How Creationists Lie To Us - 14

Here we are at Chapter 13 of the Creationist 'science' book, It's A Young World After All, by assistant professor of psychology, Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD.

In case you are new to this series:

To judge by his writing, Dr Ackerman seems to have no formal qualifications in science subjects nor much in the way of understanding of scientific methodology. There is no record of him publishing any research papers in a peer-reviewed science journal nor of presenting any to an audience of professional scientists. Nevertheless he feels qualified to write about science for a Creationist readership. His academic qualifications appear to be confined to his speciality - psychology.

Chapter 13 - Time: Evolution's Friend or Foe?

This is the last chapter in which Dr Ackerman purports to deal with specific scientific claims. I get the impression that he had a few fallacies left over which he hadn't been able to fit into the preceding chapters, so he created this rag-bag of leftover scraps as somewhere to put them. The simplest approach is probably to deal with them as they come.

The argument of this book is that the universe is quite young. If the universe can be shown to be young, then evolution is ruled out, since all agree that the evolutionary process requires vast numbers of years. Time is often viewed as the great friend of evolution, supposedly performing all the miracles of creation that in the Bible are attributed to God. The famous Harvard professor George Wald has explained the evolutionists' view of the importance of time as follows:

The important point is that since the origin of life belongs in the category of at-least-once phenomena, time is on its side. However improbable we regard this event. . . given enough time it will almost certainly happen at least once. . . . Time is in fact the hero of the plot. . . . Given so much time, the "impossible" becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait; time itself performs miracles.

Of course this is true and it shows us what Dr Ackerman is concerned about. "If the universe can be shown to be young, then evolution is ruled out..." So, if Dr Ackerman can persuade you to believe the universe is young, he can persuade you that evolution can be ruled out. Something of a give-away that, and it helps explain his extensive use of bad science and fallacies, aimed, as they are, at a largely scientifically unsophisticated and uncritical audience.

No, this is not a Creationist writing another 'science' book.

A better-known form of the evolution-through-limitless-time argument is the monkey-and-typewriter illustration. Physicist William R. Bennett, Jr., has stated it this way: "Nearly everyone knows that if enough monkeys [my emphasis] were allowed to pound away at typewriters for enough time, all the great works of literature would result."

Something about this argument is intuitively persuasive.

Obviously, if the monkeys were to type long enough, one of them would inevitably type the word to, and with just a little more time surely no one would be surprised to find the word two. And if such circumstances produced to and two, then why not eventually four, eight, and finally a complete sentence, paragraph, and so on?

The question of whether or not time is actually on the side of evolution, as Wald and Bennett maintain, is an important one even if, as this book argues, there is very little of it to work with. The fact of the matter is that time is not a friend of evolution. It is evolution's enemy.

To put it simply, if a monkey [my emphasis] is going to type a literary work, it will need to get the job done in a hurry. Time will work against the monkey's literary efforts as well as against any similar uphill evolutionary process in the real world. This fact is reflected in what scientists call the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that all real processes in the physical universe—when isolated and left to themselves—go irreversibly downhill toward increasing disorder and chaos.

The first thing to notice here is the subtle change from 'enough monkeys' to 'a monkey'. The actual monkey-and-typewriter illustration said that if an infinite number of monkeys could type on an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite amount of time, at least one of them would type the complete works of Shakespeare. It was meant to help understand the nature of infinity and how, when we include it in a calculation, anything is possible, no matter how unlikely it is. It can easily be mathematically proven, but it was never an argument for evolution and, so far as I am aware, it has never been used as an argument for it.

Using a single monkey doesn't change the logic because we are talking about infinite time, but what Dr Ackerman seems to be trying here is the fallacy that evolution depends on a single accumulation of probabilities to result in something pre-defined and specific, hence his subtle change to 'a monkey'. Evolution is, of course, not an explanation for convergence on a single pre-defined outcome; it is an explanation for divergence into many outcomes - as many as there are species, sub-species, varieties and variations in nature. Dr Ackerman's 'argument' is nothing more than a straw man; a ridiculous caricature intended to be easily ridiculed and dismissed. Straw man arguments are usually a sign either of ignorance or deliberate dishonesty.

Evolution by natural selection is emphatically not the kind of process that Dr Ackerman is presenting it as. It is not a process which is trying to produce a specific outcome and it is not a single accumulation event. I went into this in some detain in Why You? Briefly, it's the difference between dealing a specific hand of 13 cards from a pack of 52, and dealing any hand from the same pack.

Dr Ackerman either believes himself, or assumes his readers will believe, that the TOE is trying to explain how evolution dealt a specific hand at every deal. It is not. It explains how, at each generation, some individuals with a particular 'hand' of cards were more successful at dealing copies of their 'hand' and some were less so, and how this filtering process resulted in the next generation having a 'hand' they were more likely to be able to deal in that environment whilst other lines of evolving 'hands' were more successful in other environments, so they tended to deal different 'hands'. And, of course, the 'hands' they were dealing tended to change slightly because the mechanism for producing new cards is not always perfect.

There was never a specific 'hand' which evolution was trying to deal, hence we have diversification and not convergence on a specific type, as in the infinite monkey example. If we are looking for a specific outcome from the process of evolution by natural selection the only possible one is that it produces a next generation which is slightly better at producing the next generation, in that gene line, in that environment.

Another subtle 'error' in Dr Ackerman's argument here is the assumption that an evolving line only has a single ancestor at each preceding generation. This is, after all, the only rationale behind his error in accumulating probabilities to produce a single hugely unlikely improbability. Yet we know that we each have an exponentially expanding number of ancestors, hence the accumulated probabilities tend to be focussed on each generation from many gene lines, after having been filtered for ability to replicate successfully by natural selection.

With a trillion ancestors a thousand years ago, the probability of one of them having a beneficial mutation is extremely high, even if the likelihood of that mutation is one in ten million. If that stands a better chance of being replicated (which it would do it it is beneficial) then that probability of it being inherited is increased in the next generation, until, by the time it reached your generation some thousands of years later, if has become highly probable that you will inherit it.

Meanwhile, other highly improbably beneficial mutations will have occurred in other remote ancestors, and the probability of you inheriting that one is also high. The probability of you inheriting one does not affect the probability of you inheriting the others. So the chances of you inheriting a whole bunch of beneficial mutations together is extremely high, not highly unlikely as Dr Ackerman wants you to believe.

Note that, in all this, the mutation only had to happen once. It does not have to happen in every generation. Once it has happened, if it conveys an advantage, then its occurrence will tend to increase in subsequent generations. If it conveys a disadvantage then it's occurrence will diminish in subsequent generation, if it is not immediately removed.

Yes, okay you couldn't have had a trillion ancestors a thousand years ago because there weren't that many people then. That means you are related to a very large proportion of those who were around then, so you are benefiting from almost all their advantageous mutations and, because natural selection will remove any disadvantageous mutations very quickly, the probability of you inheriting one of those quickly becomes almost zero.

In terms of the typewriting-monkey example, it means that along with the accumulating chance of producing something meaningful as time increases, there must also be a consideration of the more rapidly accumulating chance that the monkey, typewriter, or both will break down. Thus, the longer the monkey types, the greater the chance that its typewriter will break. If it would take a million years for the monkey to accidentally hammer out something as meaningful as a good poem or short story, there is no chance whatsoever that the typewriter would last that long—to mention nothing of the monkey or its paper supply!

I'm beginning to wonder if Karl Pilkington is Dr Ackerman in disguise. I'm certainly beginning to feel like Ricky Gervais in this video.

Evolution does not depend on mechanical typewriters, a supply of paper or longevity of monkeys. This point is so infantile it is scarcely worth commenting upon. All it tells us is either that Dr Ackerman has misunderstood his own straw man or that he is hoping his readers will have. Quite frankly, this passage insults the intelligence even of his target audience of Creationists. To me, it suggests he holds his readers in a contempt far in excess of anything they deserve. If there were such a thing as a Code of Conduct or ethical standards for professional Creationists, this would surely risk him being struck off.

In the real world, any system posited to produce ordered and meaningful outcomes will inevitably be subject to the processes of decay and disordering known to scientists as the law of entropy (Second Law of Thermodynamics). Time is no friend of evolution.

At last our old friend the Second Law of Thermodynamics makes its appearance!

Here is as good a statement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics as you are likely to get:

The entropy of any closed system not in thermal equilibrium almost always increases. Closed systems spontaneously evolve towards thermal equilibrium -- the state of maximum entropy of the system -- in a process known as "thermalization". Equivalently, perpetual motion machines of the second kind are impossible.

Note the words 'closed system'. They are not there just to make the Second Law a bit longer; they are an essential part of it. The only truly closed system is the Universe itself. No localised part of the Universe is closed, and especially not Earth or living systems. The only thing essentially required to overcome the tendency towards increased entropy (in other words, Dr Ackerman's 'processes of decay and disordering') is energy. Given that he spent so long in Chapter 6 talking about the sun, it's difficult to believe he is unaware of it as the major source of energy on Earth. It's also difficult to believe that, as a grown adult, he is unaware that living things take in food as a source of energy and use that energy to drive their metabolism. Maybe, as a non-biologist, he is simply unaware that 'life' is, at it's lowest level, nothing more than anti-entropy machines.

Until recently, life on Earth was thought to be entirely dependent on solar energy, however, with the discovery of the deep ocean volcanic vents, particularly in the Pacific, we now know that geothermal energy can also be used by some specialised organisms. In both those systems, an increase in entropy in the energy source results ultimately in a decrease in entropy in the living organisms, but the total result is increased entropy so the system as a whole obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

And that is just about that so far as Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD.'s substantive claims go. Not a single one of them has proved to be based on real science, or supported by science, or to disprove science in ways in which he either thinks it does or wants his readers to think it does. Most of his 'evidence' is equally fanciful nonsense from other Creationists, some of which is frankly, made up.

If anything, this singularly inept attempt to falsify Darwinian Evolution with bad science serves only to emphasis just how well supported the TOE is by the other sciences. Just as with the Laws of Thermodynamics, where we can say with as close to certainty as science ever gets, that if a theory seems to falsify the Laws of Thermodynamics then the theory is wrong, so we are close to being able to say that if science seems to falsify the TOE, then the science is wrong.

Dr Ackerman fails to falsify the TOE because his science is quite laughably wrong.

Had this book been subjected to peer review by proper scientists every chapter would have been struck out. The final chapter is simply a statement of 'faith', that is, unsubstantiated assertions, and little bits of motivational gibberish designed to make his readers feel smugly superior to those crazy know-nothing scientists and that gang of evolutionists who are trying to trick them into losing their faith and think they are descended from monkeys.

To show the world you know you need to lie for your 'faith' is to show the world you know your faith is a lie.

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How Creationists Lie To Us - 13

We have now arrived at Chapter 12 of the Creationist book, It's A Young World After All by assistant professor of psychology, Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD. Only two more of these frankly dreadful chapters to go and this one is again a mercifully short one. It concentrates entirely on the claims of another Creationists which are, of course, presented as established fact.

Chapter 12 - Creation Stopwatches.

Dr Ackerman seems unable to resist a rather silly swipe at 'evolutionists' (i.e. people who accept that the Darwinian Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection explains the observable fact of evolution of life on Earth) with this:

If the Genesis account is regarded as historical narrative, then Adam and Eve are seen as sudden and "mature" creations. They are also seen as inhabiting a mature world that is finished and waiting for them. From a creationist viewpoint, it would be very misleading to try to estimate the age of the world by examining the developmental level of Adam and such other primary features of the creation as size of trees, amount of foliage, and so on.

On the other hand, with the passage of time, certain secondary features would come into existence as a result of interactions taking place between primary aspects of creation. For instance, Adam might carve "Adam loves Eve" inside a heart on a tree. This carving would be a secondary feature, and if it could be dated by some scientific process, a creationist would have a relatively high degree of confidence in the outcome. Such dating would not, of course, tell us how old the world is, but it would tell us that it must be at least as old as the tree carving. In contrast, the evolutionist would maintain that everything existing in the universe had to come about through a regular developmental process. Since no distinction between primary and secondary features is recognized, the developmental age of Adam would be given equal weight with the tree carving.

Um... well, I can't see any sane person not accepting that Adam would need to exist before he could carve his name on a tree actually, so I'm not sure what Dr Ackerman's point is here. Maybe it speaks to his target customers who probably like to comfort themselves with the thought that they are a lot cleverer than those stupid scientists but need to be given simplistic ideas to toy with.

Radiohaloes

Anyway, having got that off his chest he spends the rest of the chapter explaining the claims of fellow Creationist Robert V. Gentry and, in a style we've become used to now, he presents this as accepted, mainstream scientific fact.

Briefly, Gentry claimed to have found examples of coal from the Colorado Plateau which had, in the course of their submersion as water-logged trees, become impregnated with tiny particles of radioactive uranium which then became locked when the wood became fossilised as coal. As these tiny radioactive particles decay they leave a distinct coloured 'halo' around themselves as the radiation they emit affects the adjacent material. As the uranium undergoes radioactive decay it becomes an isotope of lead, so, if we know the rate of radioactive decay of uranium, by measuring the ratio of lead to uranium we can get a fairly good estimate of how long ago the uranium became locked in the coal.

Gentry claimed this showed the coal was only a few thousand years old.

In addition, Gentry also claimed to have found similar radiohalos caused by radioactive polonium, also from the Colorado Plateau which gave similar results. Quite a problem for mainstream science, you might think. How can we account for coal measures being only a few thousand years old?

Well, that's what you're supposed to be asking yourself, of course and Dr Ackerman certainly does nothing to correct that error. In fact, it's an essential part of his argument.

But actually, the presence of radiohalos merely tells us how long the isotopes causing them have been in the coal, not how old the coal is.

What any real scientist would have done would have been to look at other samples gathered from other sites around the world, or compared his findings with those of other researchers in other locations using different samples. He would also have taken pains to ensure his samples had not been contaminated in recent geological times with younger material.

But of course, as a Creationist, Gentry had the required result - the one he had started with - and would not have been allowed to publish these results in the normal Creationist journals had they not supported a literal interpretation of the Christian Bible, so what would have been the point of risking a lucrative book and all those guest speaker invitations on the Creationist lecture circuit by actually making sure your findings were valid?

This article by J. Richard Wakefield, entitled The Geology Of Gentry's "Tiny Mystery", originally published in 1988, comprehensively refutes Gentry's claims. Gentry has been invited to respond to these criticisms but has not yet done so.

Thomas A. Baillieul of Talkorigins.org has also published a detailed refutation of Gentry's claims in Polonium Haloes Refuted (2001, updated April 2005)

So here again we find Dr Ackerman citing a Creationist source which is not only not accepted as valid by real scientists but has been comprehensively refuted by them, yet Ackerman sees no reason to mention these serious shortcomings in his one and only source but instead presents them as established scientific facts. It's becoming quite noticeable how much Dr Ackerman relied on other Creationists for his material and how he has not seen fit to check with real science. His obvious disdain for real science and real scientists is puzzling considering his claim to be writing about science. Of course, one of the great things about being a creation 'science' writer when you have no professional scientific reputation to protect is that you don't need to worry about things like accuracy, professional integrity and objectivity. You're free to chase the money.

As I said about the previous chapter, Creationists quoting Creationists and so constructing a world with only an incidental connection with the real one.

But this is good enough for the largely ignorant and credulous market they are catering for and for whom the least of their requirements is good science, critically and objectively presented.

How Creationists Lie To Us - 12

The continuing story of the Creationist bad science book, It's A Young World After All, by assistant professor of psychology, Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD., who is not a scientists although he writes with the confidence of someone who thinks he is, only to prove beyond any doubt that he quite definitely isn't.

Chapter 11 - The Top That Reeled.

This is a strange chapter in which Dr Ackerman seems to have abandoned his plan to convince us that Earth is only 6000 years old and is now trying to convince us that Noah's Ark was real. He starts of with:

Biblical creationists consider the Genesis account of the flood in the time of Noah to be genuine history. According to the Genesis record, the flood was worldwide in its impact and occurred around 2200 to 2300 B.C.

Christians have traditionally pointed to the extensive sedimentary-rock layers with their numerous fossil remains as being the principal evidence for the flood. Another line of verification that has been put forward is the reports over the centuries by explorers and adventurers who claim to have sighted the remains of the great ark still at rest on Mount Ararat. The present chapter reports on some exciting discoveries by an Australian astronomer that provide new evidence for the Genesis flood.

And then he launches into a convoluted account of different pieces of creation 'science' which looks as though he's trying to convince us that Earth's axis has a wobble - something which is known about and explained by conventional science and which has nothing whatever to do with the age of Earth or the observable fact of evolution. You can read all about it here and here. It is called 'Precession'.

Ackerman seems to be trying to convince us that Earth suddenly tilted on it's axis and expects us to conclude that that must have been the biblical flood, then. However, to arrive at that conclusion he cites an Australian creationist called George Dodwell who claimed to have plotted various shadow measurements from ancient times and shown that 'the curve had a point of origin dating at about 2345 B.C.'.

Er... well yes of course it did. It also had a 'point of origin' in about 50,000 BCE, 10,000,000 BCE, 13.7 billion BCE and 1950 CE. If you plot any system known to fluctuate back to an arbitrary origin it will have that arbitrary origin.

All Dodwell showed is that he knew the traditional date given to the biblical creation by Bible literalists. Interestingly, one of the Australian creationists pushing George Dodwell's 'findings' is one Barry Setterfield whom we met in Chapter 8. He was the one who carefully selected measurements of the speed of light from history and plotted them on a curve which appeared to curve up to infinity in about 4300 BCE. Had he included the excluded measurements he would have shown that the most plausible explanation is that, whilst the speed of light has been constant, our ability to measure it accurately improved hugely between 1675 and 1960 - something we knew already, thank you very much!

So, we are dealing with a team who know well how to produce graphs and charts which meet the requirements of the creation industry and in particular the requirements of the ICR which requires its employees and those whose work it publishes, to take an annual oath to, in effect, never reach a conclusion which isn't in full accord with a literal interpretation of the Christian Bible.

The basic claim is that Dodwell obtained a list of measurements of shadow length on the winter and summer solstice carried out by astronomers as long ago as 3000 years. Quite how he obtained this list, and how he translated the different measuring systems used and assessed their accuracy, remains a mystery.

It must have presented particular difficulties because, for example, we know the Egyptians used cubits and spans based on the distance between an elbow and the finger-tips or between the fingertips of out-stretched arms, we do not know whose elbow and finger-tips and known attempts to standardise them gave different lengths at different times. Moreover, other peoples also used similar anthropometric measures, all of which were different. In England, the length of the inch, upon which all other units of length are based was defined after 1066 as "Equal to 3 barleycorn". In 1324 the legal definition of the inch was set out in a statute of Edward II of England, defining it as "three grains of barley, dry and round, placed end to end, lengthwise".

In Scotland King David I is said to have defined an inch in his Assize of Weights and Measures (c. 1150) as "the width of an average man's thumb at the base of the nail". It is not recorded how they estimated this average nor the basis used to measure the sample. Goodness only knows what we were using before then.

But I expect George Dodwell overcame all these problems. At least, Dr Ackerman doesn't seem to think it worth considering so it must have been something simple. Or maybe he didn't want us to be too concerned with mere details.

Anyway, all of that is irrelevant to the age of Earth, but Creationists seem to think it's somehow relevant to the occurrence of Noah's flood, apparently for no other reason than that you can plot a cyclical curve back to 4300 BCE.

For reasons which remain unclear, Dr Ackerman then sets out to persuade us that George Dodwell was right to ascribe this wobble in Earth's axis to an asteroid hitting the Pacific Ocean. He tries this:

A preserved mammoth from Siberia. Note the appetizing appearance of all that fresh meat. Yummy!

Among the most curious of archaeological mysteries are the vast beds of perfectly preserved fossils frozen in the northern tundras. Buried beneath the northern tundras of Siberia and Alaska lie the remains of thousands of frozen animals, including the now-extinct mammoth. In some cases the carcasses are preserved to such a degree that their flesh is still edible, usually only by bears and wolves but in a few reported instances by men. Today these northern tundras are cold and barren wastelands, but we know that in the past the climate was much warmer. Fossil evidence has been found of plants that grow today as far south as Mexico. At one time these tundras were covered with lush vegetation.

It is a mystery how so many mammoths and other animals could have been rapidly buried and preserved in cold storage, for the climate was warm at the time they were living. One such perfectly preserved carcass was found near the Beresovka River in Siberia in 1901. Well-preserved plant fragments were found in the mouth and between the teeth of the mammal, indicating the suddenness with which it met its death. Inside the mammoth's stomach, twenty-four pounds of excellently preserved vegetation was recovered. The mammoth's remarkably preserved state indicates that at the time of death there was a cataclysmic occurrence that produced both a rapid burial of the creature and a sudden and permanent drop in the temperature. Recent studies of the temperature parameters required to account for the state of preservation of the Beresovka mammoth reveal that 'the animal must have frozen to death in mid-summer by being suddenly overcome by an outside temperature below —150° F.'

His 'authority' for the Beresova River mammoth claim is... you've guessed it... a fellow Creationist, Jody Dillow, who published her 'findings' in [drum-roll, please...] The Creation Research Society Quarterly (June 1977). You may recall at this point the oath that people who publish through the Institute for Creation Research are required to take.

Not surprisingly, Dr Ackerman did not cite any genuine scientific sources and seems to imagine frozen meat is a fossil - a measure of his palaeontological knowledge and understanding.

The truth, as we've come to expect, is something completely different. In fact, frozen mammoths with soft body-parts preserved to any degree are not common; they are rare. There are no authentic records of any of them being edible. Sudden death with food in the mouth and stomach is easy to explain for a large mammal which lived in tundra where lakes and ponds froze over in winter and thawed out in summer. Mammoths falling through ice as it thinned would have been a fairly frequent occurrence. It would be surprising if we did not find these remains.

The claim that they must have gone from summer temperatures to —150° F. in half an hour to retain their fresh and edible condition is nonsense, of course. It 'solves' a non-existent problem. Ackerman's 'authority' is the same 1977 Creation Research Society Quarterly article by Jody Dillow. Again, no genuine science source is cited.

Dr Ackerman then goes on to explain how George Dodwell's hypothetical asteroid accounts for plate tectonic. No! Honestly!

When we get to the end of the chapter we discover that Dr Ackerman seems to have realised that trying to explain the well-know precessionary wobble in Earth's tilt in novel and entertaining ways and relating fanciful stories of fresh mammoth steaks in Siberia does not really prove there was once a world-wide flood. In a 2002 update he has added an equally fanciful section called 'Putting It All Together: The Great Flood' which can best be describes as speculative, though unkind people might use a different adjective. This, and the rest of the chapter, shows very nicely how Creationists use articles by other Creationists as though they are evidence, and so have built up a picture of the world in which any contact with reality is merely incidental.

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How Creationists Lie To Us - 11

Continuing my series on the Creationist book, It's a Young World After All, by assistant professor of psychology Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD. Having seen the previous chapter and how the entire argument in it is based on two hoaxes which could easily have been checked, you might expect a little better from Chapter 10. Alas, it was not to be so.

Chapter 10 - Forests In Stone.

This chapter was inserted in 2002 apparently, so any excuse of ignorance of science before that date can be discounted. Ackerman turns his attention to Yellowstone National Forest, an area of national parkland adjacent to Yellowstone National Park which is mostly in Wyoming, USA.

The Yellowstone area is known for it's interesting geology, being seismically active and containing one of the largest known volcanic caldera on Earth, the remains of a massive super-volcano. Not surprisingly then, much of the geology can be accounted for in terms of volcanic activity.

As Dr Ackerman puts it:

Among the amazing wonders of Yellowstone is an apparent series of 27 distinct forests entombed within the mountains. ... At numerous points in the mountainous area around Specimen Ridge, petrified trees jut up out of the ground. Embedded in the stony layers are innumerable fossilized tree trunks, many of them entombed in an upright position as though they had been buried in place as they grew.

The U.S. Park Service has adopted an evolution-based scenario for explaining the entombed trees, and this scenario is explained on tourist plaques and in information brochures found around the park area. According to this evolutionist interpretation, Specimen Ridge records events that occurred about 50 million years ago.

For 'evolution-based scenario', read 'scenario different to the Christian Bible account of Creation in Genesis'. The Darwinian Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection (TOE) has nothing whatever to say about the process of fossilisation, which lays firmly in the domain of geology, but Ackerman is showing us he realises that these fossils support the TOE by showing how old Earth really is, therefore he has to find a way to discredit the account of their formation.

Remember his words, "innumerable fossilized tree trunks, many of them entombed in an upright position as though they had been buried in place as they grew."

Here is his best effort:

The fossilized tree trunks at Specimen Ridge do not have developed root systems. Rather the roots terminate abruptly about three feet from the base of the trunk forming a root ball as is found when trees are forcibly ripped out of the ground. Also, there is little evidence of 27 fossilized forest floors with leaves and twigs, worm and insect burrows, etc. The appearance of the fossil tree trunks is consistent with having been uprooted from some other location and transported in along with the sediments that make up Specimen Ridge.

Why on Earth he would expect to see leaves, twigs and burrows under volcanic ash is not explained but there's that interesting 'absence of evidence is evidence of absence' again which, for some reason Creationists seem to think should not apply to their favourite god.

That minor point aside, however, the more revealing one is his astounding suggestion that a better way to account for these petrified trees standing upright and looking for all the world as though they were buried under a sudden out-pouring of volcanic ash, is that they were all uprooted in a cataclysmic flood and transported there in sediment to form the ridge.

Here is a picture of trees uprooted and carried away in a recent flood. See all the trees standing upright, roots downward, as though growing from a forest floor? Me neither.

So, for Ackerman's explanation to be right, all these trees would have to have been deposited upright, roots down and not forming the higgledy-piggledy jumble we see with any other flood where trees get uprooted and carried away to be deposited elsewhere.

And he presents this as serious science? Can it get any worse?

He says, without even the slightest hint of irony:

The Specimen Ridge fossilized tree trunks are reminiscent of the enigmatic polystrate fossils discussed in the previous chapter.

That would be the whale lie based on an easily discredited single account. Quite so! This feeble effort is indeed reminiscent of that laughable hoax.

Although he doesn't mention the sheer impossibility of trees being deposited in a flood all standing upright, he does seem to be aware of it, and even of the possibility of his credulous readers thinking of it all by themselves, so he tries to cover that base with this account of what happened after the Mount St Helens eruption, and promptly shoots himself in the foot:

Spirit Lake clogged with tree debris following the last eruption of Mount St Helens

After the eruption the surface of Spirit Lake, located about 3 miles north of the volcano, was covered with a two-square-mile floating carpet of uprooted trees. In the years following the eruption, research on these floating trees helped unlock the mystery of Specimen Ridge.

Over time, the floating trees become waterlogged and sink to the lake bottom. The surprising discovery was the way in which many of the logs sank. At first, all the logs were floating in the expected prone position. However, as they became saturated, some absorbed water more quickly into the root portion making it heavier such that they rotated into an upright floating position. Then, with further saturation, these trees would sink to the bottom and “plant” themselves into the soft lake sediment. New sediments washing in with each rain would bury the upright trees ever more deeply into the lake bottom. Trees that would sink at a later time would be buried higher in the sediment as though comprising a later forest. Though occurring on a much smaller scale, these observations are suggestive of what is observed at Specimen Ridge. Sonar readings and other data gathered by scuba divers revealed that 20 to 40 thousand upright trunks were planted at the bottom of Spirit Lake by 1985. Scientists estimate that at least ten percent of the tree trunks at the bottom of Spirit Lake have been deposited in the upright position.

Eureka! The only slight problem though is that the petrified trees on Specimen Ridge are not embedded in the alluvial deposits of a lake bed; they are embedded in volcanic ash.

But even if it could be shown that the petrified trees ended up in a lake which was then showered in volcanic ash, it doesn't solve his problem. He still needs to account for the evidence that this occurred 27 times about 50 million years ago and was not all the result of one flood a few thousand years ago. Although he could have solved one of the mysteries of Specimen Ridge - why weren't the trees destroyed by hot volcanic ash? However, he still needs to explain how the rest of the debris - the branches, the broken trunks, etc, just spirited away to leave just the trunks and roots and the volcanic ash...

Nice one, Dr Ackerman. It's beginning to look more and more as though it's an old world after all. Perhaps just a little more joined-up thinking next time, or is that too close to real science for comfort?

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How Creationists Lie To Us - 10

This is the ninth in the series looking at the creationist book, It's A Young World After All, by creationist assistant professor of psychology, Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD. As readers of my earlier blogs will know, Dr Ackerman writes about science; a subject about which he seems to be singularly unqualified to write. Consequently his book is littered with school-boy howlers, bad science and falsehoods which he could easily have checked but apparently did not think fit to do so. He also shows a remarkable propensity to be taken in by obvious deceptions. Chapter 9 is no exception.

Chapter 9 - Back Down To Earth.

This chapter starts off badly and just gets worse. By the end of it you are left wondering if there is anything Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD., won't believe if it supports his creationist agenda. There is no evidence whatsoever of any critical thinking. The bait is just swallowed and regurgitated as 'science' to be served up to his credulous readership who seem to buy this stuff under the mistaken impression that it is science written by a scientist.

Take this:

The Problems with Radioactive Clocks

As was seen in the previous chapter, however, the startling discovery that the speed of light has been slowing down through history changes the whole picture regarding radioactive clocks. It can now be seen that they do not indicate vast ages as formerly thought, since—as physicists well know— the speed at which a radioactive decay clock runs is directly related to the speed at which light travels.

Er... except that the 'startling discovery that the speed of light has been slowing down' was a piece of creationist nonsense as we saw in Chapter 8 and which any real physicist would have seen through in an instant. So, this plank of the edifice Ackerman is trying to erect has no support.

Having blundered into the trap of using bad science to build yet more bad science, Dr Ackerman turns his attention to a curious tale from California. He calls it A Whale On Its Tail.

Briefly, he tells the story of the fossilised skeleton of a baleen whale being found standing on its tail in a sedimentary deposit in a quarry in Lompoc, California and says that this could only happen if the sediment and the whale had all been deposited quickly in a catastrophic event like a flood.

Here is a picture of what Dr Ackerman seems to think the skeleton of such a baleen whale would look like in a quarry. Note the depth of his knowledge of the process of fossilisation and of baleen whale anatomy. (Don't laugh. It's not nice!)

Yes, indeed. Such a find would indeed be a problem for geologists because it is difficult to imagine how else a whale could stand on it's tail for the thousands or millions of years it would take for the sediment to build up around them although Dr Ackerman seems to have over-looked the little fact that catastrophic floods do occur frequently in coastal areas; they're called tsunami.

But there is an even bigger problem with this story - it is not true. In fact, it's a lie.

Here is how Talkorigins.org deals with it:

Had anybody taken the time and trouble to check the facts, they would have found that the story by Russel (1976) took some liberty with the facts and lacked very important information. First, the skeleton was not found in a vertical position, but was lying at an angle 50 to 40 degrees from horizontal. Finally, although at this angle, the whale skeleton lay parallel to the bedding of strata which at one time was the sea floor on which the dead whale fell after its death. These facts were confirmed by inquiring with the people at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History who excavated the whale. Although nothing had been published on the whale, Russel (1976) clearly identified the staff who excavated the skeleton and they could have been easily called at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History in Los Angeles, California.

The strata containing the whale consists of diatomites that accumulated within deep bays and basins that lay along the Pacific coastline during Miocene times. As a result of folding and tectonics associated with the formation of the Transverse Ranges, the strata containing the enclosed skeleton has been tilted into a less-than vertical position. These sediments lack any sedimentary structures that would indicate catastrophic deposition. Rather, the strata exhibit laminations indicative of slow accumulation on an anoxic bay bottom. Within the adjacent strata, several hardgrounds occurs. A hardground is a distinctive cemented layer of sedimentary rock that forms when the lack of sediments being deposited over a very long period of time on the sea bottom allows the surface sediments to become cemented (Isaac 1981, Garrison and Foellmi 1988). In fact, identical sediments are currently accumulating without the involvement of a Noachian-like flood within parts of the Gulf of California (Curray et al. 1992; Schrader et al. 1982).

Furthermore, a partially buried, articulated whale skeleton slowly being covered by sedimentation in the deep ocean off the coast of California was observed by oceanographers diving in submersibles. It is an excellent modern analogue of how this particular whale fossil was created without the need of a Noachian Flood (Allison et al. 1990; Smith et al. 1989).

The geology of these quarries is documented by publications of the California Division of Mines and Geology (Dibblee 1950, 1982) United States Geological Survey geological maps (Dibblee, 1988a, 1988b), graduate students at University of California, Los Angeles (Grivetti 1982), and field trip guidebooks (Isaacs 1981). The other whale skeletons which have been found in these quarries lie parallel to the bedding and owe their modern attitude to tectonics rather then some mythical catastrophe. The written documentation for the attitude of the whale skeletons is contained within field notes and locality records of the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History in Los Angeles, California.

As Darby South of talkorigins.org says:

It appears the creationists repeating this whale-of-a-tale, (including the editors of Creation Ex Nihilo) either failed to check their facts or didn't want a good story to be ruined by the facts. In either case, none of these people apparently took the time and trouble to find out what the facts were before putting pen to paper. What they claim to be God's truth is nothing more than an urban folktale used to validate personal religious beliefs.

What was found to be most disturbing was the tendency for creationists to deliberately omit specific locational data and references. Thus, they made it as difficult as possible for a person to independently confirm the data on which they offered as proof of a Biblical world-wide flood. As a result, only someone who had come across Corliss (1980) and Mr. Ginenthal's article could track down Russel (1976) and by comparing descriptions of this fossil whale to Anonymous (1988) and other places where it was used evidence by creationists determine the source of the claims about a 80-ft fossil whale having been found in California buried in a vertical position. It almost seems that the people making the claims about this whale being evidence for a catastrophic or Noachian Flood wanted the reader take their claims taken as a matter of faith as being true and make it impossible for anybody to check the veracity of the story. This is propaganda, not science in the form of paragraph- to page-size versions of media sound-bites.

Curious indeed that creationists should be so coy about this astounding piece of evidence for creationism. You would have thought they would have been advertising it world-wide and arranging for millions of visitors to come and see their evidence.

I think that just about says everything that needs to be said about this chapter. Let's hope subsequent chapters are not quite so obviously scraping the bottom of the barrel to find something to fill the pages as was this sorry effort.

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How Creationists Lie To Us - 9

Chapter 8 - The Speed Of Light.

Chapter 8 of Dr Paul D. Ackerman's creationist book, It's A Young World After All is a mercifully short and simple chapter. It's also easy to dismiss. In fact, it's so easily dismissed that even a psychologist with no science training could have done so had he wished.

It does illustrate quite nicely though a couple of the techniques creationist 'scientists', that is creationists who write books about science, use on their customers. It's probably worth recalling here how creationists who wish to have their work published by the Institute For Creation Research (ICR), which is the source of much of the 'science' behind such creationist websites as Answersingenesis.org and Creationministries International, are required to take an annual oath which means in effect that they will only ever reach a conclusion which supports a literal interpretation of the Christian Bible and especially the account of Creation in Genesis.

Ackerman describes this as the "most amazing clock of all". Apparently, he believes the speed of light (c) is changing. Supposedly, when his god created the universe in just six days, the value of c was almost infinite. This explains why object in the universe look like they are billions of light years away and yet their light, which would take billions of years to reach us, can be seen. Clearly, the light we see must have started out billions of years ago and not the 6000 or so years creationism requires us to believe the universe has existed for.

Now, the velocity of light in a vacuum is a universal constant. It does not matter how fast you are travelling relative to the source of light it will always be the same. The reason for that is that the faster you travel the slower time gets (and also the more massive you become). At the sort of speeds we are used to this effect is too small to be noticed but it can make a difference when it comes to things like space travel and satellites. A geostationary satellite like those used for communications and in particular GeoPositioning Systems (GPS) on which satellite navigations depends, are travelling considerably faster through space-time than is the surface of Earth over which they are 'stationary' so a small but important time correction needs to be applied to allow for relativity.

So, where on Earth does Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD, get this idea that c is getting slower from?

You might have guessed it. He gets it from another creationist 'scientist' of course. He gets it from Barry Setterfield, an Australian creationist. Setterfield based his notion on historical measurements for the speed of light starting in 1667 (sic) and working up to the 1960s. Of course, we are expected not to question the validity of measurements of light travelling at 186,000 miles per second in 1667 with the limited technology at their disposal.

So, plotting some of these data points on a graph and drawing a line through them extrapolated back until it curved up to infinity, Setterfield concluded that this proved that the Bible was true after all. The curve became infinite at about 4300 BCE.

There was a slight flaw in the science, though. As exposed in Talkorigins.org, had Setterfield plotted the rest of the data points he had available, he would have produced a plot whose best fit would have shown the speed of light increasing not slowing down, though allowing for a margin or error, a straight line, with increasing variability about the mean as they went back in time could have been plotted through them. So, his maths should have told him the startling fact that we weren't very good at measuring the speed of light in those days. Instead, by starting out with the answer he wanted, then selecting the data which best fitted it, he dutifully produced the conclusion required by the ICR.

Later, Setterfield was to claim that recent measurements had shown the value of c had reached its minimum in the 1960s and was now stable, so handily making it impossible to validate his claim, since any future measurement would produce a flat line. I wonder what the chances of that happening at just the right time were. Just the ticket, eh? A nice claim which is impossible to falsify. How absolutely er... creationist!

And what an amazing coincidence too that the 'speed of light' happened to stabilize just at the time when our technology became sensitive enough to measure it accurately!

The site, Dealing With Creationism In Astronomy also looks at this piece of creative creation 'science'.

Now isn't that an interesting example of how creation 'science' works? One 'scientist' comes up with the required answer and another 'scientist' presents that as authoritative. It's then left to the unfortunate customer who is probably singularly ill-equipped to question it, to check its validity and satisfy him or herself that it's good science. But then most customers for this stuff are just looking for something to confirm their existing bias and just want the reassurance than 'scientists' agree with them. Nice work if you can get it.

As for Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD., he seems to have merely accepted this bad science with no attempt to check it or to question its validity. It shows what he wants it to show, or, more likely, it shows what he knows his customers want it to show, so in the book it goes.

Earth during 'Creation Week'?

Had Ackerman, or Setterfield for that matter, been real physicist, or had they checked with any of them or had their work peer-reviewed by some, they would have been told that had c been infinite at day one, Earth would have melted during 'creation week' as a result of the very rapid rate of radioactive decay, and there would have been 417 days in a year when Jesus was born. I'm sure someone would have noticed that the calendar was 52 days too short then and that years have been getting noticeably shorter during recent historic times.

Ackerman posed an interesting question in Chapter 3:

Now the tables have turned, and the believer can throw the challenge back by saying, "If the universe was created as long ago as the evolutionists claim, why does it look so young? God is surely not a deceiver."

And if it doesn't look so young, just who is the deceiver?

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How Creationists Lie To Us - 8

We're now half-way through the treasure-trove of creationist bad science called It's A Young World After All By Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD., an assistant professor of psychology with no history of research in any science subject, no peer-reviewed science papers to his name, no record of having presented any papers to an audience of professional scientists and indeed no recognised higher qualifications in any science subject. Dr Ackerman never-the-less feels competent to assure his readers that science has got it all wrong.

This blog deals with Chapter 7. Just another seven tedious chapters to go...

7 - The Vast Beyond.

Here he lays his cards on the table:

As a biblical creationist, I believe that God created the heavens and earth out of nothing (i.e., not out of any preexisting matter) a few thousand years ago. ... If the seven days of the creation week described in the first chapter of Genesis are understood as regular twenty-four-hour days, the figure of six thousand years then applies to the whole of creation.

To many, the idea of a recent creation by the Word of God is an incredible concept. Agreed, the concept is incredible. However, in the area of ultimate origins, all the alternatives are incredible. Consider, for example, the dominant evolutionist scenario for the beginning: the Big Bang.

According to the Big Bang concept all the matter of the universe—all of reality—was once compressed into a tiny ball. For some reason the tiny ball became unstable, exploded, and turned into stars, planets, strawberries, cockroaches, Good Humor wagons, committees, and this book.

A great portion of the resources and brainpower of modern science is being poured into an effort to make this materialist scenario sound plausible. The attempt has been monumental and the results impressive, but the conflicting hard data are mounting up, and it is time for people to begin pointing out that "the emperor has no clothes." The view that the present physical universe somehow created itself and is billions of years old is contradicted by the growing weight of powerful physical evidence. The creation is not billions of years old; it is quite young.

Of course this is nothing more that the Kalâm Cosmological Argument (KCA) in disguise, but what's interesting here is how Ackerman sets his readers up with a straw man argument in his grossly over-simplified and frankly wrong definition of the Big Bang Theory and then presents his own 'A Magic Man Magicked It Out Of Nothing By Magic' notion as a more reasonable alternative. There is not, and there never will be, any attempt to explain how this magic works to make everything out of nothing nor where the magic man came from and what it was made of, and yet creationists continually demand science provide detailed proof of every minutiae of a scientific theory.

"You have to prove beyond any possible shadow of a doubt everything about your theory or my evidence-free notion wins!" This is of course nothing more that an abdication of responsibility and a triumph of intellectual and moral cowardice on the part of creationists. You can bet your house that if creationists had even the slightest scrap of real, authenticated, definitive evidence for their particular god which came anywhere close to the standard of proof they demand of science, we would never hear the last of it.

False Dichotomy. If this isn't a plane it must be a peanut-butter sandwich.

What he is trying here is the classic Creationist tactic of the False Dichotomy Fallacy and it depends entirely on the parochial ignorance of his target market for its success. His readers are expected to assume without question that, if he can cast doubt on science, the only reasonable alternative on offer is the locally popular god which just happens to be the one he is pushing. What he doesn't say, and what his readers are expected not to know, is that precisely the same argument can be used for any other hypothetical god or any other crack-pot notion you can dream up and to which you can simply assign responsibility for everything. The fact that the KCA was devised by medieval Islamic theologians to support their version of a god is simply ignored.

Let's move on to the specifics:

Consider, for example, the dominant evolutionist scenario for the beginning: the Big Bang. According to the Big Bang concept all the matter of the universe—all of reality—was once compressed into a tiny ball.

The Big Bang Theory of course is nothing to do with the Theory of Evolution By Natural Selection (TOE). The TOE would still apply even if you could show that the universe has always existed or that it was built by a construction firm. The TOE is an explanation of the biological fact of evolution on Earth just as the Theory of Gravity is an explanation of the fact that there is an attractive force between bodies related to their mass.

But that error aside, if indeed it was an error, the gross distortion of Big Bang (BB) cosmology here is disgraceful. No serious cosmologist of theoretical physicist would claim that all the matter in the universe was once compressed into a ball. The BB explains how matter was created. It does not claim it was all there to begin with.

The basic concept is actually quite easy to follow. As Einstein showed, matter is energy and energy is matter. At its lowest level energy consists of four fundamental forces: weak and strong nuclear force; electromagnetic force, and gravity. All observation confirm that the gravitational energy in the universe is equal to the sum of the other three forces, so, if gravity is regarded as the opposite of the other three forces, the sum total of energy in the universe is zero. The universe is, in total energy terms, literally nothing. It's like borrowing from a bank. You have money, the bank has an asset in the form of your debt, but you have money to spend. No wealth was created in that transaction.

And where is the evidence for all this? As with all science, the evidence can come from making predictions from the theory and testing them:

One of the predictions made by the BB Theory is that there will be a particular ratio of light elements in the universe. Guess what? The observation matches that prediction exactly.

One of the early criticisms of the BB was that there should still be traces of the initial heat and there was none. Except there was. When the microwave background radiation was detected, by accident as it turned out, by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson and for which they were awarded the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics, it turned out to be exactly as the BB Theory predicted, if the universe is as old as BB cosmologists say and has been expanding at the rate the red-shift suggests.

This has been discussed at length in a recent book by a real scientist Professor Lawrence M Krauss, A Universe From Nothing. It has also been the subject of a book by Professor Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design.

Lawrence Krauss' book also deals at length with the origin of 'dark energy' and 'dark matter' which leads me on to the last of Ackerman's attempts at the false dichotomy fallacy: the clustering of galaxies and his half-baked analogy with helium-filled balloons.

Quite simply, galaxies do not fly apart because they have gravitational mass holding them together. We know this because we can see them er... not flying apart. Incidentally, they would fly apart if they had insufficient gravitational mass, not because they behave like helium-filled balloons in Earth's atmosphere, but because of the speed of rotation of galaxies. As Relativity tells us, moving objects travel in a straight line through curved space and space is curved by mass, so, to appear to be moving in an orbital motion, they must be moving through a gravity field sufficient to hold them in that orbit.

Dr Ackerman's helium-filled balloons tended to disperse because their movement in Earth's locally chaotic atmosphere was also chaotic. Basic physics tells us that in the absence of energy to overcome it, entropy means loss of order. They tended to move away from one another because there are more ways in which they can do that than there are ways in which they can move towards one another and none of them had sufficient mass to produce a gravity field which would prevent it - which a few moments thought would have told him, is also why they floated upwards.

Once again, Ackerman has, either wilfully or through ignorance of the subject on which he so confidently expounds, got his basic science badly wrong, and so, inadvertently or by design, produced another misleading chapter which would have been laughed at by any decent scientific peer-review process.

Lastly, and so far the only subject raised by Ackerman for which science does not yet have a complete answer, is the question of the 'Dog Star' Sirius and the evidence from ancient history that it had a distinct red tinge, whereas today it is blue-white. This question is discussed here. Ackerman, as we've come to expect now, get's his science muddled and presents only one hypothesis to account for this apparent change as though it were the only one. Firstly, he 'forgets' to mention that Sirius is actually a binary star, that is, two stars in stable orbit around each other. Sirius B (beta) is one of them and is, as he says, a white dwarf.

From the Wikipedia article:

The possibility that stellar evolution of either Sirius A or Sirius B could be responsible for this discrepancy has been rejected by astronomers on the grounds that the timescale of thousands of years is too short and that there is no sign of the nebulosity in the system that would be expected had such a change taken place. An interaction with a third star, to date undiscovered, has also been proposed as a possibility for a red appearance. Alternative explanations are either that the description as red is a poetic metaphor for ill fortune, or that the dramatic scintillations of the star when it was observed rising left the viewer with the impression that it was red. To the naked eye, it often appears to be flashing with red, white and blue hues when near the horizon.

So, as Ackerman could easily have found out had he tried, there are several alternative hypotheses to account for the apparent change in Sirius' hue as seen from Earth. None of them is entirely satisfactory. Quite simply, we do not yet know and we are not even certain that there was a change, though that seems probably.

And so here we have an example of Dr Ackerman trying the familiar old creationist fall-back, the God Of The Gaps Fallacy. The reader is expected to assume that if there is something science has not yet discovered or answered in the minutest detail, the only possible explanation is that the locally popular god did it. Note also the uncritical acceptance as true the evidence that Sirius really did once appear red. Strange that Ackerman seems so ill-disposed to accept science which doesn't agree with his theology, when a completely different set of impossibly high standards of evidence are called into play, eh?

We could, of course, fill all these gaps with the equally preposterous and evidence-free notion that it was caused by a celestial peanut butter sandwich with equal logical validity and intellectual honesty. As a technique it appeals only to those who like to pretend that their ignorant superstition somehow trumps science and learning and gives them a greater understanding of reality than those who study it. It is nothing more than an excuse for intellectual indolence and it goes hand-in-hand with cultural arrogance and parochial ignorance.

I wonder how many scientific discoveries Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD. can think of which were made by a scientist sitting back in smug self-satisfaction and declaring that it must have been a god that did it. In fact, it was only when we stopped thinking like that that science began to make any real progress.

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Why You Can't Refute Evolution With Science.

Darwinian Evolution is probably the best supported of any scientific theory. Not only has it survived virtually intact as science has progressed in the intervening years since Wallace and Darwin first published their theory in 1859, but it has been strengthened by many discoveries undreamed of by them.

It came into a world which was assumed to be some 6000 years old in a Universe believed to the same age and to consist of Earth, the moon, the sun and planets and a few thousand stars. There was no known biological method by which the necessary information could be passed on from parent to offspring; there was no known agent which could change to produce the observable variability on which natural selection acts.

We did not know about Mendel's Laws of Inheritance; we did not know about genes or DNA or even about how male and female gametes unite to form a new individual in sexual reproduction.

Related land animals and plants appeared to be distributed in different continents and islands with no obvious ways in which they could have got there. We knew nothing of plate tectonics.

We knew nothing of protein structure or immunology or how enzymes worked. Biochemistry was in its infancy. We knew nothing of the genetic control of embryological development.

How Creationists Lie To Us - 7

Continuing a chapter by chapter look at the creationist book, It's A Young World After All by assistant professor of psychology (and definitely not a research scientist) Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD.

Chapter 6 - Is the Sun Shrinking?

True to form, Ackerman seems to have developed amnesia and forgotten all the science of the intervening years - or maybe he's just never learnt it - and starts off with:

"Around the turn of the century, the famous scientist Lord Kelvin created difficulties for evolutionists by presenting a number of powerful arguments against the long ages needed by their theory. In a widely heralded debate with the famous evolutionist Thomas Huxley, Lord Kelvin tore the evolutionists' position to shreds with simple and straightforward physical arguments that the earth and solar system were not old enough for life to have arisen by Darwin's proposed evolutionary process. Among Lord Kelvin's arguments on the age issue was the time factor for the sun's survival based upon Helmholtz's accepted model of gravitational collapse. Lord Kelvin had the theory of evolution on the ropes and had seemingly dealt the knockout blow."

Totally irrelevant of course because, as we now know, Kelvin's calculation of the age of the sun was based on the assumption that its heat was produced by a combustion process and/or gravitational collapse. Kelvin knew nothing of nuclear reactions and in particular nuclear fusion reactions when he did his sums. Nor did Kelvin know anything of Relativity and how mass and energy are one and the same thing, as Einstein showed. Having got the science wrong, not surprisingly he got the wrong answer. It's basically the same error as Ackerman himself made in Chapter 4 when he compared a hot celestial body with a burning cigar, assuming they were the same thing. Kelvin of course did not have the benefit of a further 100 years of science as Ackerman did, so his mistake is quite understandable.

Of course, one way to look at this is that, when physics seemed to disagree with Darwinian evolution, it was Darwinian evolution which turned out to be correct and the physicists who had to revise their theories.

You might be surprised to see a 115 year-old theory being waved as though it were current science, especially one which was falsified 82 years ago, but we are dealing with a creationist writing books for a credulous, mostly ignorant and decidedly gullible market. Isn't it strange how keen creationists are to use a scientific theory, not matter how dubious, out of date, or long-abandoned the theory is, if they think it supports them in their attack on scientific theories? No double standards there, obviously.

To make matters worse for himself, our intrepid psychologist ploughs on undeterred by mere facts. He grudgingly acknowledges that Hans Bethe introduced the idea of nuclear fusion in 1930 but only to dismiss it on the grounds that the neutrinos it should produce have not been 'captured'. In full chortle he declares:

From a creationist point of view, the results of the neutrino-capture experiments are very exciting, for they indicate that the thermonuclear-fusion theory of solar radiation may be entirely wrong. The sun is not emitting the necessary neutrinos. (My emphasis)

So, it looks like Kelvin was right then, eh?

Oops! What's this we find tucked away at the foot of the page?

More recently, scientists associated with the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada report that the long-sought missing neutrinos, discussed at the beginning of this chapter, have now been found.

Wow! So physics has made a prediction and the prediction has been confirmed! This is generally taken to indicate that the theory is a fairy close approximation to the truth. So that's Ackerman's argument disposed of then.

What any self-respecting scientist would do when his claims have been refuted with this standard of evidence would be to publicly withdraw it and, when it's been published in a book, either withdraw the book from sale or publish a new edition correcting the error. Not so a creation 'scientist' it seems.

Having tried to use a falsified theory to support his evidence-free notion that earth is only a few thousand years old because pre-wheel Bronze Age nomadic pastoralists thought is was, he then tries to present another theory as having been falsified, only to find it's now been confirmed. What is especially amusing and revealing here is how eager Ackerman was to claim the absence of evidence (in this case the absence of neutrinos) refuted the nuclear fusion theory. I wonder if he is so keen to use the absence of any evidence for his creator god to refute the theory that it exists? Any bets?

When it comes to a contest between science and theology one can only pity the poor theologians.

And what does Ackerman do having had his evidence destroyed? Instead of withdrawing the book, or even putting a correction at the top of the page, Ackerman tucks it away at the bottom. I wonder how many of his readers bother to actually read that far?

To quote one Dr Paul D. Ackerman:

One characteristic common to all people is the tendency to notice and accept information that supports their own beliefs, values, biases, and so on.

Well quite. But no point in wasting a good market when there's good money to be made in supplying information which supports the beliefs, values and biases of credulous creationists, for the mere consideration of personal integrity and self-respect, eh?

It's not until we manage to get about two-thirds of the way through the chapter though that we actually get to the point the chapter heading suggests is the main point:

Is the Sun Shrinking?

Major newspapers across the country bannered this headline: "The Sun Is Shrinking." The March 1980 Associated Press news story by Kevin McKean reported the results of research studies by solar specialist Jack Eddy of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the National Center for Atmospheric Research and mathematician Aram Boornazian. Through examination of records kept by the British Royal Observatory since 1750, Eddy and Boornazian concluded that the sun appears to be shrinking at a rate of about one-tenth of a percent per century.

I'll not go into this in detail because I could come no where near to refuting it so comprehensively as does Mark C. Chu-Carroll in an article entitled Shrinking Sun (Part 1). His conclusion is:

So, is the sun shrinking? According to all of the data we have, examined carefully with good math, the answer is almost certainly not. There's some noise in the data that makes it less than 100% certain, but I wouldn't recommend gambling against it. When you add in the other data we have, such as the shape and stability of the orbits of the planets in the solar system, the geological records of earth, and the correlation between known solar patterns and geological records, it becomes absolutely certain that while there may be some variation in the size of the sun, it's nothing like the constant linear decrease in size required by the creationist argument.

So, I wonder what else Dr Paul D. Ackerman, PhD. will reveal about the sorry state of creation 'science' in Chapter 7.

You know, I'm beginning to wonder if the creation industry needs to use a psychologist to write about science because few self-respecting real scientists would destroy their credibility by coming up with the answers required by the publishers of this stuff.

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