people, ignore young earth creationists

RichardT · #31 21st August 2007, 05:50 PM

epic lulz. the only reason people believe in creationism is because the bible says so. there is not one single piece of positive evidence for creationism. the only tactic creationists have thus far shown is just simply trying to disprove evolution. the logic they follow is that if evolution is untrue, then their creation myth must be true. we have a term for that here in the realm of real science, and it is called the false dichotomy.

This is not true. There is evidence for a young earth. Russ Humphreys 6000 +/- 2000 helium diffusion date is a prime example.

http://www.creationresearch.org/crsq...1_1/Helium.htm
http://creationwiki.org/Response_to_...iffusion_dates

Loudmouth · #32 21st August 2007, 07:13 PM

Originally Posted by RichardT

The claim that creationists don't use the scientific method is simply not true when creationists are testing new hypotheses. For example, the hypothesis that the speed of light has changed in the past has been rejected by creationists for a better explanation by Russ Humphreys which actually works.

Humphrey's model predicts that light from distant objects should be blue-shifted. What we find is the exact opposite. Light from distant galaxies is red-shifted.

The evolutionist will tell you that their work is absolutely objective (even though the methodology that they use is naturalistic).

The methodology is empiric, the very definition of objective.

But what is self evident, from this forum and in the scientific community is that they will not take the idea of a creator God seriously simply because God cannot be objectively tested.

Also on the list are pink faeries, leprechauns, Zeus, and Thor, to name a few. Scientists only disregard one more untestable entity than you do.

If you truly believe, or know that God is real, I would like to ask you to try to change your paradigm in studying science. Try to stick to empiricism. The naturalist framework is full of grave problems like abiogenesis for example.

How does saying "Goddidit" answer any questions? If I said "Thordidit" have I really answered anything? Answering a question with an even larger question is not an answer.

How about this. Show me how to insert God into an experiment.

Loudmouth · #33 21st August 2007, 07:17 PM

Originally Posted by RichardT

This is not true. There is evidence for a young earth. Russ Humphreys 6000 +/- 2000 helium diffusion date is a prime example.

http://www.creationresearch.org/crsq...1_1/Helium.htm
http://creationwiki.org/Response_to_...iffusion_dates

This coming from a creationist who criticizes the radiometric assumption that daughter products stay within the rock. Helium moves in and out of zircons, depending on their pressure and heating histories. Argon, which is used in K/Ar and Ar/Ar dating, does not. So why would you use an element that can move in and out of zircons independently of radioactive decay to falsify radiometric dating? Helium is not used to date the absolute age of rocks. It is only used to date geothermal events.

gamespotter10 · #34 21st August 2007, 07:37 PM

Originally Posted by RichardT

This is not true. There is evidence for a young earth. Russ Humphreys 6000 +/- 2000 helium diffusion date is a prime example.

http://www.creationresearch.org/crsq...1_1/Helium.htm
http://creationwiki.org/Response_to_...iffusion_dates

"Helium is a very light atom, and some of the helium in the upper atmosphere can reach escape velocity simply via its temperature. Thermal escape of helium alone is not enough to account for its scarcity in the atmosphere, but helium in the atmosphere also gets ionized and follows the earth's magnetic field lines. When ion outflow is considered, the escape of helium from the atmosphere balances its production from radioactive elements (Lie-Svendsen and Rees 1996)."

gotta love talkorigins.org

RichardT · #35 21st August 2007, 07:44 PM

Originally Posted by Loudmouth

This coming from a creationist who criticizes the radiometric assumption that daughter products stay within the rock. Helium moves in and out of zircons, depending on their pressure and heating histories. Argon, which is used in K/Ar and Ar/Ar dating, does not. So why would you use an element that can move in and out of zircons independently of radioactive decay to falsify radiometric dating? Helium is not used to date the absolute age of rocks. It is only used to date geothermal events.

Creationists, for the most part, use C14 dating and helium diffusion from zircon crystals. The helium diffusion dates give rocks a maximum age of 6000 +/- 2000 years.

RichardT · #36 21st August 2007, 07:47 PM

Originally Posted by gamespotter10

"Helium is a very light atom, and some of the helium in the upper atmosphere can reach escape velocity simply via its temperature. Thermal escape of helium alone is not enough to account for its scarcity in the atmosphere, but helium in the atmosphere also gets ionized and follows the earth's magnetic field lines. When ion outflow is considered, the escape of helium from the atmosphere balances its production from radioactive elements (Lie-Svendsen and Rees 1996)."

gotta love talkorigins.org

Unless Kevin Henke could demonstrate in the lab how the helium escaped from the rock, I'm not going to take him seriously.

http://www.trueorigin.org/helium02.asp

I think Dr. Humphreys knows what he's doing.

The following is from Dr. Humphreys rebuttal :

Diffusion Under Pressure

Back in 1996, when I first began to think about the helium-in-zircon data we had then, I considered Henke’s scenario: the possibility that the pressures deep underground might account for the extraordinary amounts of helium retained in the zircons. However, I gave up on that idea when I found that for hard materials, pressure has very little effect on diffusion rates. Hardness relates to incompressibility, which hinders pressure from diminishing the space between atoms and thereby slowing diffusion.
The pressure at 3 kilometers, the mid-range depth of our samples, is about 1 kilobar (about 1000 times atmospheric pressure). I found a paper[4] showing that even in a relatively soft material like lead, one kilobar of pressure would reduce self-diffusion (lead atoms moving through lead) by less than 20%. On the geologists' Mohs scale, lead has a hardness of only 1.5. If you put it in a vise, it is not difficult to compress.

Large zircon crystal. Zircon, on the other hand, is among the hardest of minerals, 7.5 on the Mohs scale. That is harder than the best steel (6.5), and even harder than quartz (7.0). That's why crushing granite to extract zircons is not a worry to researchers. If you put a ball bearing of the finest steel into a large vise and squeeze it as tightly as you can (producing kilobar pressures), the ball bearing will suffer little damage and little compression.
Zircon, being harder than steel, would be much less compressible than lead.[5] So pressure should affect diffusion rates much less than in lead, which for kilobar pressures had a reduction of only 20% in the rates, according to the paper above. In 1996, those considerations made me think that the pressure effect on hard minerals is negligible. Below are even more reasons to think so.
As far as I know, nobody has measured the effect of pressure on helium diffusion in zircon. However I have at hand a paper[6] that gives, among other data, the pressure effect on argon diffusion in glasses, such as rhyolite obsidian. At the highest temperature to which our helium-in-zircon experiment went, 500 degrees C, the pressure effect on the glasses was almost imperceptible, a few percent per kilobar. A few hundred degrees higher than our experiment, 600 to 700°C, the pressure effect was up to only a few dozen percent per kilobar.
Several factors combine to say that the pressure effect on helium diffusion in our zircon experiments was much less than the above few percent per kilobar:

The cooler the mineral, the less the effect, and the critical part of our data was much cooler than the above, only 100 to 300 °C.

Glasses should be more compressible than crystals of the same composition; glasses are generally not as hard because of weaker chemical bonds between parts. So our crystals of very hard zircon should suffer less from pressure than glasses that are softer than quartz.

In a given mineral, helium diffusion is less affected by pressure than argon, because a helium atom is smaller than an argon atom. The smaller the atom, the less the effect on its diffusion for a given amount of pressure-induced reduction of the space between atoms.

All these factors strongly suggest that the diffusion rates in our zircons were influenced far less than one percent by removing them from underground pressures to a vacuum chamber.

gamespotter10 · #37 21st August 2007, 07:50 PM

Originally Posted by RichardT

Unless Mr. Mark Isaac or whoever else could demonstrate in the lab how the helium escaped from the rock, I'm not going to take him seriously.

sorry, I thought you were talking about the "not enough helium in the atmosphere" argument, but they do have that part about the helium diffusion from zircons

Subsurface pressure and temperature conditions affect how quickly the helium diffuses out of zircons. D. R. Humphreys et al. selected a rock core sample from the Fenton Hill site, which Los Alamos National Laboratory evaluated in the 1970s for geothermal energy production. The area is within a few kilometers of the Valles Caldera, which has gone through several periods of faulting and volcanism. The rocks of the Fenton Hill core have been fractured, brecciated, and intruded by hydrothermal veins. Excess helium is present in the rocks of the Valles Caldera (Goff and Gardner 1994). The helium may have contaminated the gneiss that Humphreys et al. studied. In short, the entire region has had a very complex thermal history. Based on oil industry experience, it is essentially impossible to make accurate statements about the helium-diffusion history of such a system.
Scientific studies, especially those with radical implications, do not mean much until the results have been replicated by others. Many scientific claims have disappeared entirely when others could not get the same results. Confidence in this particular paper is reduced by certain points:
- Most measurement errors and variabilities are not reported. Therefore, we do not know how accurate the results are.
- Humphreys et al. claimed that they studied zircons and biotites from depths of 750 and 1,490 meters in the Jemez Granodiorite. However, Sasada (1989) showed that at those depths, the samples came from a gneiss, an entirely different rock type.
- Because of math errors, the Q/Q0 values (fraction of helium retained), used by Humphreys et al. to derive their dates, are too high.
- Humphreys et al. (2003) failed properly to total their data in Appendix C, which means that they grossly underestimated the total amount of helium released by their 750-meter-deep zircons. The amount of helium in the zircons greatly exceeds the amount that would be expected from the radioactive decay of uranium over 1.5 billion years. The high helium concentration may be due to samples that were abnormally high in uranium and/or to the presence of excess helium.
- Much is made of the fact that samples five and six retained the same amount of helium, even though the amounts are probably at the limit of what could be measured. The possibility of measurement error accounting for the results is never mentioned.
- If one discounts sample five, which is likely at the limit of measurable precision, the conclusions of Humphreys et al. (2004) rest on just three samples. Such a small data set may be the basis for further research, but not for drawing firm conclusions.
- Humphreys et al. (2003, note 9) referred to correcting "apparent typographical errors" in the raw data, casting suspicion on the validity of all the data.
The helium results could easily be due to an aberrant sample. They could be an artifact of the experimental or collecting method (e.g., defects in the zircons caused by rapid cooling) or from just plain sloppiness. We cannot know for sure until others have looked at the issue, too.
Producing a billion years of radioactive decay in a "Creation week" or year-long flood would have produced a billion years worth of heat from radioactive decay as well. This would pretty much vaporize the earth. Since the earth apparently has not been vaporized recently, we can be confident that the accelerated decay did not occur. (Humphreys recognizes this "heat problem" but is currently unable to provide a solution.)
If helium concentrations stay high around the rocks, it is possible for helium to diffuse into voids and fractures in the zircons, or at least high helium pressures could reduce the rate at which helium diffuses out. Either of these scenarios would invalidate the helium diffusion calculations in Humphreys et al. (2003, 2004). Helium concentrations within the earth become high enough for commercial mining. The sample measured by Humphreys et al. came from an area that is probably helium enriched. Helium deposits are common in New Mexico, and excess helium has been found just a few miles from where the sample was taken (Goff and Gardner 1994). To test for the presence of excess helium in their zircons, Humphreys et al. should look for 3He.
Uranium does not decay directly to lead; rather, it proceeds through a series of multiple intermediate radioactive elements (Faure 1986, 284-287). It takes about ten half-lives of the longest lived intermediate to achieve secular equilibrium (i.e., each intermediate having the same activity). The uranium decay series contains elements with half-lives well over 10,000 years. If the decay rates changed suddenly, we would not expect the various elements to be in a secular equilibrium. Humphreys et al. should test for this in their zircons. Other uranium ores are at secular equilibrium, indicating a constant decay rate for at least the last two million years.