Creation Museum Marries Adam, Eve and Dinosaurs

Some Scientists Worry That Sophisticated Center Will Distort Children's Views of Science

According to an ABC News poll, 60 percent of Americans believe God created the world in six days. In Petersburg, Ky., this weekend, a creation museum is opening that depicts a story far from what you may have learned in science class.

Exhibits at almost every natural history museum teach that dinosaurs are millions of years old, and that they died out long before human beings existed. But at the Creation Museum, they say God created dinosaurs and humans at the same time.

The Creation Museum, designed by the same man behind some of the attractions at Universal Studios in Florida, is a $27 million, high-tech sensory experience with animatronic dinosaurs and a movie theater with seats that shake.

The museum is intended to convince visitors that evolution is wrong and that the biblical story of life on earth from Adam and Eve to Noah's ark is scientifically verifiable.

Ken Ham, the president of Answers in Genesis, the group that is funding the museum, says that only "secular scientists" would maintain that the first humans never lived with dinosaurs.

"[Scientists] can say that, but what's their evidence?" Ham says, insisting that "All land animals were made on day six."

Mainstream scientists worry that because the museum is so technically sophisticated, it could be effective in giving children a distorted view of science.

"That they'll show up in classrooms and say, 'Gee, Mrs. Brown, I went to this spiffy museum last summer and they say that everything you're teaching me is a lie,'" said Eugenie Scott, the executive director of the National Center for Science Education.

"And I say, great. Amen. That's what this place is all about," he said. "It's meant to challenge people."

The stakes are high. The museum argues that evolution jeopardizes people's belief in the Bible and leads to social ills like pornography and abortion.

"In an evolutionary world view, why should you have things like absolute morality? Why would it be wrong to kill someone?" said Jason Lisle, of Answers in Genesis. "I'm not saying that evolutionists aren't moral. I'm saying they have no reason to be moral."

All dating by Evolutionist are based on assumptions of what is being dated." Dating assumptions are not based on what is being dated but on the reliability of natural processes through time - including such assumptions as; new material is deposited on top of older material, radioactive decay rates in the past were the same as present, consistency of ages given by different methods increases the confidence level in accuracy and the 'Laws of Physics' have not been changed by a capricious agent. Which of those assumptions do you believe to be unreasonable?

Dating methods1 Carbon-14 dates are determined from the measured ratio of radioactive carbon-14 to normal carbon-12 (14C/12C). Used on samples which were once alive, such as wood or bone, the measured 14C/12C ratio is compared with the ratio in living things today. The date is calculated by assuming the change of 14C in the sample is due entirely to radioactive decay. It is also assumed that carbon has been in equilibrium on the earth for hundreds of thousands of years.

Wrong dates are usually caused by assuming a wrong initial 14C/12C ratio, contamination or leaching. Samples from before the Flood, or from the early post-Flood period, give ages that are too old by tens of thousands of years. This is because the Flood buried lots of 12C-rich plants and animals. This would result in a lower 14C/12C ratio, which is wrongly interpreted as great age.

Thermoluminescence (TL) dates are obtained from individual grains of common minerals such as quartz. When such grains are heated, they emit light, and this is related to the radiation ‘stored’ in the crystal structure. It is assumed that the radiation was slowly absorbed from the environment, building up from zero at a certain time in the past (perhaps when the grain was last exposed to sunlight). A date is calculated by measuring the light emitted from the mineral grain when it is heated, and measuring the radiation in the environment where the grain was found.

Unfortunately, there are many unknowns and many assumptions need to be made, including the amount of radiation ‘stored’ in the mineral at a certain time in the past, that the change in radiation has only been affected by the radiation in the environment, that the radiation in the environment has remained constant, and that the sensitivity of the crystal to radiation has not changed. All these factors can be affected by water, heat, sunlight, the accumulation or leaching of minerals in the environment, and many other causes.

Optically-stimulated luminescence (OSL) dates are based on exactly the same principle as TL. But instead of heating the grain, it is exposed to light to make it emit its ‘stored’ radiation. The calculated date is based on the same assumptions, and affected by the same uncertainties, as for TL.

Electron-spin resonance (ESR) dates are based on the same principles as TL and OSL. However, the ‘stored’ radiation in the sample is measured by exposing it to gamma radiation and measuring the radiation emitted. The measuring technique does not destroy the ‘stored’ radiation (as does TL and OSL), so the measurement can be repeated on the same sample. The calculated date is based on the same assumptions, and affected by the same uncertainties, as for TL and OSL.

Thorium-uranium (Th/U) dates are based on measuring the isotopes of uranium and thorium in a sample. It is known that uranium-238 decays radioactively to form thorium-230 (through a number of steps, including through uranium-234). The dating calculation assumes that the thorium and uranium in the sample are related to each other by radioactive decay. Furthermore, before a date can be calculated, the initial ratios of 230Th/238U and 234U/238U need to be assumed, and it is also assumed that there has been no gain or loss of uranium or thorium to/from the environment—i.e., that the system is ‘closed’. However, the bone and soil must have been ‘open’ to allow these elements to enter and accumulate.

Protactinium-uranium (Pa/U) dates are based on similar principles as Th/U dating, but use uranium-235 and protactinium-231 instead. The isotope 235U decays radioactively to form 231Pa. Again, it is assumed that the isotopes in the sample are related to each other by radioactive decay. Also, the initial ratio of 231Pa/235U has to be assumed, and it is assumed that there has been no gain or loss of uranium or protactinium to/from the environment—i.e., that the system is ‘closed’. Again, any bone sample containing uranium must have been ‘open’ to allow it to accumulate in the first place.

Reference Details about dating methods may be obtained from such sources as: Smart, P.L. and Frances, P.D. (Eds.), Quaternary Dating Methods—A User’s Guide, Quaternary Research Association, Technical Guide No. 4, Cambridge, 1991, or Faure, G., Principles of Isotope Geology, 2nd edition, John Wiley & Sons, New York

http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v26/i1/game.asp

As for the 'law of physics' being changed by a 'capricious agent', on the contrary, it is because God is not capricious that we can count on nature to be constant (Gen.9:22)

There is nothing in any 'natural' law that shows that Evolution is correct or even possible.

You had to 'imagine' another Universe to get this one.

I know enough about it to know that it is a fact that the evolutionists have to assume that the dates on the RadioCarbon dating are not being affected by changes that came from a Global Flood. It is archaeologists, soil scientists, and similar experts who use radiocarbon dating. It only extends back some 50,000 years. "Evolutionists" rely more on other forms of radiometric dating.

Which is also based on assumptions.

You know you cannot date rocks!

So we don't account for the global flood in radiocarbon dating? We don't account for pink unicorns either. There is about the same amount of evidence for pink unicorns as a global flood at about 4350 years ago.

Regardless of the source of the inconsistency, the fact that 14C, with a half-life of only 5730 years, is readily detected throughout the Phanerozoic part of the geological record argues the half billion years of time uniformitarians assign to this portion of earth history is likely incorrect. The relatively narrow range of 14C/C ratios further suggests the Phanerozoic organisms may all have been contemporaries and that they perished simultaneously in the not so distant past. Finally, we note there are hints that 14C currently exists in carbon from environments sealed from biospheric interchange since very early in the earth history. We therefore conclude the 14C evidence provides significant support for a model of earth’s past involving a recent global Flood cataclysm and possibly also for a young age for the earth itself. http://www.globalflood.org/papers/2003ICCc14.html

What is more unlikely then a pink unicorn is something comeing from nothing and life coming from non-life.

So either it is God created everything, or nothing did.

Thus creationists need not be hindered in building their Creation-Flood young-earth model for the geological record by the many claims in the open geological literature that U-Th-Pb radiometric ‘dating’ has ‘proved’ the presumed great antiquity of the earth, and the strata and fossils of the so-called geological column. Accordingly, all the apparent isochron and other ‘ages’ that have been referred to here have been quoted as millions of years (Ma) purely in order to reveal the shortcomings of the U-Th-Pb ‘dating’ method. Indeed, even the use of conventional geological era terms such as ‘Archaean’ and ‘Lower Proterozoic’ has been for convenient reference to the rock units under discussion, there being no absolute ‘age’ significance attached to these terms here - only a relative position within the overall rock record. There is clearly a real sequence of rock units that comprise the total geological record, from the so-called Archaean to the Recent, the formation of which needs to be understood and coherently modelled within the biblical framework of a recent Creation and global Flood. Much progress towards this goal has been, and is being, made within the relatively small creationist geological community. Thus the mounting evidence that the claimed ‘absolute dating’ methods, such as U- Th-Pb radiometrics, are unreliable at best, and in reality produce many results that are impressive but geologically meaningless, can only assist in this quest.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v9/i1/dating.asp

So you admit you know nothing of radiometric dating, nor do you understand nuclear physics.

Now, where did I say that?

I never did.

And why would scientists of every type (biology, chemistry, physics, geology, astronomy, etc) who have studies and practiced sceince for years, if not decades, assume there was a global flood when not only is there no evidence of such a thing, but it counters all of the real world evidence. You can live in your own theistic bubble, but it doesn't make what you believe to be true. Or are you saying that all of science, and I mean all of it, is wrong?

Because they were taught in their schools to believe otherwise.

So, they start with a self-contained paradigm and work from that.

Now, there is no dating of any sort that proves any old earth.

Now, what the evolutionists want to avoid is giving a explaination to how all of what we have today could have happened at all.

Christians have the Creation account which explains it.

So, why don't you try to explain the evolution story.

In the Beginning, nothing existed.

And then something (poof) came about.

And billions and billions of years from that 'something' (poof) life appeared and then billions and billions of years (poof)....

You know that dating methods are based on evolutionary assumptions No they aren't. Absolute dating techniques are based on physics (e.g. radioactive decay) and processes of physical geology (e.g. the cooling of magmas). Not a single thing to do with evolution, or anything related to biology. The modern scheme of relative dating (i.e. the geological column with it's major divisions) was worked out by geologists who were creationists to a man, and was in place decades before Darwin published. How can something that was done entirely be creationists be based on "evolutionary assumptions"?

Flaws in dating the earth as ancient by Alexander R. Williams

In 1986 the world’s leading science journal, Nature, announced that the most ancient rock crystals on earth, according to isotope dating methods, are 4.3 billion years old and come from Jack Hills in Western Australia.

W. Compston and R.T. Pidgeon (Nature 321:766–769, 1986) obtained 140 zircon crystals from a single rock unit and subjected them to uranium/uranium concordia (U/U)1 and uranium/thorium concordia (U/Th)2 dating methods. One crystal showed a U/U date of 4.3 billion years, and the authors therefore claimed it to be the oldest rock crystal yet discovered.

A serious problem here is that all 140 crystals from the same rock unit gave statistically valid information about that rock unit.3 No statistician could ever condone a method which selected one value and discarded all the other 139. In fact, the other 139 crystals show such a confusion of information that a statistician could only conclude that no sensible dates could be extracted from the data.

A further problem is that the 4.3 billion-year-old zircon, dated according to the U/U method, was identified by the U/Th method to be undatable. An unbiased observer would be forced to admit that this contradiction prevents any conclusion as to the age of the crystal. But these authors reached their conclusion by ignoring the contradictory data! If a scientist in any other field did this he would never be allowed to publish it. Yet here we have it condoned by the top scientific journal in the world.

This is not an isolated case. I selected it because it was identified by the journal editors as a significant advance in knowledge. Another example is the work of F.A. Podosek, J. Pier, O. Nitoh, S. Zashu, and M. Ozima (Nature 334:607–609, 1988). They found what might have been the world’s oldest rock crystals, but unfortunately they were too old!

They extracted diamonds from rocks in Zaire and found by the potassium-argon method that they (the diamonds) were six billion years old. But the earth is supposed to be only 4.5 billion years old. So Podosek and friends decided they must be wrong. They admitted, however, that if the date had not been contradicted by the ‘known’ age of the earth, they would have accepted it as valid.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v18/i1/earth.asp

BTW, diamonds are not suitable subjects for K-Ar dating. The key assumption behind this method is that all Argon degassed from the subject rock the last time it was in a molten state. This is usually a safe assumption, but various studies have revealed exceptions. An example is "pillow lavas" which cool very quickly (under water) and therefore don't leave insufficient time for all the Argon in the magma to escape.

Studies have actually been done confirming this, e.g. dating pillow lavas at progressive points from the outside in. Outer layers give older "dates," and the age gets progressively "younger" toward the interior of the lava which cooled more slowly.

Ironically experiments like this -- where geologists are explicitly, intentionally and rigorously testing the assumptions on which the various radiometric dating techniques are based -- are regularly, and dishonestly, cited by creationists as "anomalous" dates which "prove" that geologists don't question their assumptions!

Anyway, diamonds appear to be another example that don't meet the necessary criteria for this particular dating method. Instead of forming in a crustal magma melt they actually form in the upper mantle, which is believed on good evidence to hold a rich collection of noble gases, including argon. The lattice structure of the diamond is ideal for trapping such gases.

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