(Conscious) dishonesty isn’t actually necessary. They could be engaging with just enough evidence to fool themselves (as well as their audience) that they are substantively engaging the evidence, whilst unconsciously avoiding engaging with sufficient evidence that it would constrain them from coming to their preferred conclusion.
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Often the dishonesty is unmistakable. The most blatant examples are misquotes that continue to be used decades after being exposed.
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Even using YEC terms, there is a logical self-contradiction in their view on operational and historical science. If only direct observation and experimentation is regarded as the scientific method, then explanations which invoke phenomena not founded on observed or controlled experiments are excluded as scientific. As by that criteria phenomena such as accelerated decay, rapid plate tectonics, dozens of ice layers in a single year, have never been demonstrated by operational science, any explanation which is built on them cannot be scientific.
The same does not apply, however, for historic explanations which involve processes which have been operationally validated. Explanations featuring observed rates of tectonic drift, varve accumulation, speleothem growth, and laboratory measured decay rates, are established on validated operational science and are thus scientific. As unobserved rates and processes are pervasive in YEC historic interpretations, it can be stated that creationism is broadly unscientific or pseudo-scientific, as opposed to mainstream science which is operationally based.
Agreed. This is why creationists only pretend to use the scientific method. Truly embracing it would be disastrous for them, as it’s intelligently designed to overcome our tendency toward unconscious dishonesty.
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Test comment.
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My comments have been disappearing so I’m done here.
I rejected those comments, but I won’t offer details publicly (it’s a privacy thing). I’ve been crushed at work lately, so I didn’t have time to write a note, for which I apologize.
It seems there is no note for rejection now (we are testing that).
What I will say publicly is that I tell everyone in this situation; it is the responsibility of all members to self-moderate, and not to force those difficult decision on the mods unnecessarily. The reason is that resolving such problems often takes an inordinate amount of time.
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I’ve had a reply to yourself rejected, so you have not been especially targeted. The moderators try their best to keep things on track and within guidelines, but obviously it is always a judgement call.
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Andrew Snelling just placed an article which is a good case study of the YEC contempt of physical law based on experimental science. He is arguing against Old Earth Creationist Fazale Rana who agrees that radiometric dating is reliable. Snelling’s piece is so top to bottom full of falsehoods and unbased assertions that it is like schooling fish behavior where it is hard to focus on a given fish, but here I want to highlight his ignoring of operational science in the compass of one paragraph. He writes:
Wouldn’t the decay of these radioisotopes at such extremely accelerated rates have instantly vaporized all earth’s life, both terrestrial and marine, the Ark, and all earth’s water?” No, there is impeccable evidence that the claimed heat generated by accelerated radioisotope decay rates was never a problem. Specifically, the generation of polonium radiohalos due to accelerated radioisotope decay rates and the concurrent survival of both radiohalos and fission tracks unequivocally demonstrate that there was no heat problem. Both observational and experimental evidence show that radiohalos are destroyed at only 150°C, which is very much below any vaporization temperature, while fission tracks are likewise destroyed at similar temperatures depending on the host mineral. Many skeptics are either unfamiliar with this published research evidence or deliberately choose to ignore it.
First, the reason radiohalos were not destroyed by heat is because unlike accelerated decay, at actual experimentally determined half lives, heat has plenty of time to dissipate, so the evidence is actually that accelerated decay is a fantasy and the world is ancient. But to claim there is no heat problem? What does Snelling, longtime Director of Research at Answers in Genesis and editor-in-chief of Journal of Creation, think radioisotope decay is? Like all spontaneous decay, the end products have less mass than the original isotope, with the difference assuming the form of energy. Energy is not a by-product, it actually is the lost mass having altered its path through spacetime by Einstein’s formula. Detonate a nuclear warhead for a satisfying experimental demonstration.
Creationists wish to lure onto the ground of their choosing by what they say, and it is easy to skate past what they keep quiet but is essential to the discussion. Here, Snelling just denied the most inviolable tenet in modern science, technology, and engineering - the conservation of mass and energy. He states the mass just disappears into nothingness.
But there is more. Decay rates are not independent variables, but statistical phenomena set by the dynamic balance of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces acting under quantum mechanics for the configuration of given isotopic nuclei. These same forces are what keep stable isotopes to be stable. To increase decay rates, the ratios between those forces must be changed in favor of electrostatic repulsion, and then you are in uncharted waters. What does that do to chemical bonding? How many previously vital and stable nuclei are now destabilized? What cosmological effects happen when you strip symmetry from the universe? These are timeless principles that apply across time and space. Don’t ask Snelling however, because having little regard for operational science he has never presented a theory for accelerated decay or even discussed the forces involved.
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Radioisotope thermoelectric generators literally rely on the fact that nuclear decay produces heat. In some versions the radioactive material reaches 1000 degrees C. If you accelerate the decay rate, the release of heat intensifies.
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Of course, this explains why Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter theme park uses radioisotope thermoelectric generators (exclusively) for their power needs. They recently accelerated the decay rates to increase the KWH output at no additional cost.
So don’t assume that Young Earth Creationist apologetics has no practical technological applications!
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Am I missing something, or is Snelling simply arguing that there is no problem because the Earth didn’t melt?
Physical constants are linked, so among a number of other consequences, it’s changing the speed of light.
These are the same people who like to argue the Universe is so fine tuned that life couldn’t exist if these things changed.
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I also find that the fine-tuning argument re: Earth being suitable for life contradicts the notion that life requires supernatural creation to exist. If it’s not an outright contradiction, it’s a least an incongruity between the respective claims.
(It also raises the question why such a gigantic universe was necessary to house life on a teeny-tiny planet).
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An AI definition of empirical offers “based on observation, experience, or experiment rather than pure theory or abstract logic. It describes information, evidence, or knowledge that can be measured, tested, and verified in the real world”. This encompasses but is not limited to controlled laboratory experimentation, as there is a great deal of observed real world measurement, testing, and verification beyond the bench.
For instance, using PCR technology, public health authorities routinely sample wastewater to track circulating viral strains of influenza and covid. That is empirical data. The same PCR techniques have been applied to soil in northern Greenland to catalog species that once lived there, and also to cave art to narrow the identity of the painters. That genetic data, while from ancient sources, is as empirical as any in the present. The sequencing of Neanderthal DNA is empirical, and that there are distinctive elements far removed from any modern or ancient sapiens sapiens haplotypes is empirical as well.
Despite their incantations, YEC cannot vanish empirical astronomical observations such as supernova SN1987A, or galactic jets. Radioisotope measurement, annual tree rings, and varve counts, are empirical primary real world data for which time intervals are intrinsic to their existence. Fossil remains of comprehensive and distinct global ecologies are empirical.
YEC often characterize operational science, to use their term, as empirical, and set that in contrast to historical science. For instance, AiG’s Rivera conflates and mangles the concept of empirical here, “Empirical (observational) science is observable, testable, and repeatable, whereas historical (origins) science does not meet these criteria”, blithely ignoring that one time events are observed all the time, and are just as empirical as repeatable experiments. They quote the apologist Geisler, “a science which deals with origin events does not fall within the category of empirical science”. But much science concerned with complex phenomena in the present, such as population genetics or climate study, is heavy on inference and modeling, and much understanding of the past comes out of relatively simple empirical measurement and direct observation, so empirical data is not a distinguishing characteristic. Ultimately, all science is accountable to empirical data. The same cannot be said for creationism, which freely invokes causes with zero empirical support in any terms of observation, experience, or experiment.
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Astonishingly, this is a sound and valid argument in the mind of Snelling and his acolytes.
IIRC Snelling has a PhD in geology. He knows better.
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Another characteristic YEC uses to differentiate their notions of historical and operational science is repeatability. Patterson (AiG) reasonably defines Operational Theory as “an explanation of a set of facts based on a broad set of repeatable and testable observations that is generally accepted within a group of scientists”. What does not follow from this definition, however, is that ideas about the past cannot be subject to repeatable and testable observations.
Creationists state that events in the past cannot be repeated, but it is not events of the past that need to be repeated, but as with any experiment it is the testing of the hypothesis that is repeatable. If your hypothesis is that the pyramids were quarried from limestone, anyone can demonstrate that chemistry. If your hypothesis is that Egypt’s limestone is largely composed of sea life fossils, that can be again validated by anyone with a basic microscope. Carbon dates can and are subject to blind cross checks repeated by different labs. The geological observations that led James Hutton to reject a young earth two centuries ago may be seen today. It would be trivial to multiply examples indefinitely, so repeatability is not the clear cut distinction YEC promotes.
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It should be obvious that all events that have happened are in the past by definition, and no event can be repeated. At best we can hope to observe sufficiently similar events. But they aren’t the same events, no matter how similar. So much for the difference between operational and historical science.
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@UncensoredPilgrims generally dismisses consilience as “a mirage created by systematic cherry-picking of data and methods”, but he never responded to any specific example of consilience. That is not surprising. While there are hundreds of hits for “operational”, the AiG site search engine returns no result for “consilience”, and CMI and ICR only return a couple of incidental hits buried in footnotes. Consilience is kryptonite to creationists, and therefore their usual tactic is to divide and attack in isolation. Independent lines of evidence converge on a unified history of the Hawaiian Islands and emperor seamount because the processes which built the chain have multiple non-contradictory effects, all of which take place at rates that happen to harmonize. If someone is going to fabricate accelerated rates to substitute for observationally verified ones, they have the burden of explaining why they should all be altered to the exact same degree even though the processes involved are unrelated.
In 2018 Davidson and Wolgemuth published an update of the challenge posed to YEC by the intersection of carbon dating, varves, and tree rings, concluding:
the young-earth model can explain the data only by calling upon a host of unrelated processes aligning in perfect synchronization to coincidentally match conventional expectations. It requires supernatural manipulation of nature with no apparent purpose other than to mislead
While the past may not allow for the same simplification and manipulation of a bench experiment, larger scale events more often than not have the offsetting availability of multiple lines of convergent evidence available to scientific analysis. Creationists like to proclaim that science is only possible because God gave an orderly world. A coherent universe and the law of noncontradiction demands that consilience be an essential guiding theme in scientific investigation, as much for the present as the past.
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