Todd Friel: The Holy Spirit Taught Them That the Earth Was Young

This is heresy.  Straight up.

Sorry for the light posting. I have been extremely busy and have not had time to devote to it.  I am taking a break from my hectic schedule to post on an AiG article that is one of the most offensive things i have read in some time.  The title of the post is How Do I Stay Humble When I Know I’m Right? and is written by Todd Friel, who has no biography on the web site, so we have absolutely no idea what his qualifications are. He also fronts a web site called Wretched, which, likewise, gives us no information than we already had.  So, why has this post made me a hateful person?  Here's why.

Friel recounts the story of Bob, who gets stuck in the Sonoran Desert near Tucson and has to be rescued.  Apparently, Bob is not sufficiently thankful to God for his good fortune and so Todd has this to say:

You would think Bob is either very forgetful or very arrogant. Bob was not the author of his good fortune; he was merely the recipient. The Apostle Paul would rightly ask him, “What do you have that you did not receive?” (See 1 Corinthians 4:7.)

Do you know why godly creation scientists believe God created the world in six 24-hour days?

They are brilliant.
They have PhDs.
They understand the plain meaning of Genesis 1 and 2.

While all three of those options may be true, the real reason they know the earth is young is that the Holy Spirit taught them the truth.

“The Holy Spirit taught them the truth.”  That has to be one of the most arrogant, myopic idiotic things I have yet read from Answers in Genesis and given the quality of the material on the site, that is saying a lot.  “The Holy Spirit taught them the truth.”  

In the last few years, Answers in Genesis has become much more strident in its position that if you don't accept a six-day creation, you are not a Christian.  This is one more piece that promotes this nonsense.  The implication is that if I think the earth is not six thousand years old, I don't have the Holy Spirit.  Here is a short, non-exhaustive list of other people who, apparently, don't/didn't have the Holy Spirit:

• Billy Graham
• Francis Collins
• Hugh Ross
• Pat Robertson
• Davis Young
• Carol Hill
• N.T. Wright
• J.I Packer
• John Polkinghorne
• B.B. Warfield
• William Jennings Bryan
• Tim Keller 
• John Stott

That list is not even remotely exhaustive.  You might recognize some of the people on that list as being some of the most influential Christian thinkers and evangelists that the world has ever seen, and all of whom can think circles around Todd Friel.

Joel Edmund Anderson has written about the heretical notions in Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis.  Here is yet another example.  Friel claims that the Holy Spirit has given special knowledge just to young earth creationists that no one else has. 

The people in the list above have/had the Holy Spirit and it guided them to lives of evangelism, helping people come to Christ and living inspired Christian lives. Why didn't the Holy Spirit correct their thinking about the age of the earth?

Now I am quite convinced that the Holy Spirit does guide us and nudge us in certain directions, such as “Maybe you should join the mission field,” or “Go reach out to that person over there.” On the other hand, the Holy Spirit telling someone that the earth is young is like telling someone that, when Jesus wasn't preaching the gospel, he was strangling cats. There is no biblical evidence that He did any such thing, just as there is no biblical evidence that the earth is “young.”  While it is true that some interpret the Primeval History as being literal, many, many people of great faith have wrestled for thousands of years to understand exactly what those scriptures mean and I am convinced that God honors those who earnestly struggle with those passages but have faith in Him and his son. 

I don't know who taught those brilliant people that the earth was young but I don't think it was the Holy Spirit, and Todd Friel could use a dose of humility. 

James McGrath: The Implications of Creationism

James McGrath has put together a nifty flow chart showing the implications of young earth creationism.  Enjoy. 

 

The problem, of course, is that your average young earth creationist would look at these conclusions and say “Well, yes.  They are all wrong” without really understanding the implications of that statement.  Even young earth creationists like Todd Wood admit that it all hinges on how Genesis is read.  Since Genesis 1-11 can only be read one way, then the science must be wrong.  It just has to be. 

Answers in Genesis' Deceptive Video on Radiometric Dating

Answers in Genesis now has a “Check this Out” feature where they tackle a scientific claim which argues for an old earth and try to debunk it.  Recently, much to my dismay, one of the home school teachers sent out a link to one of these videos on radiometric dating.  Aside from the mistakes inherent in the video, itself, it betrays a deep misunderstanding of how science works.  Here is the short video.



We will take this bit by bit.

• 0:28 – the narrator states that most scientists regard the age of the earth as between 4.55 and 4.6 and then remarks that, if this is so accurate, why the 50 million year discrepancy?  He then states “That seems like a lot.”  50 million divided by 4.55 billion is 1.09%.  That is the standard error. This date range is made up of thousands of individual dates. The speedometer on your car is less accurate than that (standard error of 2.5%).  In fact, in any statistical test a 1% standard error is considered is equivalent to saying that you are 99% confident that the results you have are accurate. 1% is not a lot of anything. Also carefully omitted from the narrative is that these dates are derived from at least five different kinds of radiometric isochron dating: 

• Lead-Lead isochron
• Samarium-Neodymium isochron
• Rubidium-Strontium isochron
• Rhenium-Osmium isochron and 
• Argon-Argon isochron.  

All of these dating methods have different decay states, decay rates and half lives and yet all give dates to within 1% error

• 1:52 – After a reasonably straightforward description of radiometric dating, the narrator then, while admitting that it is true that a decay rate can be measured using “observational science,” it requires “historical science” to tell how old the rock actually is. He states that in order to get accurate measures from rocks, one would have to know both the decay rate and the initial conditions of the rock, otherwise we cannot directly measure the ages of rocks.  He asks “how do we know what the initial conditions were in the rock sample?”  and “How do we know the amounts of parent or daughter elements haven't been altered by other process in the past?” and How does someone know the decay rate has remained constant in the past?"   He then says “They don't.” This is false.

• Timothy Heaton, Chair of the Department of Earth Sciences & Physics at South Dakota State University writes this about the parent/daughter ratios:
  

  Isochron dating bypasses the necessity of knowing the quantity of initial daughter product in the rock by not using that value in the computation. Instead of using the initial quantity of daughter isotope, the ratio of daughter isotope compared to another isotope of the same element (which is not the product of any decay process) is used as the comparison for isochron dating. The plot of the ratios of the number of atoms of the parent isotope to the number of atoms in the non-daughter isotope compared to the number of atoms of the daughter isotope to the non-daughter isotope should result in a straight line that intersects the vertical y-axis (which is the ratio of daughter to non-daughter isotopes). This point of intersection gives the initial ratio of daughter to non-daughter isotopes, which would also be the ratio in a mineral that crystallized without any parent isotope present.

  Here is a web site that shows how this plot works in graphic fashion. The narrator's  hourglass analogy is, therefore, inaccurate.  We don't need to know how much sand was in the hourglass to begin with, nor did we need to observe the process.  The decay rate is well-known and invariate, which leads to his second statement.
• As far as the variation in decay rates of radiogenic isotopes goes, they have been shown to vary only  0.1% in response to outside influences (here, and here) and have been shown to vary significantly only under extreme laboratory conditions not found on earth.

As noted above, buried deep in this video and others that Answers in Genesis puts out is a particular philosophical bent that sees “observational science” as real science and “historical science” as not. Ken Ham is often quoted as rejecting historical science by rhetorically asking “Were you there?”  In other words, we cannot know historical processes because we did not observe them.  Consequently, when the narrator of this video says “we don't” in answer to how we can know how some of our assumptions about radiometric dating are correct, it is this philosophical bent in action.

Such a perspective is facile, as it completely disregards the fact that we reconstruct past events every day at all levels, from the simple act of encountering a broken glass on the floor with ice and water beside it (someone dropped a glass of water) to complex murder investigations in which no one but the murderer was present.  No one questions the validity of these assumptions and they form the basis for much of what we do in life, including our entire criminal justice system.

Secondary to this notion that we can reconstruct the past is that the processes that occur today also occurred in the past.  If I am digging in a field and encounter, at a depth of three or so feet, a series of horizontal metal beams that are four and a half feet apart with ties in between them, because I know that distance is the standard railway gauge, I can reasonably assume that what I have uncovered is part of an old railway.  Was I there when they built it?  No, but I didn't have to be to have a pretty good idea of what it is.

This is true not just of human constructs but also of natural formations.  Because we have modern floods, hurricanes, meteorite craters and so on, we can identify these formations in the past.

This puts historical science and all of its reconstructive observational power on level footing with observational science.  While Ken Ham and others at Answers in Genesis might say otherwise, it simply is not so.

It is amazing how much damage to scientific and academic integrity one can do in a three-minute video.  Answers in Genesis is, apparently, up to the task.