Babylon Bee: Ken Ham Arrested For Vandalizing Grand Canyon Signs To Read ‘JUST 4400 YEARS OLD’

I love the Babylon Bee.  They will skewer anything.  This post announces that Ken Ham was caught vandalizing signs in the Grand Canyon:

Dozens of informational signs throughout the park tell visitors that the Colorado River carved the canyon over the past six million years—but Ham allegedly painted over these signs and wrote “CANYON JUST 4400 YEARS OLD—WAKE UP!” national park rangers said at a press conference.

“We found Ham hiding behind a large rock formation with several cans of spray paint and a Sharpie after seeing his Facebook posts and pinging his phone to determine his exact location,” one ranger said. “All evidence points to this being a one-man operation. Pretty much all of our visitor signs were ‘corrected’ by Ham—even the big one at the main entrance.”

If you hadn't figured out that this was satire, the last sentence in the article should have been a big clue:

At publishing time, Ham had miraculously escaped captivity and was seen painting over signs at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles.

The really funny thing about this post by the Bee is that it elicited a correction by the site “Business 2 Community,” which ran this:

Ken Ham, a spokesman for creationist, being arrested for vandalizing the Grand Canyon National Park signs to read “Just 4,400 Years Old” is satirical news. There is no truth to a report that an Australian Christian fundamentalist and young Earth creationist living in the United States found himself in trouble after he painted over signs at the country’s popular national park.

In case you don’t know, Ham is the president of Answers in Genesis, a Creationist apologetics organization that operates the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter.

As of now, the site that Ham runs, Answers in Genesis, has yet to respond to the article.In fact, as nearly as I can tell, they have not acknowledged the existence of the Babylon Bee, whatsoever. 

Matt Young Not Happy With Treatment of Andrew Snelling

Neither am I.  It seems that Andrew Snelling, a young earth creationist, wanted to do a geological study of rocks in the Grand Canyon and so petitioned the National Park Service to remove a few rocks to do this.  After reviewing the proposal that Snelling sent, the Park Service declined.  Citing religious descrimination, Snelling is suing the Park Service.  Here is an excerpt from the story in the Phoenix New Times:

In the federal complaint filed on Tuesday, ADF uses several key e-mails by scientists who put their feelings in writing to demonstrate the bias Snelling says he encountered.

"It is difficult to review such an outlandish proposal," Ron Blakely of Northern Arizona University told NPS officials in 2014, when he was asked for his opinion about Snelling's proposal.

Gary McCaleb, ADF senior counsel, told Phoenix New Times that Snelling "has been stonewalled for three years. Something's fundamentally wrong when a government stops a good scientist from doing good research."

Whether it's actually "good" research is debatable, of course. But it's unclear why government officials care what Snelling concludes about a relatively small collection of Grand Canyon rocks.

Here is Matt Young's take on it, from Panda's Thumb:

I do not know how many people request permission to remove a few rocks from the Grand Canyon. But Dr. Snelling’s proposal was to remove no more than 60, ~0.2 kg samples to use in his research. He did not ask for any funding. There is not the slightest doubt that his research would conclude that the Grand Canyon was something like 6000 years old. That is, he is pursuing, in the jargon of the times, fake research. So what? It would have been better if the National Park had allowed him to have his rocks and go play in his sandbox.

Instead, Dr. Snelling is now being represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, which has just posted an article Grand Canyon National Park continues history of hostility toward religion, and may become something of a cause célèbre among the right wing. The complaint, incidentally, refers irrelevantly to Donald Trump’s recent Executive Order on “religious freedom.”

This kind of thing gives ammunition to the young earth creationists and it was completely unavoidable. The story in Phoenix New Times suggests that reviewer Karl Karlstrom criticized Snelling's beliefs in a letter he sent to the Park Service in 2014.  Without that letter, it is hard to evaluate that charge.  It may be simply that he thought that Snelling's interpretation of the scriptures had no empirical support (which it doesn't).  That is not the same as criticizing his religious beliefs.  On the other hand, if he did criticize Snelling's beliefs, it will be much easier to get a charge of religious bias to stick.  

BioLogos: A Geological Response to the Movie “Is Genesis History?”

Geologists Gregg Davidson, Joel Duff (recently maligned by Ken Ham) and Ken Wolgemuth have contributed to an article taking on the geological premises of the movie Is Genesis History?  While the writing at BioLogos is always measured and civil, underneath, one can sense an air of frustration and anger that, yet again, the scientific evidence has been twisted and misrepresented.  As I mentioned last post, “geologist” Steve Austin figures prominently in this. The authors write:

Just minutes into the film, we find ourselves in the Grand Canyon with Dr. Steve Austin, a young-earth creationist geologist. Here we are told that the layers are flat with no erosion or significant channels, that geologists have abandoned long ages for the canyon formation since it couldn’t be stable over millions of years, that remnants of giant lakes are found that once dammed water before failing and violently carving out the canyon, and that a massive erosional feature near the bottom of the canyon, known as the Great Unconformity, has been observed all over the world. A bit later in the film, we are informed that the layers of the canyon preserve a succession of marine ecosystems, each washed in and deposited by flood surges. Conclusion? “The only explanation that makes sense is a global flood!”

Many who watch this movie will think: “These men are Christians and scientists, so it must be true!” Yet it doesn’t take much digging to discover that evidence of erosion between layers in the Grand Canyon is abundant, including now filled-in river channels as much as 400 ft deep. The so-called “abandonment of long ages” actually means that while some geologists think the carving took over 70 million years, others think it formed over a shorter period of about 6 million years. The giant lakes turn out to be speculation, with no actual evidence of their proposed size. The global presence of the Great Unconformity exists only in Dr. Austin’s mind.

We have already received announcements and invites from our home school group to get a group together to go see this film. I think that I do not have as strong a constitution as I used to. I do not think that I could sit through this film in a theatre without having an aneurysm.It is easy to forgive the average Christian who swallows this stuff hook-line-and-sinker but I have much greater animosity for those who promulgate it, knowing that they are misusing the science.  Young earth creationists tend to live in a self-referential bubble, but these errors have been pointed out to Austin time and time again.  At what point does his further promotion of these ideas become a lie?

Yesterday, I commented that I thought that young earth creationism was, ultimately, turning young, inquisitive Christians away from Christ.  These authors put it succinctly:

While the ubiquitous misrepresentations promulgated in this film are disturbing in their own right, their stated association with the gospel message is what is most alarming. This film will undoubtedly make its way into church libraries, homeschooling and Christian school curriculums, and youth group movie nights, convincing Christian youth that they can safely reject “secular” notions of deep time and evolution. When they go to college or start investigating the evidence themselves and discover they have been misled, the natural tendency is to assume that it is Christianity itself that has failed them. Unbelieving seekers who see this film will likewise be confronted with the confounding association of the truth of Christ with massive misrepresentations about natural history. An enormous stumbling block to faith is laid at the feet of these poor souls, standing between them and the cross.

In the trailer for the film, and in the subtitle, we are treated to this perspective: “Two Competing Views—One Compelling Truth.”This truth is clearly that of young earth creationism, and the stark dichotomy is there to let you know that if you don't believe Tackett's truth, you are “not of the body.” This, Joel Edmund Anderson writes, is heresy:

Read and study the Bible within the context of Church Tradition—that is how the Holy Spirit guides you. Unfortunately, this is precisely where Ken Ham and biblical literalists have gone wrong. Even though they claim they are just proclaiming the clear meaning of Genesis 1-11, in reality they have rejected the “Capital-T” Tradition of the historic Christian faith that makes it clear that the YEC interpretation of Genesis 1-11 has never been universally held by the Church, and has never been seen as a creedal fundamental of the Christian faith. Therefore, Ken Ham has absolutely no authority whatsoever to unilaterally declare that his YEC interpretation of Genesis 1-11 is the fundamental cornerstone of the Christian faith. No one has ever made this claim in the history of the Church up until the 20th Century. That is, by definition what heresy is: elevating a personal interpretation of Scripture above what the Church has always taught.

I will be curious how many people go to see this film. I have yet to formulate a ground plan or response to it, yet. When films like this come out and are warmly received by evangelicals, it further confirms to me that modern evangelicalism is in serious trouble and is off the rails.

Del Tackett: The Truth Problem?

That title comes from a post by “A concerned Christian” on The Truth Project, launched by Del Tackett, in 2004.  Now, a new movie is out by Del Tackett, called "Is Genesis History?"  Clarke Morledge, on the blog Veracity, has this to say: 

According to the promotional material, Is Genesis History? seeks to provide a new look at the evidence supporting Creation and the Flood. But it is important to realize that Del Tackett is putting forward one particular view as to what this means, namely a Young Earth, of no more than about 6,000 years old, and a global Flood in Noah’s day, covering the entire planet.

In the byline for the film, Tackett notes that there are “two competing views… one compelling truth.” The problem here is that Tackett is oversimplifying what is indeed the case among evangelical Christians, just from viewing the film highlight clips on the movie’s YouTube channel. There are actually more than “two” views to consider. For Tackett, the one view he advocates for rejects the concept of “deep time,” the modern scientific consensus of a 4.5 billion year old earth, that helps to explain the origin of our planet and its universe, within the scientific disciplines of geology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and others, as taught in every American public school and public science museum.

For Tackett, this “deep time” paradigm strikes disaster at the very heart of a Biblical worldview, and specifically the meaning of the cosmic Fall, as taught in the Book of Genesis. There are many skeptical, non-Christian scientists and thinkers who would agree, thereby rejecting the Bible. However, there are also a number of other Christian pastors, Bible teachers, theologians, and believing evangelical scientists who find no difficulty reconciling the concept of “deep time,” with an authoritative, inerrant view of the Bible and its teachings. [emphasis his]

I have already noted, in another context, the fact that, in the trailer, Steve Austin, a young earth creationist, when speaking about the Grand Canyon, states that geologists are “backing away” from the idea that it was created millions of years ago. This immediately set off alarm bells, since it has no basis in truth, whatsoever. One model suggests that the canyon began forming when the Colorado Plateau began uplifting around 3-4 million years ago.  Another model suggests a date of 5-6 million years ago for the main canyon but that older canyons in the system may have been carved as early as 50-60 million years ago.  There are no models that posit a canyon creation 6,000 years ago.

Other problems exist with the idea that the canyon was formed recently.  On the shelf, in the gift store at the Grand Canyon, sits a book called Grand Canyon: A Different View, written by young earth creationist Tom Vail. Here is what geologist David Montgomery has to say about it:

Digging deeper into the book, I read that the canyon was carved when the sediment that formed the rocks now exposed in its walls was still soft. I was puzzled that the authors did not try to explain how a mile-high stack of saturated sediment remained standing without slumping into the growing chasm—or how all the loose sand and clay later turned into solid rock. The book simply stated that, according to the Bible, Noah's flood formed the Grand Canyon and all the rocks through which its cut in under a year. There was no explanation for the multiple alternating layers of different rock types, the erosional gaps in the rock sequence that spoke of ages of lost time, or the remarkable order to the various fossils in the canyon walls. The story was nothing like tale I read in the rocks I had spent the day hiking past.

Steve Austin, if you will recall, did the bogus study on potassium/argon dating of Mount St. Helens lava flows. This man's credibility is wanting.

The trailer for Is Genesis History? makes it pretty clear that the film recycles much of the science that was in the Truth Project.  Consequently, I am not holding up much hope that modern science will be given a fair shake.  Sadly, this is part and parcel with young earth creationism.Todd Wood's clarion call for better science in support of young earth creationism is going unheeded and unheard by people like Del Tackett and Ken Ham.  As long as this is the case, the faithful, who know little hard science, will lap this up, but nobody in the scientific community is going to take them seriously and they will turn new people who are interested in science away from God.  That is sad. 

New Book Attacks Creationist Explanation of the Grand Canyon

A new book edited by Carol Hill (who has written some very good articles for the ASA journal Perspectives on the Christian Faith, here and here) and others, in the words of the Arizona Daily Sun “Takes Aim at Grand Canyon Creationism.” Emery Cowen writes:

When it comes to relaying the history of the Grand Canyon, a new book co-authored by longtime Flagstaff resident Wayne Ranney takes a different approach to one of the world's most famous geologic features.

What sets the book apart is how it places religion front and center in its discussion of the canyon’s geology. In 240 photo-rich, textbook-style pages “The Grand Canyon Monument to an Ancient Earth: Can Noah’s Flood Explain the Grand Canyon?” highlights the stark divide that continues to exist between some religious views of the canyon’s formation and the prevailing science about its more than 6 million-year-old evolutionary history.

The book does what geologists have failed to do for decades, said Ranney, a former geology professor who has written several books on Grand Canyon. It directly confronts a sector of Christian believers, called Young Earth Creationists, who maintain that the Grand Canyon’s layers were created in one year during Noah's flood and that the event happened along a timeline of Earth’s history that goes back just 6,000 to 10,000 years.

Page after page of the book is dedicated to explaining those beliefs and then showing how the canyon’s geology conflicts with and debunks them.

Lets leave aside the author's notion that this book provides a “different approach” to the formation of the canyon, since The Tusayan National Geographic Bookstore has one (count 'em, One) book espousing the creationist perspective, called The Grand Canyon, A Different View, edited by Tom Vail, while every other book takes the mainstream science approach to the formation of the canyon.

This new work is a welcome book to combat the nonsense of Tom Vail.  When I was at the Tusayan Bookstore a few years ago, I waded through the book—which has to be seen to be believed—and realized that the devotion to the young earth model causes people to concoct absolutely unbelievable geologic scenarios that simply do not stand up to any sort of scrutiny. As Geologist David Montgomery writes:

Digging deeper into the book, I read that the canyon itself was carved when the sediment that formed the rocks now exposed in its walls was still soft. I was puzzled that the authors did not try to explain how a mile-high stack of saturated sediment remained standing without slumping into the growing chasm—or how all the loose sand and clay later turned into solid rock. The book simply stated that, according to the Bible, Noah’s Flood formed the Grand Canyon and all the rocks through which it’s cut in under a year. There was no explanation for the multiple alternating layers of different rock types, the erosional gaps in the rock sequence that spoke of ages of lost time, or the remarkable order to the various fossils in the canyon walls. The story was nothing like the tale I read in the rocks I had spent the day hiking past.

That is one of so many problems with the creationist view (for example, why did the walls of the canyon not collapse, since they were composed of mud and clay and less than a year old?) that it is difficult to take it seriously.

Given that Vail's book was placed in the Science section of the Grand Canyon Bookstore, we can only hope that this one will be placed right next to it.

P.S. anyone with an interest in this area of geology should pick up David Montgomery's The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood, from which I quoted above. It is a great read.

Creationism in the Grand Canyon

Steven Newton wrote a piece for HuffPo a week or so back on Creationism in the Grand Canyon.  He notes:

Creationists often imply that to accept science (especially evolution) is to reject God. In line with this spurious way of thinking, they argue that having National Park Service rangers give talks to visitors about the Grand Canyon in terms of millions of years is an infringement of religious rights. Not being allowed to have bronze plaques on the South Rim quoting biblical verses is viewed an assault on their liberty. In a strange twist, the park association bookstores are forced to carry Tom Vail's creationist coffee-table book about the Grand Canyon, over the objections of many scientific groups.

This is an odd position for creationists to take, given that Vail's book expressly argues that modern science can explain that the canyon was produced in a calendar year, world-wide flood.  Why wouldn't creationists simply argue that mainstream science presents an alternative geologic view?  Nothing like painting a bull's-eye on your forehead.  This is the first of Newton's proposed five-part series. 

Ken Ham, Andrew Snelling, Creationism and the Challenge of Modern Geology

Recently, a story showed up in the science dailies about evidence supporting rapid canyon formation in Iceland.  First, the story that the BBC ran:

The Jokulsargljufur canyon, 28km long and up to 100m deep, is home to Europe's most powerful waterfall. By analysing the chemistry of rocks in the canyon's walls, the researchers constructed a timeline of how the canyon was shaped over time. Most changes seem to have taken place during three brief but brutal periods. Interestingly, these key flooding events occurred two, five and nine thousand years ago - separated by millennia of relative stability. Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the scientists say their findings demonstrate the importance of brief but cataclysmic events in shaping landscapes.

What the story goes on to say is that each brief, but brutal period may have been a matter of days.  This is fascinating but is not unique.  A similar even occurred in eastern Washington State in the late Pleistocene when there were a series of massive floods that carved out huge areas, creating the scablands.  Consequently, while this report is interesting, there is clearly a precedent for rapid movement of sediment by fast-moving water. Another example of this is the Canyon Lake Gorge, in Texas, which was formed in one very large flood, in 2002. 

Fast, torrential floods carving huge canyons quickly out of solid rock. This was too much of an opportunity for Ken Ham to pass up. Very shortly, his post titled Secularists Say Landscapes Can Form in Days came out. (Aside: note the title.  Ham has dispensed with all pretenses of being inclusive, now considering anyone who supports an old earth and the standard geological model a “secularist.”  There can be no room in Bible-believing Christian circles for those not espousing the young earth view.  Organizations like the Association of Christian Geologists are dismissed out of hand.) Ham writes:

Researchers studying Europe’s most powerful waterfall and the canyon containing it reportedly reached the conclusion that they were “created in a matter of days by extreme flooding.” Rather than being the result of slow-and-gradual processes, these researchers believe that a series of extreme floods several thousand years apart formed the waterfall and the canyon catastrophically. They say that these “findings demonstrate the long-term impact that extreme flood events can have on landscapes.”

The leader of the study apparently stated, “We think of natural environments as being formed over thousands of years, but sometimes they are shaped very suddenly. This insight into one of Iceland’s magnificent landscapes helps us better understand these processes, and illustrates their legacy.”

Of course, we have already known that because the Bible tells us that we live on a young Earth. Geological features cannot take millions of years to form slowly and gradually because the planet isn’t that old! When we start with the Bible we know that we live on a young Earth that was radically reshaped by a massive catastrophe, the global Flood. The Flood and its aftermath explain many of the geologic features we see today.

First, it is intellectually dishonest to accept only the sections of someone's argument that you agree with and dispense with the rest.  This is, charitably, cherry-picking the data.  Ham is quite willing to agree that the Jokulsargljufur canyon was formed very quickly, but not that it represents several episodes thousands of years apart.

Ham then calls on Andrew Snelling, the resident geologist, who figured into my last post. In response to the story, Snelling writes:

This is a brief reminder that even uniformitarians are finding that the actual observational data can only explain the formation of landforms such as canyons and massive waterfalls by catastrophic floods, not the present-day slow-and-gradual geologic processes. Of course we disagree on the timescale, but agree this canyon and waterfall in Iceland were carved after the Ice Age, the one short Ice Age that occurred after the Genesis Flood. And rather than floods being thousands of years apart, they would have been only years to decades apart. Of course, this canyon formed in hardened basalt layers in contrast to the soften volcanic ash layers at Mount St. Helens, but it still resulted from catastrophic floods which carved through the solid rock as though it were soft!

Uniformatarians aren't finding anything of the sort. Snelling is clearly putting up a straw man argument by claiming that geologists conclude that canyons can only form rapidly.  There are quite a few canyons around the world that show evidence of having been formed over quite a long period of time and geologists know it. Even the geologically recent Grand Canyon has likely been forming over the last six million years. By the way, for scale purposes, the Jokulsargljufur Canyon is 300 feet deep. the Grand Canyon, which would have to have been formed in the same, rapid fashion, is, from the top of the north rim to the canyon floor, 5500 feet, or over eighteen times as deep as the Jokulsargljufur Canyon.  Its only known water source is the Colorado River. 

But the logical errors continue.  In order for their world-wide flood model to work, flood geologists must use the “part to whole” fallacy.  In other words, what is happening at the Jokulsargljufur canyon would have to be happening all over the world.  Not just canyon formation but all rock formation, everywhere.  While it is quite possible that, in some instances, magmatic rock can form quickly, its formation is very easy to spot because it is very distinctive.  But it is the only kind of rock that can form quickly.  Metamorphic and sedimentary rock, which are also quite distinctive in their appearance, take considerably longer to form.   Further, it is estimated that up to 70% of the planet's stratigraphic rock formations are sedimentary, in origin and these formation leave extensive layering.  These rocks form by means of wind, water action, glacial action and other slow processes.  They do not form quickly.  Metamorphic rock forms even more slowly than sedimentary rock because it can only form under considerable heat and pressure.  In the context of a world-wide flood, how would these rocks, which require heating to between 150° and 200°, have formed in the first place? Ham and Snelling are suggesting, in this model, that the geological column settled, hardened into rock by an as-yet undetermined very rapid heating process, and Then incised the canyon over the still-hardening rock.  They provide no explanation for how this would happen.

It is disappointing to see that, in their zeal to disregard the work of mainstream geologists and brand them all as “secularists,” a term that is surely pejorative in this context, they present arguments that fail to stand up to even rudimentary scrutiny.  This is part and parcel of young earth creationism and this example represents only a microcosm of the insurmountable problems that it faces.  It is almost as if they feel that their devotion to their understanding of scripture should be enough to sway the reader into supporting the young earth model...just don't look too closely. 


  

Andrew Snelling, Geology and Cooking

Sorry, this one rambles a little bit.

Jonathan Baker at Age of Rocks writes an interesting column that is a response to Andrew Snelling's preposterous statement that one can be a successful petroleum geologist and yet be a young earth creationist.  In his column, he likens the different layers of the rock record to the baking of a cake.  After a series of trials in which a cake is cooked for thirty minutes at 150º, then 350º, then 500º, he writes:

In the first trial, it seems, the batter never reached a high enough temperature for these reactions to complete; in the third trial, there were too many! Thus we all know from experience that the results of our cooking depend strongly on the chosen temperature and time. Consider also the various ways to make a roast: we can cook the meat for a short time at high temperature, for a long time at low temperature, or choose some option in between. Why? Because the rate of chemical reactions is temperature dependent, and for every ~10°C increase in temperature, the reaction rate doubles.

Why is this important to understanding the rock record and petroleum geology? He continues:

This flexibility in cooking reflects a basic principle in petroleum geology called the Time-Temperature Index (TTI). The deposition of organic matter in sedimentary layers is much like pouring a raw cake batter into a pan. As those sediments are buried deeper, the temperature naturally increases, due to what’s called the geothermal gradient (heat flows from the Earth’s center to its surface, so temperature increases with depth). Once the temperature becomes high enough, those same chemical reactions that turned our batter into cake can also turn raw organic matter into a suite of energy-rich hydrocarbons (oil and gas). But the actual cooking time depends on the absolute temperature to which those molecules are exposed.

In other words, the Earth’s subsurface works like a giant oven—in fact, this terminology is frequently used by petroleum geologists. As with cooking in our homes, the end result depends on three factors: the original recipe, time, and temperature. When geologists search for oil/gas, they try to constrain those variables as best they can.

The upshot is that, due to the nature of the geothermal gradient, there simply has not been enough time to produce oil if the earth is only six thousand years old. Further, because geologists use this gradient to their advantage in examining the geological column, they have become very good at finding oil.

One of the grand daddies of modern young earth creationism, George McReady Price, received a letter from Harold Clark, another Seventh Day Adventist and fellow creationist, when Clark went out to visit the oil fields in Texas, in 1938. When he got there, Clark received a bit of a shock.  The letter read in part:

"The rocks do lie in a much more definite sequence than we have ever allowed. The statements made in your book, The New Geology, do not harmonize with the conditions in the field. All over the Midwest the rocks lie in great sheets extending over hundreds of miles, in regular order. Thousands of well cores prove this. In East Texas alone are 25,000 deep wells. Probably well over 100,000 wells in the Midwest give data that has been studied and correlated. The science has become a very exact one. Millions of dollars are spent in drilling, with the paleontological findings of the company geologists taken as the basis for the work. The sequence of the microscopic fossils in the strata is remarkably uniform. The same sequence is found in America, Europe, and anywhere that detailed studies have been made. This oil geology has opened up the depths of the earth in a way that we never dreamed of twenty years ago"

Astoundingly, people like Snelling never seemed to learn from the experience that Clark had.  In the last seventy-seven years, oil and gas explorers haven't adopted any form of young earth creationism in their efforts to find oil.  Instead, they have become better at it by using standard, well-understood modern geological methods and an understanding of the geological column that was well-known even in Clark's time.  To debate this on the part of Snelling is willful blindness. 

In some ways, this is analogous to the problem of what you would find in terms of consistency if the geological column were only 4500 years old and really did reflect the remnants of the world-wide flood.  If you could, the experiment might work like this: construct a tank that was a mile high, fill it with about 1000 feet of dirt (remember, the geological column did not exist at all before the flood but they had to be walking around on something), then pour water into the tank, simulating rain for 365 days.  At the end of that period, let the tank drain away (what the flood waters are said to have done).  You know what you will find at the end of that time?  You will find very hard mud at the bottom, medium hard mud in the middle and soupy mud at the top.  What you will not find is sedimentary rock of any kind.  You won't find sandstones, you won't find shales, you won't find chert and you won't find limestone.  Why?  You won't find them because it takes lots and lots of time for these kinds of rocks to form.

Young earth creationist studies of the Grand Canyon are interesting in this regard.  They fail to account for the fact that the walls of the canyon, had they been formed in a year's time, would not have been solid enough to stand up.  Being mostly mud, they would have collapsed, which is what you typically see in large-scale floods.  In fact, you see the relative hardness of rock on display in the canyon walls: the harder rock walls are more vertical, while the softer rock walls are more eroded.  If it were mud, there would be no canyon at all.

That digressed from the original point but these are just more examples of statements that young earth creationists make that are, on the face of it, absurd.  To paraphrase Conrad Hyers: you are asked to believe several impossible things before breakfast. 

An Exercise in Futility and a Real Time Waster OR Why Practicing Scientists Don't Take Young Earth Creationists Seriously

One person wrote a comment on my BioLogos post that went like this:

here is more then 100 evidence that the erath is younger then 4.5 bilion years:

http://creation.com/age-of-the-earth

and about human “evolution” see this great article:

http://creation.com/human-evolution-stories

 I went and looked at the first site.  On it are some 101 so-called "evidences" of a young earth and a global flood.  I decided to tackle it and the further I got in, the madder I got.  Finally, I just gave up because I saw where it was going and because I didn't have time to devote to it.  The first site is put together by Carl Wieland, a medical doctor who quit practicing in 1986 so he could be a full-time young earth creationist.  Going through the list reminded me of why practicing scientists absolutely can't stand dealing with creationists.  Here are the first fourteen.
My responses are indented.

1.     DNA in ‘ancient’ fossils. DNA extracted from bacteria that are supposed to be 425 million years old brings into question that age, because DNA could not last more than thousands of years.

a.    Probably modern contamination.  The best we can hope for is one million years for DNA http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2317-row-unravels-over-claim-of-oldest-dna.html#.U7GOwLH1vIg

2.      Lazarus bacteria—bacteria revived from salt inclusions supposedly 250 million years old, suggest the salt is not millions of years old. See also Salty saga.

a.    This point is indistinguishable from the first point

3.     The decay in the human genome due to multiple slightly deleterious mutations each generation is consistent with an origin several thousand years ago.

a.    No it is not.  This assumes that everyone inherits all of the mutations and passes them on.  Mutations occur throughout the life of an individual and are not, necessarily passed on during the reproductive years. 

b.    Sanford completely misunderstands or misrepresents Kimura’s results dealing with mutations, completely omitting the conclusions that Kimura reached that build up of deleterious mutations would have no long term effect on a species. http://letterstocreationists.wordpress.com/stan-4/

4.     The data for ‘mitochondrial Eve’ are consistent with a common origin of all humans several thousand years ago

a.    Not in any formulation of the out-of-Africa theory are the dates several thousand years ago.  When Cann, Stoneking and Wilson came up with the theory in 1987, they formulated a modern human origin of between 140 and 280 thousand years ago, in Africa.  Subsequent genetic results have not only found that modern humans and Neandertals split around 500 thousand years ago but that there was interbreeding between these two groups, between 30 and 70 thousand years ago.  This point is not only without support as stated, but simply wrong. 

b.    The author quotes Carl Weiland, a young earth creationist--not a geneticist--who writes “But these dates were based upon ‘molecular clock’ assumptions, which were calibrated by evolutionary beliefs about when certain evolutionary events occurred, supposedly millions of years ago.”  The events are independently confirmed by the fossil record and other genetic studies.  So what if it is based on “evolutionary” beliefs?  Those “beliefs” are based on hard, scientific inquiry and constitute over 150 years of research.  Armchair quarterback comments won’t change that.

5.     Very limited variation in the DNA sequence on the human Y-chromosome around the world is consistent with a recent origin of mankind, thousands not millions of years.

a.    From the paper quoted by Dorit et al.: “A coalescent model, with its assumptions of random mating, equilibrium population size, and exponentially distributed bifurcation times, provides an expected date for the last common male ancestor of 270,000 years (with 95% confidence limits of 0 to 800,000 years). Increasing the population size or nonrandom mating would lower this estimate. A lowest limit for the age of the last common ancestor of all Y lineages is derived by assuming the rapid branching and subsequent independence of all Y lineages since the last common male ancestor (known as a "star" phylogeny); such a pattern provides an estimate of 27,000 years, with 95% limits of 0 to 80,000 years. A mixed model, involving local (regional) coalescence, would produce intermediate times (15).” The zero date represents a possible error, not the actual date estimated.  This is misdirection.

6.     Many fossil bones ‘dated’ at many millions of years old are hardly mineralized, if at all. This contradicts the widely believed old age of the earth. See, for example, Dinosaur bones just how old are they really? Tubes of marine worms, ‘dated’ at 550 million years old, that are soft and flexible and apparently composed of the original organic compounds hold the record (original paper).

a.    The Ediacaran fossils are still fossils.  The preservation is remarkable but they are, nonetheless, fossils.  They are encased in Pyrite in an anaerobic setting, aided by bacteria.  From the ORIGINAL PAPER: “They were originally soft and plastic as has been demonstrated by their postmortem ductile deformation and the occasional preservation of twisted tubes without breakage. The tubes were sufficiently robust and thick-walled (Fig. 1.7) to be preserved in such a way and then extracted from the sediment without disintegrating.”  It is the level of preservation that is unusual.  Besides which, even if you could explain these, and some of the fossils that are partially mineralized, what about the countless fossils that do exist that are completely mineralized?  How do you get those to form in a few thousand years? 

7.     Dinosaur blood cells, blood vessels, proteins (hemoglobin, osteocalcin, collagen, histones) and DNA are not consistent with their supposed more than 65-million-year age, but make more sense if the remains are thousands of years old (at most). 

a.    Once again, one example of this in the face of thousands of counterexamples does not a case for a young earth make.  And further, it was “soft tissue,” not dinosaur blood cells. 

b.    Carl Wieland took this and ran with it, getting many things wrong and misinforming his public about the find. 

c.     Wieland said: “The fact that this really is unfossilized soft tissue from a dinosaur is in this instance so obvious to the naked eye that any scepticism directed at the previous discovery is completely 'history'.”  Wrong, wrong and wrong.  It was not unfossilized, it was a quarter of a millimeter in size and only visible through a scanning microscope and the criticisms of his position on dinosaurs was unaffected. 

8.     Lack of 50:50 racemization of amino acids in fossils ‘dated’ at millions of years old, whereas complete racemization would occur in thousands of years. 

a.    He mentions the Green River Formation and the Fig Tree Chert in South Africa.  The Fig Tree chert has been dated by Samarium-Neodymium to around 3.1 billion years old. 

b.    Also, from the ORIGINAL PAPER: “The rate of racemization or epimerization of amino acids under diagenetic conditions proceeds at such a slow rate that equilibrium mixtures of stereoisomers are generated within several tens of millions of years.  Kvenvolden et al (1972) have reported the presence of D-amino acids in Green River Oil Shale of Eocene age which are not equilibrium mixtures of stereoisomers.  They have suggested that either the rates of racemization in oil shale are very slow or that the original amino acids have been partially contaminated by more recent amino acids of the L-configuration.   This latter explanation is supported by the optical configuration of amino acids in hydrolysates of the bound fraction of fossil fish scales and bones were obtained from the Messel Oil Shale of Eocene age (50 x 10⁶ years)”  Wieland conveniently did not mention this.

9.     Living fossils—jellyfish, graptolites, coelacanth, stromatolites, Wollemi pine and hundreds more. That many hundreds of species could remain so unchanged, for even up to billions of years in the case of stromatolites, speaks against the millions and billions of years being real.

a.    So what?   Sharks have remained unchanged for millions of years also.  All that means is that they are remarkably well-adapted to their environment.  Species only change if there is a selective pressure for them to do so.  If there is not, they won’t.  This constitutes no evidence against evolution.

10.  Discontinuous fossil sequences. E.g. Coelacanth, Wollemi pine and various ‘index’ fossils, which are present in supposedly ancient strata, missing in strata representing many millions of years since, but still living today. Such discontinuities speak against the interpretation of the rock formations as vast geological ages—how could Coelacanths have avoided being fossilized for 65 million years, for example? See The ‘Lazarus effect’: rodent ‘resurrection’!

a.    The Coelacanth (Latimeria) is related to the sarcopterygians that lived during the Devonian but is also very different from them, besides which there are other lobe-finned fish around—the Queensland lungfish.  As with the point above, this just means that they survived intact.  We see plenty of evolution of some branches of lobe-finned fish into the early tetrapods.  That doesn’t mean they all did. 

11.  The ages of the world’s oldest living organisms, trees, are consistent with an age of the earth of thousands of years. 

a.    How is this relevant?  Why would we expect anything older than 4,500 years to be still alive?  It has no bearing on the fossils that came before that represent past, extinct life.  My father is 92.  By this logic, that is consistent with the earth being 92 years old. 

b.    Bates uses the tree-ring method to explain that there are no trees that are older than 7500 years.  However, using this method, we can also explain ice cores, which have been excavated from Greenland and the arctic and which provide “rings” of years that stretch back 40 to 50 thousand years.

12.  Scarcity of plant fossils in many formations containing abundant animal / herbivore fossils. E.g., the Morrison Formation (Jurassic) in Montana. See Origins 21(1):51–56, 1994. Also the Coconino sandstone in the Grand Canyon has many track-ways (animals), but is almost devoid of plants. Implication: these rocks are not ecosystems of an ‘era’ buried in situ over eons of time as evolutionists claim. The evidence is more consistent with catastrophic transport then burial during the massive global Flood of Noah’s day. This eliminates supposed evidence for millions of years.

a.    This information is simply wrong.  Examination of the Morrison formation show that the climate was very dry, like a savanna.  What were found were conifers, tree ferns, rushes and the like.  This constitutes no evidence whatsoever against an old earth.  I was not able to run down the reference listed but, based on what I have read so far, I am certain they were misquoted.  Much of the Coconino sandstones were deposited by water.  Of course it was devoid of plants.  They were an ecosystem, just not the ones that Snelling, Austin and Wieland thought they were.  The depositional environment was varied, however.  Some of the deposits are only consistent with being made on dry sand.  There are also fossilized raindrops.  This was not a mass burial of any sort.

13.  Thick, tightly bent strata without sign of melting or fracturing. E.g. the Kaibab upwarp in Grand Canyon indicates rapid folding before the sediments had time to solidify (the sand grains were not elongated under stress as would be expected if the rock had hardened). This wipes out hundreds of millions of years of time and is consistent with extremely rapid formation during the biblical Flood. See Warped earth (written by a geophysicist).

a.    This is a classic example of one, seemingly unexplainable geological formation is extrapolated to cover the entire earth, even though there are no such formations outside of the Grand Canyon.  The young earth explanation completely ignores the fact that rock formations can bend and twist after they have been laid down based on stresses that are placed on them.  Many kinds of rocks are formed this way—they are called metamorphic. 

b.    But even if we had trouble explaining this, and it was evidence for a catastrophic flooding of the area, how can you explain surface features such as:

                                              i.     Rain drops

                                            ii.     Dunes

                                          iii.     Beaches

                                            iv.     Soil

                                              v.     Desiccation cracks

                                            vi.     Footprints

                                          vii.     Coral reefs

c.     There are countless other examples.  Most of those are from Mark Isaac’s Problems with a Global Flood, which airs out most of the evidence. 

14.  Polystrate fossils—tree trunks in coal (Araucaria spp. king billy pines, celery top pines, in southern hemisphere coal). There are also polystrate tree trunks in the Yellowstone fossilized forests and Joggins, Nova Scotia and in many other places. Polystrate fossilized lycopod trunks occur in northern hemisphere coal, again indicating rapid burial / formation of the organic material that became coal.

a.    All that this means is that there are some instances of rapid deposition.  What is not noted about the Joggins formation is that some of the forests show evidence of forest fires.  How would that happen in a global flood?  

Do I need to continue?  Every single “evidence” of a recent creation is wrong, misunderstood or misconstrued.  Wieland selectively quotes from what he wants, leaves out what doesn’t fit his preconceived ideas, and misdirects his readers away from the true points of an article in a way that can only be called dishonest.  

The amazing thing about the voluminous list is that every claim has been refuted in one place or another, some decades ago and yet, the page was updated on May 8 of this year?  Why haven’t the bogus claims been removed?

Once again, this is why practicing scientists despise dealing with creationists.   

UPDATE: I just noticed that the moderator has removed the comment. 
UPDATE 2: now the comment is back but mine is gone.  Weird. 

New Film by Greta Schiller: No Dinosaurs in Heaven

Greta Schiller has a documentary film out called No Dinosaurs in Heaven, which I think is a very odd title and is likely to add fuel to the fire that “evolutionists” regard religious conviction as insignificant and a source of humor.  The link to the trailer is here.This is a section of the press release:

NO DINOSAURS IN HEAVEN explores the problem of creationists who earn science degrees in order to sneak their anti-science beliefs into the classroom. As a stunning visual counterpoint, Dr. Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education leads a raft trip down the Grand Canyon, where the creationist and evolutionary explanations of this natural wonder are juxtaposed. The film moves from the Grand Canyon to the American Museum of Natural History to actual middle school science classes in New York City, where public school teachers find themselves on the front lines of this struggle.

Screenings are available from Laure Parsons at laure@nodinos.com. There is no mention of the cost on the site, itself, although the distributor has these figures: universities: $289, high schools and public libraries: $99 and private rental for $150.  I doubt I will be seeing it in the foreseeable future. 

The Grand Canyon and Young Earth Creationism

At the Grand Canyon it was my sworn duty to go to the bookstore at the Welcome Center and look up Tom Vail's The Grand Canyon: A Different View. At $17.99, it was not my sworn duty to pick up a copy of it. I did leaf through it, though. It is more of an anthology than anything else, having different entries by a veritable cavalcade of Young Earth Creationists. Almost at random, I opened to a page that had several different arguments, two of which were prominent: in recent years many geologists have begun rejecting uniformitarian arguments and accepting catastrophic explanations for geological formations and that there are no transitional fossils.

I was struck by the casualness with which these outright fabrications were put to paper. There was, of course, no support for either position listed, despite the fact that the book, itself, was surrounded by no fewer than thirty books arguing that, yes, there are transitional fossils and, no, mainstream geologists are not embracing catastrophic explanations for the formation of the canyon.

The book exists in its own little island, the only one of its kind on any of the book shelves in the bookstore. That it is there at all is remarkable, given the controversy surrounding it. One can only hope it has little influence on those that enter the park.