universe. You wind up having to throw out observations that don’t match your beliefs, even if those observations are showing the universe’s true nature.
Such is the case for a minority sect of Christianity who call themselves Young Earth Creationists. This is a vocal minority, however, and their cries are heard loudly in the United States. They believe that the Christian Bible is the inerrant Word of God, accurate in every detail and the only way to judge observations. They believe that anything that does not agree with what is written in the Bible is wrong. Moreover, the Bible is not really up for interpretation: what it says, goes.
One faction of the young-Earth crowd is the vociferous Institute for Creation Research, or ICR. They are dedicated “to see science return to its rightful God-glorifying position,” and they can be considered to be as official a mouthpiece for creationism as there is.
On their web site (http://www.icr.org) is an essay about the age of the universe. In it, Dr. John Morris, the president of the ICR, says that “every honest attempt to determine the date [of creation], starting with a deep commitment to the inerrancy of God’s Word, has calculated a span of just a few thousand years.” The Bible thus strongly indicates that the universe is very young. The whole of creation was formed in just six days, it says, and it’s possible to get a direct lineal descendency from Adam to historical figures we know existed two thousand years ago. It’s difficult to get an
There is a vast amount of data from many different fields of science that indicate the Earth is about 4.55 billion years old. It is not in the scope of this book to detail that information; I instead refer you to any good textbook on astronomy, geology, biology, or physics. My point here is not to show that the scientific view of the age of the Earth and the universe is correct; I will take that as a given. It is the
Creationists usually rely on the Bible for their evidence. They are welcome to believe the Bible is inerrant if they so desire. However, they have lately turned to actual scientific findings to support their claims. But every argument they make is incorrect or incomplete. Every single one. They misinterpret scientific data, willfully or otherwise, and in their writings they only mete out enough information to support their argument, without giving all the data needed to make an informed decision.
I have no intention of discussing their arguments based on the Bible. I leave that to experts on religion and interpreting various ancient texts. I also have no desire to insult, denigrate, or argue against anyone’s religious beliefs,
Creationists like to say that they practice “creation science.” But this name itself is inaccurate; what they do is not science at all. Science is a matter of observation, data, and fact. Religion is a matter of faith and belief. The creationists start with the idea that the Bible is correct, and that any observations of the universe that do not agree with it must be wrong. That is not science; that is dogma.
If some particular scientific observation supports a particular religious belief, that’s fine. But when that observation is distorted or misused in some way, that is
The astronomical arguments they use to support their belief in a young universe can be found in their books, religious tracts, and on many web sites. They make dozens of arguments trying to support their untenable position, far more than can be covered in a single chapter of a book. Still, a few of the most common are worth dissecting.
I want you to remember as you read this chapter: these are the challenges the ICR itself and other creationists use against science. These are not straw-man arguments I made up, ideas easy to tear down to make the creationists look bad. These are their
The age of the earth and moon can not be as old as required [by mainstream science due to] the recession rate of the moon.
A common creationist claim is that the way the Moon’s orbit is changing shows that the Moon and the Earth must be very young. Certainly, they say, the Moon is no older than about a billion years, far younger than the age mainstream science declares.
You might think the Moon keeps a constant distance from the Earth, but this turns out not to be the case. Due to the complicated dance of gravity, the Moon’s distance from the Earth actually increases by about 4 centimeters (1.6 inches) or so a year (for details, take a look at chapter 7, “The Gravity of the Situation: The Moon and Tides”). This number is well determined, because the Apollo astronauts left reflectors on the lunar surface that can be used by Earthbound astronomers to measure the Moon’s distance quite precisely.
If you divide that distance — 400,000 kilometers — by the recession rate of 4 centimeters per year, you see it would take the Moon 10 billion years to reach its present distance, assuming it started its journey somewhere near the Earth. However, that naively assumes that the 4-centimeter-per-year rate of recession is constant. Actually, that rate decreases rapidly with distance; the farther the Moon is from the Earth, the more slowly it recedes. In other words, in the distant past the Moon was much closer to the Earth, and receded faster.
If the calculation is performed more carefully, using numbers accounting for this change in the recession rate, you get an age for the Moon of much less than 10 billion years. One creationist, Don DeYoung, found that the Moon can be no older than about 1.5 billion years, and he claims that this is an
But, again, the creationists are wrong. DeYoung assumed that you could simply extrapolate the Moon’s current recession rate backwards in time all the way to when it was formed. As usual in the universe, things are more complicated than that. The current rate is actually much
The Earth and the Moon interact like a complicated mechanical watch, full of gears; if one slows down, they are all affected. So it is with the Earth and the Moon. The Moon’s gravity moves water around on the Earth, causing the tides. This water rubs against the ocean floor, generating friction. That friction takes energy away from the Earth, slowing its rotation, and gives it to the Moon in the form of orbital energy. When the orbital energy of an object is increased, it moves into a higher orbit, so the Moon moves away from the Earth. The increased distance also means the Moon’s orbital speed slows.
At this point in history, the Moon’s orbit and the Earth’s rotation collude to generate a lot of friction with the sea floor, especially near the shorelines of the continents. An unusually large amount of energy is being taken out of the Moon’s orbit, causing it to recede faster than it normally would. In a sense, the Moon’s gravity has a better grip on the Earth now than it did in the past, and is better at losing its own orbital energy.
What this means is that you cannot say that the current rate of 4 centimeter per year is a good average. In the past, the rate was actually
Beyond our Earth, the creationists see our very system of planets itself as an indication of the Earth’s relative youth.
Astronomers have a pretty good idea about how and when the solar system formed. There have been many theories over the centuries, but repeated observations have indicated that the solar system formed about 4.5 billion years ago (which dovetails nicely with the age of the Earth/Moon system as well). Initially, the solar system started
