quote:Originally posted by The GeologistI can already tell who is going to read this and who isn't.
I read it.
Geo, you seem like an educated man so I'd like your opinion on something I found. I posted it here on the forums a couple weeks ago but I don't think anyone noticed it. I'm not sure really what to make of it. Besides all of the religious references in this piece, the author seems to make some valid points. Hopefully people on these forums don't get mad at me for posting such a huge post as I'm about to do, but I have a feeling if I just post the link then it won't be recognized. Here's the link if you wish to read all of this guys work. I personally don't know what to really think of all of it, but I do find it interesting. It might be outdated in certain sections though.
Linkage
I'd also like to look into the "Paley's Watch" item, but I don't have the time as of now.
The Evolution of a Creationist
10 EARTH: YOUNG OR OLD -
GIVE ME FACTS, NOT ASSUMPTIONS
When faced with lack of evidence to support their faith system, the evolution of molecules to man, the evolutionist will always fall back on the argument of "time". "Give us enough time," they say, "and evolution will occur." And so the evolutionists publish dates of billions of years for the age of the universe. These "billions and billions of years" are emphasized from our childhood days. As little children, we hear famous people and "credentialed" science writers in white lab coats over and over again and again refer to these long ages of time. News broadcasters and public television nature programs refer to billions of years as a matter of fact. Repetition is essential to brainwashing; and brainwashing is essential to belief in one-cell-to-man evolution, since there is no factual science (science not based on assumptions) to back it up. Most creationists would say that the universe is somewhere between six and ten thousand years old. A young universe is not a problem for creationists because our God, the Creator-God of the Bible, is also the Creator of time. He does not need time. He can and did create fully mature people, plants and animals.
The evolutionists make major assumptions during the course of determining a date of several million or billion years for the age of a piece of rock. If any of their assumptions are invalid, then it is impossible to use that technique to find a correct age for the rock. Here is how these dating techniques work: Let us say we find a rock and then want to determine how old it is. We decide to analyze the rock by looking for certain elements or compounds which break down over time into certain other elements or compounds. We might look for a special isotope of uranium and the element it eventually breaks down (decays) into, which is a special isotope of lead. In our rock specimen, we find some of this special uranium and some of the lead it decays into (the "daughter" element). The lead is called the daughter element because it comes from the breakdown of its mother element, uranium. We can measure how much lead is in the rock, and because we think we know how fast (or slowly) the uranium would decay into the lead, the amount of this special lead in the rock should then tell us how old the rock is. In other words, the amount of lead present in the rock would have resulted from a certain amount of uranium decaying over X number of years into lead. For all of this to yield a specific time frame in millions or billions of years, certain assumptions are made.
ASSUMPTION ONE: NO CONTAMINATION
First, it is assumed by the scientist dating the rock that his specimen of rock had never been contaminated. Nothing could have come into or out of the rock that could alter the dating technique to give an erroneous date. This would demand a "closed system" for the rock's environment. As Dr. Henry Morris says in Scientific Creationism,[1] there is no such thing in nature as a closed system. The closed system is an ideal concept convenient for analysis, but non-existent in the real world. Morris mentions that the idea of a system remaining closed for millions of years becomes an absurdity. Some evolutionists claim that every molecule in the universe has been in at least four different substances since the Big Bang. But evolutionists cannot have both; they cannot have molecules jumping around from one substance to another and molecules steadfast and immovable, as they would have to be in the closed system.
Therefore, the first assumption needed to affix old dates to rocks is not valid. Rocks do get contaminated as things seep into them, and rocks change their constituents as things leech out of them. A closed system sounds good and must be assumed to have accuracy in dating rocks, but it does not occur in nature.
ASSUMPTION TWO: NO DAUGHTER COMPONENT
The second assumption of the rock-dating expert is that the system must have initially contained none of its daughter component. In order to calculate the age of our rock specimen, for example, there can be no lead in the original rock. Let us say it takes l,000,000 years for one milligram of lead to be produced by the decay of uranium. We then analyze a rock and discover it has one milligram of lead in it. The article we publish would state, with full conviction, "This rock was l,000,000 years old as scientifically dated using high-tech procedures by Dr. Credentials who has a double Ph.D. in rock dating." Who will doubt how old the rock is? Almost no one. But hold on for a minute. Suppose God created that rock with some of the lead already in it. Or suppose some lead leaked into it somehow or was formed by some other reaction or process. How can the expert differentiate between the lead that God put there (or was formed in some other way) and the lead that came from uranium decay? Obviously, no one can know how much lead was there to begin with. Consequently, for laboratory "accuracy" the evolutionist must arbitrarily decide, "There was no lead (daughter element) there to begin with; I can't prove it, but I will pretend (assume) this to be true."
Every time you are told that a rock is several million or billion or even tens of thousands of years old, the scientist doing the dating has assumed no pre-existing daughter compound. This means he guesses every time. Do we take scientists' guesses as valid fact and then proceed to the belief that the Bible must be wrong when it talks of 24-hour creation days about six thousand years ago? Surely not!
ASSUMPTION THREE: CONSTANT DECAY RATE
The third assumption listed by Dr. Henry Morris (Scientific Creationism, p. 138) is that "The process rate must have always been the same." If the process rate (the speed at which the mother element breaks down into the daughter element) has ever changed since the rock was formed, then the change of rate of decay would have to be corrected for the age calculation to be accurate. Scientists now know that process rates can be altered by various factors. Decay rates can be speeded up or slowed down in certain substances when subjected to various types of radiation and X-rays. As Dr. Morris states, every process in nature operates at a rate which is influenced by a number of different factors (p. 139).
What if radiation bombarded the primitive earth causing the uranium 238 to speed up its decay process (in other words, its half-life was shortened due to the radiation energy). How would the scientist know that the decay process was speeded up during that radiation bombardment one billion years ago? He couldn't know, could he? This means that he could not accurately date the rock. What if the radiation caused the decay rate to speed up, but previous to the x-rays it was twice as slow as it is today? How would the scientist tell us the age of the rock? He could not do it. Yet, have we not been told that a massive bombardment of x-rays hit the primordial ooze of ancient planet earth causing the "spark" that moved dead chemicals into living cells? The so-called "punctuated equilibrium" theory would insist there have been many radiation bombardments over time to cause one kind of animal to rapidly mutate into a higher form. (Punctuated equilibrium teaches that evolution happens too fast to see, in contrast to Darwinian evolution which teaches evolution happens too slow to see.)
It seems that the evolutionists cannot have both. If radiation causes decay rates to speed up or slow down, then the radiation needed to start life from non-life and mutate (change) old life forms into new ones would totally invalidate those billion-year dates and their dating techniques. The atomic clocks would have speeded up or slowed down depending upon the radiation. Let's also look at this the other way around: if there were no radiation bombardments, then the third of the three dating assumptions listed above might even be correct (even though the other two would of themselves destroy the accuracy of the dating technique) -- but now we don't have the radiation "spark" to get life going from non-living chemicals and to stimulate the necessary mutations assumed to improve the organisms! With no radiation, the decay rates may have remained constant for billions of years, but what energy got evolution started and kept it going in this case?
As Dr. Morris says, educated guesses are made to determine apparent ages. But the apparent age may be completely unrelated to the true age of the rock.
These three assumptions: (l) a closed system, (2) no original daughter element, and (3) the same decay rate throughout all time -- are always involved when a scientist dates a rock. None of these assumptions are valid, and none are able to be subjected to the scientific method of observation and reproducible experimentation. There is no way to accurately date anything beyond several thousand years. That means the earth could be quite young and no scientist can absolutely prove otherwise!
"...there is certainly no real proof that the vast evolutionary time scale is valid at all.
That being true, there is no compelling reason why we should not seriously consider once again the possibilities in the relatively short time scale of the creation model.
As a matter of fact, the creation model does not, in its basic form, require a short time scale. It merely assumes a period of special creation sometime in the past, without necessarily stating when that was. On the other hand, the evolution model does require a long time scale. The creation model is thus free to consider the evidence on its own merits, whereas the evolution model is forced to reject all evidence that favors a short time scale.
Although the creation model is not necessarily linked to a short time scale, as the evolution model is to a long scale, it is true that it does fit more naturally in a short chronology. Assuming the Creator had a purpose in His creation, and that purpose centered primarily in man, it does seem more appropriate that He would not waste aeons of time in essentially meaningless caretaking of an incomplete stage or stages of His intended creative work." [2]
The truth is that we have been taught a lie from our earliest school days.[3] We are taught to believe that the earth is very old even though there is no factual science (see Chapter 2 "assumptions") to support aeons of time. But we are not taught the bountiful evidences that lead to the conclusion that the earth is quite possibly only a few thousand years old. How many evidences for a young earth can you list right now? Did you try to think of some? Can you write down even one solid proof that the earth is young? Most people (including Christians) cannot think of even one proof of a young age for the earth. You see, we have been led into one of the lies of Satan's world system -- that the universe is very old. If a group of Christians were asked, "Do you believe God created the heavens and the earth?" Every hand would go up attesting to their sure belief, "Yes, God created the heavens and the earth." Should a second question be proposed, "Do you believe God used billions of years of geologic ages and the process of evolution to create?", some pauses and waffling would occur, and if everyone was being honest, many hands would go up. Now, a third question is in order, "Do you believe that God created the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them in a literal six 24-hour day week? In one evangelical church in Dallas, Texas, only five hands went up in a class of fifty people. You say, "They must not have understood the question!" No, they understood, but only five believed what the Bible says in Genesis 1-11, Exodus 20, John 1, Colossians 1, Hebrews 1, Revelation 4:11, etc. They had been brainwashed by Satan's world system into thinking there is plenty of scientific evidence to prove an old, old universe.
Dr. John C. Whitcomb has done us all a great service with his book, The Early Earth: Revised Edition. Dr. Whitcomb lists and discusses many of the evidences for believing the Bible to be true as written. He contrasts faith in God and His word to faith in evolution and an old earth:
"...the non-Christian scientist must acknowledge that he also comes to the factual, observable phenomenon with a set of basic assumptions and presuppositions that reflect a profound "faith-commitment." No scientist in the world today was present when the earth came into existence, nor do any of us have the privilege of watching worlds being created today! Therefore, the testimony of an honest evolutionist could be expressed in terms of ...Hebrews 11:3..., as follows: "By faith, I, an evolutionist, understand that the worlds were not framed by the word of any god, so that what is seen has indeed been made out of previously existing and less complex visible things, by purely natural processes, through billions of years." Thus it is not a matter of the facts of science versus the faith of Christians! The fundamental issue, in the matter of ultimate origins, is whether one puts his trust in the written Word of the personal and living God who was there when it all happened, or else puts his trust in the ability of the human intellect, unaided by divine revelation to extrapolate presently observed processes of nature in the eternal past (and future). Which faith is the most reasonable, fruitful and satisfying? In my own case, while studying historical geology and paleontology at Princeton University, I was totally committed to evolutionary perspectives. Since then, however, I have discovered the biblical concept of ultimate origins to be far more satisfying in every respect.
Christians who truly desire to honor God in their thinking, must not come to the first Chapter of Genesis with preconceived ideas of what could or could not have happened (in terms of current and changing concepts of uniformitarian scientism). We are not God's counselors; He is ours! `For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who became His counselor?' (Romans 11:34) ...For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts' (Isa. 55:8-9)." [4]
Do we know what we believe as Christians? Are we ready to make a defense to everyone who ask us to give an account of the hope that is within us? (I Peter 3:15)
IS EARTH 6 THOUSAND OR 4.5 BILLION YEARS OLD?
How divergent are these two views (creation and a young earth versus evolution and an old earth)? The Bible places the Beginning at about 6,000 years ago. Many evolutionists put the beginning of earth at about 4 l/2 billion years ago. Dennis Peterson attempts to help us understand the degree of difference in these two choices of faith:
"One way to visualize the extremes of our choices is to equate one year to the thinness of one page from a typical Bible. If you were to stack up several Bibles to a height about equal with your knee, you'd have about 6,000 pages before you.
Now how many Bibles would you have to stack up to make four and a half billion pages?
The stack would reach at least a hundred and fourteen miles high into the stratosphere.
So, you're standing there between your two stacks,and you are supposed to choose which one to believe in. Why is it you are made to feel rather sheepish to admit that you lean toward the Biblical stack of about 6,000 years? Or why is it that you start to arrogantly ridicule anyone who would dare to not agree with your proud billions?" [5]
Petersen lists 35 or 40 evidences for a young earth. These are scientific reasons to believe the universe to be quite young -- on the order of several thousand rather than several billion years. Petersen states:
"Scientists are aware of over 70 methods that can give us ideas of Earth's age. We could call these "GEOLOGIC CLOCKS." All of them are based on the obvious reality that natural processes occurring steadily through time produce cumulative and often measurable results. Most of these "clocks" give a relatively young age for the Earth. Only a few of them yield a conclusion of billions of years. Those few are loudly publicized to support the commonly held theory of gradualism." [6]
The gravitational fields of the sun and stars pull cosmic dust toward them. This is known as the Poynting-Robertson effect. Our sun is estimated to suck in about 100,000 tons of cosmic dust every day. An old sun should have "pulled in" and destroyed all the particles in our solar system. Yet, our solar system is full of these particles! The Poynting-Robertson effect would demand a sun and solar system of less then 10,000 years of age.[7] Petersen states:
"All stars have a gravitational field and pull in particles like gas, dust and meteors within their range. Stars radiating energy 100,000 times faster than our sun have a spiraling effect, pulling things in all the faster. The unusual thing is that O and B stars are observed to have huge dust clouds surrounding them. If they were very old at all, every particle in close range would have been pulled in by now." [8]
Two types of stars have huge dust clouds and, hence, must be quite young. No one has ever seen the birth of a new star, although some scientists have postulated through computer simulations and theoretical mathematics that as many as three new stars should form every year. No scientist ever has, nor ever will see a star form because the Creator created all of His stars on the fourth day of the creation week (Genesis 1:14-19). In the spring of 1992 some scientists claimed to be observing a star form out in the stellar heavens. They used various mathematical equations to come to their conclusion. However, if their conclusion is in direct contradiction to what the Bible says, then their conclusion is wrong. So we sit back and wait a few months or years and finally some scientist will sheepishly admit "We are sorry folks, all our meticulously produced evidence led us to believe a new star was forming, but we now realize that we made a mistake. We will keep looking for a new star to form and we will let you know as soon as we find it." God created His last star out of nothing on the fourth day of the creation week!
Astronomers may see stars die since entropy and sin entered the universe, but no star-birth is possible; God completed His creation of the universe and rested on the seventh day. If a star (O and B) and/or a solar system (ours) has significant cosmic dust and meteoroids in the space around it, it cannot be billions of years old.
LIGHT FROM THE FARTHEST STARS
You might be thinking, "Okay, but what about the speed of light and the millions of years necessary to get light from the farthest stars to our solar system?" (This is one of the things I was thinking as I was "evolving" into a creationist back in the early seventies.) Well, first of all, how do we know it takes millions of years for light to travel to earth from the farthest stars? Some evolutionary professor told us, or some writer told us, or someone like Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather or Carl Sagan told us. There does seem to be a problem here, doesn't there? What if you were to discover that light from the farthest star could arrive at earth instantly (God created the star and the light beams from the star to the earth. We can't eliminate this possibility. Our God could do this if He wanted to) or within three days?
Dr. Barry Setterfield has done considerable work on this problem. His papers can be obtained through the Institute for Creation Research, Box 1607, El Cajon, CA 92022. Also see I.C.R. Impact #121, Starlight and the Age of the Universe, by Richard Niessen. Setterfield and Niessen offer four possible solutions to the problem of light from the farthest stars. The first possibility is that God could create the light beam with the appearance of age. A second possibility is that the distance to these remote stars has not been calculated correctly. This is very likely when the methods used to measure great distances in space are closely examined in conjunction with the basic assumptions of Trigonometry. As I.C.R. Impact #121 states, "There is no guarantee that actual distances in space are as great as we have been told." Once you get out of our solar system it is a most difficult problem to accurately measure distance.
A third consideration is that light may have taken a "shortcut" through space. Different types of mathematics and different assumptions and postulates give totally different concepts of space and distances in space. What we know about space is quite limited. How distances through space are calculated depends on the calculator's system of math and his or her basic set of postulates (assumptions).
Outer space may be straight or it may be curved. If you like to think outer space is a straight line, you will use Euclidean Geometry and its accompanying assumptions. Euclidean Geometry is used to find vast distances in space. Its calculations are, for the most part, straight line calculations.
But what if outer space is not able to be measured with straight line from here-to-there-type math? That would mean all the farthest stars could be much closer than the textbooks teach.
NON-EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY
Another legitimate way to measure distances in outer space is by using Riemannian math. Riemannian math is classified as Non-Euclidean Geometry. It assumes outer space to be curved. Hence Non-Euclidean Geometry produces much smaller distances to the farthest stars. Niessen (I.C.R. Impact #121) reviewed articles by Harold Slusher ("Age of the Cosmos" I.C.R. 1980) and Wayne Zage ("The Geometry of Binocular Visual Space", Mathematics Magazine 53, Nov. 1980, pp. 289-293). Twenty-seven binary star systems were observed, and it appears that light travels in curved paths in deep space. If you convert Euclidean straight line math into Riemannian curved math, light could travel from the farthest stars to earth in, as reported by Niessen, 15.71 years! This is a whole lot less than millions of years, isn't it?
Is Riemannian Geometry valid if it shows shorter distances to the stars? H.S.M. Coxeter published a largely ignored book in 1942 entitled Non-Euclidean Geometry. Coxeter stated, "...we still can't decide whether the real world is approximately Euclidean or approximately non-Euclidean." [9] The scientists do not know which is the valid way to measure space as it really is! They are not sure just what outer space really looks like. They have not been there and do not know what shape it has. Everything close enough to our solar system to obtain measurements (though all these contain assumptions) appears to have positive curvature. That means Riemann's method of figuring distance in space is more likely to be correct than the Euclidean methods. Niessen, then, has a better than average chance of being correct when he postulates 15.71 years for light from the farthest star to reach planet earth.
THE SPEED OF LIGHT
Niessen adds one more factor: the speed of light. Scientists have been measuring the speed of light for over 300 years, and it is appears to be slowing down. Using equations to extrapolate backwards, equations that include the figures observed and registered for the slowing down of the speed of light (the farther back in time you go the faster the light travels), light from a five billion light-year away star (assuming stars are that far away) could arrive on earth in just three days!
What conclusion can we arrive at on the basis of the above? You do not have to believe it when some textbook or scientist in a white lab coat tells you that stars are millions of light-years and perhaps trillions of miles away. There is no hard, irrefutable evidence here for a 9 to 20 billion year old universe.
Where do the 9 to 20 billion years come from? A man named Hubble (remember "Hubble's telescope" launched into space recently?) came up with the theoretical, mathematical formula for measuring time back to the initial "Big Bang". His calculations originally estimated about 18 to 20 billion years as the age of the universe. Then a few years ago, some other scientists decided Hubble had made a grievous mistake and was 50% off in his calculations. Thus, the age of the universe was cut in half (from 18 to 20 billion years to 9 to 10 billion years) by the stroke of pen. Some scientists still hold to the 20 billion year figure. They realize that even 20 billion years is statistically not long enough to evolve the universe.
COMBUSTION ENERGY OF STARS
Now, back to some more evidences for a young earth. Astronomers calculate that "O" and "B" stars may have surface temperatures of 90,000°F. This is "... more than 100,000 times the energy coming from our sun. Burning down at that rate, and clocking backward, the entire universe would have been filled with the mass of these stars just a few thousand years ago!" [10]
Some evolutionists will object, "But you can't take current processes and extrapolate back like that." Well, what do evolutionists do to find and publish their old, old dates? The same thing! They evaluate, for example, present processes such as decay rates (l/2 life), and extrapolate backwards assuming all was the same from the beginning (II Peter 3).
BRISTLE-CONE PINE TREES
If the Biblical Flood occurred about 5,000 years ago and destroyed all dry-land plant life, then we would not expect to find plants that could be accurately dated at older than about 5,000 years. The bristle-cone pine tree is such a plant. It has been called the oldest living organism on earth and has been accurately dated at about 5,000 years. Peterson states, "It's almost as though all these trees were planted on a virgin Earth just 5,000 years ago." [11]
RIVERS ARE YOUNG
Every year the Mississippi River carries tons and tons of eroded dirt into the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists have been measuring the growth of the Mississippi delta for many years.
"At the present rate the entire Mississippi River delta would have accumulated in only 5,000 years. But science acknowledges that the river has been even bigger in the past.
How could this be? Unless of course the North American continent, and all the other continents for that matter, just haven't been in their present positions any longer than that." [12]
Another river that scientists carefully watch is the Niagara. It also leads to belief in a young earth.
"Because the rim of the falls is wearing back at a known rate every year, geologists recognize that is has only taken about 5,000 years to erode from its original precipice." [13]
Often large chunks of the dirt and rock under water falls, like the Niagara, will break off, yielding even younger ages. Suppose that 200 years from now you decided to calculate the age of Niagara Falls, but you did not know that in 1994 a huge section of rock had broken away from the edge of the falls. You would assume that it took thousands of years to wear away all that rock from the falls' edge, but it happened in an instant. You would date the falls much older than it actually was. This type of mistake is common when scientists attempt to date things.
THE RECEDING MOON
Adding to the evidence for a young earth is our receding moon. Scientists know how fast our moon is moving away from earth (about two inches per year).
Louis B. Slichter, Professor of Geophysics at M.I.T., writes:
"The time scale of the earth-moon system still presents a major problem." [14]
Dennis Petersen continues:
"...working it back would mean the moon and Earth would be touching only two billion years ago. Of course, that's ridiculous. Another way to look at it is this: At the present rate and starting from a realistic distance of separation between the two, if the Earth is five billion years old the moon should be out of sight by now!" [15]
MOON ROCKS
When the first moon rocks were dated in the early 1970's, NASA published the age of the moon rocks at 4 to 4.5 billion years. Several years and many rocks later, they published a range of dates for the rocks of our moon at 3 to 4 l/2 billion years. This author called one of the geologists who dated those rocks and the conversation went something like this:
"I noticed in a recent news release that the dates of the moon rocks have been adjusted to a range of 1 1/2 billion years. That's a pretty big difference in the dates! Was the range any greater than that?"
"Oh yes, the range went from several thousand years to over 20 billion years."
"Well then, why did NASA only publish the 1 1/2 billion year range, instead of the full 20+ billion year range?"
"We did not want to confuse the public. We know the moon is about 3 to 4 1/2 billion years old, so we called the dates outside of that range discordant dates and threw them out."
Apparently, some scientists have pre-decided that the moon is about 3 to 4 1/2 billion years old. What if, in spite of their presuppositional belief, the several thousand year dates were correct and not discordant? Well, that locks in Special Creation and eliminates the possibility of evolution (which requires millions of years). Apparently that would be unacceptable to NASA. Or, what if the 20+ billion dates were correct? That, in effect, demolishes Hubble's math, and the time of the Big Bang is once again up for grabs. These scientists might object and say, "But we use a bell-shaped curve to arrive at our dates." Well, what if the assumptions which are built into their dating system skew the curve one way or another? We've already seen that the three major assumptions invariably included when scientists date rocks (earlier in this chapter) are not valid.
You might ask an astronomer where our moon and its rocks came from. Some fanciful answers will be forthcoming! Evolutionary scientists do not know from whence cometh our moon. A creationist believes that the God of the Bible created the moon, and the sun and stars as well, on the fourth day of the creation week (Genesis 1:14-19). There is no hard, factual, scientific information that can refute a young age for the moon. All old ages given for the moon are not accurate because the assumptions of the dating techniques do not square with reality.
SHORT-TERM COMETS
From time to time, comets pass by the earth. Not only can scientists not tell us where our moon came from, they also cannot tell us about the origin of short-term comets. These are comets that astronomers calculate have lifetimes of no more than 10,000 years. If the universe is somewhere between 9 and 20 billion years old, and the astral bodies were formed at the "Big Bang", evolution is left in the embarrassing dilemma of having to postulate theories for the origin of short-term comets, which it cannot prove. You have to admire the imagination of these folks, though. Some actually believe that Jupiter spits comets out of high volcanoes. The only problem is that the short-lived comets are not made of the right stuff to come from Jupiter, and their orbit is in no way oriented to enable them to refer to Jupiter as "mother". Scott Huse says:
"Comets journey around the sun and are assumed to be the same age as the solar system. Each time a comet orbits the sun, a small part of its mass is `boiled off'. Careful studies indicate that the effect of this dissolution process on short-term comets would have totally dissipated them in about 10,000 years. Based on the fact that there are still numerous comets orbiting the sun with no source of new comets known to exist, we can deduce that our solar system cannot be much older than 10,000 years. To date, no satisfactory explanation has been given to discredit this evidence for a youthful solar system." [16]
EARTH'S MAGNETIC FIELD
An examination of the Earth's magnetic field proves that Earth cannot be very old, since the Earth's magnetic field is losing its strength. Dr. Thomas Barnes has done volumes of work on the depletion of Earth's magnetic field. The conclusion of his work establishes the age of the Earth at less than 10,000 years.[17] Naturally, the evolutionary community has proclaimed Barnes' work invalid, but Barnes answers their charges quite simply and effectively in the ICR Impact #122 of August 1983 entitled Earth's Magnetic Age: The Achilles Heel of Evolution. The earth's magnetic field is getting measurably weaker. Ten thousand years ago it would have been too strong to support life. If life could not have existed 10,000 years ago because of the super-strength of the earth's magnetic field, then evolution had no time to occur.
OUR SHRINKING SUN
Recently a controversy has arisen over the shrinking of our sun. If the figures of John Eddy and Adam Boornazian are correct ("Analysis of Historical Data Suggest the Sun is Shrinking," Physics Today, Vol. 32 No. 9, September 1979), our sun would have been too hot for life to exist on Earth even l,000,000 years ago. This would, in effect, knock out the possibility of the vast expanses of time required for evolution. Evolutionists and theistic evolutionists have jumped on this one to prove Eddy was mistaken. Others now claim the measurements of the planet Mercury crossing in front of the sun each year, prove the size of the sun has not changed. We will have to wait to see how this develops.[18]
RADIOHALOS
Irrefutable support for a young earth is offered by Robert V. Gentry through his studies of radiohalos in coalified wood.[19] Evolutionists believe the coal deposits in the Colorado Plateau to be hundreds of millions of years old. Yet, Gentry's radio-halo "clock" demands a time period of only a few thousand years.
Gentry discovered microscopic bits of uranium in these coal deposits. The effect of the radioactive uranium on the coal was to produce radiation halos in the coal.
"As a radioactive bit decays, radiation extends in all directions into surrounding coal for a small, yet precise distance determined by the particle energy of the radiation. Over time this emitted radiation will change the color of the coal, forming a distinct sphere around the bit of uranium in the center. These tiny spheres of discolored rock surrounding a microscopic radioactive center are termed "radiohalos". Such radiohalos are Robert Gentry's specialty." [20]
How does the bit of radioactive uranium get into the coal to form the halos? Ackerman continues:
"Regarding the radioactive center, a bit of uranium has, at some time in the past, before the wood material was hardened into coal, migrated into its present position. As the uranium bit undergoes radioactive decay, a form of lead is created. Once the coal has hardened and the uranium bit has been cemented into a fixed position, this lead isotope begins to accumulate at the site....
Gentry has found that the uranium/lead ratios in the Colorado Plateau coal formation indicate that this formation is only a few thousand years old." [21]
The halos form around the radioactive particles in the coal and indicate a young age of only a few thousand years for the coal. The coal of the Colorado Plateau was probably formed during the Flood judgment of Noah's day as God was destroying heaven and earth system #1.
Gentry also found halos of Polonium in Precambrian granite rock. These are supposedly the oldest rocks on earth. Precambrian rock is called the "basement" rock of earth since it is thought to be more ancient than all other rock. Ackerman reviews Gentry's work:
"The question Gentry has raised for evolutionists is how the polonium bits and their resulting halos came to be in the basement granites....
The enigma is this: If the granite is hardened, the polonium cannot travel to its intrusion location. But if the granite is not hardened, no halo can form. Therefore, Gentry argues that the time lapse from a permeable, molten state to the present rock state for these precambrian granites had to be extremely brief. How brief? One of the polonium isotopes studies by Gentry has a half-life of three minutes! Another has a half-life of only 164 microseconds!
In the evolutionary model, the time required for the cooling and solidification of these granites is millions and millions of years. Gentry believes these halos to constitute powerful evidence against evolution and its presumed vast time spans. He believes these halos speak of a very rapid formation of these crustal rocks." [22]
Radiohalos in Precambrian basement rock may indicate a young age for the earth's "oldest" rocks. Walter T. Brown, Jr., (In The Beginning), lists about thirty time clocks for the age of the earth that yield an age of a few thousand years. He mentions that an analysis of the gases (such as helium) in the atmosphere yields a young age (few thousand years) for the age of the atmosphere.[23] River sediments and erosion rates indicate that the earth could not have existed as it is for millions of years.[24]
PLANETARY RINGS
A study of the rings around several planets seems to demand a young age for our solar system:
"The rings that are orbiting Saturn, Uranus, Jupiter and Neptune are being rapidly bombarded by meteoroids. Saturn's rings, for example, should be pulverized and dispersed in about 10,000 years. Since this has not happened, planetary rings are probably quite young...
Jupiter and Saturn each radiate more than twice the energy they receive from the sun. Venus also radiates too much energy. Calculations show it is very unlikely that this energy comes from nuclear fusion, radioactive decay, gravitational contraction or phase changes within those planets. The only other conceivable explanation is that these planets have not existed long enough to cool off." [25]
STAR CLUSTERS
The existence of star clusters hints at a young universe. Immense clusters of stars are travelling through space at supersonic speeds. Scientists believe that gravity holds these fast moving star clusters together. But scientists do not know how these star clusters could hold together for millions of years, while travelling at such high speeds. They should have "unclustered" and moved apart by now. But they are still in a cluster. The sole answer to this dilemma for the evolutionist appears to be special creation a few thousand years ago, not a "Big Bang" billions of years ago.
MOUNT ST. HELENS
When all other evidence fails to prove a very old heaven and earth system, evolutionists go back to rocks and rock formations, which supposedly require very long spans of time to form. The eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980, and the rapid formation of geologic systems around it is challenging the claims of historical geology. Dr. Steve Austin and Institute for Creation Research staff personnel have been documenting the phenomena of Mount St. Helens since its initial eruption. Some surprising results of the volcanic blast are being observed.
"Up to 600 feet thickness of strata have formed since 1980 at Mount St. Helens. These deposits accumulated from primary air blast, landslide, waves on the lake, pyroclastic flows, mud flows, air fall and stream water... Mount St. Helens teaches us that the stratified layers commonly characterizing geological formations can form very rapidly by flow processes." [26]
In other words, what geologists may have thought took thousands or hundreds of thousands of years to form as a column of rock in fact formed at Mount St. Helens as the scientists watched, and in less than eleven years! Perhaps aeons of time are not necessary to form the layers of rock after all.
One more fascinating phenomenon of the Mount St. Helens cataclysmic explosion is the apparent formation of the beginnings of polystrate fossils in five years. In 1985, scientists discovered that water-soaked trees were floating with root end down (toward the bottom of the lake) in Spirit Lake. These trees:
"...are randomly spaced not clumped together, over the bottom of the lake, again having the appearance of being an in situ forest.
Scuba investigation of the upright deposited trunks shows that some are already solidly buried by sedimentation, with more than three feet of sediment around their bases. This proved that the upright trees were deposited at different times, with their roots buried at different levels. If found buried in the stratigraphic record (rocks), these trees might be interpreted as multiple forests which grew on different levels over periods of thousands of years. The Spirit Lake upright deposited stumps, therefore, have considerable implications for interpreting "petrified forests" in the stratigraphic record." [27]
What does this all mean? There is a bank of polystrata fossils (one tree goes up through several layers or strata of sedimentary rock) in Nova Scotia over 2,000 feet thick with trees straight up and down at different levels up through the rocks. Geologists have claimed that a formation like the Nova Scotia formation would take hundreds of thousands of years to form. After observing the Spirit Lake water-soaked trees, scientists are reconsidering. Perhaps it does not take as long as they originally thought to form polystrate fossils. Those trees in Spirit Lake are lining up and getting buried in what should become sedimentary rock -- but less than fourteen years have gone by, not hundreds of thousands of years!
With the many evidences for a young earth, evidences which can only be answered with an earth that once was greenhouse warm and suddenly (at the Flood) became permanently frozen at the poles, why do evolutionists still cling to their theories? Only one answer seems plausible: they do not want to submit themselves in humble obedience to their Creator. They refuse to accept God even though He reveals Himself through His creation. Evolution from one cell to man is a lie and a foolish speculation of men in rebellion against their Creator.
"For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;
Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it to them.
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and divine Godhead; so that they are without excuse.
Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools." Romans 1:18-22 (Emphasis added)
I have absolutely no idea who will read this.
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