Greater Houston Creation Association
Creation News
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Acquiring and Distributing Knowledge Regarding God's Creation
Webinar and Meeting: December 2 at 7 pm
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Answers to Challenges Part 4
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Varves, Tree Rings, C-14, and More
This challenge is most effectively presented by Drs. Gregg Davidson and Ken Wolgemuth in a paper titled “Testing and Verifying Old Age Evidence: Lake Suigetsu Varves, Tree Rings, and Carbon-14” published by BioLogos in 2018. Both are geoscience professionals and professors in state universities. They have also exchanged rebuttals with YEC geoscience and physics professionals Snelling, Clarey, Oard, and Hebert. All of these are Christian gentlemen with good intent but biased by a long established position on these issues.
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A very important fact about science for all: We cannot directly observe the past, we can only observe thing in the present and the experimentally verified laws of physics and uses those to deduce or extrapolate what might have happened in the past to bring about the things we observe in the present. Only an eyewitness can tell more.
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Another very important issue involved in this discussion is one’s starting assumptions. These starting assumptions are foundationally important because they play a strong role in how one understands and interprets the observable evidence and the role of physical principles involved. Old Earth concepts demand that slow and gradual processes be dominate in Earth history. Young creation concepts demand that very rapid or catastrophic processes sometimes dominate in Earth history. Young creation concepts may also need to consider the possibility of supernatural acts by God in Earth history. In contrast, conventional academia will not consider the possibility of any form of supernatural activity. Some science scholars outside of conventional academia try for some middle ground that admits to a minor role supernatural activity in Earth history that might include God’s guidance of the evolution of life and an environment that would sustain the wide variety of life. Even though we would like to concentrate on the physical principles and observable facts, the above difference in foundational assumptions play a critical role in everyone’s conclusions. So, it is important to consider all of the principles and observational facts in light of these various worldview assumptions.
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The old Earth proposition is that there are so many logically consistent lines of geological evidence that it demands an old Earth model of Earth History. In the Davidson and Wolgemuth paper they concentrate on the presumed annual layers in a few deep lakes called varves in conjunction with tree ring dating and C-14 dating.
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Varves
There are several lakes around the world that are deep enough to be without oxygen in the lower depths. The absence of oxygen prevents any burrowing organisms from living on the deep bottom. Burrowing organisms would mix up the thin varve layers. In the spring these lakes have algal blooms which produce a cloud of falling tiny shells which settle on the bottom producing these thin annual layers. In the winter these lakes freeze over preventing blooms. That ensures production of at least on varve each year. Analysis of these lakes and their varves indicate something like 50,000 years is required to produce them. That is far more time than a straight forward reading of Genesis would allow. YEC’s would ask if there can be more than one algal bloom a year? Or, could the influx of material generated by earthquakes or trimmers modulate the algal blooms and produce more varves. A high energy catastrophic Flood event would produce a high frequency of earthquakes and trimmers during the Flood with decreasing frequency as geology settled toward a new normal equilibrium. There are many more possibilities to explore.
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Tree Rings
The oldest living tree is a bristlecone pine which has more than 5000 rings. Assuming only one ring per year the tree is about 5000 years old. However, since the thickness of tree rings is influenced by the varying climate they grew in, a technique has long been used to correlate the patterns in trees with overlapping growth periods. This method has been used to extend tree ring dating back as far as 14,000 years based on trees in Central Europe. This age is obviously a problem for a strait forward reading of the Biblical time line.
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C-14
All life that breaths air and eats plants that breaths the CO2 in the atmosphere all come to an equilibrium with the carbon in the atmosphere. The ongoing shower of cosmic rays converts a tiny bit of the nitrogen in the atmosphere into radioactive C-14 which radioactively decays with a half-life of 5730 years. When an organism dies it no longer maintains equilibrium with the atmosphere so the amount of C-14 continually decreases after death and this can be used to measure the time since death.
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This C-14 dating can be applied to tree rings and it is generally used to verify the match between overlapping tree ring sequences. C-14 dating is also applied to leaves and stems found in the varve layers discussed above and it generally verifies the varve dating back to about 50,000 years. Varves, tree rings, and C-14 are claimed to be three independent line of evidence, but they are not independent of one another. OE creationist point to this three way agreement as very strong evidence that is almost proof positive that the YEC’s straightforward reading of the Biblical timeline is wrong. But, this is this well founded?
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On December 2 at 7 pm the GHCA will bring a much more detailed evaluation of these OE challenges. We will also find that the professional geologists and physicist in the YEC community have much to challenge these claims. We will get a good start on this adventure in this meeting but there will more in the new year in January.
If you are not signed up for our free monthly newsletter you can do so in the right sidebar of our website: www.GHCAonline.com
Looking forward to seeing you all again,
Frank Mayo
President, GHCA
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Over the last sixty years, six national scale YEC organization have grown up with a staff of PhD scientists in their leadership. These organizations include:
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Marine fossils are found in all rock levels with fossils including those with
land animal or other terrestrial fossils such as dinosaurs!
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Whitmore Coconino Research Team Free Access Publications:
For geologist and other technical people here are links to the most recent free access publications making strong case Coconino SS is deposition by water.
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Sincerely,
Frank Mayo, President
Greater Houston Creation Association
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Houston Science & Culture Network
Houston chapter of the Discovery Institute's division of Science and Culture.
Tour calls out false claims. See also the link to Tour's response to critics.
The Science & Faith Podcast by Dr. James Tour
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San Antonio:
The San Antonio Bible Based Science Association (SABBSA) usually meets the second Tuesday of each month, 7:00 p.m., at Faith Lutheran church just south of the corner of Thousand Oaks and Jones Maltsberger. More info is at www.sabbsa.org.
Dallas-Ft Worth:
The Metroplex Institute of Origin Science (MIOS) meets at the Dr. Pepper Starcenter, 12700 N. Stemmons Fwy, Farmers Branch, TX, usually at 7:30 pm on the first Tuesday of each month.
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Examples of Important YEC Scientific Evidences
Some major examples of physical evidence we point to include:
- Remains of original soft tissue still found in dinosaur bones. Along with that tissue is C-14 that would decay completely away in less than a hundred thousand years, a tiny fraction of the dinosaur fossil's supposed age.
- For many years geologists have found C-14 in fossil carbon throughout the fossil record. So, the entire fossil record is less than 100,000 years old.
- The origin of the information and molecular machinery in the first living self-reproducing cell remains a complete enigma for biologist and biochemists.
- In the origin of the universe, big bang theory is being recognized as a dead end by increasing numbers of secular scientists. The hypothesized inflation has nothing to start it, drive it forward, or stop it. Without inflation fatal flaws appear with the absence of predicted antimatter, magnetic monopoles, or any means for the whole universe to come to the same precise background temperature. Then the formation of the first stars is as enigmatic as the origin of the first biological cell. Dark matter and dark energy are as enigmatic as the galactic motions they are needed to explain.
At the root of all standard science are many assumptions that may be quite incorrect. At the top is that there is no God. Another is that present process can be used to explain everything in the past. When we look at a canyon we are taught to assume the river at the bottom cut the canyon. But perhaps tectonic events made the canyon and there is a river at the bottom because water always flows downhill. At the root of big bang theory is a pure assumption that has been named the "Cosmological Principle". Perhaps inaccuracies there are responsible for the big bang's multitude of problems.
There is more about the role of assumptions in science found on our website here. There are many more resources on young earth and young universe evidences here.
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