Although I am at my core a Creationist, my role in our homeschool is to be the resident skeptic. My ears perked up when from the other room I heard young voices saying, “Science can’t PROVE anything.” What kind of twaddle is this? I came growling into the room demanding to know what sort of anti-intellectual nonsense they were swallowing. The textbook being used by my children is “Exploring Creation with General Science” by Jay L. Wile. And in big black letters across page 38 is the phrase,
Science is NOT a means by which something can be proven.
That surprised me. I thought science had proven gravity, the structure of the atom, how to predict the course of the planets, what happens when certain elements are combined. But according to the philosophy of this book, “all conclusions that scientists draw are tentative.” (p. 38) The basis of this viewpoint is the work of Karl Popper (p. 39) who proposed a system of empirical falsification rather than inductive inquiry. My gut reaction was that Popper’s ideas were being twisted by Creationists. Darwinism, they say, can tell us a lot about variation of species but it can never tell us about ultimate origins since there is no way to scientifically prove their claims. And a little digging does show that Wile is definitely a Creationist and a young-earth Creationist at that. According to his LinkedIn profile he does have a PhD in Nuclear Chemistry from University of Rochester and claims to have written numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals, but the overwhelming evidence is that he’s an apologist for Creationism.
But back to Popper, I wonder if his work is used by Creationists to undermine the credibility of the mainstream scientific community. Martin Gardner is skeptical of Popper’s theories. While J.C. Lester is skeptical of Gardner’s skepticism. I’ve added Popper to my list of authors that I’d like to read. His theory seems to address my own skepticism of the scientific method. I have a tendency to dismiss scientific explanations because it’s entirely possible that they’ll be overturned as soon as new evidence comes to light. But Popper says that any theory that gives the best explanation at the moment is an advance in our knowledge of the world even if it is later proven to be based on bad information. That is a more constructive philosophy than postmodern skepticism.
When I first came bursting in the room trying to find out whether I should burn this book, my daughter said, “Well it does kind of discourage you from wanting to study science.” But since then, the children have really enjoyed the experiments in the book, and the book itself is easy to read and generously illustrated. Wile is a critic of Answers In Genesis. Whether his theological presuppositions take precedence over his PhD in Nuclear Chemistry, I’m not sure.
See also:
Time to read Thomas Kuhn now!
I agree completely with Gardner’s critique of Popper.
Martin Gardner, whom I know, was my intellectual compass until I was 14. I own, I believe, every single one of his books. More important, I’ve actually read — usually multiple times — all of his books (collecting them was which was no easy task — but reading them was quite pleasurable)
Martin Gardner wrote an autobiographical novel, The Flight of Peter Fromm describes his transition from Fundamentalism to Deism. He mentions his rejection of Creationism them, but for a longer attack, I refer you to his excellent Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science — particularly to the chapter entitled “Geology versus Genesis.” The book is a roarin’ read, and has one of the earliest attacks (1957) on Scientology.
The Creationist discussion is always a contentious issue — a sizeable group of my co-religionists believe in a fairly extreme form of young-earth six-day creationism (indeed, most even believe in heliocentrism and in the Aristotelian model of the universe) and also believe in alternative science (e.g., handwriting analysis, astrology, when they are performed by a “kosher” practitioner.) Gardner’s analysis taught me how I could worship with these people and derive great value while still remaining true to the philosophical spirit of science and open inquiry — thus allowing me to build my own road from Athens to Jerusalem.
Thanks for broadening my horizons as usual. One of the reasons I like blogging is that I get to plug into the collective intellectual network of my readers.
I don’t accept the evolutionary myth of origins any more than I accept that humanity originated from the blood of a god or two pieces of driftwood or whatever, so I expect Gardner’s Deism would be unpalatable to me. But that doesn’t mean I swallow all the AiG nuttiness either. But these questions can’t just be dismissed since they affect our self-concept as well as our treatment of other creatures around us. Cows are more revered in India than unborn babies in the US. It all comes down to metaphysics. (Some punchline is on the tip of my tongue…)
To whichever young voice that was, I give my congratulations. They are quite correct in saying that science is incapable of proving anything. Indeed even the structure of the atom is being called into doubt by modern theories, as new forces and particles are discovered. It seems strange however that anyone who cannot be more than fourteen should take such a stance while a professional skeptic blithely accept the “proven facts.”
Neither observation nor logic nor eloquent hypothesis nor the combination of these that is science is itself enough to prove anything. But it does unleash enough understanding–even when erred, to create such marvels as the computer you are reading this on, which is to my mind the only valid reason for accepting the discipline anyway.
Popper might be enlisted to say that Science can’t prove anything, but you can’t enlist him to say that Science can’t disprove anything. The statement “The earth is about six thousand years old,” for example, is falsifiable — find something on earth that is older than that, and the statement is false. Since the earth is full of objects more than 6,000 years old, the statement is false. Because it is false, the statement “God created the world six thousand years ago” is also false.
How do you prove something is more than 6,000 years old? Dating methods, right? How do dating methods work? They’re based on experiments and assumptions and–well, I’ll give you an example. Say they used a carbon-14 dating method to determine the age of this thing they found. First, they would have to measure the amount of carbon-14. What if the machine is wrong? And isn’t this a machine based on other scientific theories? Then, based on the rate of decay and the amount originally present (how do they determine those?) they are able to give an approximate age for the item. The thing is, they have to use other theories and other equipment that relies on theories to do this. So, if it says “this pot is really 7,000 years old”, then they might have proven the age of the earth to be over 6,000 years. Or, they might have measured wrong. OR their equipment may be incorrect. OR the carbon may have decayed unusually quickly. Or… well, you get the idea.
This is why falsification doesn’t work. In order to “prove” something wrong, you have to rely on other theories, which rely on other theories, which rely on other theories…ad infinitum. Somewhere along the line, you have to find something that stands alone, or else falsification doesn’t work. And, to my knowledge, they haven’t found that fact yet.
Actually, Natalie, there are easier methods than that to prove that some things are more than 6,000 years old. It is easy to observe that snow and ice accumulate on the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps in a clearly distinguishable layer each year. Scientists have drilled cores into this ice and counted the annual layers. This method shows that the ice in the lowest layers is much more than 6,000 years old. Indeed in one Antarctic ice core the oldest ice is nearly a million years old. No need for advanced physics to prove this, you can count the layers with your own eyes and brain.
Peter, it’s ironic that you appeal to our own eyes and brains as evidence for that particular dating method. The Ptolemaists would have appealed to the same authority for the lack of observable stellar parallax, in order to prove the failure of Copernicanism. And they would have been right: stellar parallax was not observable until much later. Yet Copernicus forged ahead with his theory anyway, and was lauded by Galileo for disregarding the evidence of his senses. Sensory evidence isn’t as foolproof as we sometimes think it is.
I have to correct something Peter says, as he has obviously not read the scientific literature on ice cores. Annual layers in ice are visible only near the top of the ice core. Because of the mass of ice pushing down from above, the lower layers become visually indistinguishable. As a result, those who examine ice cores must measure PROXIES (such as oxygen isotope ratios) to “count” annual layers. They do not “count the layers with [their] own eyes and brain.” They use indirect measurements that contain all sorts of assumptions, not the least of which is that the ice sheet’s mass stayed in equilibrium throughout history. This is almost certainly not true, but it is a necessary assumption in their examination of ice cores.
Here is a good discussion of how annual layers are “counted,” and it discusses how they may be counting a single year as multiple years because of storm systems, snow dunes, and weak summer signatures:
Bamber, J.L., et. al., A new ice thickness and bed set for the Greenland ice sheet 1, measurements, data reduction, and errors, Journal of Geophysical Research 106:33773–33780, 2001.
Please also note that young-earth creationists have their own rigorous, self-consistent model of ice formation, which leads to an interpretation of the same data to indicate a single ice age and a young earth. I am not saying that I agree with the model. I am just saying the interpretation of ice cores is not NEARLY as clear-cut as Peter would like you to believe. You can read about the young-earth creationist model here:
Oard, M.J., Do Greenland ice cores show over one hundred thousand years of annual layers? TJ 15:39–42, 2001
Jay, thanks for the correction. How many layers, if not a million, are visible? I accept that there are assumptions in the method but these assumptions can be tested by watching the ongoing year by year build-up of ice.
Stephen, I am only appealing to what can be seen with the naked eye in response to Natalie’s scepticism about carbon-14 dating, which is not involved in ice core measurements.
It depends dramatically on the ice core, but usually it is less than three thousand layers that can be visually distinguished. After that, the indirect measurements begin. Also, it is not correct to say, “these assumptions can be tested by watching the ongoing year by year build-up of ice.” This is only correct ASSUMING the ice sheet is in constant equilibrium and that things have always happened basically the way they are happening right now. One can debate whether or not such assumptions are reasonable.
I think a more realistic way to check the method is to see if the conclusions reached by analyzing the data with the method are reasonable. In my mind, they aren’t. For example, using these assumptions to analyze Greenland ice cores, you are FORCED to conclude that in the past, Greenland’s average temperature changed by up to 20 degrees Celsius in less than HALF A DECADE. You will be hard pressed to find a uniformitarian process that could produce such a ridiculous amount of climate variability.
By the way, even the most hard-core, old-earth ice core analyst would NEVER claim to have see even one million years worth of ice in a core. The biggest number I have ever seen in the literature is 760,000.
I was merely giving one example to illustrate my point. I know there are other dating methods out there, but all of them rely on approximations, and assumptions that the geological phenomena of the Earth occur uniformly over time, which can lead to alot of error. For example, you know how people count tree rings, and there’s supposed to be one ring per year? Well, scientists have seen that certain conditions can cause a tree to build multiple rings in one year.
My point was that EVERY scientific method requires assumptions, but if those assumptions are wrong, then the data is bad. So, when we say we have “proven something wrong”, we may have proven it wrong, But we may have merely exposed a bad assumption that was involved in the experimental process. Thus, it’s nearly impossible to say with 100% certainty that we’ve proven something wrong.
If you check out his blog, you’ll see that Wile works hard to show that young-earth is not necessarily falsifiable.
How can science prove that something is indeed older than 6000 years? At best it uses obscure sub-atomic radiation or old rock formations which predate science itself.
It seems scientific to say that an arrow points back to the archer, but I personally have fired arrows which jam into the ground almost vertically–without using an aeroplane. If scientific law can fail a simple test like that…
Besides your statement has the mistake of bringing an omnipotent God into controlled scientific theory, which makes as much sense as measuring wind-caused rock errosion on a dynamite-laden quarry.
Not true, Josiah. See my reply to Natalie.
The fundamental problem with Popper’s falsificationism is that you can never know what exactly you’ve falsified: have you falsified what you wanted to falsify, or have you falsified one of the infinite auxiliary hypotheses which must accompany every theory? For instance, a chemistry student runs an experiment and doesn’t get the result the book says he does. He should not throw the book out the window and say, “I’ve falsified atomic theory!” No, he assumes that something else went wrong: perhaps he measured incorrectly, or the laboratory conditions weren’t quite right. Popper’s falsificationism cannot tell us which hypothesis to reject and therefore fails as a description of how science progresses.
Will’s example makes this obvious: if someone found a seven-thousand-year-old rock, for instance, creationists could reject auxiliary hypotheses (such as, “Dating methods are accurate”) rather than reject their views on the earth’s age. Now we could debate whether such a rejection is warranted, but that has no bearing on the soundness of falsificationism.
Incidentally, Pierre Duhem made this point many decades before Popper in _The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory_ (_La theorie physique: son objet, sa structure_), Ch. VI, in which he showed that there is no crucial experiment. Philosophers of science have generally moved past Popper and his disciple Lakatos, who tried to rescue falsificationism by taking Kuhn’s critique into account, because of this fundamental failing.
Thanks, Stephen. Or I should say, “Poop on Popper!” You guys are making me lose my Popperism before I hardly had a chance to embrace it…
Above, Theophrastus mentioned Kuhn (_The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_, Chicago UP, 1996). Kuhn provides examples of how Popper’s view doesn’t fit the historical practice of science (81). Kuhn’s system is flawed, too, of course — unless you don’t mind a completely relativistic view of scientific progress.
Stephen, it is science that tries to falsify creationism, and as such it is to science that falls the responsibility of creating a valid argument.
Besides Science cannot by its nature prove anything while there is an assumption being made, and accepting an argument that can be defeated auxilary falsification is therefore incorrect. By contrast faith accepts first and finds the proof later–not valid in court perhaps but apparently quite acceptable to God
Thanks for linking to my blog. Please note that science certainly has not proven gravity. In fact, if Einstein is right (and I think he is), there is no such thing as gravity. General relativity says that there is no force at work when we see things attracted to massive bodies. What we call gravity is just a result of the fact that mass curves spacetime. It has nothing to do with a force.
Likewise, the structure of the atom has not been proven. The quantum-mechanical model is a robust theory that has an enormous amount of experimental support, but the fact is there are still problems with the theory. For example, if quantum mechanics is true, then Einstein cannot be completely correct, as quantum mechanics and general relativity are incompatible.
The issue comes down to your definition of “proof.” If something has been proven, then there is absolutely no chance that it is incorrect. That’s what “proven” means. However, even the best theories in science have been demonstrated false time and time again. This is because science is built on experimentation, and experiments can be flawed. Thus, the conclusions of science can be flawed as well.
This isn’t a “creationist” issue. The idea that science cannot prove anything is the dominant view of the scientific community. In fact, my PhD advisor, an evolutionist, always told me that the job of science is not to determine what is true. It is simply to develop theories that can MODEL reality. Whether or not those theories are correct is irrelevant to science. If they can model reality, that is all one can hope for from science.
Josiah, I’m not quite sure what you mean. Science is responsible for creating valid arguments? I agree that scientists should make valid arguments, but if you mean that science is the only discipline which can make valid arguments, I disagree.
I also don’t understand the first sentence of your second paragraph. I’ll deal with it in halves. First, you claim that “Science cannot by its nature prove anything while there is an assumption being made.” But there are always assumptions being made. Pierre Duhem, back in the nineteenth century (see my citation above), compellingly argued that observations are always theory-laden: that is, our assumptions always play a role in scientific observation. You, for instance, seem to assume that science and creationism are mutually exclusive. That may or may not be correct, but it’s still an assumption. Second, you also say “accepting an argument that can be defeated auxilary falsification is therefore incorrect.” Again, I’m not sure what that means, unless you want to say that we should accept only arguments that cannot be defeated. Well, then, we should accept no arguments at all. No argument is foolproof. Someone, somehow, can poke a hole in any argument. We as reasonable beings have to decide for ourselves whether the strength of the argument outweighs the holes which can be poked in it.
Also, your distinction between faith and science does not obtain. Scientists must have a modicum of faith before starting to do science – faith that their observations are reliable, faith that numbers (which can’t be empirically verified, by the way) are usable, faith that the world is external and objective. These are all presuppositions and require just as much faith as belief in God.
I knew a young lady once who tried in debate to prove that she was an elf, according to the following logic: It is impossible to disprove a double negative; i.e. just as one cannot prove that the yeti does not exist, nor can one prove my lack of elvishness. If I were an elf I would know it. You cannot prove I am not, I say I am, my word must be accepted, I am an elf.
It is a very eloquent proof of course, with one small hole. I may be incapable of disproving the existance of yeti, but faced with a random animal, let us say a snail, I could be reasonably sure, given facial features, slime, absence in the mountains, etc, that it is not a yeti. I’ll drop that squabble before I lose my purpose.
Anyway, this is exactly the kind of error that atheistic scientists are ensnared in. They presume firstly that all their axioms are both correct and applicable–they assume that carbon 14 has always been equally abundant, that light or time moves at a constant speed, that life can create itself (in spite of the fact that it is beyond even the square of the cut-off for “scientists” impossiblity) and so forth. They have faith, to be sure, but they boast about working beyond faith, and thus being able to discredit the faith of another. Since they are not in fact opperating beyond faith they have no right to claim this advantage; yet another yeti story which, though it seems to work fine in the realm of chemistry, falls fairly flat as it
attempts to assault religion.
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I agree that Science, faith, and more are capable of producing perfectly valid arguments, but it seems to me that on this matter science has failed to do so. And yes I insist upon an argument that holds water–if it does not it is not a valid argument and the validity of its end result is entirely up to chance.
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Science and religion are not mutually exclusive, but atheistic pride wearing the garb; the white lab coat, label, and zaney hairdo; is completely unacceptable in religion.
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I hope that that is not merely more muddled than before.
Josiah
Religious pride wearing the garb, the robes, dog collar and zaney hairdo, is completely unacceptable in science.
You mis-quote me. Evolution or similar theories are motivated by sin and rebellion against God, but are not science. Hence there is an impression that religion is against science, where it really only complains aginst the sin hidden behind it.
I will have to defend Peter on this point. I strongly agree with his statement about religious pride having no place in science, as I strongly agree that atheistic pride has no place in science. Science should be nothing but an objective look at the data. Unfortunately, it rarely is.
Evolution is certainly not “motivated by sin and rebellion against God,” nor is the idea that the earth is ancient. These ideas are simply based on a group of scientists’ view of the data. Yes, those scientists bring in their preconceived notions (as we all do), but their motivations are many and varied, and I expect only a small minority is motivated by rebellion against God. I personally know (and ardently read) many godly men and women who believe in an ancient earth and evolution because they honestly believe the data support those views. I strongly disagree with such people on scientific grounds, but I often look to them as examples of what a Christian ought to be.
Okay. I’m not sure we disagree very much, if at all. Are you saying that scientists shouldn’t claim to be better than religion, when in fact they have to use faith just like religious people do? That, I agree with.
Josiah, if I’m understanding you correctly, you stated that science is trying to falsify creationism (I’m not sure I agree with your distinction of science and creationism since i think creationism is a branch of science, but I digress), thus the burden of proof should be upon science to prove creationism false, not upon creationism to prove itself true.
Please welcome to the conversation, Dr. Wile, the author of the textbook in question. His comment was stuck in moderation as were the comments by Natalie.
Stephen, I don’t know where you came from but I hope you’ll stick around. I’m really enjoying your comments.
Jay, I know this is off topic but I’m curious who the picture depicts in your avatar.
hehe – you’ve uncovered the egotist in me. It is an artist’s depiction of Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109). He was a famous philosopher/theologian and is best remembered for the ontological argument for God’s existence. Not all that great an argument, but it demonstrates amazingly original thinking. He is also considered the father of scholasticism.
My blog that you linked to is named after the title of his seminal book.
Whoever thought to use the word “avatar” for those little pictures next to our names was really tapping into a deep truth.
Jay, since we have gone beyond the allowed depth of replies I will reply to you in a new comment here. I am happy to take on “Anselm”, who I have always considered an opponent since as a teenager I used to fight with boys from nearby St Anselm’s school, in Canterbury where I was also at school.
I can’t really claim to argue with your apparent knowledge of the scientific literature. But this Wikipedia page has a picture of clearly visible annual layers at a depth of 1837 metres. It doesn’t say how many years these layers go back, but it does say that the total length of this GISP core is 3000 metres and it goes back 100,000 years, so the implication is that these naked eye visible layers are many tens of thousands of years old.
I never claimed that any cores were a full million years old, only “nearly a million”. The EPICA core is (or was) expected to provide data 890,000 years old, which I would class as “nearly a million”.
A major catastrophe such as a super-volcano or an asteroid impact could easily cause a 20 degree climate change in just a year. Imagine how much colder your summer would be if the sun’s heat was blotted out completely by a cloud of ash in the upper atmosphere. The summer of 1816 was probably 20 degrees colder than average because of a volcanic eruption, with river ice in Pennsylvania in July and August, although the effect lasted only a year or two. The assumption that one has to “find a uniformitarian process” to explain observed changes went out of the window long ago, certainly before scientists accepted that some kind of catastrophe caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. It is well known that there were massive climate changes during the ice ages, and no one knows whether these were sudden or gradual.
Peter, In order to count layers, you need a CONTINUOUS record of them. As I said, these ice cores are not nearly as simple as you want people to believe that they are. There can be annual layers at many different depths, but if they are interrupted by regions in which no annual layers are visible, then there is no way to count them visually, which is what you seem to believe can be done throughout the ice core. Thus, the appearance of annual layers at a given depth means nothing. Without continuous annual layers from the beginning, you are forced to rely on proxies to do your “counting” for you. This is why all deep ice core analyses use proxies. Counting the layers is simple at first, but it becomes more and more problematic after the first few thousand.
The problem with your willingness to posit a super-volcano or an asteroid impact to explain the ridiculous results of ice core analysis is that such an event INVALIDATES the assumptions used to date these ice cores in the first place.
Think of the absurdity of the scenario you wish to believe: A giant asteroid hits the earth, causing a 20 C shift in climate in just a couple of years. However, this impact HAS NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on the accumulation of ice! As a result, we can analyze the ice assuming nothing special happened throughout history, and then when we reach an odd conclusion, we can assume something special happened!
You can’t have it both ways. If you want to assume that everything has always happened the same as it is happening right now, you can. You can’t be assured your assumption is correct, but it is at least a valid assumption. However, you can’t then turn around and posit a giant catastrophe and claim it will not have any effect on your uniformitarian assumptions.
Jay, the whole point about the asteroid impact or whatever is that it does affect the ice core. You claim to have seen the evidence. Now maybe for a few years after this the pattern of layers is disrupted. So what. What is sufficient to disprove your 6000 year old earth hypothesis is the existence of more than 6000 visible annual layers throughout the supposedly 100,000 (or 800,000) year old core. So only a small percentage of the layers need to be visible to falsify your hypothesis. And considering that there are very clearly visible layers right at the middle of the core it seems rather likely that a significant proportion of the layers, more than 6%, will be visible under close examination. The only real way to rescue your hypothesis is to find some evidence that there was ever a large number of layers forming in a single year.
Or of course you can retreat to the old argument that God made the world with an appearance of age, as you will have to do concerning all evidence of distant stars and galaxies. (How come there are stars looking just like our own sun and clearly visible which are provably more than 6000 light years away?) This argument cannot be falsified scientifically, but only theologically in that it implies that God deliberately set out to deceive people.
Peter,
I agree – the asteroid WOULD impact the ice core. What you don’t seem to understand is that the analysis you are trying to use as evidence for your views is FORCED to assume it will NOT impact the ice core. That’s the nonsense associated with the analysis – assume nothing special happened in the analysis and then use that analysis to conclude that something special did happen. Once again, you can’t have it both ways.
I am not sure what you mean by “your 6000 year old earth hypothesis.” I have never, ANYWHERE, claimed that the earth is 6,000 years old. I think that just as you seem to be doing with the ice cores, you are now making unwarranted assumptions about my views.
You also make the odd statement that “…only a small percentage of the layers need to be visible to falsify your hypothesis.” First of all, I am not familiar with ever stating a hypothesis. All I have been doing is correcting your incorrect statements regarding ice cores. Secondly, you are once again making a huge leap of logic here. The correct way to phrase your statement would be, “only a small percentage of ANNUAL layers need to be visible to falsify a thousands-of-years-old earth hypothesis.” You need to be sure that the layers you see are ANNUAL layers, and not layers caused by storm systems, snow dunes, and weak summer signatures (among many other variables). Near the top of the ice core, this is relatively easy to do. The deeper you go, the harder it becomes, because of the pressure from the ice above. Once again, that’s why these analyses rely on proxies. It is fine if you want to make unwarranted assumptions when looking at the data. However, if you do so, at least understand the data well enough to know what assumptions you are making.
Your other odd comment is, “How come there are stars looking just like our own sun and clearly visible which are provably more than 6000 light years away?” Perhaps you are unfamiliar with general relativity, but the fact is that light from BILLIONS of light years away could easily reach earth in THOUSANDS of earth years, as long as the expansion of the universe followed certain symmetrical conditions. Just as the clocks on the GPS satellites tick at a different rate than clocks at the surface of the earth (due to both their speed and the lower gravitational field they experience – the latter much more important in the satellites than the former), clocks throughout the universe tick at many different rates. To make universal generalizations about time requires making all sorts of assumptions.
There is certainly no need to think that God made the earth (or the universe) look old. If the earth looked like it is billions of years old from a scientific point of view, I would have no trouble with believing that. However, from a scientific point of view, that’s not what I see.
I’m actually replying to PK, but its in this column because I couldn’t find his reply buton.
Anyway there is a flaw in your last argument. Even if our measurements of science are accurate and God made an appearance of age, He may have had other reasons for doing so, such as giving us an actually habitable world to live in (stars to navigate by, fuels to burn, etc). God no more did so to trick us than he made the sun and stars to receive our worship, or gave his law that we might be condemned in guilt (Read Romans if you don’t know what I mean).
Besides What is more important is the alternative.
You see if God did not create the world as he says he did, He is not only decieving but actually lying. If you think the start of Genesis is metaphorical, and a couple of psalms too, look up these verses:
Genesis 6:6
Exodus 4:11
Exodus 20:11
Job 38:4-6,8-11,32 (God’s direct speach)
Job 39:6,17
Job 40:15 (especially) and 19
Job 41:11 (End of God’s direct speeck)
Luke 2:38b
John 1:3
Romans 5:12 (sort of, if you want to dispute a literal Adam too)
Revelation 1:18
To conclude, from Romans 3:4
“Let God be true, and every man a liar.”
Since there were nearly two thousand years by the Biblical account between Adam and Noah, one can reasonably suppose nearly 2000 years of completely different climate. After all water vapour (a greenhouse gas significantly stronger and more abundent than the notorious CO2) was following an utterly different cycle, and it also forms a vital component in the formation of ice layers (duh).
I cannot claim to know what effect this might have–it could be none, or could be as much as a daily compiling of Ice. (1800 x 365.25 comes surprisingly close.) Surely that sort of unfathomable and unestimable variance throws science completely from the rails, or at the very least should force you to recompute.
I’d be reasonably confident that everything is not going on as it always has.
Jay, it is totally irrelevant to my analysis whether something special happened at some point. All I need to prove my point, against Natalie and Josiah to whom I was originally responding (sorry if I wrongly attributed to you their “hypothesis”, or better, belief), is more than 6,000 normal years with visible layers in 100,000. And yes, I accept that one needs to demonstrate that these are annual layers and not e.g. from successive storms.
And yes, Jay, I am familiar with cosmological models in general relativity, and that there are no such models which allow light to travel or even appear to travel millions of times faster than the speed of light as you seem to claim. The light from a star a billion light years away takes a billion years to reach us, more or less by definition. That IS what you see, when you look at the sky with a powerful enough telescope.
Similarly the are all sorts of easy ways to show that the earth looks billions or at least hundreds of millions of years old, as geologists had concluded long before there was any radioactive dating, largely from estimating (yes, with some assumptions made) how long it would take the observed deposits to be laid down. If you don’t believe this, you can do so as an act of faith, but you are never going to persuade anyone that you get it from scientific observations.
Josiah, you should remember that there are not 365 separate days at the poles, and certainly no clear daily patterns of ice formation as your hypothesis demands. I see no evidence, biblical or scientific, for a different climate before Noah. And I don’t see any reason why God had to create fake fossils, looking like the remains of ancient creatures but in fact not being, in order to make our earth habitable. As for your Bible verses, I accept the need to understand them, but I have no problem interpreting them in a way largely compatible with the general scientific picture of the universe.
My error, I was reading from before Adam, not before Noah.
I am sorry to keep correcting you here Peter, but it certainly IS relevant to your analysis that nothing special happened over the time the ice core formed. As is clearly stated in scientific literature, in order to interpret the deeper layers as annual layers, you MUST assume nothing special is going on. As I have said before, LOTS of things can cause layers. Near the top of the ice core (before the ice gets flattened by the pressure from the mass above), it is generally easy to sort out when a layer is an annual layer and when it is not. As you get deeper and the ice gets flattened out, that becomes impossible without the aid of proxies. The analysis by proxy REQUIRES nothing special going on. That seems to be the point you are missing. You think that counting ice layers is free from assumptions. It is clearly not.
You also are not informed on general relativity, as your statement that “The light from a star a billion light years away takes a billion years to reach us, more or less by definition” is false. Pre-Einstein, people believed in that kind of naive view of the universe. Nowadays, we know it is false.
A light year is a unit of LENGTH, not time. The passage of time varies REMARKABLY from place-to-place in the universe, because the strength of the local gravitational field affects the passage of time. Indeed, as I stated before, time passes more quickly on the GPS satellites than it does on the surface of the earth, specifically because they are exposed to a weaker gravitational field.
In order to time the passage of light, then, you first have to define the CLOCK you are using. I assume since you are worried about the passage of time on earth, you are defining time by a clock at the surface of the earth. Well then, as long as throughout its entire journey, the photon experiences THE SAME gravitational field that you find on the surface of the earth, the photon will take a year to travel one light year. However, in lower gravitational fields, it will travel farther than a light year in one earth year (because time passes more quickly for it), and in stronger gravitational fields, it will travel less than a light year in one earth year (because time passes more slowly for it). The light year, then, is BY DEFINITION a length unit, not a time unit, as time varies considerably from place-to-place in the universe.
Even though you say, “I am familiar with cosmological models in general relativity,” you clearly are not, as you follow that with, “and that there are no such models which allow light to travel or even appear to travel millions of times faster than the speed of light.” That is, of course, false as well. I know of two such models.
The first is an old-earth model by nuclear physicist Dr. Gerald L. Schroeder. In his model, time varies with the expansion of the universe (as must be the case). Thus, the first 8 billion years of what would be equivalent of earth time was only 24 hours of time in the reference frame of the universe as a whole, but the next 24 hours in “universe central time” took 4 billion earth years. Because of his cosmology, light from different parts of the universe have different times over which they travel a light year. You can read about it in his book, “The Science of God.”
The second is a young-earth cosmology by physicist Dr. Russell Humphreys. In his model, the universe expands spherically (not what the big-bang postulates) with earth’s solar system within 50 million light years of the center of the universe (which is consistent with the apparent concentricity of red shifts). In that cosmology, earth’s solar system is in a deep gravitational well during the early stages of the universe because of its placement, so earth time passes slowly compared to time at the edges of the universe. As a result, light from the farthest reaches of the universe reaches earth in a short span of earth time. You can read about that in his book “Starlight and Time.”
So clearly you are NOT familiar with the cosmological models that exist. I suggest that you become familiar with them if you want to discuss such things.
Despite the fact that you say, “Similarly the [sic] are all sorts of easy ways to show that the earth looks billions or at least hundreds of millions of years old,” I have yet to find one. There are all sorts of ways to POSTULATE the earth is billions or at least hundreds of millions of years old, but all of them require LOTS of model-dependent assumptions, many of which can be shown to be errant. Everyone agrees, for example, that the estimates of earth’s age from early geology were wrong. Old-earthers say that the assumptions the geologists used were too generous, leading to ages that were far too short. Young-earthers say they neglect a worldwide flood, which would invalidate their assumptions.
You are never going to be able to persuade anyone that you have come to your belief about the age of the earth based on science, as you have yet to produce a post on the subject that does not contain several scientific errors. If you want to believe the earth is old because the majority of scientists believe it is, that’s fine, but please admit that’s what you are doing. You have not read the science well enough to have come to your conclusion based on the data.
For me, I try to limit my understanding of the age of the earth to the science I have studied. My theology would be equally comfortable in an old earth or a young earth (to the chagrin of many of my young-earth friends). However, my science is only comfortable in a young earth. By the way, that young earth is not 6,000 years old. I expect it is under 20,000 years old, but that’s about the best the science I have studied can say.
Jay, you can insult my scientific knowledge as much as you like but I will not deign any longer to answer your pseudo-scientific nonsense in detail.
I will restate one of my points more precisely: “The light from a star that was a billion light years away from us at the time it was emitted has taken a billion years to reach us, more or less by definition”. Or, since nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, “The light from a star now a billion light years away has taken at least half a billion years to reach us”. Both of these to be understood as within any one relativistic frame. The only scenarios in general relativity which would allow anything different include highly speculative unstable phenomena like wormholes.
You seem to have some vague idea that general relativity allows anything to happen. It doesn’t. Have you ever studied the subject in depth? I have. You obviously assume that I haven’t, with your patronising “A light year is a unit of LENGTH, not time.” You are wrong.
This is NOT TRUE if you are measuring distance (in light years) as well as time from the same frame, that of the surface of the earth. Study some basic general relativity before presuming to write nonsense like this.
If Schroeder’s and Humphreys’ models allow light to travel faster than the speed of the light, in any one specified frame, then they are clearly not in line with general relativity and not worthy of anyone taking them seriously. But I suppose in any model it might be possible to choose a frame in which the universe is only 6,000 years old.
Yes, early geologists rather underestimated the age of the earth, but they clearly showed without the need for radioactive dating etc that it must be hundreds of millions of years old.
I don’t claim to be a scientific expert on this, but I can point you to a huge worldwide community of experts who over centuries have built up an impressive array of proof of the earth’s great age. Against that you have only a handful of semi-scientific arguments and an over-literalistic misinterpretation of the Bible.
Perhaps instead of “try[ing] to limit [your] understanding of the age of the earth to the science [you] have studied”, you should try studying the science you need to understand this subject area properly. I’m sorry, but science is not about what is comfortable to you, it is about what is true.
Peter,
I am sorry that you think correcting your many scientific errors is somehow insulting to you. It is not. I am simply trying to educate you and keep others from being misinformed. Like it or not, general relativity does, indeed, allow light to travel a light year in less than one year, depending on the clock involved. This does not require any highly speculative structures such as wormholes. You are confusing faster-than-light travel of massive objects with the general relativistic FACT that clocks tick at different rates in different parts of the universe. Einstein himself said, “According to the general theory of relativity, the law of the constancy of the velocity of light in vacuo, which constitutes one of the two fundamental assumptions in the special theory of relativity…cannot claim any unlimited validity” (Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory, HENRY HOLT, 1920). It is not that general relativity can do anything. It is that general relativity predicts that time does not behave as nicely as you want it to, and that prediction has been confirmed. In fact, it is confirmed every millisecond of every day by the GPS satellites.
If you don’t like Einstein, perhaps you would like to read a bit of the current scientific literature. Jean-Pierre Petit is one of the more easily-recognizable names that proposes a varying speed of light in his cosmology. His classic paper is J.P. Petit, “An interpretation of cosmological model with variable light velocity”. Mod. Phys. Lett. A 3:1527–1532, 1988. John Moffat is a more recent author, J. Moffat, “Superluminary Universe: A Possible Solution to the Initial Value Problem in Cosmology”. Int. J. Mod. Phys. D 2:351–366, 1993. Another good article is A. Albrecht, J. Magueijo,”A time varying speed of light as a solution to cosmological puzzles”. Phys. Rev. D59, 1999. So you see that the scientific literature has no problem with a varying speed of light. Why do you?
Oh…and by the way, a light year IS a distance unit. From the physics text I taught from at Ball State University: “The light year is a unit of DISTANCE routinely used in astronomy.” (Peter J. Nolan, Fundamentals of College Physics, WCB, 1993, p. 864
Your statement, “If Schroeder’s and Humphreys’ models allow light to travel faster than the speed of the light, in any one specified frame, then they are clearly not in line with general relativity and not worthy of anyone taking them seriously” is VERY revealing. You refuse to learn what general relativity really means, and then you decide to reject models that you don’t even read. Why? Because they contradict your preconceived notions. That is unfortunate, and not something any scientist should EVER do.
You claim that you can, “point you to a huge worldwide community of experts who over centuries have built up an impressive array of proof of the earth’s great age.” Well, Jan Baptist van Helmont could point to a “huge worldwide community of experts who over centuries have built up an impressive array of proof” that spontaneous generation occurs. He was wrong, and a crackpot creationist named Louis Pasteur demonstrated that. Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau could point to a “huge worldwide community of experts who over centuries have built up an impressive array of proof” that combustion occurs because of phlogiston. He was wrong.
That’s the problem with believing scientific principles based on majority vote rather than the data. Please start looking at the data. You will find that it is much more interesting that way!
Your accusation that I am somehow misinterpreting the Bible is also very revealing. I have not made a single statement regarding how I interpret the Bible. Precisely how are you determining that I am doing this? The answer is simple. Just as you make unwarranted assumptions about ice cores and light travel, you make unwarranted assumptions about how I interpret the Bible. That is truly unfortunate.
Surely we’re coming back to the original question: can science prove anything. Since there is evidence that even our concept of time is completely off mark because we are trapped in it (much alike to thinking the earth at the center of the universe because to our perspective…) I would prefer not to accept human reason on such matters.
That is why I would prefer to trust God’s word on this entire matter, and in so much as it is important (It is, because the alternative is God did not create the world and everything in it.) I’d prefer to let him who is outside the strange fabric of spacetime tell describe it for us.
Peter,
You mistake my point. I was not trying to prove that the Earth is 6,000 years old. I was merely endeavoring to point out the difficulties with claiming anything can be proven conclusively. (Please refer to my original post)
Throughout this discussion on dating methods, I’ve seen one of the very things I remarked on in my original post–data obtained through experiments based on theories and hypotheses which were created from data obtained through experiments based on theories and hypotheses… ad infinitum. I will refer you back to one of Stephen’s early posts:
The fundamental problem with Popper’s falsificationism is that you can never know what exactly you’ve falsified: have you falsified what you wanted to falsify, or have you falsified one of the infinite auxiliary hypotheses which must accompany every theory?
Again, I was not trying to offer conclusive proof that the Earth is 6,000 years old. (I’m not even sure what I believe about that, as I have people I greatly respect on both sides of the debate.) My purpose was to point out some of the problems with Popper’s falsification theory.
Natalie, thanks for clarifying your position. I accept that no one dating method can be 100% relied on. What I do not accept is that anyone can build a proper scientific case, independent of assumptions based on their faith and/or a certain interpretation of the Bible or other holy books, for the earth being only of the order of 6,000 years old. There are WAY, WAY too many INDEPENDENT methods of dating which point conclusively to an age many times older than that, and in fact no scientific evidence at all for such a young earth.
Peter is obviously wrong on this point as well. There are dating methods that give an old earth and dating methods that give a young earth. To deny the latter dating methods is to simply deny the facts. That is not what anyone who pursues science should do.
In my view, the dating methods that give a young earth are the most reliable ones. In fact, the majority of the evidence in my opinion points to a young earth.
Thanks everyone for civil discussions. I’m enjoying reading your comments.
Thanks for the discussion. Our kids will be using this as part of their homeschool studies!
I’m closing comments since we’re at an en passe.
Please consider carrying the conversation forward at Jay’s or Peter’s blogs:
http://www.drwile.com/blog/
http://www.qaya.org/blog/