As part of progress it would be nice for some arguments like Flat and Young Earths to go away. Yet, with entities like the Institute for Creation Research one still run into images of cave men riding dinosaurs. The latest one that I bumped into was from the September 15 edition of VOB’s Down To Brass Tacks which featured Dr. Russell Humphreys presented a lecture called Scientific Evidence For A Young World presented on September 10 at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre. He claimed to present 14 pieces of solid scientific evidence for a young world, contradicting the scientific view with a biblical time scale for the origin of planet Earth and its various species within just a few thousand years.
It's all summed up with Dr Humphreys, himself a former atheist, statement: “You can trust The Bible.”
I think one cannot even trust Dr. Humphreys. One can find his arguments on Evidence for a Young World on the Institute for Creation Research site.
Here we find a list of things like:
1. Galaxies wind themselves up too fast.
3. Comets disintegrate too quickly. and
12. Not enough Stone Age skeletons.
One gets the impression that these are new, never answered conundrums but that is far from true. You can see David E. Thomas answers to these going back almost 20 years to , 1998 “Creationist Physicist” Russell D Humphreys and his Questionable “Evidence for a Young World”
for example on Galaxies wind themselves up too fast (maximum age: a few hundred million years). Humphreys shows off a computer simulation in which a very simple "galaxy," a line of stars about a center point, develops a spiral shape. This spiral then winds up and disappears in just a few hundred million years. In this way, Humphreys claims to "prove" that galaxies can not be billions of years old. In his super-simple simulation, however, the stars are attracted to a "galactic center" - but not to each other! As a result, more distant stars move more slowly about the "galactic center," just as planets do around our Sun. But Humphreys fails to mention that the situation in real galaxies is far more complex than this: for one, real stars attract each other with large gravitational fields. Only the outermost stars of real galaxies have the "Keplerian" orbits he assumes, while the inner stars of a galaxy can move very differently, often almost as a rigid disk. Humphreys dismisses one of the modern theories of spiral formation, "density wave theory," as too complex, but it's really his ideas that are far too simple
On Not enough stone age skeletons (Upper limit for duration of Stone Age: 500 years).
On Not enough stone age skeletons (Upper limit for duration of Stone Age: 500 years).
"Perhaps, in a thousand centuries, some of
those burial sites might just have been eroded away, or covered with tons of soil or
debris. Predators or vandals might have disturbed some of the graves, and subsequent
generations of cavemen may have even re-used some of the same traditional burial sites.
In any event, it is clear that the number of discovered Stone Age graves does not provide
a very accurate "clock" for finding the age of the Earth. "
The arguments, which on first blush seem good critical analysis turn out to be a distraction, a way of not accepting a hard truth about Hebrew Bible claims. It's the type of threat that things like Copernican theory started and the Renaissance picked up on. Hebrew scriptures assumed & asserted that everything had been created in 7 days and designed for the use of man. If the earth plays a much shrunken role as a mere speck in a vast, billion year old universe, mankind is knocked from its center.
“No attack on Christianity is more dangerous than the infinite size and depth of the universe.”
Therefore it has to be denied and evidence has to be fabricated against it and against the scientific spirit which seemed very American to Walt Whitman.
“I like the scientific spirit—the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine—it always keeps the way beyond open—always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try
over again after a mistake—after a wrong guess.”
I'd say that a similar story applies to politically correct, economic theory like Trickle Down. That's an even longer story but a start is a recent study published by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has concluded that, contrary to the principles of “trickle-down” economics (Adding another nail to the coffin of Reaganomics) , an increase in the income share of the wealthiest people actually leads to a decrease in GDP growth.
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