The extreme evolution denialist websites that do their best to live up to every atheist's stereotype of the wilfully ignorant fundamentalist Christian sometimes occasionally come up with the odd nugget of truth. This one came from the internecine brawling on one of those science denialist echo chambers between the hard-line YECs, and the OEC faction that appreciates the folly of blithely assuming that geology is 'science falsely so called.' One of the OEC evolution denialist at the site pointed out that geology poses considerable problems for YECs:
When you look at YEC the record of geology brings up a problem for some people. The rocks certainly appear to be really really old. So there are a few options that I can think of for this:
1. All the scientists are lying or making mistakes. This implies that all the people who have ever done a K-Ar test on a rock have lied or messed up badly to perpetuate the myth. Now I am related to a geologist (my dad was one), and I don't think he would lie about this to perpetuate the myth. Are they all lying? This doesn't seem like a likely option.
2. God created the world to appear in all tests performed as if the earth was old, but this was to fool man into having a reason not to believe in him. Who are we to question the Maker? Maybe He did this, and we must not question His actions. But it does seem a bit odd that the Angels would purposely mislead people. He is a God of truth after all (De. 32:4; Psa. 31:5).
3. The scientists are not lying, but the assumptions they are using to base their work like radiometric dating is all wrong. This would mean things like the rate of K40 to Ar40 decay was in the past (6000 years ago) much higher than today. While it doesn't look like this is changing today, how would we know if this were true thousands of years ago? It seems plausible until you think of the implications in nuclear physics: if the rate of decay of K40 to Ar40 were sped up from 1.3 billion year half life to a few thousand year half life, the massive release of gamma and beta decay would be so energetic that it is unlikely that life could survive. We would be living in a radiation field so high that it would be lethal. K40 is all around us and even in our bones and in the soil. If it was decaying so fast a few thousand years ago nothing could live. It's like that with the other assumptions about radiometric dating - we don't know that the parameters and assumptions are correct, but if you look at what happens if they change to fit what YEC say, there are implications that make them unlikely to change.
4. The rocks really are very old.
It goes without saying that option 4 is correct. Option 1 is straight out of a paranoid fantasy. Option 2 is theologically offensive as it makes God out to be a liar. Option 3 betrays gross ignorance of physics.
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| Using solidification time of meteorites to date the Earth. (Source) |
While the OECs at these fundamentalist echo chambers forget is that this argument also undermines their evolution denialism. Take the presence of shared identical retroviral elements at exactly the same place in human and ape genomes. Just this line of evidence alone is enough to confirm the reality of human-ape common ancestry as it provides unimpeachable evidence of an ancient retroviral infection in the common ancestor of humans and apes which became fixed in the germ line, and was subsequently inherited by the human and ape lines that diverged from this common ancestral species. The odds of even one ERV fixing purely by chances into exactly the same place in human and ape genomes is billions to one against, and as there are many such examples of retroviral elements integrated into human and ape DNA, the chances become so high as to become negligible.
So, what are the options available to our OEC evolution denialists. The argument made by our OEC evolution denialist to use against the YECs is a good one, so I will employ it and adapt it accordingly:
1. All the scientists are lying or making mistakes. This implies that all the people who have ever examined the genomic data have lied or messed up badly to perpetuate the myth. Now I am a medical doctor who has examined the genomic data banks personally, and during my medical degree studied alongside scientists who later switched to medicine, and I don't think they would lie about this to perpetuate the myth. Are they all lying? This doesn't seem like a likely option.
2. God created the world to appear in all tests performed as if the genomic data confirmed common descent, but this was to fool man into having a reason not to believe in him. Who are we to question the Maker? Maybe He did this, and we must not question His actions. But it does seem a bit odd that the Angels would purposely mislead people. He is a God of truth after all (De. 32:4; Psa. 31:5).
3. The scientists are not lying, but the assumptions they are using are all wrong. However, the evidence for that is simply not there. The claim that these identical retroviral insertions are independent multiple insertions fails given the size of the vertebrate genome and the random nature of retroviral insertion. Any argument that these are part of the original human genome is falsified because of the codon bias readily apparent between ERV elements and host genome. Claims that the occasional inconsistency between predicted phylogenic patterns and actual patterns as one can see with ERV elements found in chimps, gorillas, and bonobos but not in humans do not invalidate the utility of using ERV elements as phylogenetic markers but are entirely consistent with incomplete lineage sorting.
Intellectual honesty alone would compete the OEC evolution denialist to accept that his evolution denialism owes everything to preserving dogma and nothing to the evidence. One waits with interest their response.
