This manuscript proposes a new approach for science's battle against the rising influence in America of pseudo-science and the Creationist movement. The framework of Creationist Bible-based earth history, focusing on Genesis and the Noachian flood, can be assembled into a single geologic time scale (Figure 1, enlarged by addition of many geologic facts, difficult for Creationists to explain. (Figure 1 is an abbreviated version of the time scale outlined in the following paragraph which was redrawn and published by the American Scientist.) Some of the items are so absurd that all but the most dedicated fundamentalists will see the overall picture as scientific nonsense, even bordering on humor, a most rare commodity in Creationist literature. Science, rather than using its traditional defensive approach of item-by-item rebuttal of Creationist attacks, needs to take the offensive by challenging Creationists to defend their "scientific" view of earth history as represented by this time scale. (Note that the numbered items in this Time Scale are further expanded in subsequent numbered sections which are keyed to these same numbers.)
Day 1 - Space, light & dark, earth materials.
Day 2 - Waters above and waters below.
Day 3 - Earth's crust and plants.
Day 4 - Sun, moon, and stars in place.
Day 5 - Atmosphere + animals of the waters.
Day 6 - Land animals + Adam & Eve.
Day 7 - Day of rest.
Figure 1. Unlike the 4.5-billion-year-old geologic time scale that has been developed through a century and a half of scientific research, creationism's geologic time scale compresses the history of the universe into about 6,000 years, requiring that radiometric dating be discredited and that many of the steps in the formation of the earth were so accelerated that millions of years of geologic change were accomplished in a few days or weeks. The entire fossil record of the earth is explained as having been deposited during the year of the Noachian flood 4,500 years ago.
Creationism has its philosophical roots in the Darwinian debates of the last century, but its welding into a potent political movement has been largely a phenomenon of the last half of the 20th century (Numbers, 1993). In recent years Creationism has grown into a force capable of challenging orthodox science in the arena of public opinion (Schmidt, 1996). After federal courts struck down attempts to force teaching of creation "science" in the public schools, Creationists have taken a new approach. They have begun pushing laws requiring that any teaching of evolution in the public schools be balanced against or accompanied by teaching of the "evidence against evolution." In effect, this "evidence" consists mostly of Creationism's religion-based pseudo-science. Such laws, if enacted, would have chilling effects on science teaching and textbook content and would lend governmental support to one particular religious interpretation.
The real battles (Schmidt 1996) between traditional science and Creationism are likely to be fought on a state by state, school board by school board basis in a form that will require active, grass-roots participation by large numbers of American scientists. Unfortunately, most of us are essentially unarmed for such battles. While Creationists regard this as a holy war worthy of their almost undivided attention, most scientists have given it short shrift, either by ignoring it or by laughing at such pretensions of "science." As a result, most scientists remain so unfamiliar with the claims, methods, and arguments of Creationists that they are unprepared for participation in any public confrontation. A notable exception was the late Robert Dietz of Arizona State University who used both science and humor of the cartoons of John Holden (Dietz and Holden, 1987) to actively debate the local Creationists. Excellent descriptions of methods used by Creationists to win such debates, at least in the public mind, are given by Thwattes and Awbrey (1993), Fezer (1993), and Arthur (1996). To develop any level of preparation for such arguments and methods, one requires copious time as well as access to the diffuse mass of "gray" publications, religious tracts, and other in-house Creationist publications. For those without the time or access to such resources, this article is intended as a "crash-course" introduction to Creationist history, ideas, and methods as well as some factual tools to oppose Creationist claims and a few of the best cartoons to inject a bit of humor into any discussion (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Creationists offer a cartooned view of science that is often hard to address in public debate. Creationism, itself, meanwhile, has tempted a few cartoonists to take up their pens. John Holden, a paleontologist by training (and co-author with R. S. Dietz of a cartoon commentary, Creation/Evolution Satiricon), has pondered the implications of Henry Morris' explanation of lunar craters as the result of cosmic battles between Satan's angels and those of the Archangel Michael.
Numbers (1993) gives a massively documented history of the Creationist movement from which much of the following is excerpted. In the 1930s a group of mostly Seventh Day Adventists founded the Deluge Geological Society (DGS) while in the 1940s a second group, mostly Baptists associated with Wheaton College, founded the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA). The ASA focused on the interplay of Christianity and science whereas the DGS sought to bring interpretations of the geological record into accord with a strict Biblical interpretation.
The ASA and DGS merged briefly in the 1940s but ultimately split largely after a talk given by a young ASA member, J. Lawrence Kulp. Kulp studied C14 dating methods with Urey at Chicago and then set up the second C14 lab in the country at Columbia University. On the basis of emerging C14 results, Kulp told the combined group in 1949 that there was no escaping an interpretation of great antiquity for the human race. The result was a permanent rift. In the 1950s Ph.D. hydrologist and fundamentalist, Henry M. Morris, and broadly educated seminarian and Bible teacher, John C. Whitcomb, Jr., joined forces. They updated many of the ideas of George McCready Price's New Geology (1923) to produce The Genesis Flood (Whitcomb and Morris, 1961). Morris believed the ASA "was too permeated with evolution ever to be reclaimed." He and eight like-minded individuals, including Ph.D. biologist Duane Gish, met in 1961 with the purpose of founding a new group based on the philosophy and ideas of the book. Out of this nucleus came the Creation Research Society (CRS) in 1963 and the scientific creationist movement.
Largely under the influence of Morris and Gish, the CRS has grown into a national and international network of organizations with links to the parent Institute for Creation Research (ICR). The ICR in the San Diego area now operates as a degree granting organization, accredited by California's State Department of Education, offering M.S. degrees in biology, geology, astro/geophysics, and science education. California removed its accreditation in 1990 but had to restore it two years later under orders of a federal judge (Numbers, 1993). The Institute publishes many books and articles and sponsors its own Bible oriented "research" studies and symposia. Currently it is reputed to operate on an annual budget of 3 million dollars (Scott, 1996).
One of the greatest anomalies in the history of scientific creationism and flood geology has been the near non-presence of well educated geologists (Numbers, 1993). Even most of the promising young evangelicals who undertook advanced work in geology emerged with badly shaken faith in strict Creationism. J. Lawrence Kulp was mentioned above. F. Donald Eckelmann, a Wheaton alumnus, ultimately became chair of Brown University's geology department and Christian evolutionist. Davis Young, the son of an eminent Old Testament scholar, studied geology at Princeton and moved on to M.S. work at Penn State, still a believer in the Morris version of the Genesis flood. During his Ph.D. work with Eckelmann at Brown, Young became more and more disenchanted with Creationist ideas, subsequently writing a book (1977) charging flood geologists with teaching "bad geological science." The same scenario ensued for Nicholas Rupke, a Dutch student of P. H. Kunen, who submitted a manuscript on cataclysmal sedimentation for publication by the CRS. At CRS urging Rupke came to Princeton in 1968 and completed a Ph.D. in 1972 under F. B. Van Houten and A. G. Fisher. He finished by accepting organic evolution and forsaking the faith of his family, going on to Oxford and a career in the history of science. Harold James, Jr., and Edward Lugenbeal attended the Seventh Day Adventist Theological Seminary before being recruited to do graduate work at major institutions at the expense of the Adventist Geological Research Institute. James, after earning his doctorate in geology at Princeton, was found to have been "so indoctrinated" as to require dismissal by the GRI. Lugenbeal studied prehistoric archeology at Wisconsin before resigning from GRI citing "the emotionally and ethically debilitating attempt to bolster our peoples' faith by telling them a series of partial truths about science" (Numbers, 1993).
A very few young evangelicals did manage to survive graduate education in geology with their Biblical fundamentalist faith intact. Three of the most prominent are Stephen Austin, John Morris, and Kurt Wise (no relation).
Steven Austin earned a B.S. in geology form the University of Washington and an M.S. from San Jose State with a thesis critical of uniformitarianism. Morris and the CRS paid Austin's tuition and living expenses while he earned a Ph.D. in coal geology from Penn State in 1979 (Numbers, 1993). During his Penn State time he also wrote creationist articles under the pseudonym of Stuart Nevins. Currently he is chair of the ICR's Department of Geology and a major contributor to their in-house publications and articles on geology. His Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe, (Austin, 1994) is a slick, full-color volume designed both as a guide for Austin's fundamentalist field trips into the Canyon (Figure 3) and as a potential text for fundamentalist college-level geology courses. In these publications his scientific philosophy is never in doubt: "The real battle in regard to understanding the Grand Canyon is founded not just upon Creation and Noah's Flood versus evolution, but upon Christianity versus humanism." (Austin, 1994)
Figure 3. Grand Canyon geology --- the sweeping history of earth told in rock that has inspired generation of geologists --- has recently been rewritten by creationists. In the alternative view the canyon was not formed by layers of sedimentation atop ancient metamorphic rock deposited over millions of years, followed by volcanic flows into the canyon and the downcutting action of the powerful Colorado River. Some 500 million years of the canyon's history are explained in this view (labels at left) as taking place during the Noachian flood year, a feat that would require massive layers of wet sediments to be deposited and harden at astounding rates over the course of weeks, leaving them solid enough to be incised into mile-high cliffs by receding floodwaters. (Creationist ages, left, after Austin 1994, with basic geology after Coney 1975.)
John Morris, Henry's son, earned a Ph.D. in geological engineering from the University of Oklahoma and taught there for several years. In 1984 he moved to the ICR where he is now Administrative Vice President. He has led several expeditions in search of Noah's ark and has worked on the supposed coexistence of human and dinosaur tracks in the Paluxy River bed of Texas. His book, The Young Earth (J. Morris, 1994), has an initial 35 pages which might just as well be the lesson book for a fundamentalist Sunday school. This is followed by about 75 pages of a mixture of geologic interpretation and Biblical themes. The final 70 pages are view-graph masters designed to "be shared with your church or Bible study groups." His overriding values seem clear. "The data of geology, in our view, should be interpreted in light of the Scripture, rather than distorting Scripture to accommodate current geological philosophy." (Morris and Morris, 1989)
Kurt Wise was raised in a fundamentalist Baptist family in rural Illinois and accepted flood geology as a teenager while attending a conference for Christian youth run by Bob Jones University. He graduated from University of Chicago with honors in geophysical sciences before going on to Harvard and his Ph.D. with Stephen J. Gould. He has been the focus of a number of articles in the popular press (Campbell and Scroggins, 1995, and Hitt, 1996) and currently teaches at the fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan College in Tennessee near the site of the Scopes trial. He minces no words about his scientific philosophy and agenda. "I intend to replace the evolutionary tree with the creationist orchard, separately created, separately planted by God." (Hitt, 1996)
Until recently "Creation Science," as presented by the likes of Henry Morris and Duane Gish, was such a hodge-podge of geologic ideas, floating loosely in time and space, that it was nearly impossible to obtain an overall picture of how their Bible-based model might fit into the fabric of generally accepted geologic and paleontologic observations. This has changed or at least been modernized with the rising influence in ICR circles of the likes of Austin, Morris, and Wise. All three are familiar with some of the geologic literature but are highly selective about which portions they decide to use. They also tend to lean more heavily on ICR in-house publications than on refereed papers in the general literature.
The current thinking of the young creationist geologists is perhaps best shown in a paper co-authored by six of them, including Austin, Morris, and Wise (Austin et al., 1994). Their "tentative" model of "Catastrophic Plate Tectonics: A Global Flood Model of Earth History" starts about 6,000 years ago with a pre-flood earth differentiated into core, mantle, and a crust with horizontal segregation into granitic continents and basaltic ocean basins. "If this differentiation had occurred by any natural means, the gravitational energy released ... would produce enough heat to melt the earth's crust and vaporize the earth's oceans. ...it most certainly occurred before the creation of organisms (at the latest Day 3 of the creation week.)" The authors note that "even though such differentiation could have been performed by God without the 'natural' release of gravitational potential energy" the differentiation process provides a natural driving mechanism for the proposed next stages of rapid motion, the Noachian flood. This was initiated as slabs of oceanic floor broke loose and subducted along the edges of continents. Deformation of the mantle by these slabs raised the temperature and lowered its viscosity into a runaway convection system which overturned the whole mantle. Upwelling mantle plumes created the mid-oceanic ridges, drove plate tectonics at rates of "meters per second," and discharged magmatic steam into the atmosphere to cause the flood. Tidal waves washed the continents and piled marine sediments into great mountain systems along the edges. In a few hundred years after the flood, residual heat from the cooling ocean floor warmed the oceans and climate into a system characterized by efficient atmospheric transport of moisture to the poles to create glaciation and ice caps.
The thermal problems of this model are mind boggling. At the start, gravitative energy released by earth's differentiation into core and mantle would raise average temperature of the entire globe by 2,500 degrees (Birch, 1965). To this must be added the frictional heating of the runaway subduction plus the massive heat of condensation of a collapsing vapor canopy. Then brand new basaltic ocean floors at minimum temperatures of 1,100 degrees C. had to form over 2/3 of the earth's surface, presumably beneath non-boiling flood waters. Finally this massive thermal pulse dissipated in a few thousand years by unstated processes to leave most of the earth's surface devoid of hot springs or abnormal heat flow. The authors apologize that their "model is still in the formative stages and thus is incomplete." From a thermal viewpoint "incomplete" seems like gross exaggeration. An incandescent earth with an asbestos ark floating on a sea of molten lava would be more appropriate!
Austin's (1994) book in particular and to some extent Morris and Morris (1989) and J. Morris (1994) are not to be taken lightly. Before entering into confrontations with Creationists any scientist, even one with extensive geologic training, would be well advised to read these publications very carefully to see where and how the record is cleverly distorted or how obscure literature citations or in-house Creationist studies are expanded into general principles concerning a global flood. In reading such literature, a traditional geologist has difficulty keeping the time scale in order. Time and again, I found myself confusing pre- and post-flood events or mixing creation week events with flood events. One version (Froede, 1995) has a rudimentary scale with major eras being Creation Week, Antediluvian Ages, Flood Event, Ice Age, and Present. Another by Walker (1994) splits geologic time into eras and stages, based largely on numbers of days during creation week and the flood event. In order to minimize my confusion and get the overall Biblical chronological sequence in order, I found it necessary to go through conflicting ideas in many Creationist papers before being able to build my own version of their geologic column. Once this framework of Creationist geologic time was in place, many of their speculations could be added to other valid geologic observations which they generally ignore to produce Figure 1. Not included are items from even the lunatic fringe of Creationism such as the flat earth based on the Biblical description of its having "corners" (Flirpa, 1987) or a geocentric solar system harking back to pre-Copernican days (Schadewald, 1985) or Henry Morris' hollow earth. After a creation seminar on October 24, 1986, Morris was asked about the bottomless pit of Revelations 9:1-11. His answer was "Whenever Hades or Sheol is referred to in the Bible, it's always down in the earth, the depths of the earth. So right there in the center of the earth, apparently there's a great opening that we can't really deal with in terms of our seismic instruments or other instrumentation. But apparently it is there. You can take the Bible to mean what it says." (Creation/Evolution newsletter, 1986)
Creationists will undoubtedly challenge or try to confuse arguments concerning individual items on Figure 1. The detailed discussion that follows attempts to arm the scientific community with some real data and references and to warn of typical Creationist attacks on particular points. For additional geologic discussion, a scientist would be well advised to read Heaton's A young Grand Canyon ?, Weber's (1980) paper on "fatal flaws in flood geology" or Young's (1977, 1982) books which seem to have upset the Creationists enough to make them attempt to answer his points one by one (Morris and Morris, 1989) or Gish's (1993) book of rebuttals.
The Biblical sequence of events of creation week is well known and discussed at length by H. Morris (1993) among a host of others. Some Creationists even highlight the discrepancy between the Genesis sequence of events and the traditional "evolutionary order of appearance." J. Morris (1994) gives the following comparisons which to his mind support the Biblical sequence but which a scientist might find an ideal place to begin application of logic.
. Biblical Order Evolutionary Order
Earth before sun and stars Sun and stars before Earth First life forms are plants First life forms are marine organisms Fruit trees before fish Fish before fruit trees Fish before insects Insects before fish Land vegetation before sun Sun before land plants Birds before land reptiles Reptiles before birds Man as the cause of death Death precedes man
The precise date of creation in years varies among Creationists. A good discussion of the origins of this date, starting with the Bishop of Ussher (1650), is given by Brice (1982). H. M. Morris (1993) suggests that creation took place about 6,000 years ago and that elapsed time from creation to the flood was 1,656 years. By subtraction, this means that the flood took place about 2350 B.C., a time somewhat after the start of recorded Egyptian and Summerian history. J. D. Morris (1994) notes that some uncertainties exist between the length of the Biblical time and the historical record but "I suspect it is the secular chronology which needs revision."
The well known Genesis story is expanded at length by H. M. Morris (1993). Walker (1994) describes a 1700 year span as the "Lost-World Era" starting with the apple incident and expulsion from Eden and ending with the Flood about 2300 B.C. He suggests this name because "not much of geologic significance would have occurred in the time available." This "not much" would include almost all events in the rich record of Precambrian geology.
Most creationist models for the source of the flood waters stem from the writings of Isaac Newton Vail who proposed (1874) and successively refined into the "annular theory" (Vail, 1912) a model in which the early earth had a series of Saturn-like aqueous rings, the progressive collapse of which caused successive cataclysms to bury and create fossils. Collapse of the last remnant ring caused the Noachian flood. Subsequently, most writings propose only one great canopy which collapses to create the flood (Dillow, 1981). Vardiman (1986a), head of the ICR physics department, calculates that the base of the canopy was about 7 km above the earth's surface with an ambient surface temperature of about 30 degrees C.. Additional unlikely details of this pre-flood atmosphere are calculated by Jorgensen (1990). Other Creationists writings such as the Austin et al. (1994) model avoid some of this problem by having much of the future flood water stored within the earth to burst forth as the "fountains of the deep" described in the Bible (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Catastrophic phenomena must be postulated to explain the occurrence of a flood powerful enough to drown all but a few creatures and to massively rearrange the surface of the earth. Creationists have suggested that before the Noachian flood the earth had a Venusian atmosphere dominated by a huge canopy of water vapor that collapsed and inundated the earth to create the flood with the help of "fountains of the deep" activated by the subduction of crustal plates. At the center of the earth in one creationist view, as yet undetected by seismology, is Hell.
Creationists argue that radiometric dates are invalid on a number of grounds, despite the massive and detailed explanation of all the dating methods by Dalrymple (1991). They argue that if the speed of light is changing, then all other fundamental constants could have changed, including rates radioactive decay. Some of these arguments are based on supposed changes in the speed of light using uncertainties in such measurements as of about 20 years ago. More recent refinements in the measurements have laid this idea to rest for all but the most committed (see discussion by Schadewald, 1984, and Lippard, 1989, 1990).
Related creationist arguments note (correctly) that light from the most distant galaxies has red shifts up to the equivalent of four times the speed of light. Hence, they argue that the universe appears to be expanding at a rate in excess of the speed light in violation of Einstein's equations and that these values for the speed of light must have changed with time. Thus, a very young universe is possible (Curtis, 1995). The whole argument is based on a false premise, that these red shifts are Doppler effects. In reality, the red shifts have little to do with Doppler-like instantaneous speeds of celestial objects. Instead, they represent a kind of tape measure of the wavelengths of light stretching from those distant galaxies to the earth. When these wavelengths started, they were of normal lengths. In the intervening eons, the cosmos has expanded along the line of travel by as much as four times, stretching the wavelengths embedded in it. Thus, the Creationist argument is a complete misreading of the physics: the red shift has nothing to do with instantaneous Doppler effects and Einsteinian equations but instead is a measure of long term expansion of the cosmos and everything within it.
Another creationist argument claiming unreliability of radiometric dating is that of Gentry (1992), who observed tiny spheres or halos of radiation damage around minerals embedded in Precambrian micas. An excellent summary of Gentry, both as a person and a "scientist," is by Gardner (1989). Gentry argues that these halos had to be formed in primordial granites by some, now extinct, very short-lived, radioactive element during the first few minutes between neucleosynthesis and Earth formation. Because this contradicts geologic dating of Precambrian events, he argues all those dates must be wrong. His argument with its confused geology and the real geologic facts refuting it are put forth by Wakefield (1988) and Wakefield and Wilkerson (1990), who show that Gentry's samples came from dikes that cut Precambrian sedimentary rocks. Hence, his samples must be younger than those sedimentary events: there is no way the geologic setting allows them to be of primordial origin. In contrast, the best radiometric dates yield a primordial age of the earth and solar system by defining sequential events of accretion and early differentiation in meteorites ranging from 4.58 to 4.50 Ga (Allegre et al., 1995).
Creationists commonly cite the helium problem as evidence for a young atmosphere, contradicting the radiometric dates (Vardiman 1986b, 1990, and J. Morris, 1994). It is well known that the rate of production of helium from the earth's crust and mantle exceeds by a factor of 2 to 5 the Jeans rate of strictly thermal escape from the upper atmosphere (Kellogg and Wasserburg, 1990; Harper and Jacobsen, 1996). If these were the only factors in the earth's helium balance, the atmosphere might have a maximum age of only 2 ma. (J. Morris, 1994). However, Shizgal and Arkos (1996) provide a number of non-thermal processes capable of accounting for steady-state atmospheric compositions of earth, Venus, and Mars. These include exothermic exchanges of He+ and N2+ to boost He to escape velocity as well as the polar wind sweeping He+ outward along high-latitude open magnetic field lines. The helium problem is still under active scientific investigation, but it has gone far beyond the classic thermal escape models still cited by the Creationists.
Another frequently cited argument for the "unreliability" of radiometric dates is Austin's (1994) dating of the Uinkaret lava flows of the Grand Canyon region. It is generally recognized that some of these flows were so young that they cascaded over the Canyon edges and dammed huge lakes within it. Austin cites a number of different analyses of these lavas which can be used to calculate a wide range of radiometric model ages, some older than the earth itself. He concludes (p. 129) by asking: "Has any Grand Canyon rock ever been successfully dated?" The counter argument might be: "Why is your sundial not as accurate as my quartz crystal watch?" There are many methods of deriving radiometric dates, some are widely recognized as being far more accurate than others. For the most part, Austin used a ham-handed approach by dating whole rocks rather than individual minerals or parts of individual mineral grains. He then culled other dates from the literature for comparison to complain about the wide spread of all the results: a straw-man approach. In reality, there are quite precise dates on these Uinkaret volcanics, using some of the best K-Ar methods (Wenrich et al., 1995). These show a regional pattern of younger and younger dates moving eastward with time to reach the youngest of the Grand Canyon volcanos only 10,000 years ago, in good accord with the geomorphic data.
Creationist claims about radiometric dates coupled with the supposed unreliability of the fossil record fail to point out the rarity of locations where rocks with well controlled fossil dates are closely associated with proper mineral material for the most precise of radiometric dates. There are at most a few hundred of these well dated localities on which the entire dating system of the geologic column is based. Where such conditions exist, the same fossil horizons yield precise dates of the same fossil horizons even then the locations are continents apart. For instance, Bowring et al. (1993) use the finest uranium-lead methods to date zircons associated with the base of the Cambrian in Siberia at 543.9 (+/- 0.2) million years while in southern Africa, Grotzinger et al. (1995) find a number of ash beds spanning the same fossil range yielding dates from 545 to 539 (+/- 1) million years. In the Rocky Mountain region, about 20 Cretaceous ash beds are interlayered with well known fossil-bearing sequences recognized both here and in Europe. Precision dating of these ash beds by Obradovich (1993) confirms the same 1, 2, 3 .. sequence as do the fossils and field relationships for individual beds differing by only 0.5 to 1 million years.
In the face of such precision and reproducibility, it is difficult to argue that radiometric methods and the associated stratigraphy, when used with care on the best of geologic locations, have no reliability and that the fossil record is a rather haphazard jumble of life forms mashed together as the flotsam and jetsam of a single great flood.
Creationists (Gish, 1992, and Ham, 1993) use Biblical statements of the absence of death in Eden prior to the apple incident to conclude that all animals, including dinosaurs, were vegetarians at that time. Thus, they would claim that God created Tyranosaurus Rex to eat leaves with those teeth and peacefully share Eden with lions, humans, and the like.
The "evidence" most commonly cited for coexistence of pre-flood humans and dinosaurs is the exposure of footprints near Glen Rose in central Texas in the bed of the Paluxy River. In that these beds are interpreted as Noachian flood deposits, the tracks must have been made by the evil people of those days as well as the dinosaurs just before both groups were engulfed by the waters. Why the tracks are those of walking rather than running individuals is not explained.
To my knowledge, the best scientifically based discussion of these tracks is by G. J. Kuban (1986) who reports visiting the site in the company of a number of Creationists, including ICR's John Morris. Kuban's extensive documentation of the tracks includes stain markings of obviously non-human, three clawed toes as integral parts of the "man-tracks." He notes later correspondence with John Morris of ICR, including Morris' subsequent agreement that all the Taylor Site tracks (the best of the sites) were probably dinosaurian. In a following article of the same issue, J. Morris (1986) makes a half-hearted retraction.
Kuban's religious neutrality is shown in an after statement to his 1986 paper: "I am a Christian and believe in a Creator, but prefer not to be labeled a 'Creationist' or an 'Evolutionist,' since I do not fully identify with all the tenets that are often assumed to typify each camp. However, on some issues that I have studied in depth, such as the Paluxy controversy (Kuban also has published a 250 page monograph on the subject), I have formed definite conclusions. Although my findings are not favorable to the "man track" claims, the objective of my research has not been to attack Creationism, but to carefully investigate and document what actually exists on the Paluxy sites alleged to contain human footprints." Kuban notes that: "When the full evidence is brought to light, it is evident that all the Taylor Site tracks are dinosaurian."
Films for Christ Association, which made and distributed the film "Footprints in Stone" about these tracks, reviewed Kuban's evidence and showed its basic honesty by immediately withdrawing the film from distribution and giving a clear retraction (1986).
Despite all this evidence, even from within Creationist circles, the Paluxy footprints are certain to be raised again and again before scientifically unsophisticated audiences. For instance, Helfinstine and Roth (1994) have published a 109 page booklet on these tracks and artifacts. H&R are at best amateur geologists (R cites his credentials as four extension course in geology; H cites none at all), and at worst they have the bias of being past presidents of the Twin-Cities Creation Science Association. They continue the claim of human footprints as well as the existence of a "human finger" of ante-deluvian man with photos looking remarkably like a geologic concretion. They also illustrate a "pre-flood" hammer embedded in iron oxide in a setting looking like a typical bog iron deposit, a process which is still going on today and could easily surround a 19th century hammer. Interestingly, their list of acknowledgments does not include ICR's John Morris who wrote a book on the tracks nor Glen Kuban with his thorough scientific studies on the site.
H. Morris (1993) noting Noah's list of the various human generations and their times of death (Genesis 5 and 6), concludes that "one of the most remarkable aspects of Noah's record is the great longevity of the antediluvian patriarchs. The average life span of those recorded - except for Enoch - was 913 years." Tables showing all the ages and calculations were published by Lightfoot in 1647 and are reproduced by Brice (1982). Vardiman (1986a) proposes that shielding from cosmic radiation by the pre-flood atmospheric water canopy was the cause for human longevity. According to the Vardiman model, Dillow's (1981) graph showing a nearly linear decrease in life span in the twelve generations following Noah at 950 years to Jacob at 147 years, was the result of progressively increasing radiation exposure once the atmospheric canopy had cleared to produce the flood.
Lunar craters are interpreted by Morris (1978) as the result of a cosmic battle between Satan's angels and those of the Archangel Michael (Figure 2). NASA has not yet accepted this model. In addition Creationists allege that lack of thick dust on the moon and it its craters indicates a young earth. This argument continues to be made despite a recent Creationist technical paper (Snelling and Rush, 1993) which reviews the subject and concludes:
"It thus appears that the amount of meteoritic dust and meteorite debris in the lunar regolith and surface dust layer, even taking into account the postulated early intense bombardment, does not contradict the evolutionists' multi-billion year time scale (while not proving it). Unfortunately, counter responses by creationists have so far failed because of spurious arguments or faulty calculations. Thus, until new evidence is forthcoming, creationists should not continue to use the dust on the moon as evidence against an old age for the moon and solar system.
The geologic record is clear in showing more and more complex life forms at progressively higher levels. Creationists argue that this represents more and more complex animals running to the mountain tops to be washed off and buried last (Figure 5), a mechanism proposed early in this century by George McCready Price in many papers and in his textbook, the New Geology (1923). Excellent summaries of Price and his ideas are given by Gardner (1986) and Numbers (1982). This mammals-to-the-mountain tops model is still in vogue in Creationist circles although some more recent variations have included rising waters engulfing first the shoreline plant and animal communities and then the upland flora and fauna. The argument somehow neglects to discuss why the burial sequence for fish, marine reptiles, and marine mammals followed the same pattern of increasing complexity when these groups should not have been so severely affected by rising waters. In addition, looking at the distribution of intelligence in today's humans, a pre-flood human race without a single individual dumb enough to be trapped on some isolated mountain top in early stages of the rising flood waters would seem to be a miracle in its own right.
Figure 5. "Creation science" explains the fossil record and deposits of petroleum, natural gas, and coal as products of the flood year. Larger land animals, it is argued, ran to the mountaintops (upper insert), explaining why they appear in upper fossil strata; meanwhile massive mats of vegetation formed (lower insert), later to become coal beds. The volcano that is now Mount Ararat rose rapidly (bottom right) beneath the deluge and just as rapidly cooled to provide a place for Noah's ark to later be grounded. According to this view, human beings and dinosaurs co-existed before the flood. At lower left, water spews from one of the Biblical "fountains of the deep."
Above all, the creationist arguments implies that the fossil record is a somewhat haphazard jumble of odds and ends dumped by the flood and represents only a general sequence of simple to complex life. They commonly argue that the geologic rock record and its fossil sequence is a vast conspiracy among pointy-headed academics who warp and misinterpret the evidence in an attempt to defend cherish beliefs about a science's particular version of the nature of the earth. Another group beside the scientific community has vested interests in the problem. Oil companies spend billions of dollars every year based on the belief that the earth contains a highly ordered and very predictable fossil record. Each year they test and refine the details of this fossil sequence to locate ancient reefs, trace the shorelines of long vanished oceans, and unravel the complex time relationships of ancient mountain systems. These fossil data control the drilling of thousands of multi-million dollar wells, guiding the drill bits to precise geologic targets at depths up to 8 km. One might expand the Creationist charges about pointy-headed academics to ask who is likely to be more reliable about hard facts concerning the nature of the earth: (1) a group of religious advocates most of whom have almost no direct knowledge of the earth but wish to push their particular theology about the Bible or (2) numerous hard-headed petroleum businessmen who have been drilling that earth on a day-to-day basis for over a century and every day pour millions more of their own dollars into ventures based on that experience with the fossils and the geologic record?
The thick limestone and dolomite formations which cover large portions of the interior of North America to depths on the order of a km or more, pose especially difficult problems for the "young earthers." In that these huge deposits are composed dominantly of former calcareous muds and fossil debris from lime secreting organisms, their production during a single "flood year" would seem to require almost Herculean activity on the part of those organisms. For instance, in the Grand Canyon region the Redwall and Kaibab limestone formations are each about 150 m thick. If spread uniformly through the entire "flood year," these two units would require organisms to have produced carbonate mud at rates of about 80 cm per day!
Recently the "young earthers" have avoided this excessive growth rate during the "flood year" by a new twist (Austin et al., 1994). For about 1,500 years between Eden and the "flood," extremely abundant carbonates were produced by the vibrant biologic activity in the postulated extremely high carbon dioxide pressure of those times. Thick carbonate muds collected in those early ocean basins only to be hurled onto the continents by violent runaway subduction during the flood as plates moved at speeds 1 to 10 km per hour, depending on the model. Conceivably this process might yield the volume of carbonate sediments on the continents but hardly the delicate and orderly succession of fossiliferous limestone and other formations of the continental interior, the Grand Canyon, and elsewhere.
Coral reefs as opposed to regular limestone deposits pose an even more difficult problem because even an unsophisticated public has some idea of typical growth rates of corals. One "young earth" approach is by omission. Austin (1994) notes (correctly) that no great coral reefs occur in the Grand Canyon and, hence, pose no problems there. He fails to mention that the Permian Kaibab limestone of the Canyon has well known and generally equivalent units in the Permian Basin of West Texas (Frenzel et al., 1988). These include the famous Capitan Reef, reaching a maximum thickness of 610 meters (King, 1948) with well exposed forereef and backreef facies, all developed on the edges of the deepwater Permian Basin. Similar integrated reefs and adjacent basin systems can be found for the Silurian of the mid-continent region (Fisher et al., 1988) and the petroleum rich reefs of the Devonian of Alberta (Johnson and McMillan, 1993).
Elsewhere, Morris and Morris (1989) argue correctly but somewhat disingenuously that "coral" reefs of the past are probably not reefs at all. They cite S. E. Nevins (pseudonym of S. Austin, 1975) that one of the greatest of these, El Capitan and the Permian "reef complex" of West Texas, comprises mostly transported fossil-bearing lime muds. However, they state that this complex had a "real topographic expression ...that... controlled the distribution and character of sediments and organisms in the region." To most geologists this is the definition of a reef whether it is 100 % coral or not. No matter what one calls them, these are organic deposits which grew in place and were buried in their own debris. In the case of the Capitan Reef, the "flood" model would require an absolute minimum vertical growth rate for the mass of 1.6 meters per day or 7 cm per hour, a rate 80,000 times the maximum ever observed for a modern reef surface (Chave et al.,1972)!
Coal beds represent compaction of organic materials to 5 to 10 percent of their original thickness. Hence, a typical coal bed might represent an original vegetational debris accumulation of 20 - 30 meters. Austin did his doctoral dissertation (1979) on a single coal bed in Kentucky. He argues that relationships in that bed suggest formation from a mat of floating vegetation, one of the half dozen or so methods of collecting organic layers to produce coal. Subsequently, with Ph.D. safely in hand, he added the interpretation that this floating mat was rafted in a part of Noah's flood accumulation (Figure 5). The implication is that all coal beds formed in this way. For some small coal beds, such mat accumulations are quite reasonable. For others, like the Pittsburgh and Kittaning coals of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, the total area of the original swamp had to be on the order of 20,000 square kilometers with systematic and continuous upward transition from underlying sands and lake beds into the swamp deposit (Wise et al., 1991, and references therein). There is no obvious regional discontinuity to represent the base of any floating mat nor can one imagine a 20,000 square kilometer floating mat avoiding breakup into smaller fragments in the tumultuous seas of the Creationists' flood. Again, the Creationists approach to this Kentucky coal is a case of taking one local example and extrapolating it to the entire geologic record (Major, 1990).
Thick salt beds formed by evaporation of sea water are a common feature of geologic columns in many parts of the world. The "young earth geologists" interpret almost all classic stratigraphic units as deposits produced during the flood year: hence, they must also account for interbedded salt formations as part of those events (Figure 6). Some of the more extensive salt formations with the U.S. are in the Jurassic of the Gulf Coast (Worrall and Snelson, 1989), the Silurian of the New York to Chicago region (Alling and Briggs, 1961; Smosna and Patchen, 1978), and the Permian of the Paradox Basin of Utah (Baars and Stevenson, 1982). In the center of the Paradox Basin these salts reach a depositional thickness of 1.5 km (Rocky Mountain Association of Geologists Atlas, 1972) with at least 29 separate cycles of salt deposition (Hite, 1960). To deposit just these beds in a single year would require the salt to form at an average rate of 4 meters per day (17 cm per hour or 2.8 mm per minute) - and this by evaporation during a world-wide flood event!
Figure 6. Flood geology must explain a massive geologic record as a single year's events. The maximum known thicknesses of sedimentary rocks of a given age are plotted at top to derive their maximum rate of deposition during geologic periods, according to radiometric dating (graph adapted from Hudson, 1964). In the chart are listed some selected features in each geologic time segment that creationist models require to have been formed within part of the year of the Noachian flood, most in a few weeks. Standard geologic interpretations require any single one of them to occupy more than the total 6,000 years of earth history allowed by creationists.
For such deposits Creationists use an ostrich approach. The chemical balance of salt in the ocean is discussed by Austin and Humphreys (1991) and J. D. Morris (1994) with brief paragraphs on each of 11 ways that salt can be added and 7 ways it can be removed. The fourth of these removal methods is by halite (salt) deposition which occurs "as a result of river water evaporation, not sea water. This happens infrequently in trapped pools, but such deposits redissolve easily. This output is trivial. The volume of salt water evaporated in trapped lagoons and not redissolved is not significant." Numerical values for each of these input and output rates are given by Morris but with no units quoted to yield an absolute maximum age of 62 ma. for the oceans. He suggests that the real age is much, much less.
Nowhere is mention given of the enormous halite deposits of the geologic record nor of their generally accepted origin by continuous evaporation of sea water flowing into semi-restricted basins. Morris, in an earlier publication (Morris and Morris, 1989), argues that ancient "pure" salt deposits are not even evaporites because they are so unlike the "dirty" salt deposits forming today. He cites the Russian Sozansky (1973) that great salt deposits are derived from volcanic rocks as products of degassification of the earth's interior brought up by juvenile waters moving along faults. The deceptive statement quoted above about evaporation in trapped lagoons is at best only partly true and even that is obtained by tightly restricting the definition of lagoon. It is difficult to believe that while almost every elementary geology student learns about these great deposits of marine salts, a Ph.D. in geology (Austin) and another in geophysics (Morris) somehow managed to gain their advanced degrees while remaining innocent of any knowledge of such marine evaporative processes and geologic formations.
Typical continents have a "granitic" basement with a cover of relatively flat lying Cambrian and younger sedimentary rocks with thicknesses on the order of a km (Sloss, 1988). Austin (1994) interprets all the traditional Cambrian (540 ma.) through Cretaceous (65 ma.) sedimentary rocks as part of the flood deposits. He labels the early Cenozoic (60 ma.) rocks of the Bryce Canyon area as "post-flood." I am uncertain of the dates he would place on the post-Cretaceous Cenozoic coastal plain and continental shelf deposits, some of which reach thicknesses of 12 km off the Mississippi Delta, but suspect that he would include most of these as "flood-year" deposits or, alternatively, as pre-flood marine deposits washed onto the continents during the flood. The flat lying and relatively undisturbed nature of these deposits argues strongly against such dumping models of pre-flood sediments.
H. Morris (1993) wants to open the ocean basins during later parts of the flood as a means of draining the waters from the continents. (For an alternate Creationist model see note #19, below.) In effect, the Morris model represents a form of continental drift and plate tectonics. If this opening occurred during the last half of the flood year with the east coast of the U.S. moving away from Africa by a total of 5,500 km, this would represent an opening rate of the Atlantic of 30 km per day or more than one km per hour.
A Creationist mechanism proposed by Baumgardner (1990) suggests that sudden subduction of the ocean floor caused steam and global rain for 40 days. Frictional heating of the downgoing slabs reduced the viscosity of the earth's mantle by a "factor of a billion" (from viscosity of rock to that of Jello). The result was a runaway convection system with the plates moving at high speed across the earth's surface. The fact that Baumgardner can write a finite element program to show convection motion proves nothing except that some form of mathematics can be applied to almost any set of assumptions, an excellent example of "garbage in, garbage out."
The "standard" oceanic columns have about 800 meters of deep sea sediments covering 6.45 km of oceanic crust (Worzel, 1974). Present day rates of accumulation of these sediments on the deep ocean floors for muds, calcareous ooze, siliceous ooze, and red clay of the North Pacific are respectively 0.2, .02, .005, and .001 mm/yr (Berger, 1974). Assuming a deposition rate of .01 mm/yr, the 800 m average accumulation would require 80 ma., a quite reasonable geologic value for average age of the ocean basins.
The "young earth" models would require all this accumulation to take place late in the flood year or during the subsequent 4,500 years, a rate averaging about 20 cm/yr or about 20,000 times that of the present. Above all, the sedimentology of very fine grained oozes and muds on the deep sea floor demands extremely slow sedimentation rates rather than the catastrophic dumping indicated by the flood model.
The largest of the Hawaiian islands is a complex of five volcanos built on the sea floor across deep sea sediments which presumably were deposited after the ocean basins opened during middle or later parts of the flood (H. Morris, 1993). Counting its underwater portion, this 30,000 foot high volcanic pile had to grow, cool, and somehow get populated with organisms rapidly migrating from Mt. Ararat, all in the last 4,500 years.
Mt. Ararat is also a volcanic peak reaching 5.2 km built on top of deformed sedimentary rocks. In the chronology of "flood geology" this geometry requires Ararat's top of 2 km of volcanic growth to have occurred entirely under water across deformed flood sediments very late in the flood year. Surprisingly the Bible does not report any associated ash or volcanic activity of this major submarine eruption just beneath the ark. Then, to be available for the ark's landing, the volcano had to cool completely in a matter of months, somewhat in violation of the laws of thermal physics and observations of underwater lava flows of Hawaii. Finally, a tree grew at a truly remarkable rate in only a few weeks on the fresh volcanic soil in order for the dove to bring a branch back to Noah.
Claims of the discovery of Noah's ark in the Mt. Ararat region are reviewed by one of the few persons recently allowed into the Ararat region (Collins and Fasold, 1996). The "ark" claimed to be found by some is shown to be nothing more than a resistant bed in a doubly plunging synclinal fold. Technical discussion of some of the ark design problems are given by Shneour (1986).
In the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone the fossil remains of somewhere between 10 and 27 successive forests are piled one on top of another separated by river and ash deposits (Dorf, 1964). Dorf counts tree rings on the petrified wood and concludes that at the time of their burial the oldest trees averaged about 200 years in age, a difficult fact for Creationists' interpretation of this stack of forests as the deposits of a single year. In early papers Fritz (1984 and references to older papers therein) argues that these forest layers are the result of log jams in successive mud flows from a volcanic flank and, hence, could have been formed in a single short-lived volcanic event. This single mud flow model was and is widely cited by Creationists as an explanation for the successive Yellowstone fossil forest layers, something like a Mt. St. Helens type of catastrophe.
Field evidence given by Yuretich (1984) showed that most of the Yellowstone fossil trees were still in a standing position and many were rooted in soil developed in place. In a discussion and reply by Yuretich, Fritz (1984) notes "Yuretich's observation of in situ stumps is compatible with my model ... of transportation of up to 15% of the upright stumps. Additional studies on stumps picked totest the critical points of the slight differences between our models should show complete agreement." In other words, the multiple levels are for the most part a series of mature forests where were successively buried in place largely by stream related processes. The Creationists cannot represent these as the deposits of a single catastrophic year.
A related Creationist argument is polystrata fossil trees, namely preservation of standing tree stumps many meters in height penetrating a number of strata. The claim is that average sedimentation rates from traditional geologic time scales would be too slow for such trees to be buried before they rotted. The difficult is in the word average in that many geologic deposits occur as a series of closely spaced flood or ash events with the next series separated in time by hundreds to thousands of years.
In the Austin model (1994) the sedimentary rocks of the Grand Canyon were all deposited during the early part of the "flood-year," later to be incised into a canyon by the receding waters. The model requires the newly deposited rocks to become strong enough within a few months after deposition to stand as mile high cliffs in violation of all reasonable calculations from hydrology, soil mechanics, and strength of materials. Some rock types, for example, some limestones, become lithified soon after deposition, but most sandstones and shales require major loss of water, compaction, and/or chemical cement to become a strong rock, processes which involve significant amounts of time. This is especially true for very fine grained muds in which low permeability makes complete dewatering almost impossible in any short period of time. Simple loading of other materials on top will not do; trapped water in the muds would cause sudden liquifaction of the entire mass, a phenomenon known to hydraulic engineers as the "sudden draw down condition." Rapid drainage commonly results in collapse of oversteepened cut banks as flood swollen rivers subside. Mudstones in the young Grand Canyon model should have behaved in the same way but would have collapsed even more readily than canal and river banks considering Canyon cliff heights are measured not in meters but more than a thousand meters (Figure 4). In that Henry Morris has the credentials of a hydrologist and engineer, might one expect a proper answer to this problem?
In order to account for the present distribution of animals and humans, some creationists propose that continental drift took place about 100 years after the flood. After the Ark grounded, streams of animals and humans migrated (under divine guidance ?) to the ends of the global supercontinent, Pangea. Once drift began, they rode the continents to their present locations. Continental traffic jams at speeds up to one mile per hour produced collisional mountain systems like the Himalayas and Alps (Curtis, 1995). A different model by Woodmorapple (1990) has the virtue of avoiding almost all these problems by suggesting that the present distribution of plant and animal life was the result of "anthropomorphic transport" after the flood. The mental picture of aboriginal peoples keeping kangaroos in place in their canoes during An Australia voyage is intriguing.
Because of its absurdity, Creationists rarely mention the Biblical tale of Joshua keeping the sun from setting (Joshua 10:12-13) while the Israelites took vengeance on the Canaanite kings. Velikovsky (1950) proposed that a few thousand years ago a comet, later to become the planet Venus, was ejected from Jupiter to do a near miss of the earth, stopping the earth's rotation and the sun's apparent motion while Joshua directed the continuing battle. Just how the earth's rotation was restarted is never mentioned. Velikovsky has been so thoroughly debated and refuted that it seems pointless to restate all the arguments and his faulty data. Many of the arguments can be found in Goldsmith (1977), Bauer (1985), and Morrison and Chapman (1990).
However, Velikovsky's mechanisms look
almost like good science
when compared with recent statements by an authoritative Creationist.
Henry Morris, in the
"Since the earth rotates on its axis, the sun could only be made to 'stand still' relative to earth by stopping earth's rotation." ... "This was surely a unique miracle, but not beyond the capabilities of the Creator of the sun and moon and planets. He started their motions,has maintained them through the ages, and is able to change them at will."
So much for a "scientific" approach to earth history and celestial mechanics.
Removal of the greenhouse effect after canopy collapse produced one and only one ice age. The Austinet al. (1994) runaway subduction model includes several hundred years of much warmer oceans (!) heated by newly formed igneous sea floors over 2/3 of the globe. It proposes that warmer oceans heated the atmosphere and facilitated transport of moisture to the poles, thus initiating the ice age (singular). Cooling was enhanced by the increased albedo of the earth from all the volcanic ash produced during flood tectonics. Once the global sea floor and oceanic cooling was complete, the ice age ended at about 2000 - 2500 B.C., and our modern climatic pattern took over. Reasons for failure to boil the oceans and methods needed to cool all this mass in a few hundred years are not included in the model.
To explain the apparent record of multiple glaciations Oard (1990) argues for a very thin, post-flood ice cap which lasted only 700 years. Periodic surges at its lobes and edges produced local burial of slightly older tills, all of essentially the same age. He suggests that true interglacial deposits are almost non-existent, that they are hard to correlate, and that the soils on them are difficult to interpret. He also argues that some soils form rapidly in today's environment and that the immediate post-flood, ice-age atmosphere caused soil formation to proceed at even greater rates to produce the buried soils.
Real evidence for multiple glaciation is overwhelming. Older works on glacial geology (Flint, 1971; Wright and Frey, 1965) describe in great detail arguments for four great ice ages in the last two million or so years. This evidence includes well developed soil horizons and sub-tropical vegetation over-run by succeeding ice advances (Morrison and Wright, 1965). More recent works (Goudie, 1983; Wright, 1989; Dawson, 1992; Anderson and Borns, 1994) support these observations and further separate the four advances into about ten different advances. In addition, they give evidence of several other very much older glacial epochs, including some Precambrian ones which would have been "pre-flood."
Probably the best arguments for the magnitude of ice age time is the record from long cores taken through the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica. Gish's outrageous statement (1992) that an armored dinosaur had been found in the ice of Antarctica might be taken as a Mesozoic age for the ice, but in reality the fossil was found in Mesozoic rocks of the Santa Marta formation (Weishampel, 1990). In the Antarctic ice, summer and winter bands can be counted back, year by year, to at least 30,000 years (Anderson and Borns, 1994) with overall core lengths indicating total time spans of several hundred thousand years. Dates from counting the annual layers in the cores can in turn be correlated with C14 dates from the CO2 contained in entrapped air bubbles, with C14 dates from tree ring correlations which can be counted and correlated back 12,000 years, with annual sediment layers from glacial lakes, with dates from the pollen records of climatic change in Europe and America, and with radiometric dates and rate of sedimentation dates on deep sea cores. Most of these dates can in turn be stitched together and mutually supported by paleomagnetic dates from other areas and dating techniques (summaries by Anderson and Borns, 1994). As new evidence is gained and dating techniques are refined, all these lines of converging evidence show increasing good correlations with the Malenkovich cycles, based on Newtonian celestial mechanics, an additional set of time determinations linked to modern astronomic measurements. To argue in the face of such massive and interlocking evidence that the entire span of the Ice Ages constituted only the last few thousand years must represent a supreme example of faith overcoming reason.
Various mineral types in large granite bodies form at different temperatures and/or are able to trap daughter products of radioactive decay within them, starting at different cooling temperatures. Radiometric dating of when these different minerals passed through their retention temperatures allows determination of the cooling history and rates within the granite body. Pitcher (1993) provides a summary of such measurements which range from 30 to 250 degrees C. per million years, depending on size of body and depth of burial. Such values are in good accord with typical laws of thermal physics.
The "young earth" proponents may be most vulnerable on the subjects of cooling rates and thermal budgets. Laws of cooling and heat transfer are well established and found in almost any elementary physics text with values and applications to geologic examples provided in many geophysics texts (Turcotte and Schubert, 1982). In addition to the Creationists' proposed preposterous rates of cooling before and during the flood as cited above, batholiths and related bodies with tens of thousands of cubic kilometers of formerly high-temperature igneous rocks require massive heat dissipation since 2500 B. C. by mechanisms recorded neither by general history nor the Bible. Furthermore, these mechanisms must be so efficient that not even hot springs remain in most areas of the globe. The Creation Research Society seems overendowed with engineers; the scientific community should challenge them to at least attempt to provide mechanisms and numerical solutions for the massive thermal problems inherent in their models.
The last 30-40 years have seen plate tectonics grow from an intriguing theory loosely supported by some data from a few sub-disciplines of geology into a revolutionary paradigm supported by massive data arrays from the entire spectrum of the geosciences. Detailed plate motion directions and velocities with their passenger continents (DeMets et al., 1990) have been derived from combinations of geophysics, deep sea drilling, seafloor magnetic anomalies, and land based structural, geophysical, and sedimentological studies, the whole cemented by a time framework based on stratigraphic, paleontologic, and radiometric time scales. Recent satellite-based global positioning system measurements for 38 sites on the different plates show a 95% correlation with the plate tectonic model predictions (Larson et al., 1997). Only the Pacific and Nazca plates needed some readjustment to fit the model. Similar conclusions, using slightly different very long baseline precision measurements from satellite and space geodesy, were reached by Robaudo et al. (1993). Because long term velocity determinations must involve a geologic timescale, an average of 3.16 my for the Larson et al. data, these measurements represent one more test and validation of radiometric and paleontologic dating methods.
To argue that the early runaway subduction processes (Baumgardner, 1994; Austin et al., 1994) have ceased and that measured present day plate motions represent relaxation phenomena which just happen by chance to be a near perfect match with the rates derived from the supposedly invalid and rejected traditional geologic time scale requires complete abandonment of Occam's razor.
Post-flood growth of coral reefs compounds the problem of "flood-year" growth of ancient reefs as discussed above in item #9. In the Bahamas Standard of California drilled 5.76 km through backreef carbonates (Meyerhoff and Hatten, 1974). The atolls of the Pacific arc the upward continuation of reefs growing on subsiding extinct volcanos. Drilling showed 1.26 km of shallow water limestone on Eniwetok (Ladd et al., 1953), 0.38 km of reef limestone on Midway (Ladd et al., 1970), and 0.78 km of shallow water limestone on Bikini (Emery et al., 1954). In that the underlying volcanos are all built across deep marine sediments, they must be "post-flood" in age with their coral caps representing the last 4,500 years. As isolated atolls, all the carbonate had to be derived from organic growth on the island. The maximum recorded rate of growth of 30 mm/yr of a single coral of Fiji and Eniwetok (Chave et al., 1972) could just about produce the drilled thickness on Eniwetok in the allowed 4,500 years. If the maximum known production rate for any part of a reef surface of about 7 mm/yr (Chave et al., 1972) could have been sustained for the reef surface as a whole, the Eniwetok limestone would require about 180,000 years to form.
The Creationist response to these figures is to propose that an excessive amount of carbon dioxide remained in the early post-flood atmosphere and that this produced phenomenal growth rates. Subsequently, the present-day atmosphere evolved and slowed rates to the modern measured values. They also claim that slow growing corals on modern reefs represent only a surface veneer of the last few thousand years over top of thick line muds from the Noachian flood (Morris and Morris, 1989), a discovery which might come as a surprise to those who have actually drilled modern reefs and found coral dating continuously form the present to about 50 m.y. in the Eocene (Ladd et al., 1953). The overall coral reef discussion in the cited references is typical of the ICR approach; a combination of omission, redefinition of terms, and misstatement of facts to provide support for their particular literal interpretation of the Bible.
Only now is the scientific community coming to recognize that while the battles against Creationism in the last decade may have been won in the courts, the war itself is in serious danger of being lost in the present court of public opinion and media nonsense. The warnings of the late Carl Sagan (1996) in "The Demon-haunted World" are a clear wake-up call for all of us. The statement by the American Geophysical Union (1994) is unambiguous: "The council of the AGU notes with concern the continuing efforts by Creationists for administrative, legislative and judicial actions designed to require or promote the teaching of Creationism as a scientific theory. The AGU is opposed to all efforts to require or promote the teaching of Creationism or any other religious tenets as science." Kraus (1996) may have made the best statement in a New York Times Op Ed piece: "The increasingly blatant nature of the nonsense uttered with impunity in public discourse is chilling. Our democratic society is imperiled as much by this as any other single threat, regardless of whether the origins of the nonsense are religious fanaticism, simple ignorance, or personal gain."
If such activities are to be opposed effectively, a first step is to learn the ideas, history, and underlying assumptions of their proponents. A second step is to devise an effective counter strategy. To date, the scientific community has been woefully inadequate in the Creationist battle on both counts. This paper is an attempt to focus our opposition, (1) by providing some readily accessible information on the Creationists, (2) by making a proposal for an offensive rather than defensive strategy, and (3) by giving some background facts to implement the strategy. In public forums, the Creationists should be challenged to defend their total model of earth history, difficulties and all, and to give their supporting "evidence" on an item-by-item basis. Again and again, we should force the point that extraordinary claims require extraordinary levels of proof. Such public confrontations with Creationists may have only the scientific depth of disputes between three-year olds, but at least the proposed strategy will force those fights to occur with their toys in their sandbox rather than ours.
Donald U. Wise is a research associate at Franklin and Marshall College and professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, where he chaired the Department of Geology and Geography from 1984 to 1988. He earned his Ph.D. in 1957 from Princeton University and joined the UMass faculty in 1969. His wide-ranging research interests have included Appalachian and Rocky Mountain tectonics, fracture mechanics, global sea-level controls, Martian tectonics, and the origin of the moon. Around the time of the first lunar landing in 1968-69, he served as chief scientist and deputy director of one of NASA's offices of lunar exploration.
Illustrations in this article are taken from his article in (1998) Creationism's Geologic Time Scale, American Scientist, v. 86, p. 160-173.
For more information contact Donald Wise at:Dr. Donald U. Wise Department of Geosciences Franklin and Marshall College Lancaster, PA 17604
