Meanwhile, Back in Texas...

A report has just come out that indicates numerous failures to properly implement the state guidelines for the study of the Holy Bible in public school classrooms. The report generally focuses on the lack of biblical knowledge of teachers who are tasked with these classes. In the middle of the list of deficiencies, however, is this little nugget:

- A number of courses and their instructional materials incorporate pseudo-scholarship, including claims that the Bible provides scientific proof of a 6,000-year-old Earth (young Earth creationism) and that the United States was founded as a Christian nation based on biblical Christian principles. At least two districts' Bible courses include materials suggesting that the origins of racial diversity among humans today can be traced back to Noah's sons -- a claim that has long been an important element of some forms of racism.

Detailed in the actual report are these observations:

Dalhart ISD [Independent School District] features a slide show arguing for a 6,000-year-old earth, and Eastland ISD shows videos produced by the Creation Evidence Museum, a Glen Rose-based organization famous for its defense of a 6,000-yearold earth and claim to possess a fossil of “a pristine human footprint intruded by a dinosaur footprint” from the Paluxy River bed

Never mind that the Paluxy River tracks have been so thoroughly debunked that even the mainstream creationists don't advise using them. Another:

The Noah story also prompts appeals to pseudoscience. In the Boys Ranch ISD, students watch “various videos from You Tube that present different views of the flood in coordination with account from Genesis.” A workbook used in Dayton ISD suggests that biblical characters’ life spans declined “due to major environmental changes brought about by the flood.”

The major environmental changes were, apparently, so widespread that there exists no evidence for them whatsoever. Not to mention that traditional understanding of those lifespans was that they encompassed entire family generations, not individual people.

The findings in this report are probably not unique and, I daresay, could be found in many other states.  How many creationist-oriented courses that fly under the radar is not known but it is probably pretty high in some areas of the country. 

A New Dating Method

According to a story from Science Centric, a new dating method involving water removal from an item during dating has come to light. The team of researchers from the University of Manchester and University of Edinburgh. The method involves the process of analyzing water absorption:

From the moment they are fired, ceramics begin to absorb moisture from the environment which causes them to gain mass. Using a technique they call rehydroxilation dating' researchers led by Dr Moira Wilson from the University of Manchester found that heating a sample of the relic to extreme temperatures causes this process to be reversed all the moisture it has gained since it was fired is lost again.

The more weight a sample loses during heating, the more moisture there was to start with, and so the older the relic. After heating, Wilson and her team used an extremely accurate measuring device to monitor the sample as it began to recombine with moisture in the atmosphere. They then used a law to predict how long it would take for all the water lost in heating to be reabsorbed, and so reveal the true age of the sample.

So far bricks from the Roman Empire have been successfully dated and the process has the potential to go back to 10 ky B.P.

Of course, all of the items that are dated should show varying amounts of moisture only for the last four thousand years or so. Before that, the world-wide flood would render all items waterlogged. As AIG states:

Genesis 11:10 tells us that Shem was 100 years old, 2 years after the Flood had finished. When was Noah’s Flood? 1,981 years to AD 0 plus 967 years to the founding of Solomon’s Temple plus 480 years to the end of the Exodus plus 430 years to the promise to Abraham plus 75 years to Abraham’s birth plus 350 years to Shem’s 100th birthday plus 2 years to the Flood. The Biblical data places the Flood at 2304 BC +/- 11 years.

Of course, if varying amounts of moisture are found in objects dated back before the supposed date of the flood, this would strongly suggest that no such flood took place, wouldn't it?