TOP
Subject: Re: Apologetics Press on Carbon 14 dating!
Author: Rick Hartzog
Date: Sep 27, 2007

> Evolution and Carbon-14 Dating
> by Eric Lyons, M.Min.

I think it's indicative of a stripped-back operation when
some guy who doesn't have any science background at all is
riffling through the previous AP articles to paste together
a re-presentation of the same old material.

> According to evolutionary scientists, radiocarbon dating
> (also known as carbon-14 dating) is totally ineffective
> in measuring time when dealing with millions of years.

That's why they don't use it for that.

So let's just play with that sentence a little bit:

According to trained professionals, potassium-argon dating
is totally ineffective for dating samples less than about
100,000 years old.

According to scientists, uranium-thorium dating has an upper
limit of about 500,000 years.

And so on.

> In his 2000 book, Genes, People, and Languages, renowned
> Stanford University geneticist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, in
> a discussion on the theory of human evolution, commented
> on radiocarbon dating, stating: "The most crucial dates in
> modern human evolution are unfortunately beyond the range
> of the radiocarbon method, which has a limit of about
> 40,000 years" (p. 61, emp. added).

That's why they've had to use other methods for dating the
Neanderthal fossils. That's why they've had to use other
methods for dating the hominid fossils in the KBS tuff in
Kenya. That's why they use other methods for dating the
zircons from the world's earliest rocks. That's why they
use other methods for dating dinosaur bones!

> Staunch evolutionist Richard Dawkins also dealt with
> the limitations of radiocarbon dating a few years ago
> in his highly touted book, The Blind Watchmaker. He was
> even more critical of this dating method than was
> Cavalli-Sforza, saying:
>
> | Different kinds of radioactive decay-based geological
> | stopwatches run at different rates. The radiocarbon
> | stopwatch buzzes round at a great rate, so fast that,
> | after some thousands of years, its spring is almost
> | wound down and the watch is no longer reliable. It is
> | useful for dating organic material on the
> | archaeological/historical timescale where we are dealing
> | in hundreds or a few thousands of years, but it is no
> | good for the evolutionary timescale where we are dealing
> | in millions of years (1986, p. 226 emp. added).

Is that being "critical", or just telling it like it is?

Notice that mention of these different radioisotopes decaying
at different rates? So how in the world can the same rock,
using two or more different radioisotopic dating methods, come
up with the same age? There is no young-earth creationist
explanation for that at all. They don't even try. They
deliberately ignore it, and try to keep the reader misdirected
with quirks of C-14 dating. You could get rid of C-14 dating
entirely and STILL be left with insurmountable problems for
the young-earth view.

> Both evolutionists and creationists stand in agreement
> that radiocarbon dating, which can be used only to date
> organic samples, is totally ineffective in measuring the
> alleged millions or billions of years of the evolutionary
> timetable.

So why are creationists continually trying to use C-14 to date
things that are (a) way older than thousands of years, and/or
(b) not organic to begin with -- such as diamonds.

> [In truth, even when dating things that are relatively
> young, carbon-14 dating is imperfect...

Define "perfect". A margin of error of a few per cent,
or even 10% or more, isn't going to help the young-earthers
any. Even if it were 20%... let's see... 30,000 years...
hmmm, that's still somewhere between 24 and 36 thousand
years. No help for the young-earth creationists there.

(I think AMS dating has a margin of error below 5% at the
40,000 year range. That's +/- 2,000 years.)

> and based upon certain unprovable assumptions (see Major,
> 1993).]

Define "provable". Science deals in terms of margins-of-error
and probability. The margin of error for old-earth dating
methods is generally a few per cent. Young-earth dating
would require a margin of error of orders of magnitude. The
young-earth creationists make the "unprovable assumption" that
all of science must be wildly wrong. The probability that
they are correct is, well, zero.

The "unprovable assumptions" of radiometric dating is that
decay rates have remained constant. But that has pretty well
been proved anyway. Either the Earth and the Universe are
ancient, or God is trying to fool us.

> If radiocarbon dating can measure only items that are
> thousands of years old, why should evolutionists even
> consider using this dating method on anything that they
> already believe to be millions of years old?

They shouldn't. And they don't. There are a number of
other dating methods -- U/Th, electron spin resonance,
paleomagnetism, varves -- that are all correlated on
the low end with C-14 and extend dating capabilities back
several tens of thousands of years further, where they
begin to correlate with other radiometric methods.

> Creationists would like to see evolutionists apply this
> method to items believed to be millions of years old,
> because it might help convince evolutionists that coal,
> diamonds, fossils, etc. are not millions of years old,
> but only thousands of years old.

Yeah, I bet the creationists would like to see that. Why
don't they pool their own finances and throw their own
money away for a bunch of worthless results? As one museum
director said of the creationists, "Using C-14 for dating
dinosaur bones is ludicrous."

> Consider that in recent years "readily detectable amounts
> of carbon-14" in materials evolutionists suppose are
> millions of years old "have been the rule rather than the
> exception" (DeYoung, 2005, p. 49).

And what are those "readily detectable amounts"? See below.
The reason those trace levels of C-14 are now detectable is
because of much better instrumentation. And look who Lyons
is quoting here! Don DeYoung, the author of one of the
"moon recession" articles!

Red flag! Red flag!

> When geophysicist John Baumgardner and colleagues obtained
> 10 coal samples from the U.S. Department of Energy Coal
> Sample Bank, one of the leading radiocarbon laboratories
> in the world tested the samples for traces of carbon. The
> coal samples were analyzed using the modern accelerator
> mass spectrometry (AMS) method. If the coal were really
> many millions of years old (as evolutionists suggest), no
> traces of carbon-14 should have been found.

Who says?

Most of the geophysicists agree that there may be background
levels of C-14 produced through uranium decay (in other
words, the source of the residual C-14 is not atmospheric
and has nothing to do with organic carbon).

> "[A]ny carbon-containing materials that are truly older
> than 100,000 years should be `carbon-14 dead' with C-14
> levels below detection limits" (DeYoung, p. 49).

Oh. DeYoung again.

Depending on the rock matrix, you may find "detectable
levels" of C-14 in rock that has never been anywhere near
atmospheric carbon or carbon-based organisms.

> But, in fact, traces of carbon-14 were found. "[A] residue
> of carbon-14 atoms was found in all ten samples.... The
> amounts of C-14 in coal are found to average 0.25 percent
> of that in the atmosphere today" (DeYoung, p. 53).

Let's see... 0.25 percent... that's still over 40,000 years.
No help for the young-earthers there.

And let's not forget the geology of the rock above and below
the coal deposits, that the young-earth creationists claim
is all the result of a global Flood a few thousand years ago.

How is it that the dinosaurs were walking aroung leaving
their tracks in soft coal in the middle of the Flood?

> Diamonds assumed to be hundreds of millions of years old
> were also tested — 12 in all. Once again, traces of C-14
> were found in every sample (see DeYoung, pp. 45-62).

You don't say! How could it possibly have happened? ;-)

This is where the RATE crooks really messed up, since
diamonds don't have an organic carbon source at all. That
means that whatever C-14 they have did not come from the
atmosphere, but through radioactive chains that occurred
deep in the Earth.

Seems like geophysicist John Baumgardner and geologist
Steve Austin, who were both members of the RATE team,
would have been aware of this basic fact. It seems like
both of these young-earth "scientists" would have been
acutely aware that they were not detecting organic carbon
in the diamonds.

> In June of 1990, Hugh Miller submitted two dinosaur bone
> fragments to the Department of Geosciences at the
> University in Tucson, Arizona for carbon-14 analysis. One
> fragment was from an unidentified dinosaur...

(just a side question: if it wasn't identified how do you
know it was from a dinosaur? One of those "unprovable
assumptions", perhaps?)

> ...The other was from an Allosaurus excavated by James Hall
> near Grand Junction, Colorado in 1989. Miller submitted the
> samples without disclosing the identity of the bones.

Thereby eliminating any possibility of obtaining a correct
age for the samples.

> (Had the scientists known the samples actually were from
> dinosaurs, they would not have bothered dating them, since
> it is assumed dinosaurs lived millions of years ago —
> outside the limits of radiocarbon dating.)

No, the scientists at the lab would have suggested another
dating method. Dinosaur bones that have washed out of their
original matrix and redeposited in soil are virtually
guaranteed to be contaminated with new C-14.

It is hardly an "assumption" that dinosaurs lived millions
of years ago. The young-earth creationists are one day going
to have to come to terms with the "iridium layer", which
consistently dates at 65 million years using appropriate
dating methods.

> Interestingly, the C-14 analysis indicated that the bones
> were from 10,000-16,000 years old — a far cry from their
> alleged 60-million-year-old age (see Dahmer, et al., 1990,
> pp. 371-374).

And probably a far cry from their original state of deposition,
too. Their are many many ways for organic C-14 to make its
way into materials near the Earth's surface, as well as the
possibility that radioactivity in the surrounding rocks can
produce C-14.

> What is C-14 doing in coal, diamonds, and dinosaur fossils,
> if these objects are really many millions of years old?

What are fishing reels doing stuck in metamorphic phyllite?

> Richard Dawkins declared that C-14 dating "is useful for
> dating organic material on the archaeological/historical
> timescale where we are dealing in hundreds or a few
> thousands of years," not millions of years (1986,
> p. 226, emp. added). Yet, "readily detectable amounts of
> carbon-14," even in coal, diamonds, and various fossils,
> "have been the rule rather than the exception" in recent
> years (DeYoung, 2005, p. 49).

These "readily detectable amounts" are not useful for
dating, either, because they are "background noise". The
whole idea is to measure the C-14 that has decayed since
the time the material was alive. If it's some kind of
material that has never been alive, or if the C-14 is
from an inorganic source, or from an outside organic source,
then the dates cannot possibly be meaningful.

> Why? Evolutionists assert that the specimens in every case
> must have been contaminated by outside carbon. After all,
> everyone "knows" coal is millions of years old, right?

That is correct. Most of the coal is from the Carboniferous
Period (guess why they call it "carboniferous").

Even Trevor Major, whose article Lyons references in this
article, pointed out:

| Contamination by groundwater, soil, or foreign matter is
| always a potential problem. However, people working with
| radiocarbon dating feel confident that good sample
| collection can overcome this problem.

Of course, Major was referring to outside contamination as
a "problem" -- suggesting that the idea that samples had
NOT been contaminated was one of those "unprovable
assumptions". And good sample collection is essential, and
not only collection but in the handling of the sample once
it has been exposed to surface conditions. One creationist
article actually performed C-14 testing on a sample after
it had been sitting in a museum, exposed to modern air,
for several years. The "date" they obtained was bogus, of
course, but they made a big deal out of it in the article.

> Using C-14 dating on specimens already believed to be
> only hundreds or a few thousands of years old is
> considered acceptable. Scientists expect to find carbon
> in samples they perceive as young. But, if specimens
> believed to be millions of years old are tested (e.g., coal),
> and found to have carbon traces, then they "must" have been
> contaminated. Or so we are told.

Yeah -- so we are told -- by the young-earth creationists.

I think we fully expect to find "carbon" in coal.

> Informed creation scientists, like members of the RATE
> (Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth) team...

WHOOP! Those crooks?

Does "60,000 years +/- 400,000 years" ring a bell? How
about "RATE's Ratty Results"?:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/helium/zircons.html

> ...contend that the modern "AMS measurements carefully
> eliminate all possible sources of carbon contamination.
> These include any trace of C-14 which has possibly entered
> the samples in recent history, or C-14 introduction during
> sample preparation and analysis" (DeYoung, 2005, p. 50).

Now how is AMS measurement supposed to possibly be able to
do something like this?

The best recourse is to measure the amount of C-13 as well,
showing that the C-13 in a sample is out of proportion with
the C-12 and C-14. And note: even with state-of-the-art
AMS dating, they are still restricting their upper limit to
about 60,000 years, because beyond that the C-14 level is
so low that it becomes indistinguishable from background
radiation.

> Whereas "unexpected carbon-14 was initially assumed to be a
> result of contamination..., as this problem was aggressively
> explored, it was realized that most of the carbon-14 was
> inherent to the samples being measured" (p. 49).

DeYoung isn't telling us the whole story here. Contamination
of samples can and does occur. When you find levels of C-14
in dinosaur bones that are high enough to derive a date, you
can be certain you have a contaminated sample. Yet there are
rocks in which inorganic C-14 is inherent. These are two
completely different situations, and DeYoung is depending on
the ignorance of his readers to slip this one by.

> The fact is, significant traces of carbon have been detected
> in samples that "should not" contain carbon. Since evolutionists
> are unwilling to adjust their million/billion-year timetable...

The fact is, "evolutionists" (unlike the young-earth creationists)
are completely UNABLE to "adjust" the timetable. It just won't
work. Trevor Major's article gives an example of why -- the
table from Whitelaw's attempt to fudge the C-14 dates. Whitelaw,
another young-earth creationist, fixes the dates all right, with
the result that they can not possibly correlate with any of the
other dating methods, such as tree-rings, speleotherms, and varves,
of which we have direct observational evidence that their
rings/layers are ANNUAL. Whitelaw's table is an excellent example
of just the sort of MESS you can come up with when start trying
to "adjust" a "million/billion year timetable" of overlapping
and correlated dates, attempting to cram one set of these dates
into a 7,000 year period.

Notice Lyons' little bobble there -- "should not contain carbon".
I think we can assume he means C-14. And if samples do contain
C-14, we can't say they shouldn't, because for some reason or
other they obviously should. We just have to identify what
that reason is. But the idea that it is because the Earth is
only a few thousand years old is out of the question.

> ...they are forced to conclude that radiocarbon dating is always
> faulty when it comes up with young dates (measured in hundreds or
> thousands of years) for assumed old specimens (supposedly millions
> of years old).

That's the way most statistical analyses work -- you throw out the
"outliers". If you test a hundred "things" and they all test within
a range of 87-93, except for one of those "things" gives you a result
of, say, 17, you would be stupid to include that in your results.

> Do you see anything wrong with this picture?

I sure do! Dear reader, do you?

> The fact is, coal, diamonds, and dinosaur fossils containing
> traces of carbon is no surprise.
>
> One would expect to find such if the biblical accounts of
> Creation and the Flood are true.

Oh no you absolutely would NOT! No no no! If the Earth was
only about 10,000 years or less, the radioisotope record
would look NOTHING AT ALL like what we observe. Nothing like
it at all!

I wonder if Apologetics Press's use of someone with a "Master
of Ministry" degree to write their science articles is a part
of their overall scheme to maintain "plausible deniability" --
instead of being able to accuse Lyons of being a blatant liar
we can only accuse him of being totally ignorant of the subjects
about which he writes?

> REFERENCES
> Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi (2000), Genes, Peoples, and Languages
> (New York: North Point Press).
>
> Dahmer, Lionel, D. Kouznetsov, et al. (1990), "Report on
> Chemical Analysis and Further Dating of Dinosaur Bones and
> Dinosaur Petroglyphs," Proceedings of the Second
> International Conference on Creationism, ed. Robert E. Walsh
> and Christopher L. Brooks (Pittsburgh, PA: Creation Science
> Fellowship).
>
> Dawkins, Richard (1986), The Blind Watchmaker (New York:
> W.W. Norton).
>
> DeYoung, Don (2005), Thousands...Not Billions (Green Forest,
> AR: Master Books).

That little publishing house in Arkansas really puts out
the science texts, doesn't it!

> Major, Trevor (1993), "Dating in Archaeology: Radiocarbon
> & Tree-Ring Dating," Apologetics Press, [On-line], URL:
> http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/2019.

If you haven't read this one in a while, I would recommend it.
There is actually a little science in it. It would be fun if
we could all get together with printed copies of Major's
article and mark with a red highlighter the sentences where
he tries to pull his flim-flams.

The difference between Major's article and the stuff they're
putting out now from the Montgomery fantasy factory really
points up how far downhill Apologetics Press has gone in the
last few years.

Rick Hartzog
Worldwide Church of Latitudinarianism

TOP
Subject: Re: Kyle Butt's "trump" card!
Author: Todd Greene
Date: Jun 11, 2007

Yet again do we hear "creationist wisdom" from the font of ignorance.

It's "NGC" not "NCG". NGC is an acronym for "New General Catalog,"
sometimes also referred to as the "New Galaxy Catalog."

This is the "brilliant" argument of young earth creationists.
Astronomers made a mistake in one particular example, therefore we
need to throw all astronomical science out the window and buy into
the young earth creationist notion that no galaxies are farther than
6,000 light-years from Earth. This is the level of sheer idiocy of
the argument being used by Kyle Butt. Another one of those "arguments
by false insinuation" that they love so much. Arguing that because
astronomers got a wrong redshift value on a preliminary analysis 20
years ago then maybe astronomers are all wrong and the Sun really
does orbit the Earth after all, is just as reasonable an argument as
the argument-by-insinuation that Kyle is making. Note this is
particular argument, "scientists might be all wrong," is a popular
one in the young earth creationist rhetoric.

Doctors make mistakes, too, therefore we shall expect Kyle to stay
away from doctors and hospitals and to tell everyone else to do the
same - if he really takes his own argument seriously. Of course, you
know we'll never see Kyle do any such thing. Pilots screw up too.
Sometimes they screw up so badly they crash passenger jets and kill
dozens of people - so according to the "logic" of Kyle's argument
airplanes can't really fly. This is indeed the kind of irrationality
that Kyle is trying to foist off on everyone: Astronomers screw up,
so astronomical science is bogus, and young earth creationist
mythology is correct, and we don't observe the Universe in existence
before 6,000 years ago even though astronomers are telling us we're
observing the Universe from the distant past.

The details of this particular matter - which you'll never get from a
young earth creationist as ignorant of science as Kyle Butt, M.A. -
is that astronomers may never have actually done a careful redshift
analysis of this particular galaxy due to not taking care to
eliminate the "light pollution" of the nearby (nearby by line of
sight) NGC 5011B galaxy - but now such a careful analysis has been
done and the relevant empirical data shows that the galaxy was not
where it had been thought to be before this more careful analysis.

Bear in mind that there are literally billions of galaxies in the
Universe (this is not any kind of exaggeration), and compared to this
vast number of galaxies that exist astronomers have only studied a
tiny, tiny fraction of them in detail, and this only happens
according to the interests and time (and resources they can get
access to, in terms of telescopic technology) of individual
astronomers.

Here's a direct link to the press release on the ESO (European
Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere)
website, where you can get the straight scoop instead of the rubbish
you get with the typical distorted mischaracterizations from young
earth creationists:

The Giant that Turned Out to be a Dwarf
(ESO, 3/7/2007)
http://www.eso.org/public/outreach/press-rel/pr-2007/pr-09-07.html

Here are two links to the research paper itself:

NGC 5011C: an overlooked dwarf galaxy in the Centaurus A group
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph?papernum=0701280
http://www.arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0701/0701280v1.pdf

Here are some pictures of the "Centaurus A" galaxy that NGC 5011C
turns out to be "close" to (at about 12 million light-years from
Earth), rather than being a member of the substantially more
distant "Centaurus Cluster" of galaxies (at about 160 million light-
years from Earth).

Centaurus A
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap030806.html

Centaurus A
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1998/14/image/a/

Centaurus Supercluster
http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/superc/cen.html

Now that NGC 5011C has had a careful redshift measurement performed
on it, we may see some other astronomer become interested in it
enough to conduct a Cepheid star survey and analysis (when it was
thought to be 140 million light-years away there would be no purpose
in this because you cannot resolve individual stars at that distance,
not even with the Hubble Space Telescope, but at the distance of
around 12 million light-years Cepheid stars can be imaged, measured,
and analyzed), and thus nail down the estimation of the distance even
more accurately. (Oh, geeze, can you imagine that? Professional
scientists might actually do MORE study and MORE analysis and thus
REVISE things even more. Isn't that terrible!)

One other point: It's amazing how utterly closed-minded, never-admit-
any-error young earth creationists have the audacity to express
criticism of scientists who are doing the right thing by pointing out
errors and correcting them, while it is the young earth creationists
themselves whose rhetoric is permeated with blatantly erroneous
misinformation about science, yet when you point their errors out to
them they bury their heads in the sand, obstinately refuse to
acknowledge or correct their errors, and then you catch them
continuing to spout the same old nonsense months, years, even decades
later.

Kyle, why do you look at the speck of sawdust in someone else's eye
and pay no attention to the plank that's in your own eye? How can you
dare to say to someone else, "Let me take the speck out of your eye,"
when you yourself fail to deal with getting the plank out of your own
eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then
maybe, just maybe, you'll be capable of seeing clearly enough to
remove the speck from the eyes of professional scientists.

Until then, your hypocrisy turns your sermon into one big joke.

Oh, by the way, the biblical text has NOT stood for centuries. We
don't execute witches, we don't condone slavery, and we don't
slaughter men, women, and children and pawn it off on the command of
a tribal God telling us to take over our "promised land." And, oh, by
the way, if the Bible teaches that the Universe didn't exist more
than 6,000 years ago - as you say it does - then indeed the Bible is
horribly wrong on the subject! Amazing how you would dare to bring up
the very science that so obviously proves that your religious dogma
is a totally false idea about the real, since it is by astronomical
observation that we literally witness events that took place out in
the Universe millions and billions of years ago!

There also the critical point of how the process of science itself
stands in stark contrast to the ravings of religious fundamentalists
precisely because constant revision is an integral aspect of the
scientific process. Kyle apparently doesn't realize this, but the
fact that he castigates science's feature of constant revision
unwittingly serves to demonstrate the epistemological failure of his
own fundamentalist mindset.

- Todd Greene


--- In Maury_and_Baty, Robert Baty wrote (post #10292):
> Kyle Butt has posted an interesting article on the
> Apologetics Press website today.
>
> Here's the link and excerpts:
>
> ----------------------------------
>
> http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/3363
>
> June 11, 2007
>
> Off by only 142 million light years
> By Kyle Butt, M.A.
>
> (excerpts)
>
> In general, our modern society places a huge premium on
> "scientific" data.
>
> Often, modern "findings" are used to "prove" that God
> does not exist or that the Bible is not an accurate
> portrayal of verifiable reality.
>
> For example, for the last 23 years, researchers thought
> that a galaxy named NCG 5011C was a huge galaxy far away
> from our own. Its small appearance, they suggested, was
> due to its great distance. But recent "findings" suggest
> that they were wrong—seriously wrong.
>
> Initially, astronomers placed the galaxy in the Centaurus
> cluster, which they believe to be located about 155
> million light years away. [NOTE: A light year is the
> distance light travels in a year. The actual distance in
> miles is about 6 trillion.]
>
> The new information, however, seems to indicate that NCG
> 5011C is not a huge galaxy 155 million light years away,
> but is instead a dwarf galaxy only about 13 million light
> years away (Goudarzi, 2007). As researcher Ivo Saviane
> stated: "Our new observations with the 3.6-m ESO
> telescope thus confirm a new member of the nearby
> Centaurus A group whose true identity remained hidden
> because of coordinate confusion and wrong distance
> estimates in the literature for the last 23 years" (as
> quoted in Goudarzi, emp. added).
>
> To put this mistake in numeric form, researchers were
> wrong about the distance of NCG 5011C by 732 quintillion
> miles or 732,000,000,000,000,000,000!
>
> That is a considerable miscalculation! And that is
> assuming that the new "findings" are accurate.
>
> While not all scientific research is plagued by such
> egregious error, the generally accepted idea that modern
> scientific "findings" trump every other source of
> information is simply false.
>
> In regard to scientific research in general, John
> Ioannidis stated, "Most published scientific research
> papers are wrong.... [S]mall sample sizes, poor study
> design, researcher bias, and selective reporting and
> other problems combine to make most research findings
> false" (as quoted in Kleiner, 2005). Ioannidis concluded
> that about one out of two (50%) randomly picked
> scientific papers is wrong (2005).
>
> In truth, information in science books changes from year
> to year. A science book is virtually out of date the
> moment it comes off the press.
>
> Yet the biblical text has stood for centuries.
>
> Its integrity has surpassed that of any book ever
> printed. And the scientific information in it coincides
> perfectly with all factual data.
>
> Truly, science texts will come and go, astronomers and
> cosmologists will miscalculate by quintillions of miles
> and billions of years, but "the word of the Lord endures
> forever" (1 Peter 1:25).
[snip]

TOP
Subject: Re: AP's Kyle Butt affirms geologic record of Noah's flood!
Author: Todd Greene
Date: Dec 16, 2005

Back on Nov. 7, I wrote the following:

> I have sent
> a copy of each of these posts to Kyle Butt at Apologetics Press,
> along with the links to the original posts in the "coCBanned"
> discussion group (i.e., these are "posted and emailed"):
>
> Re: AP's Kyle Butt affirms geologic record of Noah's flood!
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coCBanned/message/3456
>
> Re: AP's Kyle Butt affirms geologic record of Noah's flood!
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coCBanned/message/3458
>
> Putting on my mantle, I prophesy that Kyle will ignore all
> criticism of his erroneous ideas and pretend it doesn't exist.
> If anyone wants to place bets on this, please mail your check
> to my address as follows...
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coCBanned/message/3459

Just as I predicted, the young earth creationist Kyle Butt (and
other Apologetics staff) has completely ignored the numerous errors
that I pointed out to him. As I write this it is Dec. 16th, 5 weeks
later, and I have received zero response of any kind from Kyle. This
is Standard Operating Procedure for young earth creationists, to
purposely ignore their errors, obstinately refuse to correct their
errors, and the purposely continue to spread the lies. Motivated by
their Christian morality, no doubt.

Chuckling,
Todd Greene

TOP
Subject: Re: AP's Kyle Butt affirms geologic record of Noah's flood!
Author: Todd Greene
Date: Nov 7, 2005

In coCBanned, Robert Baty wrote (post #3457), "Todd, ...I would ask
that you document your formal effort to ask Kyle Butt, or any other
Apologetics Press representative, to set forth their affirmative
argument regarding Kyle's article and the evidence for a recent
world-wide flood for consideration by Todd as to taking up the
negative in a formal, in writing, for the record discussion of the
matter."

At the moment, I have sent a copy of each of these posts to Kyle
Butt at Apologetics Press, along with the links to the original
posts in the "coCBanned" discussion group (i.e., these are "posted
and emailed"):

Re: AP's Kyle Butt affirms geologic record of Noah's flood!
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coCBanned/message/3456

Re: AP's Kyle Butt affirms geologic record of Noah's flood!
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coCBanned/message/3458

Putting on my mantle, I prophesy that Kyle will ignore all criticism
of his erroneous ideas and pretend it doesn't exist. If anyone wants
to place bets on this, please mail your check to my address as
follows...

Chuckling,
Todd Greene

TOP
Subject: Re: AP's Kyle Butt affirms geologic record of Noah's flood!
Author: Todd Greene
Date: Nov 7, 2005

Previously in the "coCBanned" discussion group, I have commented on
the Lake Missoula floods as follows (and I provide some online
references for you below, to investigate further information about
the Lake Missoula floods):

| ...floods jumble things
| and mix them up. But this is NOT what we observe about the
| geological and fossil record. Don't get me wrong - within
| certain spots in the geological record we see where floods
| have produced what has then remained and become part of the
| record. There's a very recent example of this (but it's
| sediment that has not lithified into geological strata because
| it's too recent to have turned to rock), and that is the Lake
| Missoula flood in the northwest U.S. and southwest Canada
| area, massive floods that took place between 10,000 and 15,000
| years ago as the result of melting and then breaking of ice
| dams as average temperatures were becoming warmer at the end
| of the last ice age. Floods leave specific kinds of sediment
| and land forms, and the Lake Missoula floods area terrain
| shows a beautiful example of massive, catastrophic flooding.
| But that's NOT what we observe about the geological record as
| a whole. The strata that we observe were formed in particular
| kinds of environments, and are NOT just a bunch of stuff
| jumbled up and mixed together by flooding.
|
| The point to keep in mind in the context of our current
| discussion is that floods produce sediment (and it's
| particular kinds of sediment), not rock. It takes a great deal
| of time for sediment layers to lithify. And with the geologic
| column as it exists in various manifestations across the
| planet we observe tens of thousands of feet of sedimentary
| layers that were deposited (which takes a great deal of time,
| far longer than just 6,000 years), then lithified (turned to
| rock; and this takes a great deal of additional time, far
| longer than just 6,000 years), then eroded (because we observe
| with many or perhaps most of these layers that they lithified
| and then this lithified layer was eroded; and the erosion of
| significant portions of rock takes a great deal of time, far
| longer than just 6,000 years).
|
| http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coCBanned/message/320

| Geology is based on a lot of things. Where there are
| "cataclysmic" events it recognizes them. Golly, geological
| science recognizes everything from huge volcanic explosions
| and massive outflows of magma, to massive flooding (such as
| the Lake Missoula floods), to terrestrial impacts by comets or
| asteroids that wipe out whole ecosystems and substantial
| numbers of biological species. It's ludicrous for Keith to
| pretend that geology doesn't recognize cataclysms.
|
| What irritates Keith [Sisman], and the other young earth
| creationists, so much is that geological science does not
| observe anything in regard to one particular mythical
| cataclysm, namely the worldwide flood myth in Genesis that
| according to the Genesis timeframe allegedly took place a few
| thousand years ago. What irritates them as well is that
| geology also falsifies the claims that young earth
| creationists make all the time about effects that this
| alleged worldwide flood is supposed to have had.
|
| http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coCBanned/message/138

We know what massive catastrophic flood effects look like - and we
don't see anything from any alleged worldwide flood:

Glacial Lake Missoula and the Missoula Floods
(U.S. Geological Survey, Cascades Volcano Observatory, Vancouver, WA)
http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Glossary/Glaciers/IceSheets/
description_lake_missoula.html

This one has a good discussion of the giant floods and then shows a
number of pictures in the "Virtual Tour" - again, we know what
massive catastrophic flood effects look like, and we don't see
anything from any alleged worldwide flood:

Glacial Lake Missoula
(Montana Natural History Center)
http://www.glaciallakemissoula.org/virtualtour/

The Great Floods of Glacial Lake Missoula
(Evergreen State College)
http://192.211.16.13/curricular/energies/Aprojfolder/missoula/
Title.htm
(Shows maps and pictures.)

Joseph Thomas Pardee and the Spokane Flood Controversy
(Geological Society of America, GSA Today, Sep. 1995)
http://www.geosociety.org/pubs/gsatoday/gsat9509.htm
[warning: 1.9 MB PDF file]

Columbia Plateau - Channeled Scablands, Internet Resources
(North Dakota State University)
http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/instruct/schwert/geosci/
g496_columbia_plateau/g495link.htm

Regards,
Todd Greene

TOP
Subject: Re: AP's Kyle Butt affirms geologic record of Noah's flood!
Author: Todd Greene
Date: Nov 7, 2005

--- In coCBanned, Robert Baty posts the following discussion by Kyle
Butt (post #3455):
> Apologetics Press - What a Catastrophe
> http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/712
>
> What a Catastrophe
> by Kyle Butt, M.A.
>
> (excerpts)
>
> On September 20, 2005, PBS stations around the country aired a
> program titled "Mystery of the Megaflood," in which they
> explored plausible causes for the geological features found in
> the region 200 miles east of Seattle known as the scablands.
>
> In the 1920s, a geologist named J. Harlan Bretz suggested that
> neither a slow-eroding river nor glacial activity caused the
> massive geological features.
>
>> "His fieldwork convinced him that
>> the Scablands were not the result
>> of slow geological weathering but
>> of an enormous catastrophe that
>> had taken place almost overnight
>> when a titanic flood engulfed the
>> region" ("NOVA: Mystery...").
>
> His ideas were largely rejected, because they did not jive with
> the then-prevailing notion known as uniformitarianism — that the
> present is the key to the past and geologic features are the
> result of long periods of uniform transformation.

Here is Kyle's first major error. This particular error is based
both on ignorance of geology and on the several decades long
confusion that young earth creationists have created for themselves
with their own insular rhetoric about "uniformitarianism." Young
earth creationists often pretend (due to ignorance of geology) that
geologists ignore catastropic events. It's actually a very stupid
argument, since geologists have recognized catastropic events, such
as floods and volcanic eruptions, as part of geology for over 200
years.

> Yet, recent research suggests that Bretz' catastrophic conclusion
> fits the facts much more sufficiently.

"Recent research"??? As usual, Kyle is either decades behind the
times on the science, or he's misrepresenting the matter to make his
point - which means his point is based either on ignorance or
misrepresentation. Geologists have known about the Lake Missoula
floods (more than one) for decades. This is not just recent. Bretz'
conclusions were initially met with skepticism, but due to
continuing SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH in the geology of the area geologists
learned that there was not only one catastrophic flood, but a series
of them toward the end of the last Ice Age.

> (W)e have evidence that the scablands were formed by massive
> flooding, not by slow-working uniformitarian processes.

Here's Kyle's confusion about geology again. The scablands were
formed by massive flooding which was the result of uniformitarian
processes. Frankly, with the words he uses in this sentence Kyle
shows that he just doesn't know what he's talking about.

> We also have evidence that other areas around the world, from
> the Rocky Mountains to Russia and China, were similarly affected
> by megaflooding that was "comparable in magnitude."

Here's another example of massive flooding on the scale of the Lake
Missoula floods:

The Altai Flood
http://www.mines.edu/academic/geology/faculty/klee/altai.doc

> Of course, anyone familiar with the biblical account of Noah's
> Flood would certainly be led to wonder about the possibility
> that all these various "floods" might not have been localized,
> but were due to one worldwide, massive inundation.
>
> When statements like Baker's...are coupled with the fact
> that...the plausibility of a world-wide flood comes sharply
> into focus.

This is nonsense. Look up "Lake Missoula" floods (and you can see
the same kind of thing in the article about the Altai Flood) and the
geologic features of these areas and these floods show clearly and
obviously that they are not worldwide floods, but are floods
produced by lakes that were in mountainous areas where the mountains
form the walls, and glaciers formed the dams, and when toward the
end of the ice age as the glaciers were melting back, there were
times when the accumulated meltwater that had been trapped (forming
the lakes) broke through the weakening ice dam and flooded through.
In other words, Kyle totally ignores what is actually observed.

> (O)ne of the most important questions that the geological
> sciences should raise often is ignored because of its religious
> implications.
>
> Is there geologic evidence of a global flood?
>
> In truth, the answer to this question is a resounding "Yes!"

No, this is Kyle's Big Lie - a Big Lie that is repeated often in
young earth creationist rhetoric. The idea of a worldwide flood is
ignored in geology because there isn't any geological evidence of a
worldwide flood.

> With more and more geological evidences piling up pointing to a
> global flood, it is becoming increasingly obvious that those who
> refuse to recognize it as a fact are
>
>> WILLFULLY IGNORING
>> THAT EVIDENCE!

Which is an ironically humorous statement coming from young earth
creationist Kyle who WILLFULLY IGNORES what the geology of the Lake
Missoula floods and other similar kinds of floods actually look like.

To Kyle, any evidence of a flood is exactly the same thing as
evidence of a worldwide flood, which demonstrates the illogical
nature of his argument. Kyle's argument boils down to something like
this: New Orleans experienced a massive flood. This is evidence that
there was a worldwide flood on August 29, 2005.

Oh, you didn't notice it either?!?

Chuckling,
Todd Greene

TOP
Subject: Further comments to Keith
Author: Todd Greene
Date: Jun 29, 2005

Hi, Keith.

I'm writing this post because I want to explicitly state that I have
little to no interest in the recent events having to do with Bert
Thompson. I'm interested in topics having to do with science and
religion, and usually topics related to young earth creationism.
I'll be the first to tell you that Thompson's behavior of a
scandalous nature is completely irrelevant to the claims that he and
other young earth creationists make about science. Nothing that I
could or would say about these recent events would have an relevance
to the topics related to young earth creationism, or to science, so
I just don't have much interest in them. Bert himself has now "left
the building," but his voluminous young earth creationist propaganda
will live on, both in his writings on the subject, and through the
young earth creationist institution (aka, propaganda machine) that
he created and worked to build over the past many years. Now we have
Brad Harrub and Kyle Butt spewing out more YEC propaganda. And
besides Apologetics Press, there are all the COC preachers and other
COC members recirculating this material and the long-discredited
claims and fallacious logic, and of course there is the wider young
earth creationist movement among many conservative denominations in
general. There's the Institute for Creation Research (ICR, U.S.),
the Answers in Genesis group (AiG, Australia), Creation Research
Society (CRS, U.S.), and then various other smaller YEC groups.
(These days there's even a young earth creationist movement that has
sprung up in fundamentalist Moslem groups, thanks to the popular
movement in the U.S.) Bert may be gone, but I have no doubt that the
scourge of young earth creationism is going to continue for some
time yet.

Regards,
Todd Greene

TOP
Subject: Discussion/Debate on YEC open to Brad Harrub
Author: Todd Greene
Date: Jun 16, 2005

"Open Letter" to Brad Harrub...

--------------------------------

To: Brad Harrub
From: Todd Greene
Date: June 16, 2005
Subject: Discussion/Debate on YEC open to Brad Harrub

Hi, Brad Harrub.

I offer you the following propositions for formal debate (spoken or
written), or for informal discussion:

| Proposition: The empirical evidence shows that the
| Earth has been in existence longer than one hundred
| thousand (100,000) years.

| Proposition: The empirical evidence shows that the
| Universe has been in existence longer than one
| hundred thousand (100,000) years.

Those are stated as I would affirm them. Here I also state them as
you would affirm them:

| Proposition: The empirical evidence shows that the
| Earth is less than one hundred thousand (100,000)
| years old.

| Proposition: The empirical evidence shows that the
| Universe is less than one hundred thousand
| (100,000) years.

Currently I'm active in a relatively new online discussion group at
this internet address:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coCBanned

You can view the "coCBanned" posts archive here:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coCBanned/messages

Note the "coC" in the address. The list owner is a member of the
Church of Christ and I believe all of the list moderators are
members of the Church of Christ. (In addition, the list owner is a
young earth creationist, and I believe all of the list moderators
are young earth creationists. Also, I am not a member of the Church
of Christ, but I'm a former member.) I invite you to discuss the
issue of young earth creationism in that discussion forum, and
should you wish to use the form of a formal debate in written form
we could also use that discussion forum, or I can facilitate things
further by setting up a specific Yahoo discussion forum where you
and I are the sole members allowed to post to the group (though the
posts archive would be a publicly viewable list on the internet).
While I have mentioned the "coCBanned" online discussion group in
particular, I will meet you in any online discussion forum of your
choosing to discuss the subject of young earth creationism.

Please note that I treat all communications and discussion in regard
to this as "open to the public," as is this note I have written to
you, which will have a copy posted in the "coCBanned" discussion
group.

Regards,
Todd Greene

TOP
Subject: Re: Is Dr. Brad running scared from my "Goliath"? - correction
Author: Todd Greene
Date: Jun 14, 2005

--- In coCBanned, Todd Greene wrote (post #1318):
> If I remember correctly, and I believe I do, Dr. Brad is an
> advocate of the apparent age argument, which means that he actually
> acknowledges the fact that the empirical evidence shows that the
> Earth has been around a lot longer than just six or ten thousand
> years, but, of course, he argues that his Prankster God just
> created things to look that way, so all the evidence is fake.

Hi, everyone.

I was wrong about this. I confused Brad Harrub for Kyle Butt. When I
wrote this I was actually thinking about the following articles
written by Kyle Butt:

http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/482
http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/1674

Bert Thompson has advocated the apparent age argument for decades.
Here are a couple of articles at AP where Bert uses this concept:

http://www.apologeticspress.org/rr/reprints/apparent.pdf
http://www.apologeticspress.org/rr/reprints/bsage.pdf

Here's an example of Trevor Major using the concept:

http://www.apologeticspress.org/rr/reprints/chic-egg.pdf

(Note that Trevor Major may no longer agree with that position, but
Trevor is "lying low" on the subject these days.)

Does Brad Harrub advocate the apparent age argument? I don't know.

Regards,
Todd Greene

TOP
Subject: Re: Is Dr. Brad running scared from my "Goliath"?
Author: Todd Greene
Date: Jun 14, 2005

--- In coCBanned, Robert Baty quotes Brad Harrub Ph.D. as follows
(post #1314):
> Apologetics Press :: In the News
> http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/2756
>
> (excerpts)
>
> The Smell of Fear is in the Air
> by Brad Harrub, Ph.D.
>
> They are dreadfully scared!
>
> Evolutionists all around the country realize that the
> stronghold they once held over science departments and the
> public-in-general is slowly losing its grip.
>
> Evolutionists are running scared.
>
> People are questioning not only the evolutionists' biased
> agendas, but also their science and logic.
>
> Many individuals are beginning to realize that, at times, the
> evolutionists' beliefs are held in place by a stiff-necked
> desire not to yield to a Creator, rather than by the actual
> evidence itself.

The truth is that young earth creationists such as Dr. Brad are so
clueless about science, and so clueless about their cluelessness,
that they PUBLISH FOR EVERYONE TO SEE their utterly ridiculous claim
that phyllite rock formed at the Tellico River within that last 100
years!!!

The truth is that young earth creationists such as Dr. Brad are so
clueless about science that they don't even know the difference
between different areas of science, so they keep confusing GEOLOGY
and ASTRONOMY and other areas of science with evolution!

The truth is that young earth creationists have totally abandoned
any attempt to do any real science at all, so much so that now all
they do is promote 30 and 40 year old lies about short-period
comets, moon dust, Earth's magnetic field decay, a shrinking sun,
eroded tracks at the Paluxy River misidentified by young earth
creationists as "human footprints", and dozens of other silly claims
that they use to bamboozle people who don't know any better.

Young earth creationists don't even know what real science is, and
as we have seen demonstrated right here recently they don't even
know what logic is either.

As we are also seeing demonstrated right now young earth
creationists beliefs are held in place by a stiff-necked desire to
purposely ignore all of the evidence that proves that their young
earth creationist idea is totally false. (Indeed, we have seen that
they love to pretend that no evidence even exists, thus waving their
hands - over their eyes! - and wishing such obvious things as the
Grand Canyon rock layers away.)

If I remember correctly, and I believe I do, Dr. Brad is an advocate
of the apparent age argument, which means that he actually
acknowledges the fact that the empirical evidence shows that the
Earth has been around a lot longer than just six or ten thousand
years, but, of course, he argues that his Prankster God just created
things to look that way, so all the evidence is fake.

Regards,
Todd Greene

TOP
Subject: Baty: 3, Thompson: 0
Author: Todd Greene
Date: May 14, 2005

Hi, everyone.

In post #643 Robert Baty quotes Bert Thompson who wrote, "as soon as
criticism about our article began to arrive in our offices (including
some that was offered in extremely inflammatory language and that
included slurs, innuendoes, and personal attacks against both the
authors and our work in general), we nevertheless tried to accept the
criticism at face value, and worked diligently to try to ferret out
the actual facts of the case." This is pretty funny seeing Dr. Bert,
the master of inflammatory language, slurs, innuendoes, and personal
attacks, complain about inflammatory language, slurs, innuendoes, and
personal attacks!

Bert also wrote, "Truth is very important to us, and we do not want
to ever knowingly use any material, or offer any explanation, that is
not defensible via the actual facts of the case. I hope this will be
evident to any fair-minded reader, as evinced by the following
actions on our part."

Well, going from Bert's behavior over the years, it's not evident at
all, I have written about several other discredited young earth
creationist claims that Bert makes in the same article from which he
removed his moon dust claim (after over 20 years). And that's an old
article. I have discussed the errors in Bert's article here:

"Bert Thompson's "Young Earth" - 1 down, 7 more to go!"
(April 19, 2005)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Maury_and_Baty/message/5935

As a recent example of this same kind of thing, there's also Bert's
article a few months ago about the National Geographic's recent issue
on the subject of evolution. That article also contains a number of
errors and confusions, as well as well as containing a lot of
inflammatory language, slurs, innuendoes, and personal attacks.

I suspect the talk.origins correspondent is quite correct. The main
motivator here was the quick and public nature of the criticism.
Without that, Bert would never have pulled the article. That's just
how Bert operates.

But let's give credit where credit is due: At least it didn't take
Bert 20 years to realize he had a problem with this one!

Bert also wrote, "it is my hope that the fact we have removed the
article from our Web site will serve as compelling confirmation of
the value we place on truth, as well as proof that we are willing to
respond in an honorable manner when challenged."

On 5/1/05 I sent an email to Brad Harrub at Apologetics Press in
which I wrote the following:

| I'm writing because I'd love to have your explanation on one
| point in particular which really, really, really doesn't make
| any sense to me.
|
| In your article, you wrote:
|
|| "We contend that the rock is not 300 million years
|| old, as evolutionists purport. Instead, it formed
|| recently, allowing a 100-year-old fishing reel to
|| become embedded during the process."
|
| Now, the fact is that Americans have been living in the
| Tellico River area for over 200 years. (The Cherokee...were
| living there before that, but that's another story.) In all
| that time no one has ever observed rock layers (of phyllite or
| any other kind of rock) growing at the Tellico River (or
| upstream). Indeed, a few decades ago that area was also the
| focus of detailed examination because of a dam that was built
| there (so that now part of the Tellico River has become the
| Tellico Lake reservoir).
|
| So here is my question that I'd love to have your explanation
| for: If these layers of rock are forming there in less than
| 100 years as you say they are, then how do you explain the
| fact that no one has ever observed this and that what they
| have observed is that the river is pretty much the same as
| it has been for over a hundred years except for a little bit
| of additional erosion over the years and the formation of a
| lake (reservoir) due to the construction of the dam?
|
| I look forward to reading your explanation for this.

I have received no answer yet, but, of course, it's only been a
couple of weeks, and maybe Bert or some of his AP staff is going to
some additional time and expense to engage in some real Ph.D. type
investigation of the Tellico River, in order to give my question a
proper response. Anyone want to take any bets on whether or not AP
will answer my question within the next two years, if ever? Or you
could just give me an advance on my winnings now and send your check
to my address. Thanks!

Chuckling,
Todd Greene

P.S.: Matthew Maury was an old earth creationist, if not a theistic
evolutionist (I don't know whether or not Maury accepted the idea of
evolution, and I'm not digging into that one right now). Some ocean
explorers had discovered the fact that the ocean has currents - and
they had mapped some of them - before Maury was even born. And at the
big Maury monument in Virginia, he is NOT holding a Bible in his
hand! (Baty 1, Thompson 0.) The fact that there is at most a few
inches of cosmic dust accumulation on the moon is perfectly
consistent with 4.6 billion years and the OBSERVED cosmic dust
accumulation rate. (Baty 2, Thompson 0.) The fact that the people
actually living in the Tellico River area over the last 100 years and
have observed that the Tellico River is pretty much the same except
for 100 years of erosion (other than the constructed dam and ensuing
reservoir), and have NOT observed rock layers forming, demonstrates
that Apologetic Press' recent claim that rock - and not just any
rock, but phyllite rock, which is a metamorphic rock! - has formed at
the Tellico River within the past 100 years is total rubbish. (Baty
3, Thompson 0.)

TOP
Subject: Re: Group Grinds to a Stop
Author: Todd Greene
Date: Apr 5, 2005 5:07

> --- Randy Crum wrote:
>>>> Morrowitz: Days later, we see the Evols still
>>>> bickering over April 1. And, no new posts.
>>>> Time to close down the Forum?
>>
>> I don't think so. This is all HUGE fun for the
>> evolutionists.
>>
>> I'm thinking that we should have a contest. What is
>> the most ridiculous thing that anyone can suggest that a
>> creationist would actually believe in? Note that there
>> are already a number of outstanding entries.
>>
>> So far the best one seems to be that creationists
>> believe that Fred Flintstone is real!
>>
>> I don't think that I can beat that one, but maybe
>> someone else can.

--- In creationism, Jackson Thomas wrote (post #24223):
> I have two: Ms. Texas believes Neanderthals traveled
> in space, and built nuclear reactors.

Hi, everyone.

Well, I've always liked Alley Oop better than Fred Flintstone. And I
like Turok better than either one! When I was a kid, the Turok comic
books were just great! Bert Thompson, a young earth creationist in
Montgomery, Alabama with a legitimate Ph.D. in biochemistry from
Texas Tech University iirc (or maybe Texas A&M), has in the last two
months been arguing in his "Reason & Revelation" journal that the
monster of the Beowulf legend may have been a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and
that formations of phyllite rock lithify and metamorphose in less
than 100 years!

I've had discussions with one young earth creationist who seriously
argued that there were only a few hundred galaxies in the entire
universe and these were all within 6,000 light-years of Earth (of
course). And I've also had discussions with a young earth
creationist with a (legitimate) Ph.D. in Education (who taught
applied physics at a junior college in Oklahoma - a state school
from my understanding) who argued seriously that light from distant
sources in the universe - such as, say, a supernova 10 billion light-
years from Earth - would never take more than 15.71 light-years to
reach Earth! It truly is amazing - and funny - and sad - how
religious dogma can turn the brains of otherwise intelligent people
into pure mush!

By the way, notice the subject header of this thread. It's these
kinds of comments that make creationists look so utterly silly. It
reminded me of the claim that creationists have been making for over
100 years of the imminent demise of evolution in the scientific
community. If you look at the statistics for this discussion group,
you'll notice that this group is larger now and has more active
discussion now since I started it up in 1999, but Morrowitz says
it's grinding to a stop. LOL!

Chuckling,
Todd Greene

TOP
Subject: Re: Kyle Butt's credentials! :o)
Author: Todd Greene
Date: Jan 29, 2004

--- In creationism, Harold Holmyard wrote (post #16398):
> Dear Robert and Todd,
>
> I wrote an e-mail to Apologetics Press explaining that I believed
> in a young earth but found Kyle Butt's article doing more harm
> than good for the cause. I explained the reasons why and asked the
> web site to remove the article.

Hi, Harold.

Hmmm... Your effort makes me wonder if I should get in touch with
Steve Heiden's YEC brother to see what he might do along these same
lines.

Just kidding! ;-)

It will be interesting to see what kind of response you receive. I
should mention that Bert Thompson is not completely above
legitimate criticism - just the vast majority of it. (Not just
kidding!) It was apparently after receiving some critical comments
about his moon dust claim, criticism that we believe was inspired by
Robert Baty's pressing of the matter with some of Bert's supporters,
that Bert was persuaded to remove the moon dust argument, in April
2003 if I remember correctly, from an article he has online about the
age of the earth. He did this very quietly, never mentioning anywhere
that he had modified the article and was no longer advocating the
argument, but at least he did remove the erroneous argument from the
article even while never acknowledging that the argument was mistaken
in the first place. Of course, he has yet to remove the several other
erroneous arguments from the same article, errors that I have
delineated and explained in Robert Baty's discussion group (at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Maury_and_Baty/message/1002 ), but
then Bert would then have to remove the whole article! Well, is fixing
one error (by removing it) out of 8 okay? I thought even government
work was better than that! Heck, even the Detroit Lions are better
than that. (Well, this year anyway!)

Chuckling,
Todd Greene

TOP
Subject: Re: Kyle Butt's YEC-Inspired Ignorance on Comets
Author: Todd Greene
Date: Jan 29, 2004

--- In creationism, Harold Holmyard wrote (post #16395):
> Dear Todd,
>
>> I remain quite convinced by the popular advocacy of (many)
>> fallacious arguments such as this one (moon dust, shrinking sun,
>> Paluxy mantracks, Earth's magnetic field decay, Setterfield's
>> lightspeed decay, etc., etc.) that young earth creationist
>> proponents are not for the most part interested in the truth, but
>> are interested merely in promoting propaganda in zealous support
>> of their falsified religious doctrine. (Let's not forget
>> SN1987A!) I'm sure that we will continue to see the short-period
>> comets argument being commonly used by young earth creationists
>> in YEC literature and sermons for many years to come. And that's
>> a sad thing.
>
> HH: That's true, but informed YEC people find it sad, too. Answers
> in Genesis (www.answersingenesis.com) has an article listing a
> number of fallacious arguments and asking people not to use them.
> It confronts creationists who ignore these ideas. Here is an
> article like that called "Maintaining Creationist Integrity"
> http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2002/1011hovind.asp

Hi, Harold.

Yes, I agree that AiG is one of the few (very few!) YEC organizations
that engages in at least a little bit of some very much long-needed
internal criticism. AiG is reponsible for a pretty decent and very
detailed criticism of the moon dust argument, and they also warn
creationists not to use such claims as the Paluxy mantracks and
Setterfield's lightspeed decay. Of course, at the same time they're
responsible for pushing some of their own lines of YEC nonsense such
as Humphreys cosmology, an AiG version of the magnetic field decay
argument, and a myriad of other misinformational stuff on geology
(see, for example, Glenn Morton's very detailed dissection of some of
AiG's discussion of the Green River Formation, at
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/greenriver.htm ). Also, in a 11/21/02
post to this discussion list (
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/creationism/message/7006 ) I discussed
the subject of comets and the Kuiper Belt, and made reference to a
then-recent AiG article by a "Robert Newton" (a pseudonym) that gives
a distorted portrayal of the Kuiper Belt.

(Incidentally, unlike the YEC community where we observe this
maladaptive, extremist reluctance to engage in critical discussion of
erroneous information and fallacious arguments by fellow young earth
creationists, in the mainstream science community we find a quite
healthy and dynamic environment of critical discussion and dispute.)

Moreover, I'm not some scientist, nor some astronomer, laying into
young earth creationist promoters like Kyle Butt for not being aware
of some esoteric information that only experts could be reasonably
expected to be aware of. I'm just a Joe Blow guy who happens to be
interested in science, and who discusses young earth creationism
because of my religious background. I find it amazing that Kyle Butt
("M.A.", whatever that's in; and Bert Thompson, "Ph.D.", who
published the article) presents such nonsense as some kind of serious
argument for young earth creationism. Thousands of people eat this
stuff up in a completely uncritical manner, which is precisely why
we've got such long-discredited propaganda as this still being
popularly circulated in sermons, church magazines and bulletins,
Bible class study materials, and so on, decades after it is has been
falsified. Humphreys cosmology only happens to be a newer member of
the same club!

Regards,
Todd Greene

TOP
Subject: Re: Kyle Butt's YEC-Inspired Ignorance on Comets
Author: Todd Greene
Date: Jan 29, 2004

Hi, Harold.

To start with, I want you to know that I appreciate your reponse on
the topic of comets, with you forthrightly stating that short-period
comets do not constitute a good argument for young earth.

--- In creationism, Harold Holmyard wrote (post #16393):
> Dear Todd,
>
> HH: I read your response to the article "Oort Clouded Vision," by
> Kyle Butt. Your information was helpful, and the writer of a
> Wikipedia article agrees with you that Halley's Comet is from the
> Kuiper Belt.
[snip]

>
> Other sources are less sure for the Kuiper origin for Halley's
> Comet. I give the web site after the quote:
>
> Chiron, which is much larger than any other known comet, is
> similar in size to objects in the Kuiper belt, a disc of comets
> orbiting the sun at the edge of the solar system. This region may
> be the source of Halley's comet and others with relatively short
> orbital periods. Halley's orbits once every 76 years, while
> Chiron's period is 50 to 51 years.
>
> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/tt/1995/jan11/39022.html
>
> The Kuiper belt may be the source of the short-period comets (like
> Halley's comet).
>
> http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/astronomy/comets/
> cometorigins.shtml
>
> HH: I think you were right to point out that the author, Kyle
> Butt, does not mention the Kuiper Belt or offer other pertinent
> information that would help people to understand why the Oort Belt
> is an understandable proposition. With little background in
> science, the information you and a couple of other articles online
> gave easily convinced me that the Oort Belt is a natural and
> logical hypothesis, greatly supported by the discovery of the
> Kuiper Belt. So thank you.
>
> If it will calm your ire at all, I did find that some people
> associate Halley's Comet with the Oort Belt. Here are a couple of
> quotes, with web sites given afterwards:
>
> At the great distances of the Oort Cloud, comets can be affected
> by the gentle gravitational tugs of nearby passing stars. The
> passing stars tug on the comets, "perturbing" their orbits,
> sending some of them into the inner solar system. The comets
> passing close to a jovian planet are deflected by the planet's
> gravity into an orbit with a shorter period, only decades long.
> Jupiter and Saturn tend to deflect long period comets completely
> out of the solar system (or gobble them up as Jupiter did with
> Shoemaker Levy-9). Uranus and Neptune tend to deflect the long
> period comets into orbits that stay within the solar system.
> Halley's Comet may be an example of a deflected comet. Unlike
> other short period comets, Halley's Comet's orbit is retrograde.
>
> http://www.astronomynotes.com/solfluf/s8.htm

Check out this web page, which gives a diagram of the orbit path of
Halley's Comet, in three dimensions:

http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/comets/halley.html

Pay close attention to the bottom two diagrams, which are a view from
perpendicular to the ecliptic plane and a view from the ecliptic
plane. You will note that the aphelion (farthest from the sun) lies
in the Kuiper Belt. In regard to the comet having a retrograde orbit,
it is unusual for short-period comets to have retrograde orbit, but
Halley's comet would not be unique in this regard. On the other hand,
with long-period comets, the distribution is fairly even between
having prograde or retrograde orbits.

It is always possible that any particular short-period comet such as
Halley's Comet could be sourced from the Oort Cloud and then
perturbed into a short-period orbit by one of the major planets.
Indeed, not too many years ago we observed a comet that was perturbed
by Jupiter so much that it decided to beat Jupiter on the head! This
is what would make it extremely difficult, I would think, to say
definitely which region is the source of any particular short-period
comet. It will take continued improvements in observational
technology and techniques, and in computer modeling, to provide more
accurate estimates of the distributions.

But the relevant facts are that the long-period comets have orbits
that take them into a region that is where the Oort Cloud is proposed
to be, so even though we cannot observe comets that are in the Oort
Cloud region because at their sizes they are simply too far away to
be observed with current technology, we know in fact that these
comets we do orbserve orbit into that region (and out of view). And,
second, we know that short-period comets have orbits that take them
into a region that is where the Kuiper Belt was proposed to be, and
up until 1992, just as with the Oort Cloud these short-period comets
would orbit out of view, but since 1992 we have had the observational
technology to actually begin observing the larger objects in that
region (and the lower limit of the sizes that can be observed is
gradually decreasing over the years, so that we are able to observe
smaller and smaller ones).

Let's not forget the primary point of Kyle Butt argument about short-
period comets substantiating the idea of young earth creationism,
which was the statement "Of course, even this exaggerated age of
23,000 years for Halley's comet cannot be reconciled with the idea of
a solar system measured in billions of years" (
http://www.apologeticspress.org/defdocs/2004/dd-04-01.htm ). This is
the same kind of false statement as made by another young earth
creationist with whom I discussed the topic of comets back in 1999,
Darrell Broking (who is a preacher in the Church Of Christ).
Darrell's claim was that "Evolutionists have no explanation for short-
period comets" (even though we're really talking about astronomy and
astronomers, not evolution and evolutionists!).

Cannot be reconciled. No explanation. These are totally false claims
that these young earth creationists have made. (Of course, in
Darrell's case, that was the whole of his argument, so at least he
didn't contradict himself. But in Kyle's case he's picking up and
using this popular YEC line, and then he turns right around and
contradicts himself by bringing up an explanation that does at least
show a conceptual way in which short-period comets can be
reconciled with an ancient solar system!)

Furthermore, and perhaps I didn't emphasize this enough in my
previous post, it's pretty amazing that Kyle can talk about a short-
period comet such as Halley's Comet as representing an argument for
young earth creationism while at the very same time he entirely
ignores long-period comets (with orbital periods that can be far
beyond six or ten thousand years) which clearly demonstrate that
young earth creationism makes no sense at all. Talking about short-
period comets as support young earth creationism while totally
ignoring the existence of long-period comets is pretty absurd in
itself!

But my primary (counter)point with respect to short-period comets is
that whether or not we have directly observed any region that would
be a comet source, the YEC argument that there is "no explanation"
for short-period comets in an ancient solar system and that
they "cannot be reconciled" with an ancient solar system are
conceptual fallacies. This is without having discovered by direct
observation anything at all about the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud.
Then considering, in addition to the conceptual fallacy of the YEC
argument, the fact the we have directly observed objects orbiting
in the proposed Kuiper Belt region - and then to have young earth
creationists ignore these observations - just demonstrates what
total nonsense this YEC argument is.

I remain quite convinced by the popular advocacy of (many) fallacious
arguments such as this one (moon dust, shrinking sun, Paluxy
mantracks, Earth's magnetic field decay, Setterfield's lightspeed
decay, etc., etc.) that young earth creationist proponents are not
for the most part interested in the truth, but are interested merely
in promoting propaganda in zealous support of their falsified
religious doctrine. (Let's not forget SN1987A!) I'm sure that we will
continue to see the short-period comets argument being commonly used
by young earth creationists in YEC literature and sermons for many
years to come. And that's a sad thing.

Keep in mind that as a former young earth creationist I come at
this from the perspective that there are three kinds of young earth
creationists: There are those who are young earth creationists by
default simply because that's what they've been taught to believe but
it is not a subject of all that great interest to them and they are
not advocates of the idea and just really haven't thought about it
all that much. There are those who have been taught to believe it,
and who as a matter of adherence to a very strong connection between
young earth creationism, biblical infallibility, and divine
inspiration, cannot bear to give up belief in young earth creationism
because to do that would be to abandon faith that the Bible is God's
Word and they can't bring themselves to think along those lines. And
third, there are those young earth creationists who figure that the
real world is what it is and if the truth about the real world is
that it has been around for a lot longer than just six or ten
thousand years, then that's just the way it is and a person should
accept it since it's the truth, no matter what the further conceptual
consequences might happen to be.

Regards,
Todd Greene

TOP
Subject: Kyle Butt's YEC-Inspired Ignorance on Comets
Author: Todd Greene
Date: Jan 27, 2004

--- In creationism Robert Baty wrote (post #16390):
> I would like to ask Todd Greene to comment on one of this week's
> offerings from Bert Thompson, Ph.D. found at:
>
>> Oort Clouded Vision (by Kyle Butt)
>
> http://www.apologeticspress.org/defdocs/2004/dd-04-01.htm
>
> You'll note the by-line give credit to Kyle Butt, one of Dr.
> Bert's new-hires. We have spoken of him before.
>
> Since Todd has some expertise in the area, I thought it would be
> good for him to comment on this latest of articles from the good
> Dr. Bert.

Hi, Robert.

Christopher Sharp was simply too kind in his remarks. ;-)

This article about comets by Kyle Butt is nothing but sheer, almost
unadulterated ignorance. I happen to find it extremely hard to
swallow that Kyle knows enough about the Oort Cloud hypothesis from
1950 to write about it, but apparently doesn't know anything at all
about the additional Kuiper Belt hypothesis proposed one year later
in 1951, but I suppose this just might be possible. But if Kyle is
not ignorant about the Kuiper Belt, then he is lying to everyone in
his article. It's either one or the other.

Let's begin taking a look at the misrepresentative statements made by
Kyle Butt ("M.A."; gee, what is that M.A.?; is that Master of Arts in
Accounting or something?) on this subject:

| Assuming that "all things have been happening at the same rate in
| the past as they happen today" is one of the fundamental
| assumptions on which most dating methods are based. In fact, the
| dating methods that evolutionists use to arrive at vast billions
| of years for the age of the Universe are based squarely upon this
| uniformitarian assumption. There is one major problem, however,
| that arises in regard to this foundational assumption. When it is
| applied to all the phenomena in the Universe, many of the
| observable data point away from time frames measured in billions
| of years, and toward a young Universe, often dated at only
| thousands of years old.

In fact, contrary to YECs' false rhetoric about "uniformitarian
assumptions" the fact that the universe has been in existence far
longer than 6,000 years happens to be a matter of direct observation.
In the case of SN1987A we observe an event (a stellar explosion) that
took place about 168,000 years ago. (I realize that the subject to be
discussed here is comets, but I couldn't let this standard false YEC
rhetoric just sail on by untouched!)

| One such example of this exact phenomenon comes from the study of
| comets. Since comets, like planets, orbit the Sun, they supposedly
| evolved around the same time as our solar system. A brief study of
| comets in the past documents that many comets that previously
| existed have "died out,"

As expected.

| and the comets
| that now orbit the Sun also are breaking up and disintegrating
| over time.

As expected.

| Sir John Maddox,
| in a Nature article titled "Halley's Comet is Quite Young," wrote:
|
| Indeed the rate at which comets such as Halley lose material near
| perihelion is so great that they cannot have been in their present
| orbits for very long.... Their [planetary physicists' — KB]
| conclusion is that the time Halley's comet has spent in the inner
| solar system is a mere 23,000 years, perhaps enough for fewer than
| 300 revolutions of the orbit (1989, 339:95).

As expected.

| Of course, even this exaggerated age of 23,000 years for Halley's
| comet cannot be reconciled with the idea of a solar system
| measured in billions of years.

False statement. In fact, this is a particularly stupid statement -
especially since it's being made by someone who pretends to know what
he's talking about on the subject of comets even while at the same
time he fails to mention even one word about the Kuiper Belt, and
espcially since he turns right around and immediately presents the
astronomical concept that does in fact "reconcile" the idea!

| How then, do
| we account for the fact that there are still several comets in our
| solar system that have not completely deteriorated? In 1950, a
| Dutch astronomer named Jan Oort proposed a theory which suggested
| that a cloud of comets exists somewhere in our solar system. This
| mysterious cloud keeps the comets in a type of "storehouse" until
| some type of force pulls one out and launches it into orbit. When
| a comet decays, another is fortuitously launched from the Oort
| Cloud (named after Jan Oort). This Oort Cloud would account for
| the fact that comets still exist in our solar system.

Oh, so immediately following the stupid claim that the idea can't be
reconciled, Kyle points out that there IS a reconciling concept for
an "exaggerated age of 23,000 years for Halley's comet" with respect
to "the idea of a solar system measured in billions of years." It's
amazing how Kyle can make his 'no way to reconcile' claim and then
turn right around and then two sentences later completely contradict
himself by presenting a general concept that reconciles it. How in
the world are people supposed to be properly informed about something
by a guy who can't recognize an obvious contradiction like this in
his own words?

| There is one problem, however, with this idea. No one has ever
| observed the Oort Cloud through a telescope, nor has anyone ever
| seen a comet being pulled from this elusive cloud. In fact, there
| is not a single shred of observable evidence that such a cloud
| even exists (see Perloff, 1999, p. 132). It is imaginary,
| concocted, and invented for the sole purpose of explaining away
| the actual evidence that points to a young solar system. The
| eminent evolutionists Carl Sagan and his wife Ann Druyan, in their
| extensive work titled appropriately, Comet, wrote about the Oort
| Cloud theory: "The idea explains what we know about comets in an
| elegant way that no other theory even approaches" (1985, p. 210).
| They went on to note, however: "Many scientific papers are written
| each year about the Oort Cloud, its properties, its origin, its
| evolution. Yet there is not yet a shred of direct observational
| evidence for its existence" (p. 210).

Isn't it funny how "not yet a shred of direct observational evidence"
magically becomes "not a shred of evidence"? In fact, and this is the
extremely serious oversight in Kyle's article, there is the fact of
the period and shape of the orbits of comets that Kyle never even
mentions. It is the shapes, periods, and trajectories of the cometary
orbits that tell us positionally where they come from and where they
go in the solar system. The reason we can't directly observe anything
in the proposed Oort Cloud is precisely because it is so far from
the sun (and the earth). But note the absurdity contained in the
illogic of Kyle's argument: Since we can't observe the Oort Cloud
directly, "It is imaginary, concocted, and invented for the sole
purpose of explaining away the actual evidence that points to a young
solar system." Oh, so the observed orbits of the long-period comets
don't have anything to do with it? Leave it to a young earth
creationist to leave out the obviously relevant information. Hey, we
could use this very same logic and say, "When the comet gets so far
from the sun on the outbound path of its orbit that we can't see it
anymore with our telescopes, then the comet no longer exists."

Anway, the difference between the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt
with respect to cometary periods and orbits is because of the
differences in their periods and orbits. Kyle specifically refers to
Halley's Comet - which does not come from the Oort Cloud but orbits
in from the Kuiper Belt region (which, even though it is a donut-like
region with an inner boundary close to Neptune, is relatively much
closer to the sun than the Oort Cloud). Comets with relatively short
orbital periods of dozens to a few hundred years are called "short-
period comets," whereas comets with relatively longer orbital periods
on up into thousands of years for just one orbit are "long-period
comets." Kyle has the audacity to write about Halley's Comet, which
is a short-period comet and thus orbits into and out of the Kuiper
Belt region, and then pretend to everyone that the Kuiper Belt has
something to do with the Oort Cloud region. So Kyle again clearly
demonstrates that - as usual - he is a young earth creationist who
doesn't know what he's talking about (or if he does know what he's
talking about, then he is lying to his readers).

Keep in mind in this entire discussion that the Oort Cloud region is
not what is hypothesized. It is known that the long period comets
do indeed orbit in from that region by mapping of their orbits. The
part that cannot be directly observed today is small icy bodies that
would be in the Oort Cloud since we're talking about needing to see
these small icy bodies at such great distances from the earth. Of
course, this is no surprise since we can't even see the observed long-
period comets once they get too far from the earth while traveling
along their orbital paths. I will mention more about direct
observation below, in my comments about the Kuiper Belt.

| In an article
| in in the February 2001 issue of Nature, S. Alan Stern and Paul R.
| Weissman discussed their in-depth research on the Oort Cloud.
| While they maintained a belief in the Oort Cloud theory, they
| provided complicated algebraic calculations that were supposed to
| prove, among other things, that the comets in the Oort Cloud
| "formed at significantly lower temperatures than conventional
| models of the cloud have predicted" (409:591). In essence, they
| said that they believe in the Oort Cloud theory, but that the
| current ideas about this cloud are wrong. The authors did say,
| however: "Because our work involved several idealized assumptions,
| it represents only a first step toward the more complete modeling
| required" (p. 590). Idealized assumptions indeed! And the first of
| those is that the Oort Cloud even exists.

Ah, yes. Here Kyle implicitly acknowledges that the astrophysicists
are discussing models about the nature of the Oort Cloud, which is
completely irrelevant to whether or not they question the existence
of the Oort Cloud, even while Kyle pretends that this is somehow
relevant for questioning whether or not the Oort Cloud even exists.
Aren't the rhetorical games of YECs fun!

| It is amazing
| that two highly educated men can write a lengthy, scholarly
| article composing two-and-a-half pages of Nature magazine (one of
| the most respected science journals in the world) about a cloud of
| comets for which there is absolutely no observational evidence.

Remember what I pointed out earlier, how no direct observational
evidence magically becomes "no observational evidence" at the hands
of a young earth creationist? Hmmm, I guess now Kyle is pretending
that long-period comets don't even exist, since in fact the Oort
Cloud region is where long-period comets orbit in from (and back out
to).

| Would that not
| be similar to writing about the speed, acceleration ability, and
| fuel injection of a UFO that we have never seen?

No it wouldn't. With respect to the Oort Cloud concept we are talking
about long-period comets, which are observed and whose orbits have
been mapped. Again, Kyle is using misleading rhetoric to try to
pretend that we don't observe long-period comets. Kyle's analogy is
simply illegitimate.

| So we are asked to believe in an imaginary cloud of comets that no
| one has ever seen, and we are to believe this because if it does
| not exist, then our solar system is young — with an age measured
| in thousands of years, not billions! Evolutionists are driven to
| suggest such a cockeyed idea because they understand that a solar
| system only a few thousand years old would not have had time to
| evolve life like we see on our planet. So much for sticking
| with "just the facts."

No, actually Kyle Butt is asking us to believe him, who is so
dismally ignorant (or, remember, intentionally deceptive, as one
other possibility) about the current astronomy of comets, that even
though he writes about Halley's Comet coming from the Oort Cloud,
that comet actually comes from the Kuiper Belt, and icy bodies that
are in the Kuiper Belt region and don't happen to have been perturbed
into cometary orbits happen to be directly observed starting in 1992
because it was only beginning around that time that the observational
technology reached the point where astronomers were able to observe
such relatively small bodies at such relatively large distances from
the earth.

Maybe it is precisely because Halley's Comet actually comes from the
Kuiper Belt region and because the Kuiper Belt region has been
directly observed that Kyle Butt failed to mention it. Kyle is guilty
either of dismal ignorance or blatant deceit. Take your pick.

Kuiper Belt (website)
by David Jewitt
http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/faculty/jewitt/kb.html

From David Jewitt's home page on the Kuiper Belt:

| Starting in 1992, astronomers have become aware of a vast
| population of small bodies orbiting the sun beyond Neptune. There
| are at least 70,000 "trans-Neptunians" with diameters larger than
| 100 km in the radial zone extending outwards from the orbit of
| Neptune (at 30 AU) to 50 AU. Observations show that the
| trans-Neptunians are mostly confined within a thick band around
| the ecliptic, leading to the realization that they occupy a ring
| or belt surrounding the sun. This ring is generally referred to as
| the Kuiper Belt.
|
| The Kuiper Belt holds significance for the study of the planetary
| system on at least two levels. First, it is likely that the Kuiper
| Belt objects are extremely primitive remnants from the early
| accretional phases of the solar system. The inner, dense parts of
| the pre-planetary disk condensed into the major planets, probably
| within a few millions to tens of millions of years. The outer
| parts were less dense, and accretion progressed slowly. Evidently,
| a great many small objects were formed. Second, it is widely
| believed that the Kuiper Belt is the source of the short-period
| comets. It acts as a reservoir for these bodies in the same way
| that the Oort Cloud acts as a reservoir for the long-period
| comets.

From Jewitt's comments on the Oort Cloud:

| The orbits of comets exhibit a wide range of sizes, inclinations
| and eccentricities. In the past, it was convenient to divide the
| comets into two groups based on their orbital period. Long-Period
| Comets (LPCs) are those with period > 200 years, while
| Short-Period Comets (SPCs) have period < 200 years.
|
| The LPCs have several remarkable orbital properties:
|
| Their orbits are concentrated towards very large sizes.
|
| They enter the planetary region isotropically (i.e. they show no
| preferred direction). 50% of LPCs are retrograde, consistent with
| a truly random distribution.
|
| Jan Oort noticed that the concentration towards large orbital size
| was very tightly peaked. He calculated that comets falling into
| the solar system from very large distances should suffer
| perturbations from the planets (especially Jupiter) and found that
| these perturbations were actually larger than the width of the LPC
| peak. He reasoned that many of the LPCs must be entering the solar
| system for the first time, otherwise their orbits would already
| have been modified by gravitational perturbations due to the major
| planets. He also noted that the LPCs seem to fall from a distance
| of about 50,000 AU. Therefore, he suggested that the sun is
| surrounded by a spherical cloud of comets from which the observed
| LPCs are somehow perturbed.

Lesson (the usual lesson): If you want to learn something about a
scientific subject, one of the last places you want to go to get it
is to young earth creationists, because all you'll get from them are
misrepresentative distortions and convenient omissions, and your
understanding of that subject will thus be seriously flawed.

Again, as usual, I challege Kyle Butt or anyone else from Apologetics
Press to discuss this topic in this discussion forum (or I will meet
them in any other discussion forum) and to answer the charges against
them. Kyle Butt's article on comets presents a false argument filled
with errors of distortion and omission, and it is shameful for AP to
be putting out such nonsense.

Also - and again as usual - I reiterate here my statement that I
openly grant everyone and anyone the right to copy what I've written
at will, with the sole provision (and simple ethical consideration
against plagiarism) that if you're quoting me then make it known that
I am the author of it.

Regards,
Todd Greene

TOP
Subject: Apologetic Press' Dave Miller (was: Invite to Chris Sharp?)
Author: Todd Greene
Date: Jan 21, 2004

--- In creationism, Robert Baty wrote (post #16380):
> See following link:
>
> http://www.apologeticspress.org/schedule.htm
>
> I noticed that (Dr.) Dave Miller is scheduled to make an appearance
> on behalf of Apologetics Press in Tucson, AZ next month.
[snip]

Hi, Robert.

I wonder if Dave Miller Ph.D. knows the difference between
1,400,000,000 years and 6,000 years? If he does, it seems to me that
a person with any sense of honesty and integrity whatsoever would
report to his Apologetics Press colleague Kyle Butt that he made a
seriously erroneous statement in misreprenting 1.4 billion years as
being in support of the YEC notion of 6,000 years. Of course, if Dave
Miller Ph.D. doesn't know the difference between 1,400,000,000
years and 6,000 years, then his Ph.D. surely can't mean a whole lot,
at least certainly not with respect to (extremely simple!) details
like this. Come to think of it, Bert Thompson also touts his Ph.D.,
and he's the guy who published Kyle Butt's blatant error.

Isn't it absolutely fascinating how a man's obsession with an idea
and adamant refusal to acknowledge error can obliterate his
intelligence?

I see that at

http://www.apologeticspress.org/scrspeak/2003/ss-03-55.htm

Dave Miller has written the following, which is, by the way, the
exact same argument that was presented by Steve Heiden (aka Todd
Greene) in the BereanSpirit discussion group as one of his criticisms
of the apparent age argument that some young earth creationists
advocated there:

| While God can do whatever is possible to be done, in reality, He
| will do only what is in harmony with His nature. Further, to
| suggest that God is deficient or limited in power if He cannot
| create a rock so large that He cannot lift, is to imply that He
| could do so if He simply had more power. But this is false.

And

| So, no, the concept of "omnipotence" does not mean that there are
| no limits to what an omnipotent being can do. In fact, the Bible
| pinpoints specific things that God cannot do. For example, the
| Bible states unequivocally that God cannot lie (Numbers 23:19; 1
| Samuel 15:29; 2 Timothy 2:13; Titus 1:2). He is a Being whose very
| essence entails truthfulness. Falsehood is completely out of
| harmony with His divine nature.

I pointed this out in response to apparent age advocate who argued
that God could do anything, therefore He could create a world with
exactly the features, down to every conceivable tiny detail, that it
would have as if it had existed for billions of years, even though it
God only created it 6,000 years ago. (Of course, as we observed in
that discussion, none of the apparent age advocate were willing to
follow the logical conclusion of their own argument, because not one
of them were willing to say that the observed supernova SN1987A was
really nothing more than an illusion of something that never
happened - making God out to have created a world that is elaborately
deceptive. In other words - and I have found this to be the case with
almost every single apparent age advocate I've pointed out this
example to - they love their argument in the abstract as a rhetorical
device, but when it gets down to its implications with respect to the
empirical details of the real world they themselves are extremely
reluctant to accept their own argument.)

Hmmm... If I remember correctly (and I think I do!), Kyle Butt also
had an article advocating the apparent age argument in AP literature
several months ago. I wonder if Dave Miller and Kyle Butt even
realize that they are contradicting each other on this issue.

Regards,
Todd Greene

TOP
Subject: Re: "The Earth is Young", so says the moon & Kyle Butt!
Author: Todd Greene
Date: Jan 20, 2004

--- In creationism, Robert Baty wrote (post #16377):
> One of this week's offerings from Bert Thompson, Ph.D. via his
> website is copied (excerpts) following my name below.
>
> My comments:
>
> Does anyone really believe that definition of "uniformitarianism"?
> Like, we've been discussing the variety of causes for geological
> formations in connection with Buff's misrepresentation regarding
> Peter Frenzen and Mt. St. Helens.
>
> Kyle is the youngster on the AP staff. Maybe someone needs to get
> him to really look into that moon recession stuff. As I recall, we
> went through that a little with Keith Sisman recently (at least
> Todd did).
>
> In bringing up the moon issues, Kyle would have done good to take
> the opportunity to explain the recent, secret, removal from Bert's
> website of Bert's bogus moon-dust claim. We're still waiting on an
> account of that.
>
> Could be that Kyle, one day, will realize his article is just as
> bogus as Bert's moon-dust claim, but will refuse to remove it for
> cause and then will secretly remove it, hoping nobody is watching;
> no admission of error, no explanation of his error, no correction
> of his error. You think?

Hi, Robert.

This is exactly it. Bert Thompson demonstrates another typical
behavior of young earth creationist hobbyists such as him.

>
> Sincerely,
> Robert Baty
>
> ##################################
>
> http://www.apologeticspress.org/bibbul/2004/bb-04-01.htm
>
> "THE EARTH IS YOUNG," SAYS THE MAN IN THE MOON
> by Kyle Butt, M.A.
>
> (U)niformitarianism — "the theory that all geological phenomena
> may be explained as the result of existing forces having operated
> uniformly from the origin of the earth to the present time"
> (American Heritage Dictionary, 2000, p. 1881).
>
> While this idea of uniformitarianism often renders multiplied
> billions of years when applied to certain situations, it also
> sometimes renders much younger ages for the Earth when properly
> applied. The irony is that, when it yields an age old enough to
> fit evolutionary theory, that age is accepted. But when it yields
> a younger age for the Earth that does not fit evolutionary
> preconceptions, the younger age is discarded offhand as being
> incorrect.
>
> For instance, at present, the Earth's moon is receding farther
> from the Earth at about 4 centimeters (1.6 inches) per year.
> DeYoung and Whitcomb noted:
>
> (snip)
>
> Measurements of Moon recession, and age calculations from such,
> rarely (if ever) find their way into textbooks.
>
> Is it because such methods that render a considerably younger
> Earth are "less scientific" than those that render an older age?
>
> Not in the least.
>
> The sole reason that Moon recession and other young-Earth
> indicators do not "make the books" is that they battle against
> the "sacred cow" of evolutionary theory.
>
> Today, there are at least 75 methods for dating the Earth, and
> about half of them yield a much younger Earth than is acceptable
> to evolutionists (see Morris and Parker, 1987).
>
> Isn't it time we stopped screening out evidence that militates
> against evolution, and start letting the facts take us wherever
> they lead?

(Laughing loudly here) Wow! Lemons are yellow, therefore pine trees
can't grow taller than 3 feet. This is how logical this is. I'm
amazed that Kyle Butt (M.A.!!) is incapable of performing the very
simple arithmetic of a back-of-the-napkin calculation. Let's take a
look:

First we have to consider what is called the Roche limit, which has
to do with the minimum distance that a moon can orbit a planet and
not be broken up by the tidal forces. For the Earth and the Moon,
this minimum distance, or Roche limit, is approximately 32,000 miles.
Right now the moon orbits about 240,000 miles from the earth. So we
start with 240,000 minus 32,000, which gives us 208,000 miles. Let's
just round this off to 200,000 miles (note that we're rounding in
favor of the YEC direction, shortening the distance).

How many inches in 200,000 miles?

200,000 (miles) x 5,280 (feet per mile) x 12 (inches per feet) =

12,672,000,000 inches

Again, let's round this off (again in favor of the YEC direction of
shortening the distance) to 12 billion inches

Now, using the recession rate of 1.6 inches per year that Kyle Butt
himself is giving us we have the following:

12,000,000,000 (inches) / 1.6 (inches per year) =

7,500,000,000 years

That's 7.5 billion years.

That's a pretty stupid argument for young earth creationism!

But Kyle hedges his adsurdly bad bet with the quote of Don DeYoung
and John Whitcomb with yet another bogus YEC claim that "The rate of
separation, very small today, is strongly dependent on the total
earth-moon separation. This rate varies as the sixth power of the
actual separation.... This means that in earlier times the moon would
have moved outward much more rapidly than is measured today." (The
quote is from something written in 2003, but this is actually an
argument that DeYoung has been making since at least 1992, and the
equation is not something that he came up with himself but that he
has taken out of context from a 1963 article by geophysicist Louis B.
Slichter. I'm summarizing information from Tim Thompson's article on
this subject; see below. Indeed, in this way we see that young earth
creationist have made exactly the same kind of mistake that they made
with, for example, their moon-dust argument and their shrinking sun
argument. Young earth creationists took preliminary information and
guesstimates, presented this as final determinations, and then
purposely ignored all subsequent analysis, study, criticism, and
information. This is a standard method in the YEC toolbox.)

Indeed, the back-of-the-napkin calculation I did is wrong, because it
is quite true that the recession rate of the moon is the result of a
complex dynamic interplay of tidal forces between the earth and the
moon, and not a uniform ("uniformitarian") rate. The problem is that
DeYoung (as I mentioned, Whitcomb has nothing to do with this
particular argument) has got his guesstimate about the calculation
wrong. However - and this is the important point - even using
DeYoung's own calculation we get an estimate of the maximum age of
the earth-moon system of 1.4 billion years!

Gee, there's an awful big difference between 1.4 billion and 6,000!
Don't you think? (As you would say.) This is the kind of
misrepresentation that YEC propaganda is permeated with. Is Kyle able
to tell the difference between 1.4 billion and 6,000, or not? If he
is not able to tell the difference, then he is incompetent in his
argumentation. If he is able to tell the difference, then he is lying
with his rhetorical propaganda. Take your pick.

Anyway, the truth of the matter lies somewhere between 7.5 billion
and 1.4 billion years (and note, by the way, that both of these
values are exactly the same order of magnitude). This whole issue is
presented in quite some detail already by Tim Thompson at the
following web page, and I won't even try to pretend that I can offer
any improvement to his discussion:

The Recession of the Moon and the Age of the Earth-Moon System
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/moonrec.html

You can let Kyle Butt know that he is most welcome and even
specifically invited to join our "creationism" discussion group to
dig into the details of any of his "about 38" arguments that
allegedly substantiate young earth creationist notions about the
earth not having existed more than about six or ten thousand years
ago. Of course, I won't be holding my breath! The fact is, the true
number of correct geological and astronomical arguments for the YEC
notion that the earth and the universe did not exist more than about
six or ten thousand years ago is really "about zero."

Chuckling,
Todd Greene

TOP
Subject: RE: Fossilized wagon tracks near San Marcos, Texas?
Author: Stephen J. Krogh, P.G.
Date:  Jan 11, 2004

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Todd Greene
> Sent: Sunday, January 11, 2004 6:45 AM
> Subject: Fossilized wagon tracks near San Marcos, Texas?
>
> Hi, everyone.
>
> What follows is an email I received on 1/9/04 and my reply. If any
> of you know anything about this story and can help out, please
> comment.
>
> Thanks,
> Todd
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
>
> --- B.R. wrote:
> > I'm researching a Bert Thompson claim of fossilized
> > wagon tracks around San Marcos, I've seen your pages
> > with some commentary about Thompson, and noticed
> > that you mention his name occasionally on t.o., I
> > thought you may have heard of this particular claim.
> > No other creationists that I know of make this
> > particular claim, and Bert doesn't mention it in any
> > of the Apologetics Press reprints, so maybe he's
> > abandoned the claim.
> >
> > Does this particular claim ring a bell with you?
>
> Hi, B.
>
> Leave it to young earth creationists to come up with
> obscure claims! ;-)
>
> I recently tried to come up with information about a
> YEC story that was being told about some bones being
> dated at many thousands of years old until a U.S. army
> button was found with them. Needless to say, the
> creationist telling the story couldn't back it up, and
> when we wrote to the original creationist from whom
> the first creationist told us he got the story from,
> we never got a reply. How typical! Try to dig into the
> details with young earth creationists and you find
> "vaporware"!
>
> I've never heard of this particular story. The only
> thing I can find on the internet is the following,
> which may or may not have any connection:
>
> From:
> http://www.trainweb.com/routes/route_21/21_9408.html
>
> --------------------------------
>
> Brazos River (16min./40min.) We cross just as the
> river widens to form Lake Whitney, on our left. A mile
> west is Kimball Bend, where the Chisholm trail crossed
> the Brazos. Wagon tracks can still be found there,
> etched in the limestone. Wooden hunting blinds, raised
> on stilts, are testimony to fine deer hunting in this
> area.
>
> --------------------------------
>
> Except the Brazos River is near Fort Worth, not San
> Marcos or San Antonio.
>
> I'll post this in the "creationism" discussion group
> and see if anyone else knows anything.
>
> Regards,
> Todd Greene

Hi Todd,

From my stint at Baylor University, affectionately referred to as
"Jerusalem on the Brazos," I may actually be able to address this
claim. The claim may be referring to wagon ruts worn into the
surface of the Austin Chalk along Brushy Creek that runs through
Round Rock, north of Austin (San Marcos is just south of Austin).
Brushy Creek flows east, eventually feeding into the Brazos River
south of Lake Whitney near Hearn, Texas, which lies about 2/3rds of
the way from Waco to College Station, after which the Navasota River
merges with the Brazos and continues to flow to the coast. The San
Marcos River flows through San Marcos, which in turn, flows into the
Colorado River. The creek has eroded the soil from the river bed
exposing the underlying Austin Chalk. When the river is low, which
is more often than not, the exposed chalk forms a nice stable road
surface, so to speak, that would expedite pulling the wagons. Wagon
ruts worn into the rock surface are not fossils. Is Bert actually
saying that the wagons tracks were laid down during the limestone
deposition. Does he know how limestone is deposited? Were these
wagons submersible wagons? Now Bert may very well have seen wagon
tracts worn into the surface of the Austin Chalk along the San
Marcos River, but is that so surprising? The Austin Chalk surface is
quite stable and flat through the meanders of the river. Just the
claim that these are fossils is spurious. He might as well claim
that the track marks left by tank maneuvers at Ft. Hood in the creek
beds are also fossils. This is just stupid.

For further reading on the Austin Chalk see:

Krogh, S. J.; Petroleum Potential of the Austin Chalk in Brazos,
Grimes, and Madison Counties, Texas. Baylor University, 1982. ;-)
Copies can be seen at Baylor University's Ferdinand Roemer Geology
Library and the Moody Library, as well as at the Bureau of Economic
Geology Library, The University of Texas, Austin.

- Steve

TOP
Subject: Bert Thompson et al's Critique of Big Bang Cosmology
Author: Todd Greene
Date: May 7, 2003

--- In the Maury_and_Baty Yahoo Group, Robert Baty wrote
[http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Maury_and_Baty/message/1099 ]:
[snip]
> http://www.apologeticspress.org/rr/rr2003/r&r0305a.htm
>
> THE BIG BANG THEORY — A SCIENTIFIC CRITIQUE
> [PART I]
>
> Bert Thompson, Ph.D., Brad Harrub, Ph.D., and Branyon May
[snip]

Hi, everyone.

Does anyone notice these young earth creationists citing Gerardus
Bouw in this article? Bouw is a modern-day geocentrist. Look him up
if you don't believe me. Now why would Thompson, Harrub, and May be
citing Bouw, who with his advocacy of geocentrism indicts his own
credibility?

Here's something else I noticed right off the bat that was pretty
silly, this one a quote from David Berlinski: "Contemporary
cosmologists feel free to say anything that pops into their heads.
Unhappy examples are everywhere: absurd schemes to model time on the
basis of the complex numbers, as in Stephen Hawking's A Brief History
of Time...." While Hawking's scheme may be absurd (I'm not qualified
to judge - and I'm certain that Bert Thompson isn't either!), it
certainly isn't mathematical modeling using complex numbers that
makes it so. Perhaps Berlinski (and Thompson et al, who're quoting
him approvingly) isn't aware of the fact that, just for example,
complex numbers are used routinely in the differential equations used
to model the behavior of electrical circuits in electrical
engineering. (Gee, isn't scientific ignorance wonderful for YEC
rhetoric? And in specific regard to Hawking's use of imaginary time,
Quentin Smith discusses what he thinks of as a coherent description
of this concept in ideas concerning a black hole origin of the
universe, an idea which is similarly promoted by Lee Smolin; see
Smith's web page http://www.qsmithwmu.com/physical_cosmology.htm
and the article there where he discusses "The Black Hole Origin
Theory of the Universe.")

I also notice much YEC ado about nothing regarding the imprecision in
estimates of the Hubble constant. First of all, cosmologists
themselves will tell you that they've known for decades that they've
had difficulties zooming in on the Hubble constant simply because the
technology has not allowed for the precision necessary to constrain
the value. The whole point with studying the Hubble constant has
nothing to do with whether or not the universe is expanding. It is an
observational fact that the universe is expanding. The point about
studies about the Hubble constant is in trying to determine what the
precise rate of the expansion is - not whether or not the
universe is expanding. So, in other words, we see Thompson et al
using 870 words (I counted them) of discussion to make completely
irrelevant comments.

Second, in recent years - due to advancing technology which allows
for much greater precision in observational data - cosmologists
have been working on refining their estimates of the value of the
Hubble constant. Here's just one example of this:

The Hubble Constant and the Expanding Universe
by Wendy Freedman
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/16216

Here's the technical article by Freedman et al:

http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Sept01/Freedman/
Freedman_contents.html

Freedman et al provide a lot of detailed discussion concerning Hubble
constant estimates and about the nature of the uncertainties
involved in various kinds of estimation methods.

DeYoung's comment about the lack of consensus was from 1995, so as we
typically see with young earth creationists, Thompson et al are
simply "living in the past"! Data acquired by astronomers over the
last several years, from such instruments as the Hubble Space
Telescope, COBE (Cosmic Microwave Background Explorer), and WMAP
(Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) have provided data that has
allowed for more precise estimates of the Hubble constant. Wendy
Freedman's "Hubble Key Project" used Cepheid variable star magnitude
measurements of galaxies within about 100 million light-years of the
earth to more precisely estimate the distances to these galaxies.
(Due to its unprecedented resolution - there's the advancement in
astronomical technology again! - with the Hubble Space Telescope
astronomers were able to observe and measure Cepheid variable stars
in galaxies much, much farther from the earth than ever before.)
Using this data, Freedman's team arrived at an estimate of the Hubble
constant (again, this term refers to the rate of expansion) of 72
km/s/Mpc (with an appropriate range of uncertainty).

See also:

"First Year WMAP Observations: Determination of Cosmological
Parameters"
by D. N. Spergel, et al.
http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/product/map/pub_papers/firstyear/
parameters/wmap_parameters.pdf
[note that this is a PDF file]

Note that Thompson et al in Table 1 of their article completely fail
to mention the uncertainty ranges that are involved with the various
estimates. Note also how the serious astronomical articles I've cited
above contain a lot of very detailed discussion concerning potential
systematic errors and uncertainties (it actually constitutes most
of the discussion). So one wonders how Thompson et al can so
completely ignore such discussion in such an amazingly convenient
manner.

But please don't get lost in this discussion about details concerning
astronomical analyses and estimates of the Hubble constant, and just
keep in mind the fact that we observe the expansion of the
universe, and there is absolutely no disagreement among astronomers
whatsoever regarding the fact that the universe is expanding. These
detailed discussions and studies about the Hubble constant are simply
in regard to trying to nail down what the precise overall rate of
expansion is. (Indeed, some recent studies have caused some
astronomers to claim that the rate of expansion in the past was less
than what it is now. In other words, they're claiming that the
expansion rate has accelerated over time, so that the expansion rate
today is significantly greater than it was billions of years ago.
While astronomers are taking these studies seriously, the
astronomical community is still debating this issue.)

Immediately following the Hubble constant discussion, Thompson et al
start talking about redshift, but they laughingly premise their
discussion on the idea that Hubble constant estimates are based
solely on the redshift method of distance estimation, and this
premise is totally false! They also fail to mention anything
whatsoever concerning how the vast majority of astronomers thing that
Arp is misinterpreting (statistically) most of his alleged redshift
anomalies.

We also should keep in mind that whether there was a "Big Bang" or
not, the whole general point is that there was some kind of pivotal
event that took place in the distant past many billions of years ago
(13 to 15 billion years ago, perhaps?) from which our universe as we
currently observe it in its current form was spawned. The event
itself is based on the facts of what we observe regarding (1) the
expansion of our universe today and the distribution of matter that
we see, and (2) the observed abundance of elements today after
billions of years of "matter processing" by stars (which we can think
of as a kind of gigantic fusion reactor). The Big Bang model is
simply an explanation proposed by cosmologists as a model for the
initial state of the universe at the time of this event about 13 to
15 billion years ago.

Incidentally, the current version of the Big Bang model is
called "the inflationary Big Bang model," with the initial
theoreticians for this model being Alan Guth, Andrei Linde, and Paul
Steinhardt. See

"Before the Big Bang"
https://www.techreview.com/articles/vandre0203.asp?p=0
[please note that the, unfortunate, title of this article is wrong;
it's about the inflationary model of the Big Bang and has absolutely
nothing to do with anything about before the Big Bang]

But Linde and Steinhardt (and other physicists, such as Lee Smolin)
are working on new cosmological models that actually do have
something to do with before the Big Bang (indeed, Steinhardt's
model doesn't have a Big Bang, per se). For example, Linde's current
group is working on a new inflationary model in which our observed
universe is a kind of bubble (among many others, which can be
radically different from each other in their fundamental properties)
that has sprouted in a much large cosmos. Steinhardt's group has been
working on a "cyclic model" in which - surprise! - our universe arose
from the "big crunch" of a previous universe. (Sound familiar?
Steinhardt writes: "The Cyclic Model is a radical, new cosmological
scenario which proposes that the Universe undergoes an endless
sequence of epochs which begin with a 'big bang' and end in a 'big
crunch.' When the Universe bounces from contraction to re-expansion,
the temperature and density remain finite [i.e., no singularity -
Todd]. The model does not include a period of rapid inflation, yet it
reproduces all of the successful predictions of standard big bang and
inflationary cosmology.") Here's an online article about an earlier
version of Steinhardt's mode, which is actually significantly
different from his current Cyclic Model:

"'Brane-Storm' Challenges Part of Big Bang Theory"
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/
bigbang_alternative_010413-1.html

So the fact is that there are other models for whatever may have
taken place billions of years ago to result in the universe that we
observe today (even trying to intelligibly consider a genuine "before
the Big Bang"), with the observed characteristics (expansion,
distribution of matter, distribution of elements), but it is the
inflationary Big Bang model that is the currently most accepted model
among cosmologists.

I also should mention the fact that many Christian scientists,
theologians, and philosophers have fallen all over themselves in
touting the Big Bang model as being in support of an ex nihilo
creation of the universe by God, so we have to wonder what planet
Thompson, Harrub, and May are on that they write their entire article
(with more parts to come) while ignoring the fact that the vast
majority of Christians who are scientists argue for the Big Bang
precisely because they advocate the idea as being in support of a
Christian concept of creationism. Of course, since Thompson, Harrub,
and May consider geocentrist Gerardus Bouw to be one of their
authorities on astronomy and cosmology, it's no wonder that they have
difficulties understanding the fact that most Christian scientists
flatly disagree with them concerning the Big Bang.

One wonders what kind of stake in any of this that young earth
creationists like Thompson, Harrub, and May have anyway. Let us
suppose, just for the sake of argument, that the Big Bang model is
totally wrong and that the universe did not originate about 13 to
15 billion years. All this would mean is that the universe has been
in existence even longer than we think, and that its current form
has come about is some way different from what is thought of in the
Big Bang concept. Sweeping away the Big Bang model doesn't lend any
credence to young earth creationism because it doesn't change the
facts of the universe that we observe to exist right now concerning
which our observations of the distant universe also happen to be
observations of the distant past (since the light energy from distant
entities in the universe takes a lot of time to travel to the earth
across the vast distances).

Regards,
Todd S. Greene

TOP
Subject: Bert Thompson's "Young Earth" - 1 down, 7 more to go!
Author: Todd Greene
Date: Apr 17, 2003

Hi, everyone.

In reading Bert Thompson's "The Young Earth" article here

http://www.apologeticspress.org/defdocs/2001/dd-01-16.htm
[Editor's note: Now it's
http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/1991]

as it is on April 17, 2003, now that he's removed the discredited
moon dust argument (1 down), I see that he still has 7 more
discredited arguments that should be removed (*because* they've been
discredited).

Here are the other 7 bad YEC arguments I've identified in the article
by Bert Thompson, Ph.D.:

1. Population growth.

Gee, this one is so bad that in an article in the recent book
*Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics* noted Christian
philosopher Alvin Plantinga describes the population growth argument
as "stupid" and as "clearly a lousy argument" (pp. 139-140). Here's
Plantinga's long paragraph on this:

| ...how can Christian intellectuals -- scientists, philosophers,
| historians, literary and art critics, Christian thinkers of every
| sort -- how can they best serve the Christian community in an
| area like [science]? How can they -- and since we are they, how
| can we -- best serve the Christian community...? One thing our
| experts can do for us is help us avoid rejecting evolution for
| stupid reasons. The early literature of Creation-Science, so
| called, is littered with arguments of that eminently rejectable
| sort. Here is such an argument. Considering the rate of human
| population growth over the last few centuries, the author points
| out that even on a most conservative estimate the human
| population of the earth doubles at least every 1000 years. Then
| if, as evolutionists claim, the first humans existed at least a
| million years ago, by now the human population would have doubled
| 1000 times. It seems hard to see how there could have been fewer
| than two original human beings, so at that rate, by the
| inexorable laws of mathematics, after only 60,000 years or so,
| there would have been something like 36 quintillion people, and
| by now there would have to be 2^1000 human beings. 2^1000 is a
| large number; it is more than 10^300, 1 with 300 zeros after it;
| if there were that many of us the whole universe would have to be
| packed solid with people. Since clearly it isn't, human beings
| couldn't have existed for as long as a million years; so the
| evolutionists are wrong. This is clearly a lousy argument; I
| leave as homework the problem of saying just where it goes wrong.
| There are many other bad arguments against evolution floating
| around, and it is worth our while to learn that these arguments
| are indeed bad. ...we shouldn't reject [contemporary science] for
| the wrong reasons. It is a good thing for our scientists [by
| which Plantinga means scientists who are Christians] to point out
| some of those wrong reasons.

The absurdities of this population growth argument as used by YECs is
discussed at these three online references:

http://www.asa3.org/ASA/topics/Bible-Science/PSCF9-92Siemens.html
http://members.cox.net/ardipithecus/evol/lies/lie019.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-meritt/age.html#growth

2. Earth's magnetic field decay.

As I pointed out in a previous post, here YECs make an incorrect
uniformitarian assumption. (You know, the terrible assumption that
they falsely accuse geologists of making!) The field decay is neither
linear, nor unidirectional. This is known, in fact, by examination of
geological samples from various strata (such as cores from the ocean
floor) that preserve information about the field.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html#magnetic

3. Polystrate fossils.

This argument is discussed thoroughly in the following two online
references. Note that the second link is specifically about the
baleen whale fossil that Bert discusses. The last link is an archived
discussion between Dave Wise and a young earth creationist, showing
by example how a YEC operates in a dishonest manner, in the context
of the use of this particular YEC argument.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/polystrate/trees.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/polystrate/whale.html
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~lindsay/creation/polystrate.html
http://members.aol.com/billyjack6/morgan/q_polystrate_fossils.html

4. Hydrogen in the universe.

This particular argument is simply illogical. I've never seen this
argument used by any other creationist. Fred Hoyle was an advocate of
a "steady state" universe, and disagreed with the idea of the Big
Bang model of an origin universe "only" several billion years in the
past. In fact, the relative amounts of hydrogen that are observed
astronomically are in correspondence with the Big Bang model.
Relative to Hoyle's infinitely old universe, a universe "only" 14
billion years old can be called "young." But relative to the YECs'
six or ten thousand years, a 14 billion year old universe is a
falsification of their idea. Bert's argument here is simply absurd.

5. Atmospheric helium accumulation.

As I pointed out in a previous post, this simply ignores the fact
that helium does escape from the atmosphere.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html#helium

6. Ocean salinity.

As I pointed out in a previous post, this argument has been used by
YECs, and discredited, for over thirty years. It totally ignores
equilibrium conditions.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html#ocean

7. Gas and oil pressure.

See
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/hovind/howgood-yea2.html#proof18

Well, that's it for Bert's "The Young Earth" article. Typical YEC
propaganda. Bad science all the way around.

And I point out here again that the whole approach of Bert Thompson
and other YECs is simply a moot point, because by astronomical
observation we literally observe the distant past of the universe,
before just several thousand years ago, that YECs say doesn't exist.

Regards,
Todd S. Greene

TOP
Subject: Re: Legacy Building!? (Trevor Major?!)
Author: Todd Greene
Date: Jan 6, 2003

--- In creationism, Robert Baty wrote (post #8005):
> Todd, you wrote on your "Creationism" list:
>
>> "Wild card: Trevor Major. Another Glenn Morton in the making?
>> If so, Trevor has an awful lot of original propaganda to make up
>> for, and thus I hope he takes his responsibility as seriously as
>> Glenn Morton certainly has.
>>
>> Hey, Robert, take a look at this, where Trevor is described as a
>> 'postmodernist Christian':
>>
>> http://home.attbi.com/~pmcclanahan/page24.html
>>
>> (ROTFL hysterically!!!)"
>
> I don't quite get the joke! My ignorance is showing, I guess.

Hi, Robert.

Well, Trevor is anything but postmodernist. The author of that web
page cannot have read much of Trevor's writings at all. And now that
I've had to explain it, it isn't a joke anymore. :-(

>
> The Trevor Major comment, I noted, was from his 1996 article found
> at:
>
> http://www.apologeticspress.org/rr/rr1996/r&r9606b.htm
>
> In any case, Trevor Major may be a "wild card". As I recall, when he
> left Bert's employment, Bert wrote a glowing send-off of him and
> indicated he would look forward to publishing more of Trevor's
> materials in the future.
>
> As I recall, Trevor was off to Ohio State to work on a Ph.D. in
> the philosophy of science.
>
> So, what has become of Trevor these days? Anybody know? I haven't
> noticed anything recent from him.

I think he's still a graduate student at Ohio State. Here's his
current email address there: "Trevor Major" <major.15@...>

I notice that the two OSU professors for philosophy of science
research are Robert Batterman and Neil Tennant. Tennant also happens
to be an adjunct professor at OSU's Center for Cognitive Science.

Here's Batterman's faculty page:

http://philosophy.ohio-state.edu/people/batterman.html

Here is a discussion by Batterman about some philosophical issues in
physics:

Intertheory Relations in Physics
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physics-interrelate/

Here's a review of a Batterman's just published book The Devil in
the Details:

http://ndpr.icaap.org/content/archives/2002/10/hooker=batterman.html

Here's Tennant's page for PHIL 655 (Philosophy of Science) and his
publication page:

http://philosophy.ohio-state.edu/people/Faculty/tennant.9/655.html

http://philosophy.ohio-state.edu/people/Faculty/tennant.9/
publications.html

I noticed that Tennant had an article online he titled "Reason Off-
Balance? Naturalism v. Theism on the Cosmos, Life, Mind and Morals"
which, he writes, "was the basis of my response to the theist Phillip
Johnson, of the University of California at Berkeley Law School, in a
debate organized by the Veritas Forum at The Ohio State University in
Autumn Term 1995." But the link for this was bad, so maybe that's not
online anymore. But along the same line as this I also found:

"The Argument from Design, for the Existence of God: exegesis and
criticism"
by Neil W. Tennant
http://philosophy.ohio-state.edu/people/Faculty/tennant.9/101.3m.html

>
> If Trevor ever opens up, I suspect he might really have a story
> to tell about his work for Bert and the real reasons he left (not
> unlike others who have come and gone over the years).
>
> In particular, he has had specific involvement in the Maury
> coverups Bert put out and those CRSQ letters, one of which Bert
> claims was my "feeble attempt" but that I did not write.
>
> Hey, Trevor might even be possessed of the secret source of
> Bert's Maury statue claim.
>
> If only Trevor could be compelled to talk! Then again, maybe he's
> worrying about his own legacy and admitting his role in these
> things just might not be academically wise for him to do these
> days. You think?

Well, if you're at all familiar with Glenn Morton's creationism-
related writing, I think that in the "broader scheme of things" what
I'm wondering about is whether or not Trevor has begun to "see the
light" about young earth creationism, like Glenn did (and like I did,
as a matter of fact!). If (please notice the "if" here) this is the
case, what I would expect to see occur is that it takes several
months to a few years to get over the "paradigm shock" and to have
the various issues (personal and religious, as well as philosophical
and scientific) "settle out," and then after this time we should
start seeing Trevor begin writing critically about young earth
creationism (assuming he writes much about the subject at all).
Again, I state here that whether or not Trevor Major has been having
serious conjectures about young earth creationism is at this time
sheer conjecture on my part. I'm not sure why I'm thinking this,
but somewhere back several months or so, I got this impression that
there was something up with Trevor on this stuff, but my personal
impression could be totally wrong.

Regards,
Todd Greene

TOP
Subject: Randy J's "atheists" becoming creationists
Author: Todd Greene
Date: Jan 5, 2003

--- In creationism, Randy Johnson wrote (post #7966):
> --- In creationism, Todd Greene wrote:
>> --- In creationism, Randy Johnson wrote (post #7940):
>>> There is also those who were athesistic scientists who came to a
>>> belief in creation not because of "crusades" or some such but
>>> because in their field of study evolution made no sense and
>>> the "handprint" of intelligence was seen. I would provide a list
>>> of several to those who are interested.
>>
>> Please name names. Let's see what's up. The details are
>> important.
>>
>> I'm aware that John Clayton was raised as an atheist, but he's
>> certainly not a young earth creationist. Indeed, there are many
>> YECs in the Church of Christ (such as Wayne Jackson and Bert
>> Thompson) who have attacked John Clayton for over twenty years.
>
> Dr John Kramer, biochemistry; Dr Paul Geim, professor of medicine;
> Dr Keith Wanser, professor of physics; Dr Timothy Standish,
> professor of biology. These are some that I am aware of; I am sure
> that there are others that I am not.

Hi, Randy.

Just as I said, the details are important.

How can you claim that Kramer, Giem, Wanser were "atheistic
scientists who came to a belief in creation"? All of these men were
raised in fundamentalist churches. Giem and Standish, for instance,
were raised as, and are, Seventh Day Adventists. Wanser was raised in
a YEC-oriented church (though I haven't been able to track down the
specific denomination).

Score: 0 for 4.

Hmmm... That's about as bad as quoting Stassen out of context.

Golly, Randy, I'm sure you're a smart guy, just as you've said, but
smart guys who possess the attitude that it's okay to be egregiously
careless and sloppy with information and that it's okay to just throw
out false claims right and left in discussion have rendered their
intelligence rather worthless. Bert Thompson is a really smart guy,
yet as of late last year (2002) he was still advocating the moldy
oldy long-discredited YEC moon dust argument. I have absolutely no
doubt at all that Marion Fox is also a really smart guy, yet as of
the middle of last year (2002) he still admantly refused to
acknowledge to me that the existence of the Kuiper Belt has been
empirically verified by astronomers. (In the summer of 1999 I had
pointed out to Marion that astronomers had begun to verify the
existence of the hypothesized Kuiper Belt with observations in 1992.
He denied this, and then when I pointed out the astronomical
information to him where astronomers had sighted hundreds of Kuiper
Belt objects, Marion simply clammed up and adamantly refused to
acknowledge the existence of the Kuiper Belt despite my repeated
insistence that he correct his erroneous claim and acknowledge this.)

Young earth creationists aren't stupid. They are so smart, in fact,
that they've developed a sophisticated propaganda science out of
being careless, sloppy, and misrepresentative with relevant (and
irrelevant) information. Didn't you know? That's what the
term "creation science" refers to.

Sincerely,
Todd Greene

P.S.: Please don't ever doubt that I'm enjoying the discussion.

TOP
Subject: Christian philosopher calls YEC population argument "stupid"
Author: Todd Greene
Date: Oct 20, 2002

Hi, everyone.

I've been reading portions of the 800-page book Intelligent Design
Creationism and Its Critics from time to time over the last several
weeks (it's a collection of articles by various writers). About three
weeks ago I happened to read Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga's
comments on the population argument for a young earth that is used by
young earth creationists.

Plantinga writes (pp. 139-140; yes, it's a single paragraph in the
original):

> ...how can Christian intellectuals -- scientists, philosophers,
> historians, literary and art critics, Christian thinkers of every
> sort -- how can they best serve the Christian community in an
> area like [science]? How can they -- and since we are they, how
> can we -- best serve the Christian community...? One thing our
> experts can do for us is help us avoid rejecting evolution for
> stupid reasons. The early literature of Creation-Science, so
> called, is littered with arguments of that eminently rejectable
> sort. Here is such an argument. Considering the rate of human
> population growth over the last few centuries, the author points
> out that even on a most conservative estimate the human
> population of the earth doubles at least every 1000 years. Then
> if, as evolutionists claim, the first humans existed at least a
> million years ago, by now the human population would have doubled
> 1000 times. It seems hard to see how there could have been fewer
> than two original human beings, so at that rate, by the
> inexorable laws of mathematics, after only 60,000 years or so,
> there would have been something like 36 quintillion people, and
> by now there would have to be 2^1000 human beings. 2^1000 is a
> large number; it is more than 10^300, 1 with 300 zeros after it;
> if there were that many of us the whole universe would have to be
> packed solid with people. Since clearly it isn't, human beings
> couldn't have existed for as long as a million years; so the
> evolutionists are wrong. This is clearly a lousy argument; I
> leave as homework the problem of saying just where it goes wrong.
> There are many other bad arguments against evolution floating
> around, and it is worth our while to learn that these arguments
> are indeed bad. ...we shouldn't reject [contemporary science] for
> the wrong reasons. It is a good thing for our scientists [by
> which Plantinga means scientists who are Christians] to point out
> some of those wrong reasons.

Note that Plantinga, himself a Christian and a noted philosopher of
theism in the general Christian community (and who, by the way, is
sympathetic to creationism in general) refers to the population
argument, which is still rather popular in young earth creationist
literature (despite Plantinga's reference to it as part of
the "early" literature), as a "stupid reason" and a "lousy argument."

So why are Bert Thompson, Ph.D., and Brad Harrub, Ph.D., still using
this stupid argument?

"Q&A: Evidence For A Young Earth" (June 2002)
http://www.apologeticspress.org/rr/rr2002/res0206b.htm

Could the irresponsible attitude of obstinacy-in-error, as a result
of being overly zealous, have something to do with it?

"As those whose lives and teachings revolve around the
importance of truth, we, of all people, should do all we
can to avoid the dissemination of erroneous material,
regardless of how 'good' it may sound, or the 'evidential
value' it may appear to have. Yes, we should defend God's
Word. But no, we should not use error to do it.
'Faithfully teaching the Faith' is not merely an awesome
privilege, but an awesome responsibility as well."
-- Bert Thompson (Reason & Revelation, 2/99)

"There is a danger that Christians could be so zealous to
prove the atheist wrong that they pick up an argument...and
use it before the evidence proves it to be sound. The cause
of truth is not advanced by unsound arguments. When
Christians use unsound arguments in an attempt to prove that
God exists or the Bible is inerrant they damage the cause of
Christ. The honest truth seeker may see these errors and
become suspicious of either their motives, their veracities,
or both."
-- Marion R. Fox (A Study of the Biblical Flood)

Chuckling,
Todd S. Greene

TOP
Subject: Apparent Age Muddleheadedness
Author: Todd Greene
Date: Oct 12, 2002

Hi, "creationism" readers.

Robert Baty quoted the following statements from Kyle Butt (from
http://www.apologeticspress.org/rr/rr2002/res0210b.htm ):

> How old is the Earth? No one knows the exact number of times this
> globe has orbited the Sun. However, using biblical chronology, a
> person can calculate the age of the Earth to be in the
> neighborhood of 6,000 years old.

Perhaps these YECs should get together, instead of contradicting each
other and thus displaying the incoherence of their position. For
example, at the online Watchman Magazine site, YEC Maurice Barnett
writes[1], "though we don't know just how long it has been since
creation, the Bible does place some limitations on what that period
of time can be. And, lest anyone jump to the conclusion that I think
Bishop Usshur's chronology is correct, just pass that by. Nothing
definite can be determined by the genealogies of Genesis 5,11." With
this statement, Barnett directly contradicts Butt.

Butt should read William Henry Green's article[2] about the use of
biblical genealogies as chronology. Butt needs to catch up on a
hundred years of theology. (No surprise, since he also needs to catch
up on about two hundred years of science!)

Continuing with Butt's article:
> "But the Earth looks millions of years old," some people have
> protested. There are at least two responses to such a statement.
> First, one might ask: "Compared to what; what does a young Earth
> look like?" We obviously do not have another Earth that we know
> is younger than this one, so how would we know what a young Earth
> looks like.

Butt must think his readers are stupid. (Hmmm... Well, maybe he's
right about a few of them! People who intentionally put blinders on
are, well, blind, and it's their own fault.) Clearly geologists are
talking about characteristics of certain features of the earth
which require a great deal of time to have passed in order to exist
in the state in which they are found to exist. In the statement above
Butt advocates the obviously silly idea that it is impossible for us
to scientifically compare some features of Earth with other features.
Perhaps Butt should stick to teaching first grade Sunday school and
leave the heavy philosophy to us adults.

> Second, it should not surprise us if science occasionally
> calculates older dates for the Earth, due to a concept known as
> the "doctrine of apparent age."

Okay, here it comes. The ultimate YEC fallback position.

>
> This idea suggests that the things God made during the Creation
> week were formed complete and fully functional.

Features that are required in order to be functional. Please keep
this in mind. This is the critical point that YECs make that they
themselves do not even understand.

> For instance, how old were Adam and Eve two seconds after God
> created them? They were literally two seconds old! Yet they
> walked, talked, and looked like adult human beings, and even had
> the ability to reproduce (Genesis 1:28).

Right. And how many false memories did God put into the minds of Adam
and Eve of a childhood that they never had? Did God put a scar on
Adam's left leg from when Adam fell down a hillside when he was a
child and gouged his leg on a rock? Did Adam and Eve have scars? Did
Adam and Eve have false memories of events that never took place? Are
scars and false memories required for functionality?

> If a tree
> were cut down in the Garden of Eden one day after the Creation
> week, how many rings would it have had? Possibly hundreds, yet it
> would have been only five days old (trees and other plants,
> remember, were created on day three of the Creation week).

Here Butt contradicts his own argument. Tree rings are literally some
of the marks left within the tree by past events that have taken
place in the life of a tree. They have nothing whatsoever to do with
imparting functionality to a tree. Butt certainly wishes to argue for
apparent age based on features that are necessary for functionality.
However, in positing the existence of instantaneously created tree
rings, Butt has gone beyond his own argument and is now arguing that
God created, deceptively, nonfunctional features of historical events
that never took place.

> So, the real
> age of the tree and the apparent age of the tree would have been
> quite different. Just because this Earth may appear older than
> 6,000 years, does not mean it is older than that.

Butt needs to explain what functionality the Devil's Tower in Wyoming
imparts to the Earth. The Devil's Tower, in fact, is the remains of
the "throat" of a volcano that existed millions of years, but the
volcano itself has been completed eroded away, and all that is left
is the "frozen" lava that was left deep down in the throat of the
volcano after is last eruption.

Butt needs to explain what functionality impact craters impart to the
Earth. A comet or asteroid crashed into the earth a couple of hundred
million years ago in Canada (Manicouagan Crater), and so much time
has passed since that impact that the crater has been completely
lithified (turned to rock) and then eroded away. This process simply
cannot take place in merely 6,000 years, or even 100,000 years.[3]

(A few months ago, I wrote about YECs who try "to pretend that the
Earth impact craters such as the Panther Mountain Crater and the
Manicouagan Crater [not to mention a myriad of other geological
features] could be eroded, have hundreds of feet of deposition of
sediment, have this sediment lithify [become rock], then have
hundreds of feet of this sedimentary rock over the original crater
erode [weather], all in a time span of about 4,200 years. Yet the
observed weathering of the rock of the Roman aqueducts in about 2,000
years is on the order of a few inches. And YECs wonder why
geologists don't take them seriously."[4])

An impact crater has nothing whatsoever to do with being a feature
required for functionality. Something like the Manicouagan Crater is
the remains of a series of historical events, the first event being
the impact itself, that have taken place over a very long period of
time. Butt's "functionality argument" cannot explain such geological
features. Moreover, if God created detailed features of specific
events, which do not in fact have anything to do with being required
for functionality, then by their nature such features are very
deceptive indeed.

>
> Some have opined that if God made the Earth appear older than it
> actually is, then He has deceived us because things aren't really
> as old as they look. This criticism would be true — except for one
> thing: God told us what He did! He did not leave us in the dark or
> try to "trick us" or "test our faith" by hiding from us important
> information that He knew we would need. Rather, He was very
> straightforward and honest with us. Considering the material found
> in the first eleven chapters of Genesis (and elsewhere throughout
> the Bible), no one can justifiably accuse God of deception. If we
> ignore His Word regarding what He said He did, is it God's fault?
> Hardly!

Well, I see Butt writing about the apparent age argument, but the
fact is that the Bible doesn't speak one single word about the
apparent age argument. This puts Butt in the position of putting
words in God's mouth. Now, the Bible does in fact say some things
about men putting words in God's mouth, and they are not at all
complimentary. I challenge Butt to cite a single Bible verse that
discusses tree rings. The Bible doesn't talk about lithification and
erosion, nor does it discuss impact craters or any other details
regarding geological science.

Of course, since it is a matter of fact that the universe and the
earth have been in existence far longer than just 6,000 years, if the
Bible really does teach that the universe and the earth did not exist
more than about 6,000 years ago, then we all know what this tells us
about the Bible. (If the Bible teaches that the sun orbits the earth,
this would tell us exactly the same thing.)

Should anyone so wish, please feel free to copy this response to Kyle
Butt's article anywhere where you thing it may be relevant.

Regards,
Todd S. Greene

[1] http://www.watchmanmag.com/0306/030624.htm
[2] http://www.creationism.cc/PrimevalChronology.html
[3] http://www.creationism.cc/ancientproof/impactcraters.html
[4] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/creationism/message/5399