It’s a simple thing to show how W&M’s claims (and most of Creation Science) violate the laws of physics. If the laws of physics changed there would be consequences - very serious consequences. There is no evidence supporting any of this, and enormous evidence supporting (uniformatarian) physics as we know it.
It’s not our job to defend the laws of physics - anyone questioning them has a huge burden of proof if they want alternative ideas to be considered.
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Well, I don’t see why not. There’s no contradiction in any of the gods being dishonest or deceptive. I can understand why people would consider that possibility upsetting, but until we can establish a method for assessing the honesty of the gods, we have absolutely no reason to assume their honesty a priori.
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If the Resurrection is a lie, then there is no salvation, no Christ, no Christianity at all. It’s not a contradiction, but a fundamental limitation for the Christian God. The Resurrection must be real. Even YEC theologians agree on this.
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How does one tell a deceptive God from an ineffable one? Any time that God does something that is less-than-omnibenevolent (including, I would argue, being apparently-deceptive), it is interpreted as “God’s ways are not our ways” and there’s a reason why these actions are Good, except that we’re too limited to understand them.
This renders God’s omnibenevolence, to all intents and purposes, unfalsifiable.
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Well, but discovering that the gods are liars isn’t a “failure” of theology. It’d be a success: finally, a demonstration of a useful fact. It might be unpleasant or unwelcome, but it would be massive progress to both demonstrate the existence of, and the dishonesty of, one or more of the gods. I think you’re assuming that the object of theology is to affirm faith, but really, that would be a terrible object: the object has got to be to learn what’s actually true about the gods. If the object is to affirm faith, and NOT to discover the true nature of things, of what use can theology be to anyone?
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One doesn’t. It’s a requirement for Christianity to be true.
Agreed, but it would be a failure for Christianity.
I’d like to point out that we have transitioned from “the wrong argument” of countering old claims without any scientific basis, to what I consider “the right argument”, which is the theology behind the the claims of Morris and others. The endless arguments over Creation Science are only meaningful if there is a scientific claim - and there isn’t.
This (meaning Morris and Creation Science) is about theology. It’s always been about theology, and it’s a mistake to think otherwise. We should not answer theological questions with science - that is the wrong argument.
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A stronger “opiate of the masses”, a metaphorical fentanyl, if you please? 
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Agreed - but there are no theological implications of Morris being correct, because if he was correct there would be no violations of the laws of physics.
While Morris et al’s views actually do contradict the laws of physics, I don’t think you can legitimately criticise them for holding views that require God warping the laws of physics when they didn’t think the laws of physics would need to be warped.
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Agreed, but as long as the character of theological answers remains what it is, we also can do ourselves no favors by answering theological questions with theological answers. There’s no there there.
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Any measurement is unreliable if attempted contrary to best practices. A truck would crush a kitchen scale; that does not mean that it is the least unreliable for portioning lentils. A truck scale would not detect any weight at all for a feather, that does not mean it is unreliable for checking GVW of loaded semi-trucks. I would have thought this self-evident.
That 14C contamination background is difficult to avoid is not surprising. The air you breath is rich in 14C, topped up to the minute by solar spallation. 14C is embedded in your body, the retina of your eye, the DNA in your cells, the lunch you just ate, the oils from your fingertips. Even if you draw a complete vacuum, some will tenaciously coat inside the apparatus. We are bathed in 14C. This cannot be completely eliminated, but can be managed and held down to extremely low levels.
So how does this play out in practice? The older a dating sample is, the closer the amount of remaining radiocarbon approaches the contamination background. For carbon dead samples, it cannot be distinguished. In that region, you are done. You cannot tell anything meaningful at all from the results.
It is reasonable to use 0.1% of modern 14C as a threshold for the zone of comfortably reliable measurement. This tends to be a fixed uncertainty; it does not increase proportional to the measurement. Let us consider how that impacts measurements through the generally valid range. 55% percent modern carbon-14 returns an age of 5000 years before present. If contamination introduces an additional 0.1%, the actual intrinsic carbon might be 54.9%. Without working it out exactly, that looks like maybe a few decades off, which in the world of ancient archeology is nailing it down pretty decently. The uncertainty grows as the sample gets older, but often a date range is just fine. As regards YEC however, an uncertainty of even a century does not help if the measured 14C corresponds to an age of thirty or forty thousand. Yes, there is uncertainty, but that uncertainty is rational and quantified, and the date expressed with stipulated uncertainty is reliable and valid. This is entirely consistent with the expectation that contamination is a measurement limitation. Similar considerations apply to instrument sensitivity.
So the YEC positions are wrong concerning both the valid and invalid range of radiocarbon dating. In fact, as uncertainty is a part of any category of instrumentation, YEC demonstrates here that they do not acknowledge the fundamental principles of measurement which are applied in industry, technology, or research.
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Not following you entirely. If Morris (and CS) were correct there are big implications for the physical evidence we should expect. We should not expect radiometric dating to show age greater than ~10K years (otherwise God is deceptive).
Try that argument next time you get pulled over for speeding.
I think Morris simply did not realize they were making a version of the Omphalos Argument - most YEC still don’t consider this.
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I happened to catch a Youtube video in the not so distant past where environmental contamination posed a problem for the early development of U/Pb dating. The culprit was leaded gasoline.
Moving back to 14C and science in general, it becomes very apparent that scientists and creationists have different approaches. The scientist will immediately look for controls, instrument noise, signal to noise ratios, possible sources of contamination, systematic instrument error, and so forth. Creationists don’t seem to be acquainted with any of these concepts. Even the concept of a linear range of measurement for a given method is something they don’t seem to understand.
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You are half right. Here is an example of rescuing devices employed by some of your creationists:
(Y)oung-Earth creationists now argue that radioisotope decay has actually occurred, can be measured accurately, and that it would require billions of years at present rates to account for the current condition of the Earth. The scientific community has been making those very arguments for decades. The RATE team, however, because of their unshakable Biblical faith in a 6,000 year old Earth, rejects uniformitarianism (Humphreys 2005:93) and argues that the rate of decay was greatly accelerated during the first two days of Creation Week and during the year-long Flood of Noah (DeYoung 2005:150-151)…
There are, however, a number of serious difficulties with RATE’s hypothesis of accelerated decay. The RATE creationists acknowledge two of the most fundamental side effects of any such acceleration: heat and radiation. Aggregated over the 4.5 billion year history of Earth, radioactive decay has produced tremendous amounts of both. The acceleration of 4 billion years of decay into the first two days of the creation week and squeezing 500 million years into the year of the Flood (DeYoung 2005:150-151) is rather problematic. The Flood acceleration alone would have released enough energy to heat the Earth to a temperature of more than 22,000° C (Snelling 2005:183), which is roughly four times the temperature of the surface of the sun (DeYoung 2005:152). That amount of energy would have caused rocks, and presumably the entire crust of the Earth, to vaporize (DeYoung 2005:152; Snelling 2005:183). Aside from the fact that the planet would no longer exist, the geologic evidence RATE cites in support of acceleration would certainly have been obliterated. Temperatures above 150-400° C would have erased the fission tracks and radiohalos, and destroyed the zircon crystals cited by RATE (DeYoung 2005:152; Snelling 2005:182). In fact, the temperature increase in the zircons would have been an order of magnitude higher than average because of their abnormally high concentration of uranium (Snelling 2005:183). Helium diffusion improves rapidly at higher temperatures, so that would seem to contradict RATE’s claims about diffusion.
D. Russell Humphreys of the RATE team makes a novel suggestion regarding heat accumulation. Simply put, at the same moment God accelerated radioisotope decay, he also expanded the size of the universe twenty-fold (DeYoung 2005:153). This is an application of volumetric cooling, which is how refrigerators work by compressing and expanding gas. Humphreys argues the Bible contains scriptural evidence for two periods of cosmic expansion that coincide with RATE’s proffered two periods of accelerated decay (Humphreys 2005:73). For example, Psalms 104:2 says, “Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment: who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain” (CreationWiki 2005). The problem is that volumetric cooling only works for gases, not solids. In other words, there is no way a 22,000° C Earth could have been cooled through surface conduction before it exploded (Vardiman et al. 2005:763). It seems clear that even the divine intervention to expand the universe in four dimensions proposed by Humphreys would be inadequate to solve the heat problem (Vardiman et al. 2005:763).
Do you really think this is the sort of thing any thinking person should take seriously? There’s more given at the full article:
http://apps.usd.edu/esci/creation/age/content/creationism_and_young_earth/accelerated_decay.html
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I think you underestimate the human ability to harmonize things. If a deceptive God is a problem (and I agree it would be), one can simply interpret things to make the data fit.
I think @Tim has the right idea–don’t like deceptiveness? Try ineffability. We have no idea why God in His infinite wisdom decided to make things look old when they’re actually young, but there must be a good reason.
Or try human fallibility–among the confounding issues with current measurements that appear to contradict the Biblical account are: internal spiritual issues preventing secular scientists from acknowledging the truth, secular groupthink that puts liberal Christians on the wrong path, or unknown physical conditions in the past that we just don’t know about.
Ever heard someone harmonize an all-good God with Old Testament atrocities? It’s the same idea, it’s super easy, barely an inconvenience.
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Despite years of experience of watching and listening as people do that, it still chills me to the marrow. I have no difficulty, when I hear it, imagining how the Holocaust happened. The faith that can move mountains can also flatten consciences.
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Yes, it is disconcerting, as I was once one of these. I think the other side of the coin, however, is described well in Randall Rauser’s observation:
“People are better than their theology.” [1]
possibly slightly paraphrased ↩︎
You and @Tim are not wrong, but I think you are missing my point: A discussion that started out with Creation Science is turned into one of theology. Those CS claims now have to be justified as not-deceptive based on real science. That doesn’t happen of course - it can’t - there is no science to justify those claims. They could go the “ineffable” route, but that also abandons any pretense at science. It’s a win either way.
In practice the other guy has just lost his entire script of AiG arguments. They won’t admit defeat, but won’t have much else to say either.
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Well, one is entitled to hope. In general, though, I think they’re not.
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I don’t think I agree with this line of reasoning. As soon as you start raising the issue of God’s attributes, including whether he is “deceptive”, you have already put a foot across the line into Theology.
Add to this, CS has as its basis the Book of Genesis, which means that Theology is baked in from word go.
Further, as I’ve said previously in other threads, CS is actually a subfield of Apologetics, and thus Theology, not Science.
I therefore think that keeping Theology out of the discussion is an impossibility.
And given all the experience that Theology, and more particularly Theodicy, has had at defending that God is Good in the face of all the evidence of hurricanes, plagues, kids dying of cancer, etc, etc (again, all this evidence is “based on real science”), defending a spot of apparent-deception should be a walk in the park.
Finally, I would suggest that most Creation Scientists (and their followers) don’t really see a hard border between science and theology. They may call what they do “science”, but seem unphased by (I might even go so far as to say ‘unaware of’) wandering over the border into theology on a regular basis. So I don’t think throwing in some ineffability into the mix will make them “abandon” their (already threadbare) “pretense at science”.
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I think we are very close.
The cam defend their theology, but they can’t defend CS and theology without contradiction, because CS generally violates the laws of physics, to which they have no scientific response.
I’m happy to let them argue theology. All I want is to remove any pretence of science. I’ve used this approach many times, and it works.
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