William Zingrone Associate professor of psychology
Throw your geology textbook away, biology ones too, your organic chemistry textbook, your smoke alarms, don’t bother to get a PET scan or thyroid scan if you have cancer, unplug your electronic devices from the wall if your electrical power is generated by a nuclear plant.
None of the textbooks are right, and all those devices can’t possibly work because Ken Ham and Ray Comfort and other knowledge deniers claim the earth is only 6,000-10,000 years old.
According to them, Carbon-14 dating doesn’t work, nor do any of the other dozens of methods we have for dating the earth.
Yet, somehow devices like smoke detectors, nuclear reactors and nuclear imaging machines that depend on the very same incredible technology of radioactive chemistry and physics work just fine.
All the science we use daily all over the globe must be hopelessly flawed because Ham and the Ph.D gofers on his staff know better than all the thousands of scientists who can somehow run hundreds of thousands of nuclear devices correctly all over the world but just can’t get the dating part right.
The very idea is so preposterous and pretentious that it deserves all the ridicule we can heap upon it.
More than 130 labs worldwide produce C14 dates daily for archaeologists, geologists, classics scholars, biblical scholars, paleontologists, etc. C14 works excellently for dating artifacts back to 50-60,000 years old, every day of the week.
Hams’ Answers in Genesis’ website does a decent job relating the science behind C14, but then conveniently leaves out it gives dates beyond the few thousand years allowed in its absurd Young Earth Creationist scheme.
Hams’ resident Ph.D knows better than all the thousands of scientists all over the world who operate all these dating methods? Hiding information to make your crap theory seem plausible: isn’t that dishonest? Doesn’t that go against one of those commandments we hear about all the time?
Is that why so many educated Christians, even Evangelical ones like Rachel Held Evans, whose blog I spoke of in a previous editorial, have given up denying the young age of the earth because the evidence is just too overwhelming and the claim of a young earth is a bald-faced lie?
We should be outraged at this insane denial of reality, this infantile rejection of science, this dishonest attempt to make an extreme, ridiculous and idiosyncratic interpretation of the Bible look plausible by denying or deliberately hiding information as if it didn’t exist. We should be outraged.
Furthermore, we have more than 40 other dating techniques that use radioactivity like Carbon-14 that date the age of rocks, fossils, etc., beyond the range of C14, also in use daily all over the world.
The same radioisotope chemistry that tells us how to build the smoke detectors in your house, that runs the hundreds of nuclear powered subs and ships steaming all around and under the oceans or generates electricity in dozens of nations is the same science that tells us the earth is billions of years old.
The international community of scientists know the theory of how these things work, they know the intricacies of the isotope chemistry and physics in your textbooks and can build and operate these incredibly complex and elegant technologies, yet somehow Ham and his resident Ph.Ds can overturn the consensus of an entire scientific domain by proclamation alone.
Their ludicrous claim is exceeded only by its sheer bombast.
This is not a clash of world views; this is reality versus absurd delusional claims based on a perverted interpretation of Biblical scripture.
It is knowledge versus complete bullshit.
Creationism is pseudoscience and Kentucky shouldn’t be funding a dime of it. Ham and Comfort and others demand you do Christianity their way or you are not a real Christian.
Twelve trips to the moon, about 800 pounds of moon rocks dated in dozens of samples at different labs by radiometric dating, and hundreds of meteorites too, collected for decades from all over the world all yield the same dates in the neighborhood of 4.3 billion years old for the age of the earth and our solar system.
But Ham and Comfort and company don’t want you to know about that either, they pretend it doesn’t exist.
All the science must be wrong because they demand their absurd fantasies have to be right.
This is a prime example of the arrogance of religious thought.
Evidence is demanded in every other human endeavor, but you can make up whatever you want in religion and hide behind the banner of faith to promote your preposterous ideas.
We need to be strident: vociferous and loud and constant in ridicule and refutation of such Creationist drivel.
We should be outraged.