Creation Science wrapped in Science?

[Daylight]

http://www.creationscience.com/

This site seems to wrap Creation Science in a scientific wrapper so it looks like Creation Science is a viable science.

Can anyone expose any wrong conclusions they make? And back up why it's wrong? They seem to list a lot of references to back up a lot of their claims.

 

[chance]

Daylight Well the one on liquefaction (during an earthquake) was kind of pointless, the inference is to “what happens to plant’s and animals” (assumption fossils) during this type of event. IMO it would react the way all mass would react, float or sink dependant on the buoyancy.

 

[Yahweh]

The website is heavily invested in "Hydroplate Theory", which it sums up as:

But first, what is a hydroplate? Before the global flood, considerable water was under earth’s crust. Pressure increases in this subterranean water ruptured that crust, breaking it into plates. The escaping water flooded the earth. Because hydro means water, those plates will be called hydroplates. Where they broke, how they moved, and hundreds other details and evidence—all consistent with the laws of physics—constitute the hydroplate theory and will be explained later.

Hydroplate theory falls to pieces when physics are actually used to study it.

Among other things, I dont know of many rocks that float on water with much ease, much less continental plates11. See A Few Silly Flaws in Walter's Hydroplate Theory for a proper treatment of this.

The heat created by a cracking of the plates and vast resovoirs of water erupting onto the surface of the earth would have vaporized Noah.

A prominent feature in Hydroplate theory is "Liquefaction" (which is responsible for the sorting of strata and fossils), however that hypothesis has been falsified.

The website also mentions mammoths being snap frozen in the Flood. From AnswersInGenesis.com - Arguments We Think Creationists Should Not Use:

‘Woolly mammoths were snap frozen during the Flood catastrophe’. This is contradicted by the geological setting in which mammoths are found. It’s most likely that they perished toward the end of the Ice Age, possibly in catastrophic dust storms. Partially digested stomach contents are not proof of a snap freeze, because the elephant’s stomach functions as a holding area—a mastodon with preserved stomach contents was found in mid-western USA, where the ground was not frozen.

 

[Kaon]

Daylight: They seem to list a lot of references to back up a lot of their claims.

Ahhh...creationists and their "references". Allow me to start by quoting an article from Scientific American, June 2002, "15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense" by John Rennie:

When confronted with a quotation from a scientific authority that seems to question evolution, insist on seeing the statement in context. Almost invariably, the attack on evolution will prove illusory.

Now, I don't have the time to go through all of their references and see if they're taken out of context or not, but I can give you an example of how they use a reference that is quite absurd.

52. Space, Time, and Matter: No scientific theory exists to explain the origin of space, time, or matter. Because each is intimately related to or even defined in terms of the others, a satisfactory explanation for the origin of one must also explain the origin of the others.a Naturalistic explanations have completely failed.

And the reference:

Nathan R. Wood, The Secret of the Universe, 10th edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1936).

Note here that they actually quote a book from 1936!!! Now, so much has happened in astrophysics in general, and cosmology in particular, in only the last few years, that most litterature from that day and age are completely outdated.

Another devious example is when they claim that the Big Bang theory is seiously flawed, they quote the following from an article in Nature:

“Observations only recently made possible by improvements in astronomical instrumentation have put theoretical models of the Universe [the big bang] under intense pressure. The standard ideas of the 1980s about the shape and history of the Universe have now been abandoned—and cosmologists are now taking seriously the possibility that the Universe is pervaded by some sort of vacuum energy, whose origin is not at all understood.”

Note the bracket they've inserted, implying that by "theoretical models of the Universe" the author is talking about the Big Bang. Now, the Big Bang is not a model of the Universe, it's the model of the beginning of the Universe. The Universe models the author refers to here are most likely models of the Universe after the Big Bang. And the standards of the 1980s could be such models as the Friedmann-Lemaitre model, or the Einstein-de Sitter model, both of which include a Big Bang, but neither which include the observed accelerating expansion of the Universe.

Now, I'd also like to give an example of how they have gotten the history of astrophysics completly wrong. They say:

Actually, “missing mass” had to be “created” to preserve the big bang theory.

This is either a direct lie, or a total misunderstanding of history. The idea of dark matter, or missing mass, actually predates the Big Bang theory, as it dates back to the work of Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky related to the study of galaxies in the 30s. For more on that se for example Wikpedia.

Furthermore they say:

Neither “dark matter” (created to hold the universe together) nor “dark energy” (created to push the universe apart) can be seen, measured, or tested.

This I find quite amusing, as both the idea of dark matter and dark energy were derived from observations.

There's probably a lot more to be said, but hopefully you get the general idea, that they've based their arguments on misunderstandings, lack of knowledge and so forth, like most creationists.

 

[Skeptical Greg]

The biggest hole in the Creation Science sieve is that; if the complexity of the universe implies a creator / designer, then that implies an even more complex designer of the creator, ad infinitum (... nauseum? ).