Real Science Radio: Hugh Ross & Captain Zircon

 * Fred Williams: webmaster for Creation Research Society co-hosts Real Science Radio with Bob Enyart and they conclude discussion of Volume 20(3) of the 2006 Journal of Creation, a prestigious peer-reviewed science journal from CreationOnTheWeb.com.

* Captain Zircon's Helium Race: Bob and Fred describe how helium diffusing out of zircon refutes some old-earth claims. From our List of Not So Old Things (rsr.org//zircons), Helium Found Everywhere It's Not Supposed to Be. By the evolutionary time frame, zircon crystals should not have loads of helium in them, but they do. The periodic table shows helium to be an ultralight element. As even deflating birthday balloons suggest, because its atom is so tiny, helium easily escapes from most enclosures, especially natural ones including from crystals! The crystal lattice is large compared to the size of the tiny helium atom. All movement from the unavoidable atomic vibrations of thermal fluctuation, will relatively quickly result in helium escaping its confinement. Empirical laboratory experiments confirm this obvious physical reality. Continental crust contains uranium, and uranium has a super slow half-life and its decay chain produces helium. The above facts enable us to test a huge assumption made by old-earth geologists, namely, that zircons, which also contain radioactive uranium, are a billion years old. If zircons were that old, and if uranium always decayed slowly over hundreds of millions of years, then zircons should have almost no helium in them becuase while such decay would be super slow, the helium would diffuse out of the crystal very rapidly. A Ph.D. geophysicist from Los Alamos Nat'l Labs and other physicists and scientists published a prediction of the rate of helium diffusion from zircons at various temperatures. A high-precision laboratory then measured actual diffusion rates which precisely matched their predictions. These impressively credentialed scientists based their predictions on a 6,000 year age of the zircons. Meanwhile, a prediction based on billion-year ages would be off in the amount of helium retained in zircons by a factor of about 100,000. Thus, this is powerful worldwide evidence, based on the most fundamental effects of temperature on atoms, that the assumptions are unjustified which give radiometric ages of billions of years.

* Origin of Earth's Radioactivity: Show update. See rsr.org/radioactivity for a report on Dr. Walt Brown's theory of the origin of Earth's radioactivity. And, if you want easy-to-explain, powerful evidence against the alleged stellar catastrophe origin for uranium, see rsr.org/radioactivity#uranium! :) 

* The White Australian Policy: by evolutionist Keith Windschuttle admits and documents the connection between racism in Australia and Darwin's racism and the racist views of Darwin's followers including the racist, embryo fraud perpetrator and founder, ironically, of the Association for the Propagation of Ethical Atheism, Ernst Haeckel. (Update: Consider also Bob Enyart's interview of Sharon Sebastian on her book, Darwin's Racists.)

* Hugh Ross and Reasons To Doubt: Old-earth creationist Huge Ross co-wrote Who was Adam? which shows his desire to muddy the waters by making monkeys (non-humans) out of men, for example, quoting a now thoroughly discredited study (debunked in the evolutionary Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) that had wrongly claimed that Neandertal tooth growth rates provided evidence it was not human. Also, Ross boasts of predictions of his Old-Earth model such as 1) mankind's population was once small, and 2) humans then spread around the world, leading Bob to point out that he prefers the kinds of predictions made by Dr. Walt Brown!
UPDATE & WARNING: See Bob and Fred's 2012 RSR: Caveman program which presented an interesting genetic comparison such that, "two modern chimps of the same species will have more DNA variation than Neanderthals or Denisovans have to modern humans!" But, beware the photos and scary video!

* Hugh Ross and General Unreliability: Forget relativity. First we've got to deal with General Unreliability. For years old-earth theists have circulated the fine-tuning claims from progressive creationist Hugh Ross (Reasons to Believe). Those claims are shown to be sloppy at rsr.org/big-bang#ross. Sadly, Dr. Ross has a reputation for sloppy handling of scientific, linguistic, and biblical data. One of our own examples is Hugh's claim that the Genesis days must be long ages because any "biblical chronolog" must be sequence determinable from external evidence. That is fanicful. He merely concocted a hermenetic out of thin air because it supports his terribly loose interpretation of Genesis. (For example, Ross rejects the global flood, rejects that the Sun was created before Day One, rejects that God created plants before aquatic animals; etc.). In The Fingerprint of God, Ross writes that:

Genesis 1 fits the form and, hence, the function of a Biblical chronolog. A study of all other chronologs in scripture reveals that events presented in sequence are both time-order discernable and time-order significant.

Sadly, all of this is pure fabrication. No such "study" exists, yet Ross claims that this is, "a major purpose of the chronolog". The prophecies of Daniel and Revelation that Ross references as proof are irrelevant to a claim that a historical sequence recorded in the Bible must later be, "discernible... for validating the supernatural accuracy of the writers statements." There is no such hermeneutic that requires that a "Biblical chronolog" result in external factors that must enable students of God's Word later to discern the order of such events. That is fanciful and of course it would be violated anyway by, for example, the ten plagues of the Exodus.

* Hugh Ross' Affiliated Scientists Debate Bob: You might enjoy our CD of a moderated debate before a live Denver audience between young earth and old earth teams. Bob Enyart and his friend, Christian high school science teacher, Don Daly defend the young earth position versus two members of the Colorado chapter of Hugh Ross' Reasons to Believe, noted geophysicist John Nicholl, former president of the  EEGS, and mathematics professor Gordon Brown from the University of Colorado in Boulder. You just might love listening to the: Age of the Earth Debate!

 * Surprising praise of Christianity: A widely published author and former research sociologist at UCLA Berkley, Rodney Stark, wrote The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success! Modern science arose from Christianity. And although Stark uses a lengthy definition for the term capitalism, Bob prefers economic freedom, or the authoritative, do not steal.

 
* Well, at Least She Didn't Blaspheme: Honest to Genesis by biologist Margaret Towne makes the absurd anachronistic error that all vertebrates have gills and tails as embryos.

Today's Resource: You just might love listening to Bob Enyart's Age of the Earth Debate!