|
|
Squirming at the SquishosaurA refutation of a progressive creationist response to our articles on the finding of soft dinosaur tissue16 May 2005 It had to happen, I suppose. The lashback from ‘progressive creationists’ about our excited announcements on the soft tissue found in a dinosaur fossil (Still soft and stretchy: Dinosaur soft tissue find—a stunning rebuttal of “millions of years” and “Ostrich-osaurus” discovery?: Shedding more light on the new startling find of soft tissue in a T. rex bone). The ministry Reasons To Believe (RTB), propagating the views of ‘progressive creationist’ astronomer Hugh Ross, is totally committed to the millions of years philosophy. This despite the fact that, sadly, this has to involve abandonment of any consistent, time-honoured, and intellectually honest approach to hermeneutics (as is overwhelmingly clear from my colleague Dr Sarfati’s classic book Refuting Compromise). In fact, it turns the words of the Lord Jesus on humanity’s time of appearance upside down, and puts millions of years of bloodshed, suffering of nephesh (soulish) creatures, extinction, thorns and cancer before Adam (the Curse before the Fall), and much, much more that is equally tragic (see The Fall: a cosmic catastrophe: Hugh Ross’s blunders on plant death in the Bible). So, they could scarcely ‘let it slide’ when our web articles, picked up by tens of thousands and circulated widely, said things like:
The first ‘counter’ was a radio broadcast featuring Hugh Ross and associate Dr Fazale (Fuz) Rana. That referred to some ‘detective work’ done by one of their apologists, a Greg Moore, who has now published two articles on this sort of topic on the RTB website, the latest being the one rebutted here. (The previous one was attacking our announcements on the 1997 discovery, by the same researcher, of red blood cells.) This article cites the RTB broadcast five times. Even more importantly, the original article, ‘Dinosaur Blood?’, by this same author acknowledges that its ‘background’ is an article by one Gary Hurd, an antitheistic social scientist, posted on an unsavoury atheist site; Moore’s follow-up here largely follows Hurd as well. This is unfortunately not the first time that Ross or his minions have cited disreputable Christ-haters to attack biblical creationists—see here.
In view of the importance of the issue, the entire article1
has been reproduced here under the ‘fair use’ provisions (so no-one
could think that we had misrepresented or selectively quoted it). I respond to it
in interspersed ‘email style’. As will I trust be clear, apart from
some hairsplitting about definitions, and despite clever use of prejudicial language
and similar rhetorical maneuvers, no evidence has been presented that would generate
any discomfort in our standing behind the conclusions of the articles. In fact,
if anything, our conclusions are reinforced by the transparent desperation in some
of the tactics employed.
CW: This choice of wording is subtly but significantly prejudicial, to the point of being misleading. An uninformed reader might think I had written about blood still dripping onto the floor, yet that was nothing like what I said. My article, to which he refers, was about the 1997 discovery, under the microscope, of red blood cells in a segment of unfossilized dinosaur bone. The article did state that the vessels were visible under the microscope, and that there was immunological evidence for the presence of the protein hemoglobin. In the RTB broadcast mentioned in the introduction, Ross ally Fuz Rana strongly implied that it was merely survival of the porphyrin (heme) ring, which is more stable than the globin chains made up of specific amino acid sequences. However, this refutation of a critic shows that in order to get an immune reaction to hemoglobin, one would need substantially more than a porphyrin ring and 3 or 4 amino acids. This hemoglobin was associated with what I referred to as ‘the still-recognizable shapes of red blood cells’. And that is exactly the case. Cameron Tsujita, a paleontologist at the University of Western Ontario in London, discussing claims that these are blood cells, says that he ‘can’t really think of what else they could be.’2 Interestingly, in the RTB radio interview mentioned earlier, Fuz Rana employed similar tactics by saying that ‘the young earth community is making the claim that what was found was an unfossilized T. rex femur that contained blood in it’. That sets up the listener nicely, so that anything other than flowing, gushing blood out of a totally fresh dino bone could easily be perceived as a creationist ‘distortion’. He then says: ‘Well, actually, this is not the case. It’s an incompletely fossilized femur, which is very different from an unfossilized femur.’ In fact, my article actually quoted Schweitzer as saying that ‘some parts deep inside the long bone of the leg had not completely fossilized.’ So anyone reading the word ‘unfossilized’ in the next sentence would have been fully aware of how I was using the term. The organic material in that section of bone had not been replaced by minerals. Natural History magazine concurred
I can only conclude that all this handwaving and smokeblowing by Moore is meant to distract from the main point, namely the astonishing discoveries in question (especially the recent one).
CW: Let’s see.
CW: Not surprisingly, I deny that the article would give a normally discerning reader such an impression, especially when I said on the twelfth line of the main text that Schweitzer ‘used chemicals to dissolve the bony matrix, revealing the soft tissues still present.’ But ‘impressions’ are fuzzy subjective things, slippery to pin down, and so perhaps tactically more suitable to relieve long-age embarrassment about what I have given the tongue-in-cheek label ‘Squishosaurus’. Especially when there is no actual error to refute.
CW: Note that this emphasis is Moore’s, not mine.
CW: I would reaffirm this statement. Many long-agers have openly expressed their astonishment. E.g. Derek Briggs, a paleontologist at Yale University said it was a ‘totally novel discovery,’ while Dr Tsujita said such preservation is ‘improbable but obviously not impossible.’ Note that this is a veiled admission that he was surprised by such tissue preservation over alleged millions of years, but since preserved tissue has been found, to a long-ager, it’s obviously proof that it can be preserved over such eons!3
CW: Notice the ‘clever’ positioning of that word ‘However’—priming the reader’s ‘glasses’ to see what follows as contradicting what I said. Which it really doesn’t.
CW: Presumably Moore and RTB’s editors hope that the people
reading this will not bother to check my article, where I said ‘the bone was
still largely hollow and not filled up with minerals as is usual’. So if I
said it, how can Moore’s saying the same thing be the magic ‘however’
to rebut my statements?
CW: As quoted earlier, this is what my article stated, up front and early in the piece. Except that I said it was ‘chemicals’, not ‘dilute acid’; according to this detailed supplement to the original report :
So the demineralization seems to have been in a slightly alkaline solution, not acid. But the main demineralizer was the very effective chelating agent EDTA. Fuz Rana in the earlier broadcast stated it was ‘weak vinegar’, so he appears not to have read the details of the process, either. Many internet sites seem to have also been ‘fuzzy’ about this issue of what was used, so I won’t be too hard on this mistake.
CW: Just to clarify things for readers, note that bone—any bone, even the freshest of bone—has a ‘matrix’ of hard mineral (see also Bridges and bones, girders and groans). To get to be able to ‘stretch’ and ‘squish’ the soft tissues inside, such as the blood vessels running within a fresh bone, you have to dissolve this mineral matrix. It is a common school experiment to soak a chicken bone in vinegar, turning it eventually into a soft, sagging mass—the non-mineral component of the bone. Note that Schweitzer’s team, in their eagerness to compare this dino’s soft tissues with its alleged evolutionary relative the ostrich, did essentially the same thing with fresh ostrich bone, to expose/extract the soft tissue to compare. So any suggestion that Schweitzer’s use of a chelating agent (EDTA) to dissolve the bone matrix changes the issue is absurd. The point is that the stretchy, pliable stuff that was in the shape of blood vessels, etc. was regarded by Schweitzer, and by all other reasonable people who have read the paper concerned, as remarkably preserved soft tissue, i.e. it has not been replaced by minerals. As quoted in my article, she said that ‘preservation of this extent, where you still have this flexibility and transparency, has never been seen in a dinosaur before’.
CW: Notice that emotive use of ‘strikingly’. But why should it be noteworthy or surprising that a long-age-believer, especially one who saw how Creation magazine made good use of her 1997 red-cell discovery, should choose her words as cagily as she possibly can? Schweitzer has publicly expressed her disappointment about creationist mileage from her finds. But as becomes clear further down, even her carefully chosen words do not attempt to run away from reality.
CW: A moment’s careful thought should suffice to realize that Schweitzer’s descriptions are in no way inconsistent with those in our article. If a chicken bone is demineralized, and all one has left is the soft tissue, then that is what one has, soft tissue, whether or not one refers to it as ‘demineralized bone’. Schweitzer’s descriptions are correct, as are mine.
CW: But, as already mentioned, I did point this out; in fact if the words quoted from Schweitzer above are meant to be a ‘careful’ pointing out, then mine are much more careful and extensive. It was so glaringly obvious in my article, in fact, that Moore cannot be expected to leave himself too wide open by ignoring it altogether. Having thus ‘scored points’ illegitimately, he now feels obliged to grudgingly mention it after all. He therefore says
CW: Later? It was, as stated, in the twelfth line down from the beginning of the main text. Good try, Greg.
CW: Briefly? Moore could not even resist implying that I should have used more space in this already-brief web news report. This whole section by Moore is trying to downplay the fact which he is forced to admit, namely that I did make it plain and clear to the reader.
CW: Not true? That’s a powerful statement. (Not-so-subtle meaning: these dreaded young-earth creationists are lying to you—that is certainly the impression of some who have emailed us after reading this Moore/RTB article). Let’s see if he’s right. Remember that the correct use of the term ‘soft tissue’ is any tissue (body structure substance) other than bone. For example, in a secular article on salamander fossils we read: ‘There are whole bodies, impressions of soft tissue preserved, and stomach contents.’4 The soft tissue does not necessarily have to be preserved in a soft form to be referred to as such. But, let’s go with Moore’s description above of the ‘clear implication’ of my statement and see if it is ‘not true’. Question: Did the bones contain actual soft tissue (e.g. blood vessels that had not been replaced by mineral?) Answer: Yes. Could the researchers see the soft tissue until the bony matrix was removed? Answer: No. So much for that.
CW: Huh? How can demineralization produce soft tissue that was not already there? If I dissolve a fresh ostrich bone and am left with the stretchy soft tissue, that tissue was in the bone all along. It won’t appear ‘soft’ when the bone is broken open, of course, because it is being supported from all sides by the bony matrix. If Moore should excuse his comment by saying that he merely meant that the tissue’s softness was the result of the soaking, then he is really pushing the envelope of reasonableness. Because the whole (and the obvious) point was that substantial swathes of tissue made up of fragile protein molecules have survived in this dinosaur bone not just in some amorphous form, but in recognizable structures, even transparent ones, and recognizably containing red blood cells, for example. Whether they would lose some of their ‘stretchiness’ should they be dried out again is in any case beside the point. If the original material of the soft tissue had not been preserved, then it would also not be capable of ‘rehydrating’ to any extent. If dry soft tissue that was unfossilized had been found in a dinosaur leg bone, and this only stretched when softened a bit in water, it would have been just as sensational. Because it is hardly likely that a section of dino soft tissue that had been preserved by being replaced with minerals (i.e. petrified) would become flexible just from hydrating, i.e. soaking up water! However, all that seems to be academic, anyway, because to clinch the point, Schweitzer’s article says that the soft tissues were subjected to several cycles of dehydration/rehydration—without losing their elasticity! So they appear to have been elastic (soft and stretchy, not hard and brittle) in both the dry and wet state. Of course, Moore did not quote that part of the article.
CW: A more-than-reasonable conclusion, as will be seen.
CW: As will be seen, ‘hopeful speculation’ puts a substantial spin on the paper. The researchers’ stated belief (not speculative, wild guess) is a very confident and reasonable conclusion from the observed facts. These facts, inter alia, are: Soft, stretchy, transparent branching structures were found inside the bone of a long-dead animal after the bone was demineralized (by a substance that dissolves fresh bone matrix too). These intricate structures appear identical to those in a recently-dead animal bone. Inside them are further structures which have all of the appearances of red blood cells, including the nucleus in the centre of each one.5 The contents of these hollow branching tubes that have these red-cell-appearing structures inside them can still be ‘squeezed out’. The onus of proof is on those who would claim that they are not what they overwhelmingly appear to be. By the way, the RTB broadcast glossed over something that is not even mentioned here in Moore’s article, namely that the researchers also found astonishingly clear 3-D structures in the shape of osteoclasts—these are very characteristic-looking cells found in bone—that were once again identical to those in living creatures. Even the title of Schweitzer et al.’s paper in Science affirms the conviction of its evolutionist authors: it is not called, e.g., ‘Unusual Structures Which Sort of Remind us of Blood Vessels and Cells’. It is in fact called ‘Soft-Tissue Vessels and Cellular Preservation in Tyrannosaurus rex’—the title alone seems virtually sufficient to ‘blow away’ Moore’s article!
CW: The italics emphasizing the word ‘resembled’ (to try to downplay the issue) are in fact undone by Moore’s own words, where he points out that the ostrich vessels and their contained red blood cells were for all practical purposes identical.
CW: The only way it can not contain any ‘original organic material’ is if it has been, as Moore states, ‘replaced by mineralization’. But no magical mineralization process is known or conceivable which would result in soft, flexible tubes with all the appearance of the original blood vessels and showing red blood cells inside. I invite the reader at this stage to revisit the illustrations (below). M. H. Schweitzer 
Remember, too, that proteins have been detected in dinosaur bone before, in specimens not even showing any soft tissue preservation like this one does. So I am hardly sticking my neck out by making the claim that there is no way that this soft stretchy tissue contains none of the original protein materials, i.e. there is no way that it has, instead, been replaced ‘brick by brick’ by some inorganic mineral. Remember, too, that even the original 1997 red-blood-cell find gave immunological evidence of one such protein, namely hemoglobin that is found in living red cells.
CW: Atheist sites attacked our original announcement of the 1997 discovery by saying that we called them ‘red cells’ when in fact they were ‘the remains of red cells’. But if I were to find a human finger in a block of cement, by definition it is the ‘remains’ of a finger, even when fresh, ten seconds after the concrete is poured. As time goes on, it will become more and more degraded, but it is still the ‘remains’ of a finger at all times. Say I find one such finger that is partially degraded after a few weeks, but still soft. Is it reasonable or not to describe the discovery as ‘a human finger in cement that is still soft’? Of course it’s reasonable! It would be nothing but the most excruciating, deliberate and devious hairsplitting for someone to attack the claim by saying, ‘ah, ah, ah—naughty—how dare he say he found a finger in cement. He should have said it was the remains of a human finger! Obviously, you can’t trust this guy.’
CW: Again, even to have lasted 4,000 years, one would expect some degree of alteration. But this is really beside the point; the astonishing nature of the preservation is already overwhelmingly clear, and totally unexpected by long-age thinkers.
CW: I am happy to here quote entirely what Stokstad said, namely: Stokstad is being commendably cautious, but for those familiar with graptolite morphology, the difference is profound and would not have caused a stir on our website (nor indeed did it raise much of a fuss at the time); it is nothing like the same issue or appearance of ‘identifiable soft tissue’ as this. And the resin example is neither surprising, nor relevant to this find—amber is thought to be hardened resin, so why would the nuclei not be replaced by resin? The most exquisite details of organisms, including microscopic, have routinely been found preserved in amber, yet this preservation per se was never ‘splashed’ by us as an argument against the millions of years. More significantly, the Stokstad quote shows a misleading aspect of this part of the Moore/RTB article (dutifully taken from their favorite atheistic source, Hurd). It claims that Stokstad says ‘that there are known instances where reworked material can have the appearance and resilience of the T. rex “tissues.”’ The unwitting reader might think that Stokstad was claiming that structures looking like the flexible blood vessels in the T. rex had been found in other fossils, when he said no such thing. Nothing in a fossil remotely resembling these dinosaur blood vessels in both appearance and resilience has ever been found, and Stokstad’s article does not say otherwise.
CW: Notice that neither my words nor those of my anatomist colleague Dr Menton claim that this (or indeed anything) can prove a young earth, but that it is powerfully, overwhelmingly consistent with it. Certainly it ‘taxes one’s imagination’ less to believe that such structures have survived a few thousand years, as opposed to >65 million. Even the most rabid long-ager would surely have to agree with that simple proposition.
CW: Exactly. But most such instances (which all speak of rapid processes, incidentally) do not involve the tissue itself, or any remnant of it which is still flexible or even capable of hydration. For example, the preservation of feathers is often merely their imprint. ‘Cellular structure’ can be preserved within a rock-hard, completely mineralized specimen (which structure would therefore disappear if those minerals were dissolved, by the way). That is not what we are talking about here.
CW: It is not universally agreed that this is always the result of bacterial action. In some instances, the soft tissue (even cellular) shape is preserved, as noted a few lines above in Schweitzer’s quote, while the tissue itself is replaced by minerals and/or at least the interstitial spaces filled. This does not necessarily require bacterial action.
CW: Moore really misses the point. Obviously, there is no dispute with the fact that different degrees of preservation can occur depending on different environments, burial, etc. Look at the many fossils buried in the Flood; many are extremely mineralized, some less so, and some much less so, as in the case in point. The strongly mineralized ones do not present an argument for a young age or an old age. They could have been mineralized 600 million years ago, or a century ago (the process of mineralization, e.g. artificial petrified wood, can occur very rapidly given the right chemical environment). Once they are in effect ‘turned to stone’, they can last more or less indefinitely. But ones that are not well mineralized are not going to be anywhere near as protected from the forces of decay. As Dr Aw Swee Eng (former professor of biochemistry, Singapore University) confirmed to me personally, complex biomolecules such as proteins are thermodynamically destined to fall apart eventually (from the random motion of molecules) even were they to be protected from all outside influences such as air, moisture, bacteria, etc. This is why it is so astonishing to think of a non-minerally-protected soft tissue structure lasting for millions of years.
CW: Before reading her explanations, it is important to note that she is totally philosophically committed to the millions-of-years age of the specimen; to her, it is a ‘given’. So from that perspective, it is understandable for her to look for ways to ‘explain’ the evidence in front of her eyes. As she indicates, there must be ‘yet undetermined’ things which have made it happen, despite all expectations to the contrary. Read on …
CW: Hearsay evidence—via Deem, a notorious Rossite—of some alleged smell would seem to be a mark of desperation. Schweitzer failed to mention any detection of formaldehyde, for example, in her official paper (though aldehydes were used in the fixation process).
CW: To date, there is just as much ‘evidence’ that the bones landed in an alien spacecraft which preserved the tissue.
CW: It may be difficult to predict the degree of stability, but surely there is a limit at which credulity ceases. Evolutionist Bryan Sykes, confronted with the alleged discovery of DNA in a fossil magnolia ‘millions of years old’ indicated that from the known rate at which it breaks down in the lab, ‘no DNA would remain intact much beyond 10,000 years’.6 But here it apparently was, so he said it was just as well that this chemical deduction was not known to the people who tried to extract the DNA. One can grant that it would be hard to be dogmatic and to say that it is not possible to stretch that 10,000 years by a bit. The rate of ‘falling apart’ is not that precise. And DNA is more fragile than, say, hemoglobin or osteocalcin or collagen. But to stretch it by about four orders of magnitude (some 10,000 times)?
CW: Indeed it does. Water will rapidly hydrolyze them, as well as supporting bacterial attack. But the converse does not follow, namely that the absence of water will permit the biomolecules to remain forever intact. In fact, had water been permitted access, they would not have lasted anything like the few thousand years since their presumed burial in the Flood.
CW: This seems to be an assumption based on hearsay, not an observation, being used here as part of a ‘handwaving’ exercise. And note that what was first a ‘possibility’ has now become a probability in just a few paragraphs.
CW: Hmmm … it seems that on the one hand, we’re told that they are very resistant to breakdown, presumably an argument being used to support the fact that they’ve been preserved. Then we’re told that they are not preserved, i.e. ‘not the original blood vessels’. So why is the argument of their toughness needed at all? Because it is obvious to all that any ‘remnants’ (remember my finger in the concrete example, it is always going to be a ‘remnant’ or ‘the remains’ of a finger, with varying degrees of preservation) that ‘retain some elasticity and resiliency’ are a powerful ‘alert’ to the public at large that maybe something is not quite right with the millions of years. So Moore needs something to reassure true believers in long ages. Incidentally, the reference for this ‘remarkable long-term stability’, as it is in four other places herein, is the Ross/Rana broadcast itself. In that broadcast, they argued that because the ostrich bone had been treated with collagenase, an enzyme that breaks down collagen, to release the vessels and cells for study, and this was not necessary for the dino bone, that this was ‘further evidence of breakdown of biomolecules’. But this reinforces our point! We believe that this was a very old tyrannosaur fossil, likely about 40 centuries or so. So it is hardly going to be a ‘fresh’ specimen of bone! The fact is that some of the biomolecules had already degraded, as expected, and some had not. The astonishing thing was not that there had been degradation of biomolecules in that time, but that some had survived. But ‘astonishing’ becomes ‘unbelievable’ when the alleged timescale is >65 million years. Ross said for the benefit of listeners: ‘The difference is that the ostrich bones were young, the dinosaur bones old. Therefore they used a different treatment process. That’s evidence in itself that the dinosaur bones must be old.’ It is hard to restrain oneself from excess sarcasm in contemplating this amazing conclusion—a fossil bone from an extinct creature is ‘old’, and a freshly killed ostrich bone is ‘young’. Well, well. Rana responds to Ross’s insight with ‘Exactly, so for me this is a very interesting piece of work …’. Enough said.
CW: Let’s see … earlier in the article we had unknown geochemical processes postulated. Here another long-ager puts up his ‘suspicion’ that these vessels have been converted into an unknown polymer which (by definition, in his belief system) resists degradation but, amazingly, preserves both the structure and the elasticity, appearance, transparency, etc. for millions of years. When Dr Collins finds what that wonderful substance is, he should invest in the company that is first to market it. (It reminds me of the letter to the editor of an Australian newspaper many years ago. The writer had just been given the spiel at a national park about the long ages assigned to indigenous rock art. He said something like: ‘I’ve just bought a can of the best house paint around, and I’m told if I’m lucky, it’ll last 15 years. Yet I’m shown where some Aboriginal has blown some soggy ochre onto a rock and I’m told it’s lasted 40,000 years. Where can I get a can of that stuff?’)
CW: Notice incidentally how the emphasis has shifted from denying the idea that these are the actual tissues, i.e. the actual biomolecules, to now stating that they ‘can survive’. Which is it? (If they are not the original biomolecules, they have not survived!) But despite the bravado in that phrase, the survival for millions of years has been assumed, not demonstrated. The only ‘evidence’ for it is the belief that specimens containing biomolecules are millions of years old.
CW: As pointed out earlier, this is attacking a straw man, and misrepresents our position. We do say that we have every reason to be excited about this as strongly reinforcing what God has long revealed in His Word about the timing of Creation Week (see Biblical Chronogenealogies and In the days of Peleg).
CW: Notice that ‘Wieland suggests … however the truth is … ’ (Ergo: Wieland lies. Yet this is the same ‘Reasons to Believe’ that, when exposed in various ways in our literature, plays the victim with wounded innocence, saying that one should not attack fellow Christians.) In fact, this comment about technology is an astonishingly misleading statement, and it is hard to know how Moore/RTB can defend this with a straight face as ‘the truth of the matter’. Consider: how much technology does it take to crack open a dinosaur leg bone, grab some EDTA (it’s been around for a very long time), wait some days and then take a closer look? Schweitzer was clearly motivated by her serendipitous (and totally unexpected, thanks to the long-age belief system7) microscopic discovery of the red blood cells in dino bone to start looking for such things. When the leg bone was broken open, it was sent to her because other dinosaur researchers knew of her interest, subsequent to the red cell find, in looking for such things. Evolutionists are now saying that, because of the discovery, museums should consider looking again at their specimens with a view to breaking open some bones, as they have probably overlooked many such specimens all along. Many are looking forward to now being able to test various evolutionary theories on such specimens (i.e. now that we ‘know’ that soft tissues must be able to survive millions of years). To reinforce the point, Schweitzer has apparently found a number of other such specimens since this one. In other words, now that we know that it’s worth looking, we can easily find such specimens. So why wasn’t it done before? Because no one expected to find such things, because they would not be expected to last millions of years. How much more obvious could it be?7
CW: This is an odd statement in isolation—it is not possible to test everything. Unfortunately, RTB has a habit of wrenching passages out of context, and does so here again. In context, it is about testing purported prophetic utterances—the verse immediately preceding this is ‘Do not despise prophecies’. The passage in general concerns our Christian walk, doctrine, etc. So when some strange new teaching comes along within the church (such as the old-earth dogma which was absorbed from the secular world well before Darwin, as Dr Terry Mortenson’s book The Great Turning Point so ably documents) this should be thoroughly tested. It has been tested, and it falls dramatically short in the light of Scripture.
CW: Here is where we see the different directions from which both sides are coming. We want to try to always start with Scripture, which is the final authority. We don’t see any number of finds as the reason to believe the Bible. Rather, we see things as either confirming or challenging the truth of the Bible. When the old-earth evidences are examined (and it is mostly bluff and bluster to talk of ‘thousands’, as if they were independent of each other) they invariably turn out to be based on axiomatic rejection of the Bible’s account of creation in the first place. This was always true of long-age beliefs—see this admission from the ‘father of uniformitarianism’ (the founding principle of long-age geology), James Hutton.
CW: ‘Science’ believes nothing—people do. Science is a methodology, a wonderful tool that has been very helpful to humanity, but one whose limitations and operation are often not well understood by a lot of anticreationists. Scientists are fallible human beings, whose interpretations of the evidence are strongly constrained by the paradigms of their culture and time. The history of the scientific enterprise is littered with the rejection of ideas (phlogiston, miasma theory of disease, etc.) that were based on the same logic, i.e. ‘most scientists believe …’ or ‘most of the evidence points to …’—there is huge resistance to ideas that challenge the dominant paradigm. As if scientific truth is arrived at by weighing up the number of arguments anyway.
CW: Sigh—another misrepresentation. Are Moore’s readers really being asked to believe that we don’t examine the evidence that opposes our viewpoint, as if we close our eyes to it? There are probably thousands of pages of this very website devoted to examining and dealing with/refuting such evidences, not to mention a book refuting Ross, which refutation could not have been accomplished without examining his claims! We do so because, like Paul, we seek to ‘demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God’ (2 Cor. 10:5). In any case, the implication of Moore’s comments here is that evidence ‘speaks for itself’, a naïve 1950s view of the philosophy of science. I.e. if only one can put all the ‘evidence’ (i.e. the ‘facts’) on the table, the ‘truth will out’. But this ignores the following:
When I was an atheist at university in the early 1970s, smug in my long-age/evolutionary beliefs, it was a creationist (YEC) book that God used to draw me to Him. The thing that most powerfully affected me was that here, for the first time, were intelligent Christians writing on origins who were dealing honestly and unashamedly with what the Bible taught, accepting it, and not pretending it was saying something other than what it so clearly does. It was soon very clear that the reason for my unbelief was not the ‘scientific evidence’ at all, but something deeper. There is ample evidence to support the straightforward view of Genesis history, as believed by the Lord Jesus and the apostles, to make it clear that biblical faith is not some blind ‘leap in the dark’. I.e. there is ‘reason for the hope’ (1 Peter 3:15). This squishy dinosaur find is just one more confirmation. Further readingReferences and notes
|