Posted on 08/06/2007 6:34:13 AM PDT by steveg1961
Professional paleontologists from around the world are concerned about the misrepresentation of science at the newly opened Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. The Creation Museum has been marketed to the public as a "reasoned, logical defence" for young- earth creationism by Ken Ham, the President and CEO of Answers in Genesis, which runs the Creation Museum. The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, a world-wide scientific and educational organization concerned with vertebrate paleontology, contends that the museum presents visitors with a view of earth history that has been scientifically disproven for over a century.
The Creation Museum's fossil exhibitions, though artistically impressive, include a vast number of scientific errors, large and small. These errors range from implying that the Earth's sedimentary rocks were deposited by a single biblical Flood, to claiming that humans and dinosaurs lived alongside one another, to denouncing the reality of transitional fossils.
"Ken Ham is not recognized as a scientist or educator among experts in the fields of geology and paleontology, and his views on the interpretation of Biblical texts are extremist. Visitors to his 'museum' may arrive knowing little about these sciences, but they will leave misled and intellectually deceived," said Dr. Kevin Padian, Professor and Curator, University of California, Berkeley and President of the National Center for Science Education.
The fossil exhibits at the Creation Museum discount the last 150 years of paleontological and geological discovery. Not only are transitional fossils, including snakes with limbs and dinosaurs with feathers, abundant in the fossil record, but radiometric dating allows paleontologists to pinpoint the timing of major events in the ancient history of the earth.
For example, Tyrannosaurus rex existed over 65 million years ago, whereas modern humans didn't show up on the scene until 200 thousand years ago. They never walked side by side. The Creation Museum neglects to include this critical data in its analysis of the history of life on earth. "Most of us in the public view museums as places to get the latest information on scientific discovery. In this case, the Creation Museum is using the disguise of science museums and centers without including an iota of science inside," said Dr. Kristi Curry Rogers of the Science Museum of Minnesota.
"That's the real danger of such a place – undermining the basic principles of science, eroding the public's confidence in science, and causing a general weakening of science education in the country," commented Dr. Glenn Storrs of the Cincinnati Museum Center.
Philosophy doesn't enter into the equation.
Ah, now you're confusing macro and microevolution. It's one thing to say that fruit flies can be bred to have longer wings or red eyes (which is observable). It's quite another to show that fruit flies can evolve into amphibians (which is, by its very nature, NOT observable, nor has the like been confirmed by fossil evidences). Creationists have no problem with the former proposition, just the latter.
And this is where the philosophy comes in. The only thing that we can directly and empirically observe about development of new types is, well, that these types exist. We haven't observed this take place, nor have we seen any fossil evidence to suggest that such occurred. Traditional Darwinism, with its proposition of gradual diversification through natural selection, has failed to be experimentally or evidentialy substantiated. This is why some prominent evolutionists have resorted to propagating alternative theories generally centering around some sort of "punctuated evolution" mechanism - long periods of no change, interspersed with very brief periods of gangbuster speciation.
All of this, ultimately, rests not on any solid empirical evidence, but on the philosophical necessity that evolution be true, and thus that it be the way in which we explain the world around us.
Quite a lot, actually.
“...you can also ridicule the hold in contempt the 100,000 visitors...”
That less that 150 per day - my local pub gets a bigger crowd (most of them I hold in contempt, too). At least my bartender doesn’t lie to me.
That's pretty subjective. How many is "quite a lot" to you? A dozen, a hundred, a thousand, several thousand?
What *I’ve* been wondering, and I’ve asked this question on FR before and received dead silence as an answer, so I’ll ask it again, is how do evolutionists account for the fact that, if the Grand Canyon is the product of millions of years of riverine erosion through rockbed, why don’t we see many, many such grand canyons everyplace where a major river flows? I ask the question as a serious question, not just to try to twist evolutionist tails. What is the evolutionist answer to this, since I’m sure they’ve thought one up at some point?
With all due respect, it's the Ritalin-dispensing medical profession that's invaded the schools, the radical special-rights for sexual orientation proponents that have invaded the schools, the historical revisionists, the write, "Allah is God" 100 times crowd, the "don't tell your parents that you're getting an abortion but you have to get written permission for life-saving asthma medication" folks.... shall I continue?
The Free Marketplace of Ideas is a wonderful concept for personal, unsubstantiated opinion. It is not so great when one deals with science. In science, ideas are tested. The idea is either refuted, refined or remains intact. To maintian science as a free market place of ideas means having to ressurect theoties that have been discarded a long, long time ago and to indroduce pseudoscientific nonsense that will not add anything to the advancement of our knowledge.
Evolution has survived 150 yers of scientific testing. Even decades before evolution came along, the physical evidence against a special day of creation and/or a global flood was mounting up.
Essentially, anyone who rejects evolution is also rejecting physics, chemistry, geology, archeology, biology, astronomy, paleotology, and all of the technological and engineering accomplishments based on these disciplines.
Moreover, typical creationist arguments are based on lies and deception. These dishonest people hope to convince the scientifically illiterate of their point of view through less than moral means.
A: Yes it is!
M: No it isn’t!
For many here this is what it comes down to.
Ever see the gorge under Niagara Falls? Based on the erosion rates of the falls, it’s 30,000 years old and was one of the earliest evidence that the world was older than 6000 years and that a global flood did not occur 4000 year ago. The great lakes region is an excellent area to look for geological processes that occurred over the last 100,000 years ago. The geomorphology there is the result of glacial processes, not running water. And those events are geologically recent so there is abundant evidence throughout Canada.
It's none of their busienss.
Nice to know a computer scientist feels qualified to comment he is ignorant of. Do you wonder what more capable folks might think? Here are a few you can start with:
1 Radiometric Dating: How do we determine the age of a rock?
http://www.dc.peachnet.edu/~pgore/geology/geo102/radio.htm
2 Museum Victoria: Radiometric Dating
http://www.museum.vic.gov.au/scidiscovery/radioactivity/radio_dating.asp
3 University of Central Arkansas: Radiometric Dating
http://faculty.uca.edu/~benw/sci3410/pres/radiometrics/
4 Tulane University: Radiometric Dating
http://www.tulane.edu/~sanelson/eens211/radiometric_dating.htm
5 Marine Reservoir Correction Database
http://www.qub.ac.uk/arcpal/marine/
6 Scottish Universities Research and Reactor Centre
http://www.gla.ac.uk/centres/surrc/index.html
7 Countertop Chemistry Experiment 32: Radioactive Decay of Candium
http://www.science-house.org/learn/CountertopChem/exp32.html
8 Nuclear Chemistry: Radioactive Decay
http://www.shodor.org/unchem/advanced/nuc/
Amen, brother. We can see galaxies that are around 15 billion light years away. If that isn't showing a part of God's glory, then I'm a monarch butterfly. ALL of the evidence points to a universe that is around 15 billion years old. NONE of the evidence -- including the Bible -- points to a universe that is 6,000 years old.
It's people like this who give Christianity a bad name and make it difficult to witness to people with an IQ over room temperature.
Well, the Grand Canyon formed as a convergence of several geological factors that span millions of years - the main one being having the river in place and then having the ground it flows across uplifted thousands of feet.
And there are other very large canyons across the globe, such as Copper Canyon in Mexico, along with deep gorges in Asia - another place where regional uplift is happening.
“Moreover, typical creationist arguments are based on lies and deception. These dishonest people hope to convince the scientifically illiterate of their point of view through less than moral means.”
Great post, doc!! Couldn’t have said it better myself!! (And I’m blue in the face from saying it so many times on previous similar threads).
It’s a tourist trap.
The “professionals” aren’t going to lose their cushy jobs in academia. They need to grow up and get a life.
If by "we" you mean young earth creationists, you're right. However, scientists don't make the same mistakes.
In the case I'm familiar with, a creationist
1. Applied the wrong kind of dating to the wrong kind of rock (you can't apply K-Ar dating to rocks with little-to-no Potassium).
2. Failed to remove xenoliths from the rock being examined (causing contamination of the sample)
The validity of every radiometric dating technique has been repeatedly confirmed by other dating schemes.
Concerning the age of the earth, how so?
Are you kidding me? Tree rings go back farther than 10,000 years. Varves go back 13,000 years. Ice cores go back 800,000 years. All go back more than 6000 years, invalidating creationism.
But don't stop there. Plate tectonics and palaeomagnetism can be used to derive rough ages of the earth (even if not as accurate as radiometric dating). Helioseismic dating accurately confirms the date of the sun (which, according to a Creationist interpretation of the Bible happened on the same day as the creation of the earth). Mitochondrial mutation rates date life back hundreds of millions of years, not a direct date for the earth but certainly an indirect one. This is just stuff I'm pulling off the top of my head -- I'm sure if I actually thought longer about this I could come up with many more evidences for an old earth.
Dead silence? Pure BS. There are dozens of named canyons around the world. Whether or not a river forms a canyon depends on the local geology. Not all rivers form canyons.
http://www.canyonsworldwide.org/
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