Creationist Talk Woes

So, recently I went to a talk at the local university. The talk was put on by the local creationist group, as well as the campus "creation club"

The speaker was Emil Silvestru. His talk was on Catastrophic Plate Tectonics. Unfortunately I hadn't heard of this theory at the time, but only hydro-plate theory and the vapor/water/ice canopy theories. ( Don't forget Hovind's "Ice Meteor" theory )

There were a few people saying things like "AMEN" and "You tell it BROTHER!". Not bad for a talk about science, but since it was helping them to re-affirm their presuppositions, they treated him like a preacher. I don't mean this as an attack on them being motivated by his talk of course, only recently having left the church, I felt part of me almost rooting for the guy. He is very charismatic, has a way with the crowd, and for the most part I liked the guy. Perhaps a few years ago I would have been saying the same thing as them. It definitely stuck with me, since I'd never heard such comments while hearing a lecture about science :p

Now I won't get into Catastrophic Plate Tectonics here today, but he was "somewhat" fair when he was presenting it. The following quote is from the Creation Ministries website.

"After becoming a Christian he quickly realized that the ‘millions of years’ interpretation, so common in geology, was not compatible with Genesis. ‘Once I became a Christian,’ Emil says, ‘I knew I had to “tune up” my scientific knowledge with the Scriptures.’"

He fully admits that the way that he "interprets" the information is from a biased point of view, and he also presents the idea that teaching students facts is much more responsible than teaching them the interpretations. Unfortunately if you don't show students the interpretations, how do you move on to related material? Plus, our interpretations are based on the best scientific consensus at the time, leaving it up to high school kids to "decide for themselves" what the data means is not only asking way too much when we HAVE very good explanations, but is an irresponsible way to teach our kids. Teach them to think critically, yes. Explain to them that the interpretations we have are tentative, and can be changed based on new information, yes. Even show them where we have been wrong in the past, and how we have improved models based on more information and increases in measurement accuracy.

What we should NOT do, is simply throw a pile of facts on the desk and ask them to sort through them and try to decipher what it means. It has taken a long time with the leading edge minds to get the the point where we are at now. To expect students to sift through and come up with the best answers unguided is absurd.

Now, the theory he was presenting has all sorts of holes, and while he admits that he has a biased point of view, I was impressed with his information, demeanor, and charisma. I can see why people in the crowd ( particularly those without a knowledge of science ) would look at his charts and pictures, nod their heads while he makes his claims, and accept this talk as truth. It is much easier to accept a claim that falls in line with your own presuppositions than it is to question it, to try to ensure that the information is correct before accepting it, ESPECIALLY when you don't have the background knowledge in the basics of science, and how to research a claim and it's problems.

There were two things that really upset me at the end of the talk. He had built the picture of a "consistent atheist". By consistent atheist, he meant someone who will only believe in atheism no matter what he is shown, thus the label consistent. Now, I don't know about you, but I can't remember the last time I ever met one of these "consistent atheists". Usually I meet people that lack a belief but are ignorant on the topic and don't care, people that are atheist because of a problem when they left the church, and the majority that I associate with are the ones that lack a belief in a deity due to skepticism, and a lack of evidence for any particular god claim we've been presented with.

This worst example he used, was that if a human skeleton was found in the same layer of sediment, or a layer under, that of a dinosaur, that we would say "obviously someone in the future was capable of time travel, went into the past, and died there" rather than accept that the current theories of the worlds geology, evolution etc. were flawed. The room roared into laughter at the expense of this ridiculous atheist straw-man.

Of course there would likely be a much better explanation than time travel, but even if we did end up accepting a young earth theory, it still doesn't prove a god. His own "consistent atheist" that he had built up would still not need to give up atheism simply because of the location of a skeleton, it would simply mean there is something wrong with out theories, or there was some other extremely difficult to imagine explanation.

The other problem that I had was during question period. It basically turned into "let's bash radiometric dating" session. Yes, radiometric dating has its limitations. You generally can't date anything past 10 half lives reliably at all, which is why we only date within the useful parameters of a set method. For example, Carbon-14 has a half-life of approx. 5,700 years. After 10 half lives, you have approximately 1/1000th of the original carbon 14 remaining. After this point it is impossible to date anything with accuracy since the error margins are so enormous.

The following image is representative of the firt 5 halflives of carbon 14. To be honest, I'm a bit surprised we are able to date much past 5 halflives with much accuracy, but you can see the problems we get into once we go much past that point.


*image borrowed from bbc*

One would expect that carbon deep down in the earth would be underground far too long to have any remaining carbon 14, so it is popular for a creationist to bring up diamonds found with just that! The problem is, Diamonds are not 100% pure, the most common contaminant found in them is Nitrogen ( 0.1% in gem-quality diamonds ) . Nearby radioactive sources can trigger the exact same Nitrogen->Carbon-14 process as we find in the upper atmosphere which results in the near constant rate of carbon-14 in living surface animals. We expect that diamonds found near radioactive sources would have higher amounts of Carbon 14, and this is what we find.

This small, but non-zero contamination shows how older samples cannot be reliably dated, since the trace amounts already would have large margins of error, looking at the slope of the halflife chart after a few halflives. These extremely small amounts however will not usually have a large impact on younger samples.

Of course at this talk, the ideas of contamination and the unreliablility after a certain amount of time were scoffed at, as if it suddenly brings down the entire house of cards for radiometric dating, but it's a matter of understanding the limitations, routes of contamination, in order to more accurately date the world around us.

We've been able to calibrate the "near constant" atmospheric Carbon-14 levels with independently verifiable dendrochronology ( using tree rings with overlapping identifiable patterns in an area to date wood up to 10,000 years ago ) These fall in line quite well with what we would expect to see using the carbon dating method, and have helped us to increase the accuracy substantially.

I'm working on a youtube video to delve further into the topic of radiometric dating, I only wanted to touch on it here since it came up at the recent creationist talk.

Overall I wasn't particularly impressed with the information presented, lack of evidence, straw-men, an inability to explain discrepancies with radiometric dating other than accusing them of being unreliable, and the attitude taken towards science as if it's some big conspiracy to try to destroy religion.

Now, I don't have anything against the idea of a deity being real. I used to be religious myself. I simply refuse to accept anything as fact without sufficient evidence to do so, and as Carl Sagan put it, "Extraordinary Claims require Extraordinary Evidence". If the god of the christian bible turns out to actually be true, then he's got a lot of explaining to do, and I'll be waiting!

Thanks for sticking this out til the end. Until next time, keep thinking!