Incompetent Objections to Flood Geology

Some owlhoots who profess to be Christians in the BioLogos gang (implied motto: "Jesus lied") have been riding with the hands at the Darwin Ranch in their continuing mission to slap leather with biblical creationists. For some reason, old Earth proponents (especially theistic evolutionists) elevate atheistic interpretations of science to the magisterial position over the Bible, which they claim to believe. Then atheists trumpet, "See? Even these religious people believe in evolution!", and then continue their perfervid denunciations of Christians, including their TE useful idiots.

François de La Rouchefoucauld (Frankie the Rock) had several maxims, this is one of my favorites. If you study on it a spell, most people will consider someone insightful when they are in agreement. Some will respect intelligent opponents who disagree with them, but those are in the minority. Here, BioLogos uses secular sources in their attempts to refute biblical creationists, but they failed to do their jobs properly: the material cited is not what they bargained for. In fact, some of the science supports the Genesis Flood models of creationists. 

The BioLogos Foundation has published a popular-level article by old-earth geologists Gregg Davidson and Ken Wolgemuth presenting arguments for an old earth. One such argument involves counts of sedimentary laminations (“varves”) within the floor of Japan’s Lake Suigetsu. Their article claims that the very large number of Lake Suigetsu varve counts is strong evidence for an old earth. Creation scientists would argue that most of the lamination couplets are not true annual events. In fact, a plausible explanation for the couplets was presented in the young-earth creationist literature one year prior to Davidson and Wolgemuth’s article. Davidson and Wolgemuth, however, present a new “spin” on the argument: they claim that the correlation between these “varve” counts and radiocarbon dates (as well as tree-ring counts), proves that the Lake Suigetsu varves are true annual events, thus presenting an unanswerable argument for an old earth. However, careful examination of the papers they cite shows that this apparent agreement is the result of the typical uniformitarian circular reasoning. Furthermore, Davidson and Wolgemuth made numerous errors in their article (even within their own uniformitarian framework) which cause one to question whether they carefully read all of the technical papers they cited. Furthermore, they seem to misunderstand the recent results of the RATE research project that showed strong evidence of ubiquitous in situ radiocarbon within fossil specimens that should be radiocarbon “dead” by uniformitarian reckoning. Such results pose a serious challenge to uniformitarian assumptions underlying conventional radiocarbon age-dating methods.

This article deals with three scientific subjects used to old Earth proponents. Be prepared, it's rather technical, not an easy read, and rather long. Still, I reckon there are some people who will benefit from the material. To keep going, click on "Do Varves, Tree-Rings, and Radiocarbon Measurements Prove an Old Earth?"