“Scientists often insist that they follow the data wherever it leads. A study has suggested, however, that their politics may often also guide them.”
In a study of the effect of political outlook on science, 71 teams of academics were independently given the same data set and asked to develop findings based on that data.
“Scientists often insist that they follow the data wherever it leads. A study has suggested, however, that their politics may often also guide them.”
In a study of the effect of political outlook on science, 71 teams of academics were independently given the same data set and asked to develop findings based on that data.
What the academics did not know is that they were grouped by political philosophies.
The academics ended up developing “wildly different results” based on the same data set.
The point is that even when a scientist claims to be operating purely in the realm of ideologically neutral science, the scientist’s world view always pokes through.
Even when dealing with hard data sets, there are always judgement calls to be made. The world view strongly influences these judgements.
This study was on the politics of immigration in Britain, but the point is equally valid for historical science efforts such as estimating the age of the earth.
The critics of young earth creationists essentially claim that their science is trustworthy and those who oppose them are ideologically biased.
Truthfully: everyone’s science is biased. Some of us are willing to admit it.
A foundational assumption of the radiometric dating process is that rates of nuclear decay have always been constant. If rates were ever different in the past, then estimates based on current decay rates are invalid.
We now know that decay rates do in fact vary. Here is a report on recent discoveries that solar activity significantly alters decay rates (“It’s a gigantic effect…”):
Secular scientists used radiometrics to estimate the age of the earth at 4.5 billion years old. This is now completely invalid.
I personally don’t expect anyone to change their mind when confronted with this new evidence. World view assumptions are stubborn things that strongly resist evidence.
Another, related finding that I did not learn until recently: Lab experiments show that nuclear decay can be greatly accelerated given the right conditions. See “Billion-Fold Acceleration of Radioactivity Demonstrated in Laboratory”
The significance of this experiment is that 1) accelerated decay is possible and 2) we can’t rule out that the earth has never been through periods of accelerated decay.
Vaughn Mancha, mentioned in a previous post, states that Old Earth Creationism seeks to harmonize the biblical creation narrative with “the established scientific consensus” of the age of the earth.
Why would you want to?
Is it really your belief that the secular scientist has no world view bias? Spare me. The secular scientist is devoted to a narrative that excludes the God of the Bible. (See the World View presentation)
Do you really think dating methods are reliable? They aren’t. (See the Radiometrics presentation)
Do you think that denying the plain meaning of scripture is a trivial thing? It isn’t.
If you harmonize with these people, you’re letting them define the range of possible meanings of the Biblical text.
And if this is all about preserving your reputation with secular scientists, then you’re delusional.
Maybe they won’t mock you for young earth views, but they will certainly mock you for the doctrines of the virgin birth and bodily resurrection of Christ.
Vaughn Mancha is an Old Earth Creationist who frequently posts on Facebook. Here is a snap of one of his posts, in which he defines the key characteristics of Old Earth Creationism.
Note two major points: the purpose is to harmonize biblical narratives with scientific consensus, and that the “days” in Genesis are actually vast periods of time.
We’ll start with the second point. The Hebrew word “yom” can mean a regular day, and depending on the context, can also mean something more abstract, like an era. The Answers in Genesis organization points out that since Genesis uses a number with “yom”, the meaning has to be a regular day.
The clincher for me is Exodus 20:8-11. In that passage, “yom” has to mean that the days of creation week were regular days.
Your beliefs about the age of the earth should be based on the text of scripture.
Paleontologists went digging for T-Rex dinosaur bones in Montana. In order to transport the bone, they had to break the bone in half. Out spilled bloody soft tissue.
At the time this happened, absolutely no one thought soft tissue could survive millions of years. The uniformitarian assumption had always been, based on human experience with dead tissue, that the soft tissue would decompose in a matter of a few decades at most.
After the discovery of soft, bloody dinosaur tissue, did scientists begin to acknowledge that the earth might be young? Of course not. The world view assumption that the earth is millions of years old was never going to be reconsidered. Instead, everyone changed their assumption that bloody soft tissue couldn’t survive deep time. Of course soft tissue lasts millions of years! Happens all the time!
It was a matter of time before a rescuing device was proposed and adopted: The presence of iron. The problem is the amount of iron available was far too little to create the effects they needed.
The earth’s magnetosphere protects the earth from harmful radiation. The magnetosphere is known to be decreasing in strength at a rate of about 5% per century. If the earth were more that about 10K to 20K years old, the magnetosphere would be too strong to allow life on earth.
The uniformitarian assumption of the decay of the magnetosphere directly leads to a younger-earth result. I am unaware of any old-earth refutation of these facts.
Comets lose a measurable amount of mass each time they make a circuit around the sun. The loss of mass is so significant that no comet should last more than 10 trips around the sun – a few thousand years. This is a far shorter life span than allowed by secular estimates.
The uniformitarian assumption directly translates to a younger-earth result.
Consequently, advocates of the old-earth hypothesis invented a rescuing device: an imaginary object, the Oort cloud, which serves as a comet reservoir, occasionally sending fresh comets our way.
There is no observable evidence for the Oort cloud; yet it is fervently believed to exist by people committed to the old-earth hypothesis.
Uniformitarian assumptions are frequently used in creating estimates of the age of the earth and the universe.
A scientist measures current processes, and extrapolates those processes into the past to make an estimate of the age of the earth.
A Uniformitarian assumption is an assumption that the way things are right now, are the way things have always been.
It is a reasonable assumption, to a point, but there are cases where uniformitarian assumptions fail.
Moon recession is a case where the uniformitarian assumption has a limited range of applicability.
The moon is known to be receding away from the earth at a rate of 1.5 inches per year. That is the current rate. Physics tells us that the recession rate would have been faster in the past. If we extrapolate backwards, the moon would have been in contact with the earth 1.5 billion years ago.
No one thinks this happened, because it would have been catastrophic for life on the planet. But if 1.5B years is absurd, then even more so is the standard old-earth assumption of 4.5B years.
Clearly the uniformitarian assumption is valid only within a limited range, and we don’t really know where that range begins.
Elsewhere on this website, I assert that no informed person believes life came from inert chemicals.
What then to make of the Youtuber Veritasium? In his episode “If you don’t understand this, you don’t understand evolution” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX7PdJIGiCw Veritasium presents a theory that life did come from non-life. How strong is his case?
His scenario begins with chemical soup and energy. From this point, molecules form, and then blobs of molecules form until ultimately some megablobs become self-replicating.
He doesn’t acknowledge it, but he has just invoked a miracle.
The only known self-replicating molecules are the DNA and RNA molecules inside living cells. There are no known self-replicating molecules outside of a living cell. They do not exist. The world outside the cell is simply too hostile for these fragile molecules, if they form, to last any significant amount of time.
But in his telling, the delicate RNA or DNA came first, survived somehow, then somehow built protective structures around itself. This narrative denies reality. Therefore it can be fairly characterized as a miracle.
His argument is dead at this point, but we’ll assume it is possible in order to evaluate the rest of the argument.
There is a recently coined expression one sees a lot in short, pithy on-line writing: ” Expression is doing a lot of work in this sentence.” It perfectly fits some of his statements. He states that the self-replicating megablobs “stumble upon” ways to move or “stumble upon” mutations to aid survival. “Stumble upon” is doing a lot of work in these sentences. He is saying that random mutations eventually lead to better megablobs.
We know that cells need DNA information in order to build structures. This information tells the cell what the structures are to be, and how they are to be built. Blueprint-type information. Specifications. Where does this information come from? Information does not come from random processes. The only known source of information is an intelligent mind.
Veritasium’s “stumble upon” narrative essentially claims that random mutations created the information needed to build out the rest of the cell. This is the Monkey theory: That an infinite number of monkeys typing away on typewriters will eventually reproduce Shakespeare. This is nonsense. Professor Gerald Schroeder has proven that even a single 488 letter sonnet can’t be reproduced, even if the entire universe is converted into high speed computer chips producing a billion sonnet trials per second, and assuming the big bang timeline.
Information from random processes is the second miracle that Veritasium invokes. With these two miracles, Veritasium has magicked away gigantic, insurmountable obstacles to evolution.
He then adds a simulation that provides a veneer of rigor to the analysis. Humbug. The simulation has both miracles built in.
His world view does not seem to allow him to acknowledge our Creator God. What he has done is come up with the best possible explanation for life that excludes our Creator God.
I reaffirm my assertion: No informed person thinks life came from inert chemicals. The only persons that claim to do so have slipped miracles into their narrative.
Astronomer Michael J. Disney describes Big Bang cosmology this way:
Big Bang cosmology is not a single theory; rather, it is five separate theories constructed on top of one another. The ground floor is a theory, historically but not fundamentally rooted in general relativity, to explain the redshifts—this is Expansion, which happily also accounts for the cosmic background radiation.
Redshifting has been assumed to be an evidence of the expansion of the universe. But is it?
Back in the 1930s, Cal Tech professor Richard Tolman proposed a test for determining if Redshifting and the expansion of the universe are linked.
Tolman calculated that the surface brightness (the apparent brightness per unit area) of receding galaxies should fall off in a particularly dramatic way with redshift—indeed, so dramatically that those of us building the first cameras for the Hubble Space Telescope in the 1980s were told by cosmologists not to worry about distant galaxies, because we simply wouldn’t see them. Imagine our surprise therefore when every deep Hubble image turned out to have hundreds of apparently distant galaxies scattered all over it (as seen in the first image in this piece).
Tolman couldn’t be wrong: his physics is as sound of a bell. So, if the universe really is expanding, which seems likely, why do all the galaxies, irrespective of their redshift, appear to have the same identical surface- brightness? High redshift galaxies are no less than 4000 times brighter than they ought to be. There’s no escaping from that. 4000 times! (https://mjdisney.org/2022/07/at-the-beginning-of-time-what-the-james-webb-telescope-might-see/astronomy/)
Physicist Eric Lerner agrees that the surface brightness data support the non-expanding universe hypothesis:
…we find that when the effect of telescope resolution is taken into account, the r–z relationships for disc and elliptical galaxies are identical. Both are excellently fit by SEU [static Euclidian Universe] predictions.
What does this mean? The theory of General Relativity predicts an expanding universe, but redshifting data does not confirm expansion. If the universe is not expanding, the ground floor of the Big Bang theory has just been destroyed!!
A second implication: When astronomers measure the size of the universe, they use several techniques of the “cosmic distance ladder” to estimate distances from the Earth. The fourth and final step of the “cosmic distance ladder” estimates distances based on redshifts and the implied doppler effect. That fourth step is no longer valid. Surface brightness observations prove that redshifts are not analogous to the doppler effect.
A third implication has to do with the concept of “time since creation.” If the universe is not expanding, then the idea that measuring redshifts lets us look back in time is invalid.
