat misunderstanding work by geologists. The irony is that they quote
   out of context from a paper which is intended to help geologists avoid
   anomalous results and use it to imply that geologists are careless. That
   is only one example from many Dalrymple discusses.

As a Christian I believe that the Bible is the Word of God. The Word of
God does not have to be defended by tactics like the ones above. Are
creationists truly doing God's will, or are they acting in the flesh?

Bill Hamilton
please reply to hamilton@gmr.com
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Bill Hamilton                  |
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Computer Science Dept.         |      Now faith is the assurance of things
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