Matson v Hovind - Young Earth Proofs Part 1

Copies of this paper may be made and sold by Edward T. Babinski, the National Center for Science Education, and all other groups who are battling the attempts by "scientific" creationists to adversely affect the quality of science education. All others are welcome to make and distribute copies provided that they are given away free of charge.

You are cordially invited to investigate a wide variety of arguments for a young earth, a number of arguments against the radiocarbon dating method, several arguments disputing the authority of the geologic column, and some points of general interest. Our course will closely follow the section of Dr. Hovind's Creation Seminar Notebook entitled "Facts from Science that Demonstrate the Unvierse is Not 'Billions of Years Old'" and will be amplified by material from his video presentations. Unfortunately, Dr. Hovind's "'proofs' of a young earth" are either brief assertions or outline headings which I have had to flesh out based on my knowledge of young-earth creationism. Dr. Hovind's assertions (paraphrased according to my best understanding of them) are followed by my rebuttals which are labeled for easy reference.

"Scientific" creationists have claimed that the physical evidence, without the need of miracles, supports an earth which is only about 6000 years old. They have written numerous books in support of such claims. If the number of books written, lectures delivered, and debates staged had any relationship to the accuracy of one's claims, the "scientific" creationists would have succeeded a long time ago!

The scientific debate, of course, was settled long ago. However, a public debate is kept very much alive by the activities of the "scientific" creationists. I use quotations here because real scientists look at the data first and then determine if their hypotheses will fit in. "Scientific" creationists begin with biblical "truths" which may not be questioned. They look at the data and then decide whether or not the data will fit in with their interpretation of the Bible. Supporting data are collected; contradictory data are assumed to be incomplete or erroneous. That is not science!

The shocking truth, unknown to much of the public, is that the arguments advanced by the "scientific" creationists are not only bad, but shockingly bad! Arguments based solely on obsolete data are by no means rare. Misrepresentation of the data are commonplace! (It is usually a case of bad data being passed along or wishful thinking rather than out-and-out dishonesty.) Thus, the question as to how good the young-earth arguments are takes on a new meaning.

This paper was written with the upcoming May 1994 Babinski-Hovind debate in mind. Dr. Kent Hovind, a popular "creationist evangelist," has offered $10,000 to anyone who can provide him with "evidence for evolution." If that offer is a meaningful one, then this manuscript may be viewed as a step toward claiming that prize. Therefore, Dr. Hovind's list of 30 young-earth proofs" --so typical of those offered by young-earth creationists over the past few decades--will be the primary focus of our discussion.

I wish to thank Edward T. Babinski for proofreading this manuscript as well as offering some good arguments and sound advice. Ed, formerly the editor of the Theistic Evolutionists' Forum, an activist for common sense with irons in various fires, will likely be heard from more and more as the years go by.

I also wish to thank Dr. Alan Hayward, Dr. Stephen Brush, Dr. Arthur Strahler, Daniel Wonderly, Dr. Eugenie Scott of The National Center for Science Education, Dr. Laurie Godfrey, the Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Stanford University Press, and Kalmbach Publishing Company (the publisher of Astronomy and other interesting magazines) for permitting extensive use of their material.

YOUNG EARTH PROOFS

Part 1

Dr. Hovind: It only takes one proof of a young earth to decide between CREATION and EVOLUTION.

0. Wrong! Dr. Hovind appears to have misunderstood the very nature of science. If you want "proof" turn to mathematics or logic! Nothing in science is ever "proven" beyond all possible doubt. Scientific hypotheses are rated according to their credibility; as more and more data support (or fail to refute) a scientific hypothesis the greater our confidence in it. Not a single one of Dr. Hovind's "proofs" inspires confidence in its validity. Meanwhile, an avalanche of burgeoning data continue to increase our confidence in an ancient earth and cosmos. I will demonstrate the former by examining every single "proof" of a young earth listed in Dr. Hovind's Seminar Notebook. I will demonstrate the latter by supplying two or three examples which have no reasonable interpretation save that Earth is old.

1. The shrinking sun argument contains two errors. First, and by far the worst, is the assumption that if the sun is shrinking today, as might be determined over a period of years, then it has always been shrinking!

That's a little like watching the tide go out and assuming that the water level must have always been going down at that rate. In order for that to be true, much of the land must have been flooded mere weeks ago! Inasmuch as the earth shows no signs of such a flood we conclude that the earth can't be older than a few weeks!

Obviously, we cannot extend a rate willy-nilly. We do have to take into account the physical nature of the system. The fact that the tide is going out doesn't mean that it can't come back in! Just as obvious, at least to the experts if not to yourself, is the fact that our sun could never have undergone a long period of continuous shrinking as described by the creationists. Such a view totally ignores the forces at work within our sun. Infinitely more likely is the possibility that our sun might alternate between small periods of shrinking and small periods of expansion, a kind of oscillation. Indeed, some scientists believe that there may be an 80 day cycle of slight shrinking and expanding.

Over billions of years, of course, the depletion of the sun's hydrogen will upset the sun's internal balance and the sun will undergo some continuous changes. But, that has absolutely nothing to do with the shrinking sun argument above which attempts to prove that the solar system is less than 5 million years old.

Thus, the shrinking sun argument rests squarely on a naive extension of a rate measured over a relatively short period of time. It's the type of blunder one would hope not to find in a high school science project.

The second error is the assumption that the claimed rate of shrinkage in the study by Eddy and Boornazian is an established fact. In fact, serious flaws in their methodology turned up and the data has been discredited. As a result, the full text of their study was never published.

Some creationists, such as Walter Brown, have tried to keep the argument going by quoting additional sources (Lippard, 1990, p.25), but they have not passed the test. In Brown's case, two of the three sources he offered were obsolete, and the third actually undercut his position (Lippard, 1990, p.25)! In a rebuttal to Lippard, Walter Brown offered no new studies to back up his "feeling" that the sun is undergoing a small, but continuous shrinkage (Brown, 1990, pp.45-46).

Brown, in his debate with Lippard, then dodged into the missing neutrino problem in a vain effort to turn it into evidence for his position. However, no support can be had there unless it is demonstrated that the "missing" neutrinos are due to a corresponding lack of fusion, and that the sun's current output of energy is due, in large part, to gravitational collapse. As there are several possible solutions to the missing neutrino problem (Lippard, 1990a, p.32), Brown's scenario is an extremely tall order. Even if it were proved that there is a deficiency in solar fusion, that being the cause of the missing neutrinos, Brown would still have to prove that the situation was permanent. It could be a temporary glitch or even part of some complex cycle. Thus, any attempt at present to use the missing neutrino problem as support for a shrinking sun is wholly misguided.

It was in 1979 that astronomers John Eddy and Aram Boornazian presented a paper and published its abstract: "Secular Decrease in the Solar Diameter, 1836-1953." In the April 1980 issue of ICR's Impact series (Impact #82), Russell Akridge picked up the report and naively extended the shrinkage rate of 5 feet/hour into the indefinite past. As that soon led to an impossible situation, he concluded that the earth was much less than 20 million years old. Soon, Walter Brown, Thomas Barnes, Henry Morris, Hilton Hinderliter, James Hanson, and other creationists were in on the act, and the shrinking sun argument became a part of creationist legend.

A number of studies have not found any evidence for continuous shrinking in the sun. Leslie Morrison, for example, drawing on Edmund Halley's observations of the solar eclipse of 1715, concluded that there is no evidence that the sun is shrinking. His findings were reported in January, 1988 in Gemini (no.18, pp.6-8). Gemini is the official journal of the Royal Greenwich Observatory.

Thomas Barnes, Walter Brown, and Henry Morris used the argument for several years after the original report by Eddy and Boornazian was discredited (Till, 1986). I guess a lot of creationists still haven't gotten the word. In his debate with Dr. Paul Hilpman, on June 15, 1992 at the Royal Hall of the University of Missouri, Dr. Hovind applied the obsolete shrinking sun argument.

Isolated from the corrective of continuing professional investigation and evaluation, the 'creation-science' community continues to employ this unwarranted extrapolation of a discredited report as 'scientific evidence' for a young Earth. (Van Till, 1986, p.17)

That was true in 1986 and is true today; it will be true for years to come. "Scientific" creationism lives like the proverbial ostrich, with its head in the sand, and has no effective mechanism to weed out error.

2. The most amazing thing about the cosmic dust argument is that it is still being used! It has coasted along on obsolete evidence, and nothing but obsolete evidence, for the last 25 years!! More than any other argument, it shows how creationists borrow from each other and never do any outside reading.

The obsolescence of the cosmic dust argument has been brought out in numerous debates, published in numerous books, journals, and newsletters. It can be discovered by anyone who exercises his or her library card. It's not a state secret! What does it take to get through to the creationist brain??

The cosmic dust argument received a big kick-off in 1974 from Henry Morris' book, Scientific Creationism. Morris quoted the highest figure mentioned in a 1960 Scientific American article by H. Petterson. Petterson's upper estimate for the influx of cosmic dust, based on samples of air from the top of Mauna Loa on the Island of Hawaii, was 39,150 tons/day. Petterson actually favored a lower figure, about a third of the above, and he cautioned that his results might be way too high.

This caution seems to have been lost on Henry Morris, who ignored Petterson's preferred value in favor of his highest estimate. By the time the Impact #110 (August 1982) insert of Acts & Facts came out, sporting as it did a collection of young-earth claims, the reader was being told that just prior to the manned moon landing scientists were worried about a thick layer of dust. Of course, the dust did not materialize, and the Impact article claimed a victory for creation science which predicts a young moon without much cosmic dust. Steven Shore showed that this entire scenario is wrongheaded.

In a conference held in late 1963, on the Lunar Surface Layer, McCracken and Dublin state that "The lunar surface layer thus formed would, therefore, consist of a mixture of lunar material and interplanetary material (primarily of cometary origin) from 10 cm to 1 m thick. The low value for the accretion rate for the small particles is not adequate to produce large scale dust erosion or to form deep layers of dust on the moon, for the flux has probably remained fairly constant during the past several billion years." (p. 204) (Shore, 1984, p.34)

In 1965, a conference was held on the nature of the lunar surface. The basic conclusion of this conference was that both from the optical properties of the scattering of sunlight observed from the Earth, and from the early Ranger photographs, there was no evidence for an extensive dust layer. (Shore, 1984, p.34)

Thus, several years before man landed on the moon there was a general feeling that our astronauts would not be greeted by vast layers of dust. Although direct confirmation was not yet at hand, allowing a few dissenting opinions, few scientists expected even as much as three feet of cosmic dust on the moon. In May 1966 Surveyor I had landed on the moon, thus putting an end to any lingering doubts about a manned landing sinking in dust.

The cosmic dust argument was already obsolete by the time Henry Morris included it in his Scientific Creationism.

Since the late 1960s, much better and more direct measurements of the meteoritic influx to the Earth have been available from satellite penetration data. In a comprehensive review article, Dohnanyi [1972, Icarus 17: 1-48] showed that the mass of meteoritic material impinging on the Earth is only about 22,000 tons per year [60 tons/day]... Other recent estimates of the mass of interplanetary matter reaching the Earth from space, based on satellite-borne detectors, range from about 11,000 to 18,000 tons per year (67) [30-49 tons/day]; estimates based on the cosmic-dust content of deep-sea sediment are comparable
(e.g., 11, 103).(Dalrymple, 1984, p.109)

Thus, we have good satellite data from the late 1960s in addition to estimates from deep-sea sediment content, the latter going back to at least 1968 and yielding comparable figures.

Dohnanyi's figure of 60 tons/day includes everything from slowly settling dust to the average input of meteorites.

Dohnanyi's figure for the moon (2 x 10^[-9] grams/square centimeter per year) yields 2.3 tons/day. In 4.5 billion years a layer of about one and a half inches of cosmic dust would accumulate on the moon. (On the moon, of course, a ton would weigh much less. We're actually talking about a mass that would weigh 2.3 tons on Earth.)

In his book, Age of the Cosmos, published in 1980, Harold Slusher devoted a chapter to the amount of space dust raining down on the earth. He dwells on Petterson's 1960 figure of 39,000 tons/day and even produces a 1967 figure which gives a whopping 700,000 tons/day! Alan Hayward, a respected physicist and Bible-believing Christian, felt it necessary to make the following observation:

To write like that in 1980 was inexcusable. The two sources he quotes were dated 1960 and 1967--hopelessly out of date in a fast-changing area of science. They merely provide estimates of what the influx of meteoritic dust might possibly be. But we no longer have to rely on estimates. A paper, published four years before Slusher's book, described how the amount of meteoritic dust in space has now been measured, with detectors mounted on satellites. (Hayward, 1985, pp.142-143)

That July 1976 article by D. W. Hughes, published in the New Scientist, gives a figure of 48 tons/day which is enough to cover the earth with about 1.5 inches of dust during the earth's lifetime! It's nearly a 1000 times smaller than Petterson's figure, and it utterly destroys the cosmic dust argument.

Because of the incredible amount of space junk orbiting the earth, modern estimates of incoming dust have become more difficult. However, with the 1990 retrieval of the Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF) satellite, which spent nearly six years in orbit, possibly the clearest figure yet is now available for the influx of space dust.

In the October 22, 1993, Science, Stanley G. Love and Donald E. Brownlee (University of Washington) describe their analysis of 761 small impact craters found on some of LDEF's aluminum-alloy plates. These surfaces continuously faced spaceward while the satellite was in orbit.

...As the researcher explain, this location was superbly suited for their study. It was largely protected from orbital debris and secondary impacts from collisions elsewhere on the satellite, and in pointing outward it also sampled a variety of interplanetary directions as LDEF orbited the Earth. (Sky & Telescope, March 1994, p.13)

The article goes on to explain that dust particles as small as 35 trillionths of an ounce (10^-9 grams) were detected. Love and Brownlee concluded that each year the earth collects about 40,000 metric tons (121 tons/day) which is a bit higher than the less direct figures given above. The results are "comparable to rates crudely calculated from the long-term accumulation of the rare element iridium in sea sediment and Antarctic ice."

Thus, the very latest and possibly the best cosmic dust influx measurement dooms the creationist argument once again. (How many strikes does it take before you're out in creationistland?) The general scientific consensus, going back to the 1960s, has been borne out by numerous measurements during the last 25 years.

Perhaps the constant reminders about obsolete data finally got to Henry Morris. Yet, he did not drop the cosmic dust argument like a hot potato as one might expect. On the contrary, his second edition of Scientific Creationism (1985) expanded his footnote reference to Petterson to suggest that a much more recent source from NASA gave an even larger influx of dust! The reader was referred to: "G.S. Hawkins, Ed., Meteor Orbits and Dust, published by NASA, 1976" (Wheeler, 1987, p.14). Thus, Morris appeared to have an unimpeachable source which was even more recent than Dohnanyi's figure!

Frank Lovell, suspecting that years of direct measurement from space (supported by sea floor studies) could not be that wrong, smelling a rat as it were, checked up on the source. It turned out that the actual date was 1967! The digits had been reversed (Wheeler, 1987, pp.14-15). Furthermore, the figure quoted by Morris (200 million tons of dust each year) was not given in the original source! It was a calculation based on the original source, done by an unnamed "creationist physicist" who botched it! The unsuspecting reader would have assumed that the rate had the official blessing of NASA. Astronomer Larry W. Esposito had some choice words concerning this incredible fiasco by Morris:

...the work is incorrectly cited, outdated, from a non-referenced symposium publication, based on unreliable data. The calculation multiplies together unrelated numbers: the product of these factors is not a reliable estimation of the current cosmic dust deposition rate.
(Wheeler, 1987, p.15)

Wheeler and Lovell were party to another strange, creationist tale of reversed digits! They had written a letter to a religious magazine, Concern, published in Louisville, Kentucky, and had criticized an article which used Petterson's obsolete figure for cosmic dust influx. Concern published that letter along with a reply from the author of the original article. The author stated that Richard Bliss (a member of the Institute for Creation Research) had written the following to him in a letter:

It seems that we have estimates on meteor dust deposition, based on various assumptions, of the total volume of incoming meteoritic material ranging from 800,000 to 1 x 10^6 tons per day. You can get this information from the following sources:

1. Space Handbook, Astronautics and its Applications by R.W. Beucherin and staff of the Rand Corporation, Random House, NY 1959.

2. Nazarove, I.N. Rocket and Satellite Investigations of Meteors presented at the fifth meeting of the COMITE Speciale De I'annee Geophysique International, Moscow, August 1985. (Wheeler, 1987, p.15)

The first source was even more obsolete than Petterson's, but the second one was dated 1985. In response to a query, Bliss said that he got the figures from Harold Slusher, also of ICR. Several attempts to get through to Slusher failed.

Finally it occurred to us that the date cited for this reference, like that of Morris, might be incorrect. The International Geophysical Year ("I'annee Geophysique International") was 1957-1958, and I found in Nature [182:294 (1958)] that the fifth meeting of the Special Committee was held in Moscow in July-August 1958, and that it included a symposium on the rocket and satellite program; this obviously was the source of Slusher's reference. (Wheeler, 1987, p.15)

Thus, we have a second case of inverted digits! A complaint about obsolete data was answered with data even more obsolete!! The average reader, of course, would have never guessed that the citation was bad.

Thus, creationism carried the banner of the obsolete cosmic dust argument ever forward. In 1989, Walter Brown came out with the 5th edition of his booklet In the Beginning. He was no longer quoting Petterson as was the case in older editions. Nevertheless, he calculated that in 4.6 billion years 2,000 feet of dust should have accumulated on the moon.

Brown says his figure is based on data from two sources, Stuart R.Taylor's Lunar Science: A Post-Apollo View (New York: Pergamon Press, 1975, p.92) and David W. Hughes's "The Changing Micrometeoroid Flux" (Nature 251(379-380), 4 October 1974). Hughes gives no basis for any calculation. (Schadewald, 1990, p.16)

As for Taylor's data, Schadewald identifies the appropriate distribution equation, makes use of the calculus, and shows that in reality, even if we extend the range of particles way beyond what was actually detected, we would get a layer about 1 inch deep! Schadewald was left wondering where Brown got his 2000 feet of dust, and he concluded that he may have had moon dust in his eyes when he made the calculation.

Perhaps I shouldn't tease Dr. Brown on that point since I blew the initial calculations myself before finding my way! The equation which Schadewald uses (from Taylor) is:

N is the number of bodies with mass greater than m impacting a square kilometer of moon per year. The density of the dust is given as 3 grams/cubic centimeter. It does make a difference which units one uses for mass. The context of Schadewald's article suggests that the proper mass units are grams (not kilograms), and a little playing around with the equation makes that reasonably clear. If one erroneously uses kilograms and integrates N(m) over a range of 10^-16 kilograms to 10^20 kilograms, a figure of 2259 feet of dust may be obtained for a period of 4.6 billion years. Possibly something like that happened in Dr. Brown's calculation.

If I understand the equation properly, a straightforward integration of N(m) is not the most precise procedure, but it does yield a good approximation to the answers I got. For a mass range of 100Kg to 1000Kg I calculate that 4.6 billion years would deposit a layer of dust 0.107mm (4 thousandths of an inch) thick. For a mass range of 100gms to 1000Kg I get 0.79mm. However, in extending the calculation to extremes, from 10^-13 grams to 10^23 grams, I came up with 26.4cm (10.4 inches) instead of 2.5cm which Schadewald got. The point is that you wouldn't even get 10.4 inches of dust in 4.6 billion years, being that the formula is not accurate for these extreme ranges. Attempts to inflate this value further, by going to even greater ranges, is simply an abuse of the formula and proves nothing.

Neither the above formula, when properly used, nor actual measurements made in space offer anything close to the huge amounts of cosmic dust needed in this young-earth argument. Of course, a little thing like that would never stop the argument from circulating!

Today, numerous creationists such as Dr. Hovind carry forth the banner of the cosmic dust argument, and some of them are still using Petterson's 1960 calculations! As for Dr. Hovind, he seems to have written a new chapter altogether! In his June 15, 1992 debate with Dr. Hilpman in the Royal Hall of the University of Missouri, Dr. Hovid calmly stated that scientists had predicted that 182 feet of cosmic dust would be found on the moon based on an accumulation of 1 inch every 10,000 years. I played that video segment three times to make sure I was hearing it right. Had he checked those figures he would have found that they represent two different rates, that of 4144 tons/day and a whopping 872,798 tons/day! Compare either figure to the 2.3 tons/day given by Dohnanyi which was based on actual measurements made in space. The cosmic dust argument, having been obsolete for 25 years, has now entered the realm of comedy! Perhaps, I should have said "tragedy" since this is the kind of nonsense creationists want to teach our children.

A few embarrassed creationists do understand this point, and in them there is some light at the end of a long, dark tunnel.

3. In his debate with Dr. Hilpman, Dr. Hovind stated that comets lasted 10,000-15,000 years before being blown apart by the solar wind! I had to replay that video segment a few times!. Any high school kid with an interest in astronomy will tell you that it is the heat of the sun which is a comet's undoing. Each time a short-period comet passes near the sun the heat boils off tons of its material (which is mostly ice) thus limiting the number of orbits such a comet can make. The solar wind plus the heat of the inner solar system is responsible for a comet's magnificent tail. That's why comets brighten up as they near the sun. A few comets are terminated by crashing into one of the planets, especially Jupiter. In passing, we might note that the projected life span of one short-period comet, that of Halley's comet, is 40,000 years (Chaisson and McMillan, 1993, p.339).

The only way short-period comets can be made to support a young solar system, hence a young earth, is by showing that they have no reasonable source of replenishment. The burden of proof is on those who allege, a point which seems lost on many creationists.

Creationism's main argument seems to be that we don't have close-up photos of the Oort Cloud and, therefore, cannot be 100% certain that it really exists! Sorry fellas, but if you want to use this comet argument it is up to you to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the Oort Cloud and other sources don't exist!

Having made that crucial point, let's briefly summarize what science knows about comets. In 1950, based on a study of the orbits of several long-period comets, the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort proposed that a great spherical shell of them existed at the remote frontiers of our solar system. Better statistics in more recent years have supported the existence of the Oort Cloud and put it at a distance of 50,000 AU (1.3 light-years).

During the 1980s, astronomers realized that Oort Cloud comets may be outnumbered by an inner cloud that begins about 3,000 AU from the Sun and continues to the edge of the classical Oort Cloud at 20,000 AU. Most estimates place the population of the inner Oort Cloud at about five to ten times that of the outer cloud -- say, 20 trillion or so -- although the number could be ten times greater than that. The innermost portion of the inner Oort Cloud is relatively flattened, with comets extending a few degrees above and below the ecliptic. But the cloud rapidly expands, forming a complete sphere by the time it reaches several thousand AU. (Benningfield, 1990, p.33)

This inner cloud of comets is called the Hills Cloud. Originally, it was thought that short-period comets were merely long-period comets from the Oort Cloud which had been converted by close encounters with Jupiter or the other large outer planets. That may well be true for some of them, but modern studies of short-period comets have identified their probable origin in a region of space now named the Kuiper Belt, which resembles a flattened ring just beyond the orbit of Neptune. Computer simulations show that such a source would account beautifully for the low-inclination, short-period, prograde orbits, and other features associated with short-period comets. The Kuiper Belt probably has around 100 million to several billion comets, which probably formed at that location when the planets formed, and the gradual pull of the giant gas planets over time sends a few of them continually towards the sun. Thus, the short-period comets are replenished.

Theoretical calculations indicate that the great bulk of comets were originally formed in the region between Uranus and Neptune. They represent planetesimals which escaped being gobbled up by the outer planets. Gravitational interactions tossed them into elliptical orbits which took them thousands of astronomical units (AU) away from the sun.

Oort determined that comets tossed into highly elliptical orbits by Uranus and Neptune would be nudged into more nearly circular orbits by encounters with passing stars. Stellar encounters also would scatter comets above and below the ecliptic plane, creating a sphere of comets instead of a flattened disk. After four decades of refinements to Oort's original ideas, astronomers today believe the Oort Cloud extends from about 20,000 to 100,000 AU (almost 2 light-years) from the Sun and contains as many as two trillion comets with a total mass several times Earth's. (Benningfield, 1990, p.31)

A star passing within a few light-years would likely perturb the orbits of the comets in the Oort Cloud, sending some of them towards the sun. Statistical calculations indicate that about 5000 stars have passed that closely during the earth's lifetime. An encounter with a giant molecular cloud, which is likely to happen every few hundred million years, as our sun orbits the galaxy would also perturb the Oort Cloud.

Another newly discovered agent for perturbing Oort Cloud comets is gravitational tides. Created by the gravitational force of material in the Galactic disk, these tides could alter the orbits of Oort Cloud comets. In fact, some astronomers estimate that as many as 80 percent of the long-period comets entering the inner solar system for the first time were shoved from their previous orbits by the gentle tug of Galactic tides. (Benningfield, 1990, pp.32-33)

Once in a great while, estimated at about 9 times during the lifetime of our Earth (Astronomy, February 1982, p.63), a star will pass so close as to stir up even the Hills Cloud of comets (the innermost Oort Cloud which is shaped relatively like a disk). A collision with a giant molecular cloud would have a similar effect.

Occasionally, though, a star or giant molecular cloud passes directly through both Oort Clouds, scattering comets like a cue ball striking the neatly racked balls on a billiard table. Such an event kicks many comets into the outer cloud, replenishing those lost to other processes. (Benningfield, 1990, pp.33-34)

Thus, we have a plentiful source for our long-period comets as well as for our short-period comets.

Granted, that we don't have photos of the Oort Cloud or the Hills Cloud, or even of the Kuiper Belt. Comets less than 40 miles in diameter would simply not show up even in the best telescopes at those distances. The fact that these comet clouds are "theoretical" does not mean that they are based on wild guesswork and groundless speculation. Computer simulation, as already mentioned, matches the short-period comets to the Kuiper Belt. Similar studies of long-period comets, even from the 1950s, pointed to their origin in the Oort Cloud. All in all, a great deal of computer work has been done in supporting and refining the above models. The astronomical community treats them, at the very least, as excellent working hypotheses.

Benningfield (1990, p.32) lists some interesting evidence which suggests that vast comet clouds exist around other stars, but we shall not pursue the matter further. The point has already been made. The creationist must prove that there are no reasonable sources for replenishing comets. The above is a very reasonable scenario for comet replenishment, and that renders the creationist argument dead in the water!

4. Meteorites are hard enough to find on the surface of the earth when they are fresh and "obvious" -- unless one happens to know about a choice site in advance such as a fresh fall. Randomly select and search an acre of land in the United States and see how many meteorites you will find. I suspect that you won't find a single one even if you repeated the search a thousand times on a thousand different acres.

How much more difficult it must be to find a meteorite embedded in ancient strata. Most meteorites landing on the continental areas, no doubt, suffer much erosion before eventual burial. Those which fall into the ocean are likely to be subducted with the oceanic plate into the earth's mantel or metamorphosed and thrust up in a mountain chain. Most people who drill or dig in the earth are not looking for meteorites and would not recognize one if it fell into their lap. After a little erosion, a stoney meteorite looks just like any other pebble or rock; iron meteorites would likely have rusted out long ago. Thus, it would be a truly rare meteorite to survive initial erosion and chemical decomposition, to be uncovered by erosion, and, finally to have some rockhound stumble upon it and identify it. If you ask yourself how many people in the world can identify an eroded, stoney meteorite, you'll have some idea of the problem.

After reviewing such difficulties, geologist Davis Young (1988, p.127) tells us that, "The chances of finding a fossil meteorite in sedimentary rocks are remote. It is not to be expected." G. J. McCall, in Meteorites and Their Origins (1973), said on page 270, "The lack of fossil record of true meteorites is puzzling, but can be explained by the lack of very diagnostic shapes and the chemical nature of meteorites, which allows rapid decay..."

I once saw a large, circular orange splotch of rust stain embedded in the white chalk near Lompoc. For all I know that might have been the remains of an ancient iron meteorite, but I certainly couldn't legitimately count it as such. The "fossilization" of iron meteorites seems most unlikely.

It may surprise you, therefore, to hear that, against all odds, we do have such a find! Two Swedish scientists made the first positive identification of a fossilized stoney meteorite (Astronomy, June 1981).

Per Thorslund and Frans Wickman reported in Nature that a 10 centimeter object found in a limestone slab from a quarry in Brunflo, central Sweden in 1952 is really a stoney meteorite as demonstrated by microscopic examinations and other properties. It has a terrestrial age of about 463 million years. The object had until recently been mistaken for something else. If the odds were not bent enough, it appears that the meteorite hit an Ordovician mollusk which is fossilized in conjunction with the meteorite! (Spratt and Stephens, 1992, p.53)

In 1930 a fist-sized piece of nickel-iron was said to have been recovered from a bore hole at a depth of 1,525 feet, from the Eocene. This "Zapata County" Texas iron has since been lost (Nature, January 22, 1981).

Fritz Heide mentioned that "The iron of Sardis, Burke County, Georgia, was found in 1940, in strata believed to be of Middle Miocene age." (Heide, 1964, pp.118-119.)

We may conclude, therefore, that it is not true that fossil meteorites don't exist in the geologic record. However, recovering and identifying them is extremely rare.

A much better test is to look for the remains of giant meteorite impacts. Although their craters are not always a snap to identify, due to erosion and burial, we can at least expect to find some if, in fact, they fell. Given their present impact rate, we would not expect to find any in the geologic record if the latter were laid down in a year's time by a great flood.

Thus, we have a most excellent test between the two viewpoints. If the earth's geologic record is the result of many hundreds of millions of years of slow accumulation, then we would expect a fair number of "fossil" craters. On the other hand, if the geologic column was laid down in a mere year by Noah's flood, then it would be extremely unlikely to find even one "fossil" crater.

Well, I won't keep you in suspense. The geologic record contains at least 130 positively identified "fossil" craters, and they are found from the Precambrian (2 billion years ago) to Recent times.

R. A. F. Grieve and P. B. Robertson (1979) list the known meteorite craters. Since 1979 a considerable number of fossil craters have been found, but a portion of their list will do just fine. With one exception, all of the following are larger than Meteor Crater in Arizona.

Precambrian .....Vredefort, South Africa.............1.97 billion years
Precambrian .....Sudbury, Ontario, Canada............1.84 billion years
Precambrian......Janisjarvi, Russia..................0.70 billion years

Cambrian ........Kelly West, N.T., Australia..........550 million years
Cambrian.........Holleford, Ontario, Canada...........550 million years
Cambrian ........Kjardla, Estonia.....................500 million years

Ordovician.......Saaksjarvi, Finland..................490 million years
Ordovician.......Carswell, Saskatchewan, Canada.......485 million years
Ordovician.......Brent, Ontario, Canada...............450 million years

Silurian.........Lac Couture, Quebec, Canada..........420 million years
Silurian.........Lac La Moinerie, Quebec, Canada......400 million years

Devonian.........Siljan, Sweden.......................365 million years
Devonian.........Charlevoix, Quebec, Canada...........360 million years
Devonian.........Flynn Creek, Tennessee, USA..........360 million years

Carboniferous....Crooked Creek, Missouri, USA.........320 million years
Carboniferous....Middlesboro, Kentucky, USA...........300 million years
Carboniferous....Serpent Mound, Ohio, USA.............300 million years

Permian..........Kursk, Russia........................250 million years
Permian..........Dellen, Sweden.......................230 million years
Permian..........St. Martin, Manitoba, Canada.........225 million years

Triassic.........Manicouagan, Quebec, Canada..........210 million years
Triassic.........Redwing Creek, North Dakota, USA.....200 million years

Jurassic.........Vepriaj, Lithuania...................160 million years
Jurassic.........Rochechouart, France.................160 million years
Jurassic.........Strangways, N.T., Australia..........150 million years

Cretaceous.......Sierra Madre, Texas, USA.............100 million years
Cretaceous.......Rotmistrovka, Ukraine.................70 million years
Cretaceous.......Chicxulub, Yucatan, Mexico............65 million years

Oligocene........Mistastin, Labrador, Canada...........38 million years
Oligocene........Wanapitei L., Ontario, Canada.........38 million years

Miocene..........Haughton Dome, N.W.T., Canada.........15 million years
Miocene..........Karla, Russia.........................10 million years

Pliocene.........New Quebec Crater, New Quebec, Canada..5 m.y.
Pliocene.........Aouelloul, Mauritania..................3.1 m.y.

Pleistocene......Bosumtwi, Ghana........................1.3 m.y.
Pleistocene......Lonar, India...........................0.05 m.y.

It is only relatively recently that a means of positive identification for fossil craters has been worked out, thus we must not be misled by out-of-date quotations. George Wetherill (1979, p.59), identifies some of the clues available in 1979:

1. The presence of the usual geologic structures one might expect to find in an old, eroded crater.

2. The presence of igneous rocks that have recrystallized after having been melted by sudden impact.

3. The presence of greatly compressed forms of quartz (such as coesite and stishovite) that can be created only by a combination of high temperature and high pressure. Coesite requires above 30,000 atmospheres of pressure and stishovite requires over 100,000 atmospheres of pressure. They have been found in the vicinity of many impact craters.

4. The presence of "shatter cones" which are structures of quartzite that flare outward and downward, away from the direction of impact.

5. In some cases the chemical "signature" of a nonterrestrial impacting body can be identified in the material thrown out by the blast.

Various minerals known as impactites are associated with finding ancient craters. Fossil meteorites, themselves, would not likely be found in connection with a large crater because the cosmic speeds of impact for large meteorites liberate so much energy as to easily vaporize the meteorite. Such tools, as developed in recent years, are useful for distinguishing between ancient meteorite craters and volcanic craters or other natural crater-like formations.

As you can see, plenty of impact craters have been detected throughout the geologic column, from the Cambrian to recent times; three have been found in the Precambrian. Traditional geology stands vindicated. Obviously, the major strata of the geologic column has been laid down over the ages, thus allowing plenty of time for each to record the rare major asteroid impacts.

Major impacts are obviously very rare, being that none have occurred during recorded history. Creationists must conjure up a miraculous swarm of asteroids which decide to drop in on Earth throughout the year of Noah's flood. They do so without destroying the ark with mile-high waves or blast effects far exceeding that of any atomic bomb. After the flood dries up, this bunch of asteroids, which had been steadily bombarding the earth with miraculous numbers of craters, suddenly decides to pack up and go home. Thus, history knows of no large impacts in the thousands of years since that magical year. Sounds a little like a fairy tale, doesn't it?

While we're on the subject of asteroid impacts, let me point out another fatal problem for the young-earth scenario. A casual inspection of the cratered surfaces of Mars, the Moon, and Mercury make it intuitively obvious that Earth has also been battered with a massive bombardment of asteroids. Unlike the Moon and Mercury, and to some extent, Mars, the great bulk of these craters have not been preserved. Various geological processes, such as weathering and plate tectonics, have erased almost all of the early craters.

That the earth also partook in this early massive cratering is made even clearer by the use of statistics.

Start with the oldest parts of the Moon, and imagine counting up the number of craters of different diameters. On the Moon, you find that when you go down a factor of ten in crater size, the craters become more common by about a factor of a hundred. Of course this rule isn't perfect, and some crater sizes are present in greater or lesser number than this simple rule leads you to expect.

Now play the same game with craters on the ancient terrain of Mars, or on Mercury, and what do you find? Not only do you find the same overall relationship between crater number and crater size, but those particular sizes that broke the rule on the Moon break the rule to about the same extent on Mars and Mercury as well. A common interpretation of this similarity in cratering records is that all these worlds were cratered by the same population of objects... But if Mars, Mercury, and the Moon were all pummeled by the same population of impacting objects during the heavy bombardment, Earth and Venus must have been as well. (Chyba, 1992, p.31)

Any one of the largest impacts would have produced a short lived global atmosphere composed of rock vapor, temporarily raising the temperature of Earth's surface to above that of the inside of an oven. In the most extreme cases, this searing heat would have lasted long enough to have evaporated the entire ocean, sterilizing the surface of the Earth.

Scientists can use the cratering record on the Moon to estimate just how often this level of destruction took place. Statistically, because of Earth's larger gravity, something like 17 or so objects larger than the largest object that hit the Moon should have collided with Earth. If the largest object that impacted the Moon was the one responsible for the 2,500-km-diameter South PoleÄAitken basin on the lunar farside (whose controversial existence was finally confirmed two years ago by the Galileo spacecraft), Earth was probably hit about five times by asteroids or comets big enough to have completely vaporized its oceans. [A number of scientists now believe that life originated several times on the primeval earth, only to be wiped out in its first few attempts by the above impacts!] (Chyba, 1992, pp.32-33)

Creationists just haven't come to grips with the tremendous beating which the early Earth took from impacting asteroids. Most of that evidence has been destroyed on Earth and Venus, but it can still be seen on the Moon, Mercury, and the older portions of Mars. There is absolutely no way that such violence could be crammed into even a few thousand years without destroying life on Earth, let alone be confined to the year of Noah's flood.

Not only would Noah have been blasted out of the water, assuming that he wasn't sunk first by the smaller asteroids, but the ocean, itself, would have boiled away! While all that was happening, Noah, if still alive, would have had the dubious privilege of breathing hot rock vapor instead of normal air!

Creationists had better start looking for miracles, because the above scenario just doesn't cut it. The creationist young-earth scenario is a fairy tale, and like all fairy tales it needs a little magic to smooth away the hard facts.

5. Once again, Dr. Hovind's figures just boggle the mind! Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the Moon is receding at 6 inches per year. If we go back a million years, then the Moon was 6 million inches closer to the earth. That comes to about 95 miles! Since the Moon is about 240,000 miles away, that doesn't amount to diddly-squat! Indeed, since the Moon doesn't orbit in a perfect circle it varies more than that on its own.

A more accurate estimate, based on the present rate of lunar recession, puts the Moon within the Roche limit around 1 or 2 billion years ago. That is the argument most creationists use. (Since Dr. Hovind's notes match the figures he quoted in his debate with Dr. Hilpman, I assume that those figures are not a simple oversight.)

As I understand it, the tides act as a brake which slows down the earth's rotation. The earth's lost energy can't simply disappear, and it goes into speeding up the Moon. As it speeds up, the Moon moves to a higher orbit. Thus, the energy of the Earth-Moon system is conserved.

Correction The total angular momentum of the Earth/Moon system must remain constant (all else being equal). If the momentum of the Earth is reduced, the orbital momentum of the Moon increases to maintain overall constant momentum. Increased momentum moves the Moon into a higher orbit. [Credit to Mark van Hoeij]

The effectiveness of the tidal brake on the earth's rotation strongly depends on the configuration of the oceans. Thus, we should inquire as to whether the current arrangement is an average value or not.

The present rate of tidal dissipation is anomalously high because the tidal force is close to a resonance in the response function of the oceans; a more realistic calculation shows that dissipation must have been much smaller in the past and that 4.5 billion years ago the moon was well outside the Roche limit, at a distance of at least thirty-eight Earth radii (Hansen 1982; see also Finch 1982). (Brush, 1983, p.78)

Thus, our moon was probably never closer than 151,000 miles. A modern astronomy text gives an estimate of 250,000 kilometers (155,000 miles), which agrees very closely with Brush's figure (Chaisson and McMillan, 1993, p.173). Thus, the "problem" disappears!

It may surprise you to learn that Darwin's son, George Darwin, a respected scientist in his time, did some serious calculations along this line. In the nineteenth century that was a reasonable scientific conjecture. Today, in the light of what we know, it's an exercise in futility. For more insight into the problem, see Dalrymple (1991, pp.51-52).

6. Thorium-230 is an intermediate decay product of uranium-238 which has a half-life of about 4.468 billion years (Strahler, 1987, p.131). Thus, it will be continually generated as long as the supply of U-238 lasts. Funny, that Wysong should overlook the intermediate decay products of long-lived isotopes!

According to the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, 7th edition (1992), the naturally existing uranium isotopes are: U-234 (0.00054%); U-235 (0.7%); U-238 (99.275%). However, trace amounts of U-236 also exist in nature. Dalrymple (1991, p.376) informs us that "U-236 is rare but is produced by nuclear reactions in some uranium ores where sufficient slow neutrons are available."

Thus, Th-230 and U-236 are currently being generated and their existence in nature proves nothing. Creationists will find a table of the known radioactive nuclides with half-lives greater than 1 million years far more interesting. It provides a elegant demonstration that the earth is exceedingly old!

Look at the table (Dalrymple, 1991, p.377) below. Notice how every single nuclide with a half-life greater than 80 million years is found in nature; every single nuclide with a half-life less than 80 million years is not found in nature unless it is currently being reduced by nature. Does that tell you something?

You're looking at prime evidence in favor of an old Earth! Those radioactive nuclides with half-lives below a certain value have, in the turning of the ages, decayed away to nothing. The only survivors are those which can be created by nature.

V-50        6    x 10^15     Yes
Nd-144      2.4 x 10^15     Yes
Hf-174      2.0 x 10^15     Yes
Pt-192      1.0 x 10^15     Yes
In-115      6    x 10^14     Yes
Gd-152      1.1 x 10^14     Yes
Te-123      1.2 x 10^13     Yes
Pt-190      6.9 x 10^11     Yes
La-138      1.12 x 10^11     Yes
Sm-147      1.06 x 10^11     Yes
Rb-87       4.88 x 10^10     Yes
Re-187      4.3 x 10^10     Yes
Lu-176      3.5 x 10^10     Yes
Th-232      1.40 x 10^10     Yes
U-238       4.47 x 10^9      Yes
K-40        1.25 x 10^9      Yes
U-235       7.04 x 10^8      Yes
Pu-244      8.2 x 10^7      Yes
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sm-146      7    x 10^7      No
Pb-205      3.0 x 10^7      No
U-236       2.39 x 10^7      Yes-P
I-129       1.7 x 10^7      Yes-P
Cm-247      1.6 x 10^7      No
Hf-182      9    x 10^6      No
Pd-107      7    x 10^6      No
Mn-53       3.7 x 10^6      Yes-P
Cs-135      3.0 x 10^6      No
Tc-97       2.6 x 10^6      No
Np-237      2.14 x 10^6      Yes-P
Gd-150      2.1 x 10^6      No
Be-10       1.6 x 10^6      Yes-P
Zr-93       1.5 x 10^6      No
Tc-98       1.5 x 10^6      No
Dy-154      1    x 10^6      No

Perhaps, you might urge, this is a chance arrangement. Not likely. The odds against being able to draw a line anywhere which divides the nuclides in the above table so that all the nuclides above that line are found in nature while all below are not, is 536 million to one! (Of course, we don't count those which nature can create.) To be fair (in testing for a 10,000 year-old Earth) we should extend the table below to include nuclides with a half-life of 1000 years or more. Certainly, they would not have decayed away if the earth were only 10,000 years old. The odds (based on an eligible list of 56 nuclides) now jumps to 72 quadrillion to one! Any takers?

Those who argue that the missing nuclides were never created must hope and pray that there is some natural process which works against the creation of short-lived nuclides. However, that argument comes up empty also.

There is good evidence that nucleosynthesis occurs in stars today and did so in the past. The spectra of some old stars, for example, reveal the presence of technetium, an element that has no stable nuclide and does not occur either in the Sun or on Earth (Merrill, 1952)...

Prometheum has also been found in stars (Aller, 1971), and yet the longest-lived isotope of Pm has a half-life of only 18 years.
(Dalrymple, 1991, p.380)

In the Large Megellanic Cloud, which is a small companion galaxy to our own Milky Way, a spectacular supernova (SN1987A) occurred in 1987. After the main explosion died away, much of the light from this supernova was actually powered by radioactive elements! For a time cobalt-56 (with a half-life of 77.1 days) dominated. It is a decay product of nickel-56 (with a half-life of only 6.1 days) which was produced in quantity by the explosion. After the cobalt-56 decayed away over a period of about 4 years, cobalt-57 (with a longer half-life of 270 days) became the main source of the supernova's light. The decay of cobalt-56 and cobalt-57 liberates gamma rays of very specific energies, and these diagnostic gamma rays can be detected by high-altitude balloons or satellites. Moreover, astronomers could actually watch the light fade according to the exact decay rates of these two cobalt nuclides! (Gehrels et al, 1993, p.75).

Beginning around November [of 1987], spectra from the Kuiper [NASA's airborne infrared telescope] and from Australiatogether revealed an entire zoo of elements in the supernova core -- not just iron, nickel and cobalt but also argon, carbon, oxygen, neon, sodium, magnesium, silicon, sulfur, chlorine, potassium, calcium and possibly aluminium. Their intense infrared lines signaled larger quantities than could have been present in the star at its birth. The elements--the components, perhaps, of some future solar system--were made in the core of the star or in the explosion itself.
(Woosley and Weaver, 1989, p.38)

Such direct evidence, as well as laboratory findings and theoretical study, make it clear that when Mother Nature gets around to cooking up elements she makes plenty of those "missing" nuclides. They are missing from our old neck of the woods because they decayed away a long time ago. Dalrymple (1991, pp.280-384) supplies additional evidence showing that there is no barrier to the production of the missing nuclides. After probing the details for iodine-129, Dalrymple concludes with:

Similar arguments can be made for the other missing nuclides listed in Table 8.3. Most occupy advantageous positions in the chart of the nuclides so that ready synthesis by the r- and s-processes is expected. A few are less exposed and are produced in lesser but not negligible amounts by other nucleosynthetic processes. (Dalrymple, 1991, p.384)

Finally, to add insult to injury, we find that some of the short-lived nuclides really did exist in our solar system once upon a time!

The fact that our solar system lacks aluminum-26 suggests that it is at least 15 million years old. That's about how long it would take for all the aluminum-26 to decay away. Mother Nature certainly knows how to make it; there's no problem in that department. With the help of the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, which was placed into orbit in 1991 by the space shuttle Atlantis, we now know that our galaxy is full of aluminum-26 (Gehrels et al, 1993). Most of it lies along the galactic plane as would be expected if it were produced by supernovae from time to time.

Supernovae not only produce new elements but are implicated in the birth of stars. The gas shells of ancient supernovae have been identified, and some of these coincide with swarms of young stars. This is not too surprising since the shock wave of a supernova would compress any gas clouds which happened to be in the vicinity, thus setting the stage for the formation of new stars.

Indeed, our own solar system appears to have formed in that very manner! John Wood (1982) gives an excellent account of that discovery from which the following has been abstracted. It all began with the Allende meteorite which broke up over Mexico on February 8, 1969, showering the area near the village of Pueblito de Allende with thousands of stones. Scientifically speaking, it was one of the most important meteors ever to fall. Radiometric dating showed that the material was about 4.5 billion years old which is the accepted age of our solar system. More importantly, Allende samples contain little inclusions of material which once floated freely in space before being packed together with the surrounding space dust. These inclusions are rich in calcium, aluminum, and titanium, and are called CAI minerals. CAI minerals appear to be survivors of a primeval heating of the material from which our solar system was formed.

In addition to the irregular-shaped inclusions, Allende also contains oval-shaped inclusions called chrondrules which are mostly made of olivine and pyroxene. A study of the chrondrules and inclusions of Allende led to a remarkable discovery in the 1970's by Robert Clayton and co-workers of the University of Chicago. They found that the ratios of oxygen-17 to oxygen-18 in Allende (and similar meteorites) could best be explained by assuming that two fundamentally different sources supplied the oxygen in our solar system. The discovery opened up a whole new area of scientific research with respect to meteorites.

One of the major advances on this front was made by G. J. Wasserburg and co-workers of the California Institute of Technology in 1976, when they found unequivocal evidence of the former presence of Al-26 in Allende CAI's. This isotope has a very short half-life, only 720,000 years, toward its decay into Mg-26. For any detectable amount of it to have been "alive" in Allende inclusions requires that it was created immediately before or during the formation of the solar system, and promptly mingled with the solar system's raw materials. It seems inescapable that a supernova (which is capable of creating Al-26, among other things) occurred near enough to the nascent solar system in space and time to contribute important amounts of freshly synthesized nuclides to it. (Wood, 1982, pp.191-192)

That ancient supernova probably triggered the collapse of a nearby nebula which, in turn, produced our sun and, most likely, a slew of other stars which have long since left the general vicinity. Such a supernova, like SN1987A, would have contributed a whole zoo-full of short-lived radioactive nuclides in addition to aluminum-26. Vast quantities of oxygen, carbon, sulfur, iron, silicon and other basic elements would likely have been produced as well.

Consequently, we not only have Wasserburg's discovery that aluminum-26 was present in the early solar system but also the supernova process responsible for it which guarantees that short-lived nuclides were a natural part of the landscape. Had the earth literally been created in seven days, Adam and Eve would have fried amongst the radioactive aluminum, cobalt, and what-have-you!

Another of the missing nuclides (very nearly so) is that of radioactive iodine-129 which has also left solid evidence of its former extensive existence in our solar system. (The small amount of iodine-129 found in tellurium ores, where it is produced from tellurium-130 by cosmic-ray muons [Dalrymple, 1991, p.376], and that from atomic bomb fallout do not affect our argument.) In the Richardson Meteorite, which fell in 1918, and the black stone Indarch, which fell in 1891, one finds regular iodine-127. That's the iodine you find in iodized salt. Since iodine-129 would have been produced along with ordinary iodine-127 during nuclear fusion, and since their chemical similarity would have tended to keep them together, we have a mystery. Where did all the iodine-129 go?

Studies showed that the above two meteorites have unusually large amounts of xenon-129 trapped in them, and xenon-129 is a stable decay product of iodine-129! Indeed, there was far more xenon present than could be created by cosmic rays. But here is more:

In the Earth's atmosphere, Xe-129 constitutes about one-fourth of total xenon. ... Yet in many meteorites Xe-129 is as much as 30 times more abundant, relative to the other xenon isotopes, than expected (Reynolds, 1967: 294, 1977: 217). As it is very probable that isotopes of the same element were thoroughly mixed when the Solar System formed, where did the excess Xe-129 come from? (Dalrymple, 1991, p.384)

Thus, we have something missing and something extra, and the two are only sensibly linked by radioactive decay! Iodine-129, which would have been created side by side with its chemical twin, iodine-127, had long ago decayed away, and xenon-129 is a daughter product of that decay.

With a half-life of 16.4 million years, 99.97% of that iodine-129 would still exist if our earth were only 7000 years old! Since it's all gone, save that produced by atomic bombs and in tellurim ores, Earth is at least 300 million years old.

When we consider the above table of nuclides as a whole, we find that the earth is more than a few but less than about 10 bllion years of age (Dalrymple, 1991, p.387). For a variety of reasons this approach can only give us a rough estimate, but it's enough to easily put away the young-earth claims.

Creationists, out of sheer desperation, often challenge the constancy of the decay rates. Maybe radioactive elements decayed much faster in the past! However, neither theory nor laboratory experience offers any hope for them (see topic R2). That fact, of course, hasn't prevented creationists from taking flights of fantasy via their homespun theories about the universe. They simply toss Einstein's relativity, quantum mechanics, and any other inconvenient bit of science into the trash bin! But, hey! Special relativity (and to a lesser extend, general relativity) and quantum mechanics have earned their stripes.

They are the great success stories of modern science! We're not talking about rank speculation here! Atom smashers are built according to the specifications of special relativity; quantum mechanics is the core of theoretical chemistry. Both have been tested by diverse and clever experiments, and have run true in thousands of applications.

Who are these creationists who can walk in and, without even putting their case before the scientific community, make up their own theories about the universe? They are generally individuals who are driven by religious doctrines of biblical literalism rather than by an honest search for truth. On the pretense that we have no reliable theoretical knowledge, they ask who was there, in those long lost ages, to check those decay rates. That is their ultimate refuge against the reliability of the radiometric clocks.

The astounding fact, as noted in another context a page or two earlier, is that we do have a direct observation pertaining to ancient decay rates! The light of supernova SN1987A, in its trailing phases, was produced almost entirely by the radioactive decay of cobalt-56, at first, then cobalt-57 a few years later. Those two nuclides of cobalt were positively identified by their gamma rays as they decayed. In both cases the rate at which the light faded precisely matched the decay rates for cobalt-56 and cobalt-57! (Regarding the claim that the speed of light may have slowed down, see topic A6.)

All we need now is the distance to SN1987A which turns out to be around 170,000 light-years (i.e. 52,700 parsecs). See topic A6 for more details. Surprisingly, that distance does not depend on the speed of light (in a Newtonian sense). Putting it all together, we reach the firm conclusion that we are seeing SN1987A as it was about 170,000 years ago. Thus, as it were, we have a window on the past which confirms that there has been no changes in the decay rates for cobalt-56 and cobalt-57. Hence, there is no reason for believing that any of the decay rates have changed as quantum mechanics describes them all and has been vindicated in the case of the two cobalt isotopes.

We also have a less direct but equally reliable window on the past in the formation of the present Atlantic Ocean. The magnetic stripes on the Atlantic sea floor, running parallel to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, show that the sea floor has been spreading at a rate which has been roughly constant. That rate, which can now be measured directly with fair accuracy, is 1.5 inches per year. Averaging a couple of measurements of the width of the Atlantic from my trusty globe, I came up with 3500 miles as a good ball park figure. At 1.5 inches per year it would have taken 147 million years for the Atlantic to reach its present dimensions. It turns out that the oldest sediments in the Atlantic, those near the continents, are from the latter part of the Jurassic Period. The Jurassic Period, as determined by radiometric dating, covers a period of time from 135-190 million years ago. Therefore, the two methods are in excellent agreement. Obviously, there was nothing much wrong with those radiometric decay rates even 150 million years ago!

It's "miracle time" again for the young-earth creationists as they have no scientific answers. However, if your viewpoint requires a miracle to save it, then it doesn't belong in the science classroom.

7. The Poynting-Robertson effect is an effect that sunlight has on small dust particles orbiting the sun. The continuing absorption of sunlight robs the dust particle of more and more of its angular momentum, giving it a tendency to slowly spiral into the sun.

Based on the Poynting-Robertson effect alone, particles 0.001 cm in diameter located at a distance equal to that of the earth's distance from the sun (one AU) would spiral into the sun in about 19,000 years; particles 0.0001 cm in diameter would require less than 2,000 years. (Strahler, 1987, p.145)

Slusher, in his book Age of the Cosmos (a 1980 ICR technical monograph), argued that the presence of such fine dust in our solar system limits its age to less than 10,000 years.

However, Slusher has overlooked several things. Reflected sunlight (as versus absorbed light for the Poynting-Robertson effect) applies an outward force on dust particles. As a particle gets nearer to the sun, this outward radiation pressure increases faster than the force of gravity pulling the particle in (Strahler, 1987, p.145). Certainly, that would have an important effect on any time calculations.

Another point overlooked by Slusher is the gravitational effect the planets would have on dust spiraling in. Many dust particles would be kicked into elliptical orbits which would greatly lengthen their time in space.

Still another effect "...overlooked by Slusher is trapping of particles by gravitational resonances with the larger planets (Alfven and Arrhenius, 1976, p. 81). So trapped, particles could remain in stable orbits indefinitely." (Strahler, 1987, p.145).

What about those comets which sweep through our solar system every now and then? Comets usually have two tails, one of gas and one of dust, and those tails often extend many tens of millions of miles across space. Comets would contribute quantities of new dust (Dutch, 1982, p.31). Collisions in the asteroid belt, or even major asteroid impacts on the smaller planets or moons, would also contribute some dust to the interplanetary spaces.

Therefore, the Poynting-Robertson effect provides no panacea for young-earth creationism.

8. Not having the references, I have no idea as to what this argument is all about! I can't make heads or tails out of it.

I believe that some creationists have argued that many stars in a typical globular star cluster are moving outward, thus limiting the cluster to a certain age before it dissolved. Such an argument betrays a gross ignorance of globular clusters. A given star moves away from the central area of a globular cluster for a time, but it slows down, reverses direction, and falls back through the central region of the cluster and out the other side. Thus, stars move back and forth through the center of the cluster. There is no net expansion there.

Globular clusters do, however, present a stunning proof of great age! To reasonably understand the details of this proof, you should read Dalrymple (1991, pp.365-375). I'll quote from Dr. Alan Hayward to sum up the central idea.

[Scientific] techniques have enabled astronomers to work out the life span of each particular kind of star. They have found, for example, that the hottest and brightest blue stars were endowed with only enough energy to keep them going for a few million years, whereas the coolest red stars have a life span of many billions of years.

With this background in mind, we must now take note of a most remarkable fact about the star clusters...

Some clusters contain stars of all life spans, from the shortest to the longest. Some contain all except the very shortest-lived types. Some contain all except very short-lived and fairly short-lived types. And so on, all the way to those clusters where only the long-lived types are present.

But never do we find a cluster without a selection of the long-lived types. The missing ones are always from the shorter end of the range. We can look at the data for each cluster and say, 'This particular cluster contains only those types of stars with life spans greater than x years', where x has a different value for each cluster.(Hayward, 1985, p103)

The explanation is quite simple. Originally, when each globular cluster formed it was populated by a variety of star types as might reasonably be expected. As it aged, the first stars to disappear were the shortest-lived stars, and they were followed by he short-lived stars, until, in the very oldest globular clusters, only the very old red stars remained.

Since this conclusion is based upon a great mass of experimental data it seems inescapable, unless we are prepared to write off the extraordinary distribution of star types in clusters as a mere coincidence. And the odds against that have been calculated to be countless millions to one. (Hayward, 1985, p.104)

Thus, the odd distribution of stars in the globular clusters is a result of great ages at work. Most globular clusters, based on the above and other factors, appear to be more than 10 billion years old! (Chaisson and McMillan, 1993, p.411). Far from being an argument for a young universe, globular clusters are a showcase for an old universe.

9. If Saturn's rings are less than millions of years old, then what of it? That doesn't prove that the planet is less than millions of years old. Recent study indicates that the rings are not older than 100 million years (Discover, April 1994, pp.86-91).

In his fifth seminar video, "The Hovind Theory," Dr. Hovind briefly indicates the nature of the above instability. Incredibly, he states that Saturn's rings are still spreading out according to particle size in keeping with the Poynting-Robertson effect! However, the Poynting-Robertson effect applies to fine dust in orbit around the Sun, not to particles in orbit around Saturn! Furthermore, most of the particles which make up the rings of Saturn are the size of large snowballs -- much too large for the Poynting-Roberttson effect (Chaisson and McMillan, 1993, p.290).

Perhaps Hovind's argument is an evolved version of Slusher's argument made back in 1980 (ICR Technical Monograph #9, "Age of the Cosmos").

He argues that astronomer Otto Struve in 1852 noted that observations of Saturn's rings over the period from 1657 to 1851 show an increase in the widths of the rings and in the width of the gap between the planet and the inner edge of the B ring. The changes are interpreted to mean that the ring system is rapidly evolving and has not yet reached an equilibrium. ... Steven I. Dutch has evaluated Slusher's arguments and questions the observations interpreted as changes in the ring widths and distance from Saturn [1982, pp.31-32]. Drawings by Huygens in 1659 and Cassini in 1676, according to Dutch, show the proportions of the rings essentially as they are known today. Considering the poor quality of the early telescopes and the crudity of the drawings, no significant change can be inferred with confidence. Dutch summarizes with the remark that "the present creationist position is based on faulty data and erroneous reasoning, and is simply irrelevant to the age of Saturn" (p.32). (Strahler, 1987, pp.145-146)

10. Jupiter is not cooling off that rapidly! Based on the fact that Jupiter is radiating twice as much energy as it receives from the Sun, and given its mass and other data, we can calculate the heat loss.

"A simple calculation indicates that the average temperature of the interior of Jupiter falls by only about a millionth of a kelvin per year." (Chaisson and McMillan, 1993, p.269). (A drop of one kelvin is equal to a drop of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit.) In short, Jupiter is big enough that it could still be radiating heat trapped during its formation 4.5 billion years ago. Thus, there's no problem there.

Saturn, which radiates almost three times more energy than it receives from the Sun, is a more complicated case as it is not massive enough to retain its primeval heat of formation 4.5 billion years ago.

The explanation for this strange state of affairs, first suggested by Ed Salpeter of Cornell and David Stevenson of Caltech, also explains the mystery of Saturn's apparent helium deficit, all in one neat package.

At the temperatures and high pressures found in Jupiter's interior, liquid helium dissolves in liquid hydrogen. In Saturn, where the internal temperature is lower, the helium doesn't dissolve so easily, and tends to form droplets instead. The phenomenon is familiar to cooks who know that it is generally much easier to dissolve ingredients in hot liquids than in cold ones. Saturn probably started out with a fairly uniform mix of hydrogen and helium, but the helium tended to condense out of the surrounding hydrogen, much as water vapor condenses out of Earth's atmosphere to form a mist. The amount of helium condensation was greatest in the planet's cool outer layers, where the mist turned to rain about 2 billion years ago. A light shower of liquid helium has been falling through Saturn's interior ever since. This helium precipitation is responsible for depleting the outer layers of their helium content.

...As the helium sinks toward the center, the planet's gravitational field compresses it and heats it up. [Saturn is a "gas giant," a planet without a surface. As the helium in the outer layers "rained" down into the lower levels it was squeezed into a smaller space due to gravity, which caused the helium atoms to bump into each other more often. That is, the helium heated up according to Boyle's law.] (Chaisson and McMillan, 1993, p.288)

You may object that the above is just a "theory," but this hypothesis comes with realistic, detailed mathematical and physical explanations -- something almost unheard of in creationist literature. We now have a plausible explanation for Saturn's heat output. Therefore, Saturn presents no problem with respect to the above creationist argument.