John_Harshman (C101),
That dodges the question. How can you accept radiometric dating for ancient meteorites yet reject it for other ancient but slightly more recent rocks?
It’s not so much that I accept radiometric dating for meteorites, as it is that I have no particular reason to challenge it. The meteorites appear to have had no significant geological changes (for this purpose—they do get bombarded by cosmic rays). Once geological formations get heated and metamorphosed, the correlation between radiometric dates and real time gets murkier, at least IMO.
PaulGiem:
It isn’t that I (or others) would say that radiometric dates are all accurate at the beginning, but rather that it helps our model to have time for the aforementioned decay to take place (without vaporizing the earth).
So you accept an ancient earth purely out of convenience? That’s doesn’t seem very scientific.
I thought that fitting one’s theory to the apparent implication of data was a good thing.
PaulGiem:
I’m quite aware that you find Flood geology incredible.
Yes, but why don’t you? And how do you condense most of the Phanerozoic into a single year only 4-5000 years ago?
Well, let me see if I can make any sense to you.
If there is anything emergency medicine has taught me, it is that our job is to make decisions and act on them, based on incomplete and inaccurate information. The patient may not remember all the history accurately, patients may lie to us, old records may not be available for days, physical findings and labs can be non-diagnostic, and even the studies used in decision making can be inaccurate, or the patient we are seeing can be excluded from the study population, so the study does not apply to this patient. And we often have to make a decision to give a drug or not (postponing the giving is actually deciding not to give it for now). We have to decide to discharge or to admit, or to hold the patient further. And if we waited until we could absolutely prove that we were right, we would never make any decision, and presumably by default not act. That is not in anyone’s best interest.
But life is also like that. Every week one must decide whether to go to church, or synagogue, or mosque, or somewhere else, or nowhere. And yet, no one can absolutely prove which course of action to take. And one cannot always split the difference. So I cannot require absolute proof before acting. IMO I must make the best judgment I can and then act on it.
So let me start at the beginning. As I understand it, the universe began at a singularity. At this point in time, energy, space, and even time itself were created. There is a substantial body of physicists that have concluded that this required a creator, and I agree with them. One can argue for multiple universes instead, but this seems to me to be unscientific (we can never observe these universes, even in theory), unparsimonious, and would destroy the basis of historical science. For if we saw something that was against the laws of nature, particularly against the Second Law of Thermodynamics, we should be obliged to shrug our shoulders and say, “In some universe, this was bound to happen. We just happen to be living in that universe.” I don’t find that to be a satisfying philosophy.
You don’t have to agree with me. I’m just explaining how I see things. If you want more detail, you can read my book Scientific Theology (available online for free). Or more recently, The Return of the God Hypothesis by Stephen Meyer.
The beginning of the universe seems to have been designed to allow for life. If I am taking what seems to me to be the most rational view, I accept that it was actually designed for life. That requires a designer whose intelligence exceeds mine by orders of magnitude, and whose power exceeds mine by multiple orders of magnitude. I see no reason to withhold the name God from that entity.
Then I see a straightforward interpretation of quantum mechanics to suggest that particles do not have properties until they are measured. A quantum can be in two contradictory states at the same time, including two places at the same time, or at least in each other’s absolute elsewhere. And not just photons or electrons. We now can send substituted benzene rings with multiple fluorinated benzene rings attached to them, through two slits at the same time, so that an interference pattern develops. This calls into question our classical belief in matter. It is tempting to solve this problem by proposing that information is primary and matter is an epiphenomenon.
We can have faster than light communication between particles, so that they match each other in predictable ways even if they are widely separated in space and again in each other’s absolute elsewhere (which means that to some observers the transaction appears to be simultaneous—sometimes to us it appears so). It has long been recognized that quantum mechanics strongly suggests that novelty is entering the universe. It now appears that correlated novelty is entering the universe. One can make a decent argument that some entity other than the particles is doing this, as otherwise we would be attributing apparently supernatural powers to the particles themselves. This entity would be intelligent enough to understand quantum physics, and powerful enough to ensure the correlations everywhere in the universe (omnipresence, anyone?). It seems most logical to assume that this entity is the One which started the universe in the first place.
We then come to the origin of life. At this point, it seems to be obvious to me (and to Eugene Koonin, hardly a champion of theist ideas) that the chances of this happening on any planet in our universe are so remote as to require essentially infinite universes, that is to say, basically a miracle, unless we allow for some kind of brilliant intelligence (smarter than we are right now). And if we attribute this to some intelligence other than God, the question of who designed the designer applies with full force. We can only go back some 13.7 billion years and the designer cannot have its intelligence dependent on the organization of matter. Again, Occam’s Razor suggests the same God that created the universe and sustains it.
But if one goes this far, several conclusions suggest themselves. First, atheism is wrong. Second, one must read the original papers; popularizations such as what one finds in the media, or even in some textbooks, are likely to be misleading. Third, what God wants to do (theology) becomes more important than what nature can do without special assistance from God (science). (That makes the accuracy of our theology very important.)
I’m prepared to be openminded about all this. For example, one could challenge that God is involved in the origin of life. All one would have to do to change my mind on this would be to show a clear theoretical pathway to life that does not involve astronomical improbabilities, or to show that the origin of life can be reproduced experimentally with minimal intelligent input (for example, put montmorillonite clay, ammonia, phosphates, methane—I’ll give you methane, whatever other inorganics you want, put miniature volcanoes in it, zap it with lightning, and wait 3 years, or 30 years, and out comes some living thing not related to present living organisms, and I’ll believe. I just don’t see why I should believe with no good theoretical pathway and no experimental evidence.
Could I be wrong? Sure. But I have long since quit being paralyzed into not making judgments and acting on them just because I could be wrong. I need to be shown that I am probably wrong before I would change my beliefs and actions.
Note that the arguments so far do not require the assumption that there is a God. They only require that we do not rule out the possibility of such an entity a priori, which seems to me to be a prejudicial assumption.
Now it seems to me that if God cared enough about life to create it, he would want to communicate with His creatures. And in the history of the world, it seems that the one place that God communicated with us the best was in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. That being so, I should listen to Jesus.
And Jesus seems to have taken the Hebrew Scriptures in a way that would be described today as uncritical. It was not uncritical in reality; Jesus was willing to say that Moses wrote some things “for the hardness of your hearts”. But the trump card Jesus used in this case was the creation story, drawing from both Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. I am reluctant to say that Jesus was mistaken in this. So it seems best to try to interpret the scriptures, and science, in a way that is consistent with my perception of Jesus’ view of scripture. At this point, claims to the contrary are regarded by me as extraordinary claims, and it seems to me that they require extraordinary evidence.
So I am willing to explore possibilities that would not be considered by the current scientific consensus, which IMO has failed in the past, both in the matter of the origin of the universe and in the origin of life. That is why I am willing to reconsider radiometric dating, and to ask for stronger evidence where others might just assume that the evidence we have is good enough. I could be satisfied, but am not yet.
As for the Flood itself, I’m not sure that anyone on either side (actually multiple sides) has all the answers wrapped up. But just to give you a few sets of observations that might make the Flood more believable, I could point out the massive layers, especially the widespread layers, in the fossil record that have no modern analogue. The Shinarump conglomerate spreads over several US states fairly uniformly, and conglomerate by its very nature requires rapidly moving water; it cannot be laid down a thin layer at a time over millions of years. The Shinarump lies on top of the Moencopi shale in many places conformably, with some 10 million years of conventional time just gone. Furthermore, in some places the Shinarump oozes down into the Moencopi. I’ve seen it myself. I have difficulty visualizing soft Moencopi sitting there for 10 million years, staying soft but without significant erosion and nothing growing on it, then having the Shinarump laid down and oozing down into the Moencopi. It is much easier, at least for me, to envision a rapid deposition with perhaps hours or days separating the two depositional events.
Then there is the matter of paleocurrents, where entire continents have unidirectional flow during the Paleozoic and early Mesozoic, only to partially reverse during the later Mesozoic, then gradually break up during the Cenozoic into the modern basinal flow. This is easier to visualize as part of a worldwide Flood, at least for me, than as some kind of weird preservation artifact during millions of years of deposition.
Considerations like these have made it not quite so irrational, at least for me, to believe in a global Flood. I hope that helps with your understanding.