Can YEC sources be trusted?

[rogue06]

I've noticed that a significant number of those who believe in young earth creationism (YEC) around here rely fairly heavily on various YEC websites for their information while trying to refute the various evidence for either evolution or an earth that is far older than a few thousand years old^[1]. The big three would have to be Ken Ham's AnswersinGenesis (AiG - the largest), the Institute for Creation Research (ICR - the oldest) and Creation Ministries International (CMI - the group AiG split away from when Ham took control). While there are others, for the most part they depend to a great degree on them for much of their information, often simply reprinting articles that they've published.

So the question becomes, just how accurate and trustworthy are they? After all these groups never seem to miss an opportunity at proclaiming themselves experts in issues of both science and theology.

Numerous threads and posts have sought to demonstrate that they are mendacious and deceitful pointing to such things like the fact that everyone who writes for them is required to sign an oath that they will ignore any and all evidence that contradicts their already decided upon conclusions. Others point to the dreadful level of scholarship that they offer.

Still, many YECs will not be swayed by these facts and continue to trust them as their go-to information source for supporting the YEC position. In many cases their supporters frankly don't have the necessary education in the related fields to accurately determine who is telling the truth so they stick with the sources that they are predisposed to agree with.

But perhaps there is a different way to approach this.

Perhaps it might be best to reveal how stupendously inaccurate their claims are in areas that most YECs at least ought to be familiar with or can check for themselves the veracity of the claims these organizations make.

With that I'll turn to something that has been put out by ICR and has been unquestionably reposted on Facebook and twitter by a number of YECs.

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In case that there is any problem displaying the image it has the following caption:
with the following assertion:

"Roughly half of Christ's references to Scripture were quotations from Genesis

He obviously understood the importance of origins to Christian doctrines"

This is a pretty straightforward claim here, and one would think that ICR wouldn't make it if it weren't true since it isn't hard to verify.

So is it accurate? No. Not even remotely close.

In reality Jesus quoted from 24 different Old Testament books but Genesis only once -- twice if you want to be generous and count repeated versions contained in the Gospels (Matthew 19:4-6; cf. Mark 10:6-8). Although if you want to get technical, it could be said that He is citing Genesis 1:27 and 2:24 there.

In contrast, as best as I can tell, and only counting them once even if found in more than one gospel, He quoted Exodus (primarily the Decalogue -- Ten Commandments) seven times. Isaiah eight times. Deuteronomy ten times. And Psalms eleven times. So just from those five books Christ quotes from them on 36 occasions whereas he quotes Genesis once, maybe twice.

I guess that I should note that this demonstrably incorrect claim originates in a book called Creation Basics & Beyond: An In-Depth Look at Science, Origins, and Evolution which was authored by all of the staff of ICR and which declares that it was "written and reviewed by experts" in order to assure the reader that it is as "accurate as humanly possible." It can be found in chapter nine where it says

In fact, Jesus quoted from Genesis about as much as all the other books of the Old Testament combined. Roughly half of Christ’s references to Scripture were quotation from Genesis. He obviously understood the importance of origins to Christian doctrines.

So this cannot be hand waved away as the product of an over enthusiastic intern or secretary posting this without being vetted or getting prior approval. This is YEC scholarship at its finest.

So this brings us to the question of if ICR is too incompetent to get something as simple to check as this wrong (or maybe brazenly misrepresenting it on purpose trusting on their fellow YECs to swallow whatever they say without question), can they be trusted with more obscure and technical matters such as scientific research?

Personally, I think that the answer is no.

[rogue06]

Another, and IMHO, much more egregious example would be when a couple of years ago AnswersinGenesis (AiG) got caught red-handed editing out a reference to a belief in an earth that was millions of years old by the 19th century Charles Spurgeon, sometimes referred to as the "Prince of Preachers," from one of his sermons that they reprinted on their website.

On July 17, 1855 in a sermon titled “The Power of the Holy Ghost” at London's New Park Street Chapel (later the Metropolitan Tabernacle) where Spurgeon served as pastor for 38 years he said the following:

Source: The Power of the Holy Ghost

“In the 2d verse of the first chapter of Genesis, we read, ‘And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’ We know not how remote the period of the creation of this globe may be—certainly many millions of years before the time of Adam. Our planet has passed through various stages of existence, and different kinds of creatures have lived on its surface, all of which have been fashioned by God. But before that era came, wherein man should be its principal tenant and monarch, the Creator gave up the world to confusion.”

© Copyright Original Source

On the AiG website they removed the sentence "We know not how remote the period of the creation of this globe may be—certainly many millions of years before the time of Adam." AiG "sanitized" Spurgeon’s sermon for its audience apparently because they did not want them to know that he had accepted that the earth was far more ancient than a few thousand years old.

Moreover, the censors at AiG even rewrote a portion at the end of Spurgeon's sermon that changed his statement that "the Creator gave up the world to confusion" to "the Creator initially created the world as a chaotic mass on the first day of creation" apparently to make it look like Spurgeon was a YEC of some sort.

This of course sparked outrage as Spurgeon and his sermons are still much beloved by many Christians and having been caught in flagrante delicto AiG added a footnote to its version of the sermon where it relegated the censored portions (which, btw is not how you properly edit a paper) and justified the decision to re-write the sermon by in effect declaring that Spurgeon wasn't intelligent enough to "understand the age of the earth issue."

That didn't wash either. Pressure continued to mount and finally AiG reluctantly put the edited portion back into the main text -- although enclosed within brackets. The editor's footnote, explaining that Spurgeon, "brilliant as he was," wasn't smart enough to be trusted on the age of the earth, remained at the bottom of the sermon.

So we see that AiG cannot even fully embrace some of the greatest conservative Christian thinkers and preachers of the past unless they alter and distort what they said to better fit in with what AiG believes.

Again, this brings up the question if AiG is willing to misrepresent Spurgeon's views in such an audacious and contemptuous manner -- deleting and re-writing his actual words to make it conform to their views, then what else are they misrepresenting? If they are willing to do this with something as widely and publicly available as Spurgeon sermons, can they be trusted in more difficult to confirm subjects? In short, what else are they lying about?

[Bill the Cat]

C'mon Rogue. Jesus mentions Abraham several times. That's quoting Genesis...

[Jedidiah]

Mentioning Abraham is not the same a quoting Genesis.

[rogue06]

Mentioning Abraham is not the same a quoting Genesis.

I was assuming, well, maybe hoping, that Bill was being facetious. That or a jerk

[Faber]

In reality Jesus quoted from 24 different Old Testament books but Genesis only once -- twice if you want to be generous and count repeated versions contained in the Gospels (Matthew 19:4-6; cf. Mark 10:6-8). Although if you want to get technical, it could be said that He is citing Genesis 1:27 and 2:24 there.

Are they talking about Jesus quoting Genesis or citing it? He referred to it many times, talking about creation, Lot's wife, Abraham, Adam, Jacob, Jacob's well, Sodom, etc.

[rogue06]

Are they talking about Jesus quoting Genesis or citing it? He referred to it many times, talking about creation, Lot's wife, Abraham, Adam, Jacob, Jacob's well, Sodom, etc.

"Roughly half of Christ's references to Scripture were quotations from Genesis"

[Sea of red]

It's all about trustworthiness in any discussion.

I think we don't give YEC's enough credit. I don't think they are simply confuses, misinformed, or stupid. They know damn good and well that they are using unreliable information, and that many of the things they say are pure bunk.

[rogue06]

It's all about trustworthiness in any discussion.

I think we don't give YEC's enough credit. I don't think they are simply confuses, misinformed, or stupid. They know damn good and well that they are using unreliable information, and that many of the things they say are pure bunk.

With the "rank and file" I don't think that is the case, but with the leadership it is difficult to believe that isn't true with many of them.

An example of the latter would be the late Duane Gish, of the "Gish Gallop" notoriety, who would concede a point during one debate and then shortly afterwards repeat the exact same point that he acknowledged was in error in front of a different audience who wouldn't be aware of that fact.

Donald Prothero, in his "Evolution: What The Fossils Say and Why It Matters" (highly recommended for those interested in transitional fossils) recounts his experience debating Gish and his habit of conceding a point in one place then immediately repeating what he had acknowledged was wrong during his next debate. As he puts it on pages 47-48:

Gish is particularly dishonest in this regard. If he is beaten in a debate in one city and forced to admit that an argument is not true, he will still use the same invalid argument the next night in front of a different audience, since they didn't see him recant the argument the previous night.

He goes on to ask "How honest or truthful can a debater be if he cynically uses an argument he knows has been proven wrong on the next unsuspecting audience?" Good question.

Karl Fezer of Concord College who debated Gish in 1992 made a similar observation:

"An author concerned about getting his facts right would certainly, when accused of error by a recognized authority, seek out the relevant evidence. Yet Gish never asked Brace to cite his sources... Other scientists have also tried to straighten out Gish. There is little evidence that Gish modifies what he says to take this criticism into account. Appearance is everything. Truth seems not a high priority."

One particularly well known instance of Gish admitting that one of his claims was wrong yet continuing to assert it as being true was when Drs. William Thwaites and Frank Awbrey of San Diego State University in the Spring of 1978 invited Gish to debate his claim publicly that the hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone in Bombardier Beetles spontaneously explode unless an inhibitor is added to prevent the explosion.

During the debate they mixed hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone solutions together. There was no explosion; the mixture slowly turned brown as they oxidized. Gish then claimed that he had mistranslated the original German reference mistaking the German word for "unstable" for "explosive." Yet in spite of that he was still reciting the false story about this mixture spontaneously exploding in a debate with Dr. John W. Patterson at Graceland College, in Iowa in January 17, 1980.

This false claim that these chemicals explode is still being pushed on the AnswersinGenesis website: The Amazing Bombardier Beetle

Further, since 1981 Gish has claimed in debates that Lord Solly Zuckerman had examined the Australopithecus afarensis known as "Lucy" and concluded that she couldn't have walked upright. The problem is he never saw "Lucy" and when challenged on this in Ontario by Jay Ingram back in 1982 he got upset and complained that he wasn't responsible for people misinterpreting his remarks. But he continued making the false claim. Nine years later in a debate with biologist Fred Parrish, he even went from implying to outright declaring that Zuckerman had examined the Lucy skeleton itself: "For 15 years...[Zuckerman] studied fossils of Lucy and fossils of 1-2 million years younger than Lucy.

And then back in July of either 1982 or 1983, when San Diego public station KBPS aired an hour-long program on creationism called "Creation vs Evolution: Battle in the Classroom" Gish proclaimed the following:

"If we look at certain proteins, yes, man then -- it can be assumed that man is more closely related to a chimpanzee than other things. But on the other hand, if you look at certain other proteins, you'll find that man is more closely related to a bullforg than he is to a chimapanzee. If you focus your attention on other proteins, you'll find that man is more closely related to a chicken than he is to a chimpanzee."

This is supposedly based upon Berkeley geochronologist Garniss Curtis' remarks that he heard someone once claim that bullfrog blood proteins were similar to human blood proteins.

The problem is that Curtis was making a transparently sarcastic remark. Tongue-in-cheek Curtis said that the "frog" which yielded the proteins was an enchanted prince. Obviously the claim has never been verified and the nature of the remark was explained but that didn't matter to Gish and he continued to repeat the claim at various debates.

It just seems that at least in the higher YEC circles that honesty is not very highly regarded.

[Roy]

This false claim that these chemicals explode is still being pushed on the AnswersinGenesis website: The Amazing Bombardier Beetle

Careful - they actually say Gish was wrong, and that hydroquinone and H₂O₂ don't explode.

What they don't do is explain why it was at least 27 years after that claim was demonstrated to be false before ICR and AiG stopped making it.

That a claim is false has never stopped AiG/ICR/Hovind from using it. That only happens when the claim becomes so widely known to be false that even their own supporters become critical - and as has been demonstrated both with the Bomby pamphlet and on TWeb with Sarfati's misuse of the Clark/Caswell quote, that can take a loooong time.

Roy

[JonF]

Some of the YEC misrepresentation is outright fraud. Andrew Snelling dated lava from recent eruptions of Mt Ngauruhoe in New Zealand. He wrote a popular press article about it at Radioactive “Dating” Failure. He used the K-Ar method when the much more accurate and robust Ar-Ar method was available, and he generalized this "failure" to all radiometric dating. But that's not the half of it. Not by a long shot.

He also wrote a technical paper at Andesite Flows at Mt Ngauruhoe, New Zealand, and the Implications for Potassium-Argon "Dating". Therein he provided the smoking gun, none of which was mentioned in the first article linked above.

You do need to know the meaning for two technical terms. "Xenoliths" (literally "foreign rock") are pieces of older rock embedded in a younger rock, often "scraped" off the walls of the magma chamber during the eruption. "Whole rock" means what it says; the entire rock is ground to powder and that powder is dated, without any attempt to separate individual constituents from the rock. That being said, let's see what he has to say:

Steiner [90] stressed that xenoliths are a common constituent of the 1954 Ngauruhoe lava, but also noted that Battey [7] reported the 1949 Ngauruhoe lava was rich in xenoliths. All samples in this study contained xenoliths, including those from the 1975 avalanche material. ...

All samples were sent first for sectioning - one thin section from each sample for petrographic analysis. A set of representative pieces from each sample (approximately 100 g) was then despatched to the AMDEL Laboratory in Adelaide, South Australia, for whole-rock major, minor and trace element analyses. A second representative set (50-100 g from each sample) was sent progressively to Geochron Laboratories in Cambridge (Boston), Massachusetts, for whole-rock potassium-argon (K-Ar) dating - first a split from one sample from each flow, then a split from the second sample from each flow after the first set of results was received, and finally, the split from the third sample from the June 30, 1954 flow. ...

Xenoliths are present in the Ngauruhoe andesite flows (Table 3), but they are minor and less significant as the location of the excess 40Ar* residing in these flows than the plagioclase and pyroxene phenocrysts, and the much larger glomerocrysts of plagioclase, pyroxene, or plagioclase and pyroxene that predominate. The latter are probably the early-formed phenocrysts that accumulated together in the magma within its chamber prior to eruption of the lava flows. Nevertheless, any excess 40Ar* they might contain had to have been supplied to the magma from its source. The xenoliths that are in the andesite flows have been described by Steiner [90] as gneissic, and are therefore of crustal origin, presumably from the basement rocks through which the magma passed on its way to eruption. ...

Ewart and Stipp [27] regarded their Sr isotopic data as more consistent with the production of the andesites by partial assimilation of sedimentary material by basaltic magma (derived from the upper mantle), the adjacent greywackes, siltstones and shales being the most likely sedimentary material, and the unassimilated gneissic xenoliths probably representing the basement rocks to those sediments. However, they admitted that the data did not exclude the possibility of a primary andesitic magma derived directly from the upper mantle, provided that some assimilation of crustal material modified it prior to eruption.

I.e he took samples that were a mixture of old and young rock, and had them mixed together in a powder and dated. We would expect the date to be some sort of weighted average of the ages of the constituents. But Snelling claimed that the fact that the dates he got were not the recorded dates of the lava flows was a death blow for radiometric dating, including Ar-Ar which might well have demonstrated what was really going on:

Therefore, these considerations call into question all K-Ar "dating", whether "model ages" or "isochron ages", and all 40Ar/39Ar "dating", as well as "fossil dating" that has been calibrated against K-Ar "dates". Although seemingly insignificant in themselves, the anomalous K-Ar "model ages" for these recent andesite flows at Mt Ngauruhoe, New Zealand, lead to deeper questions. Why is there excess40Ar* in these rocks? From where did it come? Answers to these questions in turn point to significant implications that totally undermine such radioactive "dating" and that are instead compatible with a young Earth.

I could say lots more, e.g. about his blatant misrepresentation of Dalrymple's 40Ar/36Ar analyses of historic lava flows, but that's the major story

[Bill the Cat]

I was assuming, well, maybe hoping, that Bill was being facetious. That or a jerk

Yes.

[rogue06]

Careful - they actually say Gish was wrong, and that hydroquinone and H₂O₂ don't explode.

They must have updated it fairly recently.

[rogue06]

Some of the YEC misrepresentation is outright fraud. Andrew Snelling dated lava from recent eruptions of Mt Ngauruhoe in New Zealand. He wrote a popular press article about it at Radioactive “Dating” Failure. He used the K-Ar method when the much more accurate and robust Ar-Ar method was available, and he generalized this "failure" to all radiometric dating. But that's not the half of it. Not by a long shot.

He also wrote a technical paper at Andesite Flows at Mt Ngauruhoe, New Zealand, and the Implications for Potassium-Argon "Dating". Therein he provided the smoking gun, none of which was mentioned in the first article linked above.

You do need to know the meaning for two technical terms. "Xenoliths" (literally "foreign rock") are pieces of older rock embedded in a younger rock, often "scraped" off the walls of the magma chamber during the eruption. "Whole rock" means what it says; the entire rock is ground to powder and that powder is dated, without any attempt to separate individual constituents from the rock. That being said, let's see what he has to say:



I.e he took samples that were a mixture of old and young rock, and had them mixed together in a powder and dated. We would expect the date to be some sort of weighted average of the ages of the constituents. But Snelling claimed that the fact that the dates he got were not the recorded dates of the lava flows was a death blow for radiometric dating, including Ar-Ar which might well have demonstrated what was really going on:



I could say lots more, e.g. about his blatant misrepresentation of Dalrymple's 40Ar/36Ar analyses of historic lava flows, but that's the major story

There are a lot of examples like that, but I was hoping to provide a couple examples that someone without any sort of scientific background could see and understand. Massively screwing up what Jesus quoted from and sneakily editing a sermon from a highly respected pastor so that it better matches their own views seems to me good choices.

[Roy]

There are a lot of examples like that, but I was hoping to provide a couple examples that someone without any sort of scientific background could see and understand. Massively screwing up what Jesus quoted from and sneakily editing a sermon from a highly respected pastor so that it better matches their own views seems to me good choices.

I've always considered the most blatantly obvious examples of YEC chicanery to be
(i) Davies' and Sarfati's omission of the words "is also solved" from a reference to a problem
(ii) Hovind using a paper written in 1975 to describe a fossil dug up in 1977
(iii) Citing only element residence times over 6000 years from Goldberg, and not those as low as 100 years, as evidence that the Earth is young.

These are all easily understood regardless of scientific background and are so straightforward that for anyone with even a shred of integrity, they should not only not continue to be used, they should never have happened at all.

Roy