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  • RADIOMETRIC DATING ON TRIAL: HOW RELIABLE IS IT? PART 2 November 16, 2016
  • DINOSAUR BLOOD AND THE AGE OF THE EARTH BY DR. FAZALE RANA BLEEDS OUT AND DIES ON THE EXAM TABLE, BY MARK ARMITAGE November 16, 2016
  • RADIOMETRIC DATING ON TRIAL: HOW RELIABLE IS IT? PART 1 November 11, 2016
  • THE MARK ARMITAGE LEGAL VICTORY AND A CLARION CALL FOR LAITY TO CARRY THE TORCH IN THE CREATION-EVOLUTION CONTROVERSY November 8, 2016
  • EVOLUTION AS MAGIC October 10, 2016

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    RADIOMETRIC DATING ON TRIAL: HOW RELIABLE IS IT? PART 2

    November 16, 2016 by Tom Shipley

    Mt-Kilauea

    continued

    WITNESS NUMBER TWO

    If one watches any number of numerous popular documentaries about nature, especially about extinct animals or plants (dinosaurs are everybody’s favorites), a conspicuous feature of virtually all of these documentaries is the dogmatic, matter-of-fact manner in which the ages of rocks and fossils are assigned dates of so many millions or billions of years. These ages are smugly asserted pontifically as empirical data, as unquestionable facts. It is never explained to the viewer how these ages were determined.

    In reality, these age designations are axioms, arbitrary logical premises, assumptions, based to some degree upon the misplaced confidence many have in radiometric dating; for example, radioactive uranium to lead decay, or radioactive rubidium to strontium decay, or radioactive potassium to argon decay ratios. To the much greater degree, the rocks are not dated by radiometric dating but are dated by what are called “index fossils” or “zone fossils” according to age schemes previously “established” by evolutionists: “there’s a tyrannosaurus fossil in there—oh, that’s 65 million years old;” and so the mantra goes.

    The discrepancies, the contradictory age results which are produced when radiometric “dating” is used, which invariably result from use of the different radioactive substances as source materials, are never disclosed to the viewers and yield greatly contradictory results measuring in some cases in the billions of years! (Yes, that’s billion with a “b.”) Greatly contradictory age determinations also result using the same method in various samples of the same rock or the same stratum. Yet the viewers are never informed of these facts. The Great Darwinian Propaganda Machine just rolls on and on and no one looks too hard at the actual means by which dates are determined.

    Our next witness against the trustworthiness of radiometric dating is RICHARD MILTON.

    Richard Milton is an agnostic and, like Roger Lewin whom we discussed in Part 1, Milton is no biblical creationist. He is a science journalist and design engineer and a member of Mensa and a member of the Geologists Association. Though Richard Milton does not dispute evolution, he does dispute Darwinian gradualism. Milton wrote a book called “Shattering the Myths of Darwinism.” Milton’s book should be required reading in every class that teaches on the subject of evolution. Milton notes on pg. 20-21:

    “Radioactive techniques can be applied only to volcanic rocks that contain some radioactive mineral (emphasis supplied) —the primary rocks of the earth’s crust. But the geologic column consists of sedimentary rocks.”

    Sedimentary rock (where fossils are found), let it be emphasized, is rock lain down in almost all cases by water deposition—(hmmmm). The “geologic column” depicted in our school textbooks, complete with its orderly “progression of life” and prominently consisting of land vertebrates, is a mental construct, an abstraction, and a correlation across continents and not a physical reality anywhere in the world. The “geologic column” is the fossil-bearing rock of the sedimentary rock, and (note well) covers nearly the entire land surface of the earth averaging a mile to a mile and a half in depth, and consists of over 99% marine invertebrates (hmmmmm). The land-dwelling vertebrates so conspicuously filling up our textbook depictions of the geologic column are, in terms of percentages, virtually non-existent in the fossil record.

    Luther Sunderland notes in his book, “Darwin’s Enigma,”

    “The geologic column was established before 1840 by men in England and Scotland when most of the world had not yet been explored geologically….Rock formations have never actually been found anywhere in the world in the complete arrangement shown in the column. Neither has there been even a significant portion of the column found in one place.”—pg. 48

    Moerover Milton quotes John Thackray of the Institute of Geological Sciences,

    “The only sediments which can be dated directly are those in which a radioactive mineral is formed during diagenesis [laying down] of the sediment… Where lavas or volcanic ashes are interbedded with a sediment of known stratigraphic age, then a date may be given to that stratigraphic division…The RARITY OF SUCH CASES, TOGETHER WITH ANALYTICAL ERROR INHERENT IN AGE DETERMINATION, MEAN THAT ISOTOPIC AGES ARE UNLIKELY TO RIVAL OR REPLACE FOSSILS AS THE MOST IMPORTANT MEANS OF CORRELATION.” (emphasis supplied)

    In other words, what Thackray is telling us is that radiometric dating is not really used to date fossils. The fossils are used to date the rocks based upon a-priori age assignments of the fossils established before 1840 (and expanded repeatedly since then) which is in turn based upon prior evolutionary age assumptions. In other words, the entire process of rock and fossil dating is a classic tautology, a circular argument pre-loaded with assumption after assumption—in a word, fraud. Milton goes on to point out that the whole age schema commonly accepted today goes back to the speculations of Charles Lyell, the founder of modern uniformitarian theory and old-earth theory which paved the way for Charles Darwin’s evolutionary speculations. The age schema now in vogue among evolutionists was firmly in place before radiometric dating even existed.

    Arch-evolutionist Niles Eldredge, former Curator of the American Museum of Natural History, and co-founder of the “punctuated equilibrium” hypothesis also notes this and admits:

    “Paleontologists usually cannot tell time with the handy radiometrics of geochemists… Sedimentary rocks more than a few million years old simply do not have such isotope-bearing minerals crystallized de novo within them…

    “Paleontologists cannot operate this way. There is no way simply to look at a fossil and say how old it is unless you know the age of the rocks it comes from…(emph supp.)

    “Long before radioactivity was known to physicists, paleontologists had another way to tell time. Fossils occur in the same vertical sequence throughout the geologic column. The same, or closely similar, fossils frequently occur in many far-flung localities…The repetitive pattern of occurrence allows geologically minded paleontologists to correlate…

    “And this poses something of a problem: if we date the rocks by their fossils, how can we then turn around and talk about patterns of evolutionary change through time in the fossil record? We need an independent time frame…” Niles Eldredge, Time Frames, pg. 51-52, emph supp.

    This whole process is clearly circular reasoning and requires (and assumes) evolution to be true first before the process can have any validity at all, and even then there is no way to give actual dates even if you can conclusively prove a sequence. The whole sequential arrangement (which is not consistent everywhere in the world, Eldredge’s assertion notwithstanding) of strata can just as easily have occurred over one year or one hundred trillion years!

    Milton notes on page 29: “No other scientific discipline would be permitted to even consider such procedures.”

    On page 37-38, Milton observes:

    “The most widely used methods, such as uranium-lead and potassium-argon, have been found to be seriously flawed, not merely in practice but in principle. In addition [note well] THE METHODS YIELDED DATES SO DISCORDANT AS TO MAKE THEM UNRELIABLE.” –emph. supp.

    Testing volcanic lava rock of known age is a “proof of the pudding” kind of procedure. One of the examples Milton cites includes: rock of KNOWN age formed from lava from an eruption of Mount Kilauea in 1801 yielded a radiometric date (excuse me, multiple dates, plural) of up to THREE BILLION YEARS on rock known to be 214 years old! Is there anyone reading this who thinks three billion years of error is somewhat off the mark? And I would like to ask, why is radiometric dating so heavily relied upon when it can be empirically demonstrated to yield results so amazingly and staggeringly erroneous?

    Also, Milton points out that the Australian National University found ages up to 465,000 years for lava in New Zealand known to be less than 1,000 years old (pg. 38, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism). Regarding the KBS Tuff of Leakey fame, where the famous skull 1470 was found, which we examined in Part 1 of this series, Milton notes separate radiometric dating tests by different research groups resulted in multiple discordant dates ranging from 1.5 – 6.9 million years in one series of radiometric datings, and 0.5 – 2.4 million years in another series of radiometric datings, and yet more discordant results of 8.43 to 17.5 million years on another sample.—pg. 54-55

    Such is the “reliability” of radiometric dating. And though the administrators of the Great Darwinian Propaganda Machine do not want anyone to know it, the fact is that these contradictory results are the norm.

    Milton characterizes this state of affairs on pg. 50 of his book:

    “What is alarming is that in the very few cases of truly independent evidence we have…the measured dates are spectacularly wrong. The response of radioactive dating advocates is to reject the few cases of independent verification as aberrations, and to prefer instead their theory purely because of its INTERNAL consistency, principally that it fits with a belief in an old earth. In doing so, they are rejecting the only real independent check available.”

    And,

    “If all the rejected dates were retrieved from the waste basket and added to the published dates, the combined results would show that the dates produced are the scatter that one would expect by chance alone.”—pg. 51

    Comment is hardly necessary here and this is just the tip of the radiometric dating iceberg.

    Our next witness in Part 3 will be Don Boys, Ph.D.

    Filed Under: Creation, Darwin, Evolution Tagged With: AGE OF THE EARTH, CHARLES LYELL, creation, evolution, FOSSILS, GEOLOGIC COLUMN, GREAT DARWINIAN PROPAGANDA MACHINE, INDEX FOSSILS, ISOTOPIC AGES, JOHN THACKRAY, KILAUEA, LAVA, LUTHER SUNDERLAND, LYELL, MILTON, Niles Eldredge, RADIOMETRIC DATING, RICHARD MILTON, SEDIMENTARY ROCK, UNIFORMITARIANISM

    THE MARK ARMITAGE LEGAL VICTORY AND A CLARION CALL FOR LAITY TO CARRY THE TORCH IN THE CREATION-EVOLUTION CONTROVERSY

    November 8, 2016 by Tom Shipley

    Mark Armitage Jurassic-documentary-2015-on-Dinosaurs

    “If I profess with loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except that little point which the world and the Devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battlefield besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.”—Martin Luther

    Creationists who work in academia or science research should not be lulled into a false sense of security because of the recent Mark Armitage legal victory against his persecutors at California State University Northridge. I am writing this article on the assumption that the reader has some knowledge of the Armitage case and his science research and publication. (For those of you who may have little or no knowledge of the case, a good sense of the case and its history can be gleaned at the following article links here, and here, and here, and here and here, and here, and the following video links hereand here.)

    Armitage was the victim of religious discrimination and persecution perpetrated by Dr. Ernie Kwok and others at CSUN in the form of wrongful job termination because of his religious beliefs and the exercise of his free speech rights. Armitage’s legal and Constitutional rights were violated. Armitage sued and won. That’s wonderful. But let’s put this in perspective: one lone legal victory for a creationist in a State Court does not by any stretch of the imagination signal a reversal of the pervasive discrimination and persecution that has been perpetrated for many decades against many THOUSANDS of others who have never seen an iota of justice. As far as I am aware, Mark Armitage is one of a very small handful of Darwin doubters (that perhaps that can be numbered on one hand) to prevail in his battle against religious discrimination in American academia. Illegal discrimination, willful violation of Constitutional rights, and bigotry against creationists in the form of wrongful job termination goes on routinely and pervasively, perpetrated by, and with the blessing of, academia and our judicial establishments. The law simply does not matter to the academicians or to most of the judges ruling in most of these cases. The law itself is routinely treated as irrelevant.

    We can rejoice, and I certainly do, that there has been a modicum of justice in the Armitage case. I don’t want to rain upon anybody’s parade. But what I want to know is this: why does Ernie Kwok (et al) still have a job at CSUN? If I understand the dynamics of the Armitage case as well as I think I do, Kwok was the prime perpetrator of religious discrimination against Mark Armitage. If Ernie Kwok and Armitage’s other persecutors still have their jobs (at taxpayer expense), then is not CSUN in principle still endorsing discrimination and persecution based upon religion?

    The failure of CSUN to terminate the employment of faculty who have violated the fundamental Constitutional and civil rights of their fellow Americans declares that they are still committed to a policy of religious discrimination, especially against Christian creationists. They may have acquiesced to a particular battle they knew they could not win (and was simply too damaging because of its publicity) but they are still at war against all those who do not share their own religious faith in Naturalism. Make no mistake about that. So let’s stay the course and not get too heady about the Armitage victory.

    The Mark Armitage case is significant for multiple reasons, one reason being that his case demonstrates the two principal modus operandii of the Darwinists in academia (what I refer to as the GDPM, the Great Darwinian Propaganda Machine) and science research: 1) censorship and repression of information and 2) punishment against dissenters. Another reason the Armitage case is significant is because of the actual science at the root of it.

    Make no mistake about it, Big Brother thought control, in the vein of Orwell’s 1984, is precisely what the Darwinists in academia seek to achieve. Freedom of inquiry in academia is a myth where it concerns the subject of evolution. The straw which broke the proverbial back of the camel in the Armitage case, the thing which exceeded the toleration level of the Great Darwinian Propaganda Machine, was not “hellfire and damnation” preaching on campus, it was not a sermon on the book of Genesis and creation in the biology classroom. No, it was a peer-reviewed scientific article, titled “Soft sheets of fibrillar bone from a fossil of the supraorbital horn of the dinosaur Triceratops horridus,” by Armitage published in the prestigious Acta Histochemica containing straight reporting of raw data on his find of soft dinosaur tissue from a triceratops horn from the Hell Creek Formation in Glendive Montana. The truth screams aloud from such finds: to wit, “if it ain’t fossilized (permineralized), it ain’t millions of years old!” Crash goes the Darwinian and uniformitarian paradigms. The significance of this is not lost on the devotees of Naturalism and worshipers of their idol, evolution.

    In the attempt to put an end to the dissemination of such knowledge, Armitage had to go. The American Inquisition and the Great Darwinian Propaganda Machine, in the form of Dr. Ernie Kwok, et al, at California State University Northridge, leapt into action. Two weeks after the publication of Armitage’s article, Ernie Kwok, in Machiavellian fashion, engineered the firing of Mark Armitage from his job. Information which conflicts with the story-line of evolutionary and old earth fairy tales simply cannot be tolerated and neither can the people who publish such information.

    Another example which exemplifies and demonstrates the extent of Orwellian thought control in our universities is that of Michael Behe, famous for his book, “Darwin’s Black Box.” Behe is famous for coining the phrase “irreducible complexity,” a feature of biological organisms which is a dead giveaway of intelligent design.

    In a video production of the Discovery Institute, Behe makes some very eye-opening and significant comments:

    At approximately 12:05 – 13:25 in the video, Behe staes:

    “For the longest time I believed that Darwinian evolution explains what we saw in biology, not because I saw how it could actually explain it but because I was told that it did explain it. In schools I was taught Darwinian biology and through college and graduate school I was in an atmosphere which just assumed that Darwinian evolution explains biology and again I didn’t have any reason to doubt it. It wasn’t until…I read a book called “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis” by a geneticist by the name of Michael Denton, an Australian, and he put forward a lot of scientific arguments against Darwinian theory that I had never heard before, and the arguments seemed pretty convincing. At that point, I started to get a bit angry, because I thought I was being led down the primrose path. Here were a number of very good arguments and I had gone through a doctoral program in biochemistry, and became a faculty member and I had never even heard of these things.”—Michael Behe, emph. supp.

    Behe’s comments here are worth dwelling upon at length to grasp their significance. Think about this: here is a scientist with a Ph.D. in biochemistry, a faculty member, who had never heard “a lot of scientific arguments” in the realm of his own specialty! And don’t think for one moment that Behe’s case is unusual. Behe’s experience of being kept in the dark and “led down the primrose path” (to use his own characterization) is typical of academia in general. As cynical as I am about the Darwinian academic establishment, this type of comment is still absolutely astounding to me. How is it remotely possible, one must ask in utter astonishment, to go through at least seven years of university training and be in total ignorance of an extensive body of knowledge, a lengthy detailed book full of pertinent information in one’s own discipline? That is mind-boggling to me and demonstrates the extent to which the Great Darwinian Propaganda Machine engages in bona fide thought control and brainwashing of its disciples in our academic institutions. The paradigm, the model—in this case, commitment to a religious faith, Naturalism, and its supreme article of faith, evolution—takes priority over facts and data. If the empirical facts are contradictory, then damn the facts and—and don’t let any one else know.

    Censorship reigns supreme in this regard, and don’t let any naysayer on this point deceive you with sophistries. This is all deliberate and conscious, as it certainly was in the Mark Armitage case. Like Stalin’s tyranny in Communist Soviet Russia, there are ongoing purges to cast out Darwin doubters, especially Christian creationists, from academia by systematic and pervasive denial of tenure, outright firings, demotions and campaigns of vilification directed against “scientific sinners.”

    Persecution by the Darwinian establishment is real, and is well-exemplified in the cases of Mark Armitage and many others. These purges of academic dissidents are for the purpose of maintaining strict control of “scientific” orthodoxy (the “orthodoxy” in the case of evolution being pseudo-orthodoxy) and stamping out “science sin.” I like the observation of Stephen Jay Gould: “Academia is a den of vipers” (pg. 112, The Panda’s Thumb”). Anybody who believes we have “open inquiry” in academia is ignorant of the reality. The firing of Mark Armitage from his microscopist job at California State University Northridge because of his religion and his “creationist projects” is just one such example. Another is the demotion of Richard Sternberg (an evolutionist) at the Smithsonian Institution. Another is the firing of creationist David Coppedge at NASA because of his creationist beliefs (yes, even NASA terminates employees on the basis of their religious beliefs). Another is the firing of Guillermo Gonzalez from the University of Iowa because of his religious beliefs, specifically belief in ID. Another example is Dr. Caroline Crocker, author of “Free to Think,” who was purged out of George Mason University because of herbeliefs. These five examples are most emphatically not exceptions to the rule or anecdotes. They are drops in the ocean. The list of names goes on and on and on with mind-numbing endlessness. Just ask Jerry Bergman. (See his video presentation here, and the results of his investigation of censorship in academia here.)

    Which brings me to my central point and conclusion in this article: the torch in the creationist movement needs to be carried, probably primarily, by knowledgeable LAITY, that is to say, those of us who are not employed in academia or science research and not vulnerable to termination of employment because of our religious beliefs. It is not enough to just sit back and expect academicians and research scientists to speak up and publish relevant material. As in the Mark Armitage case, speaking up can carry a heavy price, and most will simply remain silent. Until the active hostility and persecution against Darwin doubters in academia changes, there will continue to be a severe dearth of degreed professionals doing this work. Most (if not nearly everyone) in vulnerable positions in academia and science research will not dare to risk their jobs and their professional and academic accreditation. Even those who are willing to endure persecution regarding themselves will seldom be willing to subject their families to such severe life disruption.

    For those who are in academia and science research and who ARE willing to take the associated risks, Armitage lays out the program. In a personal communication with me about this matter, Armitage states:

    “I do agree with your point that the laity needs to carry this torch…(T)he pattern I have laid out is an easy one to follow if people are willing to do the work to follow it. As I say I took the time to learn my craft. I got off the path of being an expert microscopist for the microscope companies and got onto the path of Academia. I went back to school and learned electron microscopy. I then sought employment in Academia with my highly honed unique skills. There will always be need for microscopists so I have set a pattern that others who are skilled in biology or chemistry can follow. Next I sought employment at universities who are looking for a microscopist. Sadly I was thrown out of Azusa Pacific University for being a literalist on Genesis. But the settlement they gave me for wrongful termination was enough to buy my own electron microscopes. Then I had the opportunity to work for a State University and I gave full disclosure in my interview about being a creationist and being a Christian. Because I had a publication history, a secular publication history they hired me on the spot. Then I excelled at my craft for the University and won the hearts of 95% of the professors there. So I’ve established a pattern that others can follow, and we need to do this. The only way we can get through to the professionals and the millennials is to have a track record of excellence in The Sciences. So yes the laity need to take up the torch but they need to follow the pattern that I have laid down.

    “I only got a master’s degree and look at how far the Lord took me. But you are right we need Christians to get their Ph.Ds and learn these skills and get hired in universities where they have access to the research equipment and can do the studies. Then they will be effective…This is the front line of this battle and we need the laity to step up to jump in and to follow the pattern that I have established.”

    Featured image credit: Godinanutshell.com

    Filed Under: Creation, Darwin, Evolution Tagged With: ACTA HISTOCHEMICA, ARMITAGE, BIG BROTHER, CAROLINE CROCKER, censorship, CIVIL RIGHTS, CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS, creation, CSUN, DARWINIAN PROPAGANDA, DARWINISM, DAVID COPPEDGE, DISCOVERY INSTITUTE, ERNIE KWOK, evolution, FIBRILLAR BONE, GLENDIVE, GUILLERMO GONZALEZ, HELL CREEK FORMATION, JERRY BERGMAN, MARK ARMITAGE, MARTIN LUTHER, Michael Behe, MICHAEL DENTON, NATURALISM, ORWELL, RELIGIOUS DISCRIMINATION, RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION, RICHARD STERNBERG, SOFT DINOSAUR TISSUE, Stephen Jay Gould, THOUGHT CONTROL, TRICERATOPS, UNIFORMITARIANISM

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