Important Questions (3A)

September 9, 2009, 8:22 am by dc-agape.

Last week I ask some tough questions to one of my Christian commenters.  I had a reason for each of the questions.  You see, Christians worship a supreme being that is known for compassion, justice, and love.  The questions I ask should have included two more, but I thought I had covered all the important topics.  I will explain the reason for each of the questions in the next nine posts.  The purpose of the questions was to determine if our commenter was True to the Christ-like qualities expected from Christians.

I then asked if he believed that Creationism should be taught in the science classroom.  I requested his response to the recent trial in Dover, PA, USA.  It is true that as an Ethical Humanist (materialist) and a scientist I do have two biases.  One I have described many times…I do not see any proof of an existence of supernatural beings.  But being a scientist reinforces this bias by requiring data that supports any hypothesis, requires critical analysis of all data, and also requires that overlapping schools of thought (methods of gathering data) support each other.  As a scientist I believe that the skills of critical analysis are crucial to the solving of problems; either in the home, work, politics, environmental or international.

You see Creationism focuses mistakenly on evolution and biology as its target.  But at the same time Young Earth Creationists (most creationists) must also deny much if not all of Chemistry, Physics, Geology, and Astronomy.  These people believe that Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution is the cornerstone of all modern sciences.  They also believe that if they can topple this one theory then all the other sciences will fall as well.  But this is a very large mistake on their part.

Chemistry

Two fundamental theories of chemistry must be separately proven wrong for the Creationist to have a viable hypothesis.  One is radio-nuclear decay and the other is isotope labeling.  Both of these topics are now stronger theories than gravity or the speed of light (which are also theories). 

In radio-nuclear decay we know that Carbon-14 has a half-life of 5,730 years.  We can measure up to seven of these half-lives before the concentration of carbon-14 become too dilute to measure by modern techniques.  By this type of measurement we can deduce what living material existed up to 40,110 years ago!  Well beyond the YEC’s belief that the universe was created on Oct 4, 4004 BC.  But this is just child’s play compared to another radio-nuclear decay: potassium-argon.  Potassium exists in nature as Potassium-39 and Potassium-41, but there is a naturally occurring radioactive Potassium-40.  Its half-life can also be measured and it turns out to be 1.26 billion years.  Since it is natural in the earth’s crust we can measure its concentration in rocks.  In this case the same number of half-lives as the Carbon-14, we find evidence of rocks that are 8,820,000 years old!  BTW, I call this Chemistry even though it borders on physics (it is difficult to separate some science from each other).  Since these two different tests based on the theory of nuclear decay are different than Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, YEC’s must account for this theory as well.  The theory of radio-nuclear decay was discovered by Henri Becquerel in 1896.  Darwin wrote his Theory of Evolution in the book by the name of “Origins of the Species” in 1859.  So even though the two men were contemporaries their research was in completely different subjects.  Most likely Becquerel either had never read Darwin’s work or did not take it as serious or important work.  You see Darwin’s work was not fully accepted by most scientists and even by conservative Christians until 1880 (look under trends).  To claim that Becquerel’s research was created to support evolution is a long shot at best.  You see Becquerel discovered radioactivity because he was studying Phosphorous and by serendipity stumbled on the decay of this element.

The other chemical problem that YEC’s will have to overcome is isotope labeling.  Meteorites from space have different percents of elemental isotopes than the rocks found on Earth.  Why does this cause a problem for the YEC hypothesis?  Because it means that these rocks were made under different conditions than our Earth.  Iridium is one of the leading elements in determining where a meteorite is from.  You see non-radioactive Iridium is almost none existent in Earthly rocks at a level of about 1 part per million (ppm).  Yet in meteorites its concentrations can be as high as 500 ppm.  Other elements also exist that change the percent of isotopes depending if they are earthly or “heavenly”.  Carbon ratios (C-12 vs. C-13), osmium, tungsten, nickel, iron, molybdenum, ruthenium, and the list goes on and on and on.  Again, this particular test method is considered within the scopes of physics, astronomy, and chemistry (the sciences are very difficult to compartmentalize).

Well this post is definitely going to have to be split up.  The topic is very broad and I have not even gotten to the Physics (speed of light and sub-atomic particles), Geology (Plate Techtonics and erosion), and Astronomy (star distances and star types).  I will see if I can make this into two more posts. 

I will have to get into why Creationism is not science more clearly as well.  But for now, let me just say that without viable hypothesizes for these phenomenon (other than “God don’it”) YEC does not teach critical thinking skills and does not allow for curiosity or learning about arguments based on cold hard data collected by work in the field.  The YEC hypothesis has no field to work in…since we cannot measure or even observe the supernatural.

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